Frank Miller’s Not Dead, But That Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Dance On His Grave

I’ve been sort of half meaning to read the Long Halloween for a while. I’ve seen some of Tim Sale’s art before…mainly when he did that Comics Journal cover a little while back, I think. Anyway, I like his work; he has a nice clean design sense, with good use of blacks and dark areas especially. His character designs are striking too; he manages to be cartoony in a way that doesn’t seem to come either from manga or from humor comics. Instead he seems more directly influenced by art nouveau…or perhaps it’s just Frank Miller. I don’t necessarily love everything he does. I find his Catwoman design kind of meh, for example; the purple suit seems overly angular and drab, and I don’t share his obsession with abs for all.

But even so, the panel is competently blocked and consistently stylized. It’s professional, damn it. And some moments are in fact inspired, like this Joker as Christmas- Grinch sequence…

The way the Joker’s body is all folded up in that first panel, and then the veins in his eye shot through the magnifying glass…that’s fine storytelling. It’s worth looking at.

And then there’s the story. I think that, maybe, if you really want to appreciate Dark Knight, you should read The Long Halloween. It’s easy to look back at Frank Miller’s writing and sneer at the grim and gritty Batman, the hard-boiled repetitive dialogue (“this would be a good death”), etc. etc. But, damn it, there was a ton of humor and energy there as well; his Joker, for example, was genuinely, viciously funny (dressing Selina Kyle up as Wonder Woman — what the hell? or calmly stating “I’m going to kill everyone in this room” — to which the David Lettermen analog gives the pitch-perfect response, “Now that’s darn rude!”) And his Batman had a real voice and inner life — stolen from all those pulp sources, of course, and over-the-top, but still, in part for those reasons, memorable and even nuanced. I loved that moment at the end of the book where he tells Robin to sit up straight for example; he’s both this grim avenger and this crotchety father figure. He’s perfect, and the perfection is played as a cantankerous tic. Certainly, the book is dark in that people get killed and there’s blood and it’s for grown-ups, more or less. But it’s not dark in the sense of being dreary. It’s filled with ideas and weird jokes and satire and a lot of love for the characters and for imaginative possibilities.

The Long Halloween, on the other hand, has no imaginative possibilities to offer. Forget Miller’s occasional forays into society and politics and mortality — Jeph Loeb doesn’t even have anything to say about Batman or his rogues gallery. Sale makes sure everyone looks great, but that can’t hide the fact that the designated writer has the proportional spunk and gumption of an actuary on quaaludes. The Scarecrow wears straw and the Mad Hatter speaks wiTh FuNny caPs — that’s about as much personality as Loeb can offer. They might as well all just stand around telling each other, “Um…die, Batman. I’m really nuts. No, no, I am. Die.” Except that would be marginally entertaining, wouldn’t it? Instead the Joker laughs and the Catwoman does her Catwoman ooh-I’m-ambivalently-evil thing, and Batman wanders around stiffly, sticking out his muscles, muttering the same few lines over and over (“I believe in Harvey Dent.”), and painfully clanking forth some insight from the old Frank Miller scripts he probably reads before going to bed (don’t wear the costume in the day — check. Got that in Year One. Thanks.) The mafia guys are similarly lackluster,the third-hand Godfather cliches played with so little sense of irony that the best joke in the book ( instead of the good-guy mafiosos refusing to move into drugs, they refuse to move into super-villains) just sort of sits there looking confused and pitiful.

Plopped down in the middle of such dreary, derivative schlock, the book’s iterated tagline, “I believe in Gotham City,” comes across as neither inspiration nor bittersweet aspiration, but as callow fanboy special pleading. Because you know what? This is going to come as something of a shock, but…Gotham City? It’s not real. You want me to suspend disbelief, you need to put in some effort and some genius. Because simply asserting that your little corporate fan-fic fantasyland has profound meaning makes you seem like some kind of aesthetic mosquito, battened desperately on the decaying carcasses of past minimally talented Batscripters. Suck mightily as you will, though, that juice is gone. All you can get out of those corpses is a dry slurping noise, which sounds mighty empty as it echoes about in your doddering edifice of piffle.

