Reading Comics #132 "Detective Comics #27 Free Edition and Vertigo Defy"

via Robot 6

Batman is arguably the most famous fictional creation of the past hundred years, and the most consistently celebrated one, eclipsing his closest competition, who is more important, Superman.  This year there've been even more celebrations than usual, thanks to his seventy-fifth anniversary.  One of them was Detective Comics #27, not the 1939 version, but the DC New 52 relaunch edition, an oversized issue stuffed with all kinds of special creators chipping in to celebrate the occasion.  It was pretty great.  Well, DC liked the idea so much it kind of did it again, this time a little smaller, a lot more free, and so here I am talking about that.

The lead story is from the original version, the 1939 one, from Bob Kane and Bill Finger, the very first Batman story in all its dated glory.  Then comes the Brad Meltzer version of that same story, originally presented in that second edition, and a little later a third version, borrowing the captions from the Melzter story and the Finger art from the Kane story, altered by famed graphic designer Chip Kidd, an excerpt from an otherwise exclusive element to a different Batman release for the celebration.  And to round all that out, the Scott Snyder/Sean Murphy story from the second edition, which remains brilliant, one of the best things Snyder has ever written (the best?), and conveniently reminding everyone that Snyder and Murphy also collaborated on the recently-concluded Vertigo mini-series The Wake (which I haven't read, because I've grown leery of Snyder aside from this Batman short).

Anyway, all that being said, if you caught this freebie, that's all well and good.  It's still available at comiXology if you'd like to have a look yourself.

I'd like instead to talk about something that might have been obvious to a lot of other people, but for me was really only obvious after reading through this special: Tim Burton's Batman was pretty much "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate."  Sure, the Joker wasn't in it originally, but everything else is basically exactly the same (no "king of the wicker people" or black rubber suit, I also realize).  Meltzer certainly supports that impression (and he does insert the Joker).  The first dozen or so times I saw the movie, I'd never read the first Batman story, so I can be excused for not realizing that.  Movie critics will certainly never care about that, either.  (They care very little about how accurate a comic book movie is to its source material, although Marvel always seems willing to oblige direct comparisons, at least as soon as they update their own material to match.)  I wonder how much fans really care, either.  But there you go.  I'm not even sure Burton particularly cared that he was making a Batman movie.  It might even be argued that he wasn't making a Batman movie at all (the same can certainly be said about Batman Returns).  He had a look at the first story, figured out the Joker was a perfect figure to insert and build around, and really, there wasn't much else he had to do.  Batman is kind of a creep in the movie.  He's not even necessarily the good guy, just the guy who defeats the villain.  It's a gangster movie.  For some reason, gangster movies made a surge at that time, with Godfather Part III and Goodfellas and The Untouchables.  Even Dick Tracy!  (Is it any surprise that the further the Batman movies drifted obviously toward comic books or even Burton's own tendencies and further from other their own origins, the more audiences questioned them, to that point?  The decade following Batman saw a flood of comic book movies, and virtually none of them was a success.  The decade after that, everything changed.  But then, event movies had finally come to complete dominate the market.)

So let's switch topics and examine what one might learn from browsing through the Vertigo Defy preview:

via Comic Vine

When it was announced that long-time Vertigo chief Karen Berger was leaving, fans kind of assumed that the DC imprint would turn to pot.  It used to be an indication of some of the best comics in the market, having that logo on the cover.  For a good twenty years, it was practically a guarantee.  I think the rise of Image as a mature readers publisher built around The Walking Dead instead of Spawn changed the rules a little.  Suddenly all the cool creators were at Image instead of Vertigo, which became instead a little like the vanity label Marvel has tried to establish for years.  I mean, to a certain extent, Vertigo always was that, but now it seems like there's less to support its credentials, all the hype and none of the substance, or far less of it anyway.  But here's a review of what the freebie presented as the Vertigo of 2014:

