Batman and Robin (Not the Movie)

Today, I'm talking about another Batman project from Jim Lee.  This time, he was teamed with Frank Miller to create All Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder.  It was meant to accompany the acclaimed All Star Superman from Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, but went down a bumpy road.


The story is about when Dick Grayson first joined Bruce and Alfred.  Through the course of the story, we get to see some pretty big figures from the DCU.  Wonder Woman, Superman, Plastic Man, Hal Jordan, Catwoman, Black Canary (possibly a combinations of Dinahs I and II), Joker, Vicki Vale, and Jimmy Olsen all show up in the series.  I don't know why Olsen's working in Gotham in this series, but that's a mere detail given that I'm reviewing the book as a whole.  Some stories come to rest by the last issue and some are left open-ended (with fans waiting for the series to come back).  Beyond the crude language and very dark violence, I think that the primary story in the series is Bruce Wayne learning how to be a propper role model to a young ward.

SPOILERS

It isn't until the end that Bruce allows Dick to try making peace with his family's demise.  Until that point, Batman was all for turning Grayson into a figure of vengeance.  That's not healthy and in the last issue, it's too dangerous even for Batman to allow.



So some of things I liked even just for aesthetic was the industrial design of some of the equipment.  Having the police driving in retro style squad cars with cherry top sirens only added to the feel of old school corruption behind the badge.  Batman makes a point to say that police elsewhere can be trusted and so can one man with the GCPD (Gordon), but in general the Gotham cops were very corrupt.  The first Batmobile we see goes with the vibe of Raymond Loewy era automobiles, looking like a 60's Ferrari but with a lone batwing on the back like during the Bill Finger days.  Then the Batmobile turns into a jet fighter and then a submarine, and the ever heightening contrast in technology makes it seem all the more apparent how far advanced Wayne's technology is.

Something else that stood out to me about this book is script.  This is a very wordy book, and I can accept that.  There's a lot of play between dialogue and monologue (external and internal) and a little of what I'd like to call "nonologue".  Just to get nonologue out of the way, its what I'm using to describe the expression of information that is more universal and transcends language barriers.  It's

the ambience in a scene or how the panels are composed.  With a cinematic approach, illustrators can convey things that would otherwise need to be summed up in words.  The creative team did that in many ways through this book.  You take in the overwhelming expanse of the Batcave with a six-page spread.  Many of the characters in the Bat-books are very private people.  Thinkers, but private thinkers so there is a lot of inner monologue to be expected.  Like what Gail Simone does in Birds of Prey, you can usually tell whose inner monologue is whose by how it is presented.  Font, color, background, texture, the shape of cell containing the script, ....  It's when Black Canary gets introduced that you get a lot of  play with this.  She works in a bar and is getting all these rude catcalls from the patrons.  As the internal monologue rolls, you see it get interrupted repeatedly by different characters making gestures towards her.  It shows that she's a private thinker but us conscious of these customers' lines to the point where they push her past the tipping point.  Then you get a whole lot of external monologue and martial arts.  She's dressed like Dinah I, but but we get hints from what her talking does to people that maybe this is a more subtle "canary cry" of Dinah II.  Dialogue also causes some issues beginning with this issue.  It's the one issue where we see the Gordon household.  Barbara has a very dirty internal monologue that often includes a word that could have been cut down to b$ or more.  Miller doesn't mince words with this language.  When I picked this up on it's first Wednesday of sales, the book had slipped past DC's censorship.  In the hardcover, there's black lines through the word everywhere it appears.  The other problem I had with dialogue in the end of the book was in the final issue that seemed out of character even for a Miller Batman portrayal.

All throughout the book, Batman is sniping at Superman for what he stands for, what abilities he has, and what he does with them.  So who does he go toe-to-toe with in the last issue?  Hal Jordan.  A dumbed down Hal Jordan.  With the first few pages we get that this GL is the butt of jokes.  The unexplained weakness towards the color yellow, a corny personality, silver age, and the Comics Code approved gimmicks for his ring constructs.  It feels like Miller is going out of his way to make Jordan more of a subject to ridicule than actually pitting Batman against someone who could be a credible rival as far as heroes go.  Then the dynamic duo trap him with a confrontation where everything in the room aside from the GL is yellow.  Even the lemonade that Batman offers.  I get the humor, but since when does Batman work so hard on a gag?  It reminds me of the very thought out practical jokes Jim and Dwight would play on each other in the American version of the Office.  Lastly, there's the fact that Batman has so much external script (monologue or dialogue) in this scene with Jordan.  Especially with Miller's iconically dark and broody Batman, why is he so talkative?  I like the absurd creativity of the yellow room gag, but I think my favorite part of the issue was after Robin had severely injured Jordan (more than Batman would've wanted).  It's then that Batman pulls back his yellow cowl and uses some medical skills he had picked up.  Chromatically, you gets some nonologue, in how the humor of the yellow palette gets disrupted by the seriousness of the matter at hand, how Batman starts speaking to Robin, and his concentration on saving Jordan's life.  It's a great visual technique.  Before this concluding issue there's some extensive scenes showing a sadistic killing by Joker.  Joker's behind one of the greater stories in this series, but I think that giving this  big chunk of book to show a killing irrelevant to the main plot was originally meant to do more than just show how demented a person he can be.

I'd still recommend this book to Batman fans, but it's a messy last few issues that keep this from being a great series in my eyes.  Hopefully Miller and Lee get back together to create a sequel book to this.  The publishing schedule was sporadic like Alex Ross's Justice, and Joe Quesada's NYX, and I'd gladly want to read what  they put together to end the story as they had intended.