And of course since no character in the entire exercise has anything like an actual personality, the inevitable twist ending comes across as utterly gratuitous. Oh my God, the killer is — Harvey Dent’s wife! That’s so profound because, like, she was such an utterly boring, stereotypical whiny wife throughout the whole book, and now…she’s still an utterly boring, stereotypical whiny wife, but with a plot arc cribbed from Scott Turow.

Oh, wait, did I spoil the end? Sorry. Guess you won’t want to read it now.

Maybe you could just look at the art?

19 thoughts on “Frank Miller’s Not Dead, But That Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Dance On His Grave

  1. Is that the story where they tried to play up Calendar Man as this really cool Hannibal Lecter type?

  2. Richard, that's the one. That could have been funny, actually…and yet somehow it wasn't….

  3. A friend told me to pick up Superman For All Seasons by the same team – called it one of the best Superman stories ever done. I didn't pick it up as I couldn't get past the art which is in Sale's atypical and (to my eyes) much less attractive "superhero clear line" style. I wish Jeph Loeb would stick to making horrible TV programs and leave comics alone. Btw, Noah – I can't imagine that The Long Halloween is worse than the Loeb-written Hush.

  4. From what I remember of it, Long Halloween had an actual story, albeit not a very good one. Hush read like a video game that consisted of nothing but boss battles.

    And yet Hush is still better than any of Loeb's recent work. It's kinda depressing to think that with years of experience in television and comics, he's actually become a worse writer.

  5. Interesting comparison re: Hush as a video game. Sort of explains why it read like a damp turd. I just finished playing this PS3 superhero game called "Infamous" and while it has a poor story, it was still more involving on the level of gameplay than anything in Hush. It's a losing proposition to make comics like video games. On the other hand, Jeph Loeb should probably consider writing for computer game companies (if he hasn't already) – it's the one medium where his lousy stories wouldn't stick out.

  6. Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura are very videogame like actually…or they seem so to me, anyway. I haven't played video games of any sort in like 20 years, though, so I could be mistaken.

    Has Sale worked with any decent writers?

  7. Does Matt Wagner count as a "decent" writer? Sale worked with him on Grendel. Otherwise, he's mainly worked with Loeb.

    I don't really enjoy Magical Girl series and I definitely haven't enjoyed what I've read of Clamp (I haven't read or watched anything by them in approx. 10 years). But I'm not the target audience – their stuff sells to teenage girls and that's what matters. I would say that a lot of popular anime and manga are written to take advantage of merchandising/gaming. That's where the money is. I understand that in most cases the games are even worse than the original product but I'm only going by the reviews I've read. There's no way I'm going to buy a manga/anime computer game tie-up.

  8. I really like Clamp's art. The stories are a bit dicier, though I appreciated Cardcaptor Sakura.

    I liked Grendel back in the day…and that Demon mini-series Wagner did was pretty great…or so I thought at the time. Maybe I should look at that again…. I haven't read anything by him in a long time though.

    That's a shame that he does all his work with Loeb. What a waste.

  9. Clamp art is definitely competent for the genre. I watched quite a bit of Magical Girl stuff when I was growing up but have grown tired of it. It's just not the kind of Shojo stuff I enjoy (re: repetitive plots/transformations etc.).

    I really liked Wagner's stuff pre-Batman/Grendel and the shift to DC. But I haven't read any of his stuff in years as well.

  10. In a perfect world I'd be misremembering this, but I believe that HUSH was actually Harvey Dent, AND his wife, AND someone else at various times.

    I'm a Jeph Loeb fan. He's always really good at writing to the strengths of his artists and giving them cool stuff to draw.

    (And absolutely abysmal at plotting, quite possibly the worst I've ever encountered in any kind of paid commercial art. But I prefer to view it as a kind of Beckett-esque surrealism.)

    I'm not huge a huge fan, generally, of Tim Sale – Although the panels you posted were quite nice. Every panel has, like, three too many lines to give it that nice Alex Toth elegant simplicity.

    Hey! Hey! Hey!

    You should review Superman:Batman volume two by Jeph Loeb and Michael Turner. It has Wonder Woman in it. And Supergirl. You'd really like it.

    ***Snicker. Heh. I told him he'd really like it.***

  11. Despite your sneaky efforts, I doubt I'll be reading more Jeph Loeb anytime soon. (I only read the Long Halloween when it showed up in my house more or less by accident.)