• Bodies from Si Spencer.  This is the listing for a new project with an excerpt.  The only time I've read Spencer I was soundly unimpressed (X-Club).  I can't imagine anyone believing in him as a strong talent, but maybe my experience was unrepresentative, he's grown, what have you.  The excerpt isn't terrible, but excerpts can be deceiving.  It's a mini-series that launched in July, so if you want to have a look at a story about multiple investigations across time concerning the same corpse and hope Spencer pulls it off, by all means, do so.
• Coffin Hill, a current monthly.  I know nothing about this one other than the one-page ad in this special.  Doesn't seem to have distinguished itself.
• The Names from Peter Milligan.  This is another new mini-series, complete with an excerpt.  Milligan is a long-time Vertigo talent, although one I personally have never been sold on.  From what I see here, I haven't found a reason to change that opinion.
• American Vampire from Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque, one of Vertigo's current headlining acts.  Snyder and Albuquerque (an instant favorite when I saw his work in the pages of Blue Beetle a good handful of years back) had the helping hand of Stephen King when they originally launched this project, and I read those issues, and King's work was consistently my favorite work, Skinner Sweet being an instant icon whereas Pearl was just another character experiencing the beginnings of the saga along with everyone else (although that fact that I remember her name was Pearl is probably a point in Snyder's favor).  Is this a shining example of Vertigo at its finest?  I have such a hard time appreciating Snyder the way virtually everyone else seems to, it just seems like the prime example of Vertigo's new vanity image (heh), something he gets to do to give his Batman work greater credibility (because otherwise Snyder remains in a relative vacuum as far as his output is concerned other than the Dark Knight).  
• Astro City, Kurt Busiek's long-standing metaphor baby, a kind of ongoing Alan Moore-style nostalgia project trading on his Marvels reputation, relocated to Vertigo as a matter of convenience (it's also been published, of course, by Image).  
• The Kitchen, another new mini-series with an excerpt.  Doesn't much distinguish itself anymore than the other two.
• The Sandman: Overture, the callback mini-series to Vertigo's formative years and heyday, which is typical Neil Gaiman brilliance and a reminder of what the imprint can do when it's really inspired.
• Dead Boy Detectives, an ongoing series that spun out from Sandman.
• Hinterland, an ongoing that seems to be a variation on Fables, the other current Vertigo headliner.
• Suiciders, a new monthly from Lee Bermejo that seems to be an extended version of the movie subgenre of people killing each other for sport and survival and yes, entertainment.  Seems mostly relevant for its art (heh) and even as a kind of bridge back to superheroes (famously, Vertigo had its origins with alternative looks at superheroes, and the biggest thing to happen to the imprint recently was in fact losing all its most famous superhero projects back to DC proper).
• Fables, the ongoing that's highly popular in the trade collections and similar to the later-launched TV series Once Upon a Time.  Started out horribly but seems to have leveled out and become an institution, although it's kind of a poor man's Sandman (no offense to Bill Willingham intended).
• Fairest, a Fables spin-off that focuses on female characters.
• FBP (stands for Federal Bureau of Physics), an ongoing that launched last year that might actually be the best non-Sandman Overture series Vertigo is publishing at the moment, the one I still most recommend checking out, even though I haven't done so in a good long while (I'm now fearful that I've missed too much, and so I should instead start reading in the trades if I'm so inclined).

Missing from the lineup is The Unwritten, which is probably another series Vertigo can hang a happy shingle on.  I'm not sure why it was left out.  The conclusion I reach from this survey, however, is that the imprint needs a little help at the moment.  (I'd personally love to see what Geoff Johns would do if he finally decided to launch something there.  Maybe give some other DC acts that kind of chance.  Vertigo is always at its best when it's reinventing itself.)  American Vampire and Fables are not terrible ways to headline the imprint, but I'm also not sure they stand up to the best it's ever seen.  The best of what's around doesn't necessarily say much.  Maybe FBP is that series.  It certainly needs more publicity.

Or, like Detective Comics #27, perhaps a lot more repetitions of what's already been said...