  12. I found Long Halloween, and it's sequel, Dark Victory, underwhelming too. I stuck with it mainly out of reverence for Sale's art, which is gorgeous.

    I did, however, like the Loeb/Sale Batman collab that preceded these two books, called Haunted Knight. Rather than Miller-aping noir, it went for straight-up mind-warping horror. Both Loeb and Sale are much better in this genre, I think.

    In fact, one of my favourite comics ever is The Witching Hour, written by Loeb with art by Chris Bachalo (how the guy get to work with such brilliant artists, I don't know…) It's a Sandman-like fantasy horror story, with characters that have real energy. They hold your interest, even when they are lightly sketched.

    So I don't see Loeb as a *total* hack. He can surprise you. But after Long Halloween and Hush, I can understand why you would prefer to move on to better things…

  13. Huh; I'd never heard of either of those Loeb comics you recommend Mercer. I'll keep an eye out for them, though….

  14. I prefer to think Matt Wagner is in a decline. I too liked his Demon way back when…and Grendel and even Batman/Grendel…

    But more recently (not that recent, but still), I read a couple of his Batman series: Batman and the Monster Men and Batman and Something Else. They were pretty crappy Batman-by-numbers stories…the art is still good, but I stopped spending money on Matt Wagner at that point.

    I liked Tim Sale's art in Long Halloween flipping through it at the library–but I just couldn't make myself check it out (yes, for free). A couple pages of the Loeb story was enough to tell me to forget it.

  15. I have a lot of affection for Challengers of the Unknown Must Die, which is the only Loeb/Sale team-up that isn't another a retread story. There's some pages that you'd really like in it, as well as a couple of mildly amusing riffs with the dialog. I can never remember the plot, which doesn't say much for it, but it's the one thing I think of whenever a roundtable of "i hate everything loeb writes" gets moving.

  16. Witching Hour was one of the worst things I ever read. It was not merely bad, or "not my thing," I literally could not understand it. It was like the pages had been rearranged at random. Lovely Bacchalo art, though. Just ignore the word balloons.

    I still like Matt Wagner. I'm enjoying Madame Xanadu.

  17. When I finally got to read Loeb/Sale collaborations on "Superman for all seasons" and "Long Halloween" and "Dark victory", I felt really underwhelmed. Moreover, the most interesting thing I got of the strange mystery stories Loeb wrote on Batman was how they inform the re-imagination of the character.

    I believe that all of the gangsters Frank Miller mentioned in "Year one" get killed in "Long Halloween", with the crooked policemen of the same story following suit in "Dark victory".

    But, much more interesting than that was the fact that DC seems to have quietly remade Batman's continuity following "Year one". Ignoring "Year two", it seems that editorial intends the reader to pick "the real story of Batman, as imagined by today's best artists".

    I guess this would mean following Miller's work with Ed Brubaker's "the Man who laughs" for the first Joker appearance, than continuing with Matt Wagner's "Dark moon rising" mini-series for the first super-villains, followed up with "Long Halloween/Dark Victory" for first Two-Face and the introduction to Robin.

    The recent movie tie-in Specials featuring Two-Face and Scarecrow seem to further cement the kind of slow-build "Ultimatization" of the Batman franchise that DC has been doing for years now.

  18. I'm as late as ever joining this conversation, but that just means I don't have to point out how much Loeb sucks, since everybody already did it for me. I do recall those Batman Halloween specials being decent, but I could be wrong about that; the one where various ghosts show up and play Christmas Carol for some reason (to make Batman lighten up and enjoy Halloween? Was that it?) sounds pretty lame in concept, but I think the art was nice. It's sure a shame that Sale is wasted with all these Loeb-written books; he really needs to break out and do something else. One of the few things I've seen him do otherwise was a Superman story written by Darwyn Cooke about the first time he encountered Kryptonite. It was so-so. I did like another Cooke-written story in Sale's issue of Solo though, in which Batman and Catwoman had a "date" that consisted of him chasing her around Gotham City after she broke in to a museum and stole some jewels, or something like that. That was fun. And it was the later Catwoman design that Cooke popularized on her solo book, so none of that purple ugliness. Check that one out if you get the chance, I believe it's also reprinted in a volume called Batman: Ego and other Tails, which collected various Cooke stories from over the past decade.

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