Batman Incorporated

Grant Morrison & Jim Nick Nick Davidson Batman Incorporated (2012)
Ever since Stewart Lee described him as such, I can't quite pull back from thinking of the guy as Batman the children's character, and probably because I've never really found him that interesting. Although I haven't read it in a while, I recall loving Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns in which our man is portrayed as a vicious nutcase, which seems about right. He's more or less a vicious nutcase here, but a vicious nutcase inhabiting a story which may as well be derived from the goofy 1960s television show, albeit a version of the  goofy 1960s television show without much in the way of humour.

The story is that Batman, having decided that crime is a disease and that there's only one cure and so on and so forth, trains a whole team of international Batmans so as to cure the disease of crime on a global scale. It starts well enough, and seems beautifully told regardless of whatever it is that's actually being told, and then it sort of gets lost in an undifferentiated mush of narrative and stuff you might understand if you're some kind of Batman expert, which I'm not. I'm all for showing rather than telling so as to instil a comic book with the portentous atmosphere of a Fassbinder film, but occasionally it helps to tell your audience what the fuck is happening, particularly when what you're showing is mainly ingenious plot points and obscure references to Jorge Luis Borges punctuated with scenes of Batman kicking someone's head in. It tends to give the impression that the point of this comic is principally as a vehicle for Jim Davidson's beautifully cinematic illustrations of Batman descending upon ne'er-do-wells from tree, balcony or tall building and then kicking their heads in; so it's more or less Judge Dredd, except there's a point to Judge Dredd and it's usually funnier.

Come to think of it, I very much enjoyed Keith Giffen's Batman in the old Justice League comics, but then the point of that Batman was giving the other characters something to take the piss out of.

Raving Communist that I apparently must be, the thing I took from Batman Incorporated is more or less the same thing I take from Donald Trump's presidential campaign - tough on crime but protect your investment in the causes of crime, so let's get the drug dealers and kick their heads in and shit. Chavs too - let's add them to the list whilst we're here, the greedy bag-snatching work-shy fuckers.

Conversely, I suppose you might point out that we also have a Native American Batman here - which is a nice idea - and Morrison takes the trouble to explain in the appendix how he identifies and empathises with the slow genocide of the native American because he went to a reservation and it was a lot like some parts of Glasgow.

Great.

Well, it's not so much an appendix as pages of Jim Davidson's preliminary sketches, mostly of amazing new character sensations - some of whom you'll miss if you blink whilst reading the actual comic - notarised by Morrison listing the obscure 1950s issue of Detective Comics in which they first appeared.

Also there are schoolgirls wearing stockings and suspenders, like they do. Phwoaar! Eh? Eh? They love it!

I have no idea what I've just read, but it wasn't for me.

Jim Davidson didn't really draw it by the way. I just couldn't be arsed to type out the four million names of those who did, although they all did a really tremendous job.

Great.

Swamp Thing: Family Tree

Scott Snyder, Yanick Paquette, Marco Rudy & others
Swamp Thing: Family Tree (2013)
I sort of enjoyed the first seven issues of the revived Swamp Thing comic as assembled in Raise Them Bones, but somewhere in this collection it just seemed to stop doing whatever it was doing that worked for me. The artwork is beautiful, at least for the first half and very much in the vein of John Totleben; but then we whizz off somewhere else to reinvent Anton Arcane and it turns into something which looks like it's sort of trying to not resemble cutesy big-eyed manga shite with Alec Holland as a blue-eyed Kurt Cobain variation from some sappy 1990s autobiographical comic, but not trying very hard; and it isn't quite so bum-violatingly agonising as the Camden-Archieisms of Philip Bond or Jamie Hewlett, but it's closer than I would like. Annoyingly this particular weak-link exposes the other one, namely that the writing probably could have used a bit more elbow grease. The horror aspect is fine, and all very Alan Moore up to a missed point, said missed point being that Moore's horror worked in his version of Swamp Thing because it was played off the contrast with a well-written prosaic reality, scenes focussing on the minutiae of the every day and familiar so as to root the story in something we vaguely recognise. This version of Swamp Thing is, on the other hand, just one horror scenario after another tooled so as to resemble some kind of narrative. It lacks the aforementioned contrast and is, after a while, unsatisfying, reading much as though referring only to previous comics, films, or - shudder - games in the same genre.

The drooling abomination that is Anton Arcane bursts into the shack. 'What, no hug for your Uncle Anton, Abigail?' he slobbers.

'I've got your hug right here,' she growls just like Sigourney Weaver, levelling her shotgun at the monster. By hug she means two barrels of hot leaden death, you see.

Clever.

Maybe I'm just too old for this, but I don't think so. I can read the earlier issues of Swamp Thing without wincing - the issues which came out when I was roughly somewhere within the age group at which they were aimed. This is just lazy writing, media which refers almost exclusively to previous versions of itself.

Swamp Thing: Raise Them Bones

Scott Snyder, Yanick Paquette & others
Swamp Thing: Raise Them Bones (2012)
Following on from my finding Peter Milligan's Red Lanterns borderline unreadable, it was proposed to me that I might direct my gaze elsewhere in DC Comics' newly reinvented cosmology, specifically to the Scott Snyder version of Swamp Thing.

'It's not as good as Alan Moore's Swamp Thing,' my informant told me, 'but it's better than the Mark Millar version.'

So here we are.

In case anyone missed the memo, DC Comics have been doing this sort of thing for a while, regularly rebooting its entire cast of characters back to their own year zero so as to avoid the ludicrous situation of anyone finding themselves required to draw Batman falling asleep in front of Countdown and not shitting himself before he's made it to the lavatory. I'm still not sure what to make of this development, although as I barely read the things these days my opinion would in any case probably be worthless. I was a massive fan of the version of this title which ran throughout the eighties and some of the nineties as written by Alan Moore, Rick Veitch, Doug Wheeler and others, and I can't really see that anything is likely to improve upon those issues. Apparently Swamp Thing has been revived twice since then, by which point I'd wandered off in another direction; and now here we all are, back to the beginning once more. Except it isn't exactly back to the beginning because it tells a story at the same sort of tangent to its earlier self as tends to arise from Hollywood adaptations. Similar situations and characters emerge seeming less like reinvention than someone playing with Alan Moore's toy box - the parliament of trees, the defender of the green as foretold by prophecy, broken necked chaps with their heads facing backwards, and so on. So it all feels at least a little familiar, even referencing what went before in obtuse acknowledgement of everything having returned to year zero, but all joined together in an unfamiliar configuration. Abigail Arcane has had a haircut, and she turns up on a motorbike with a shotgun which she points at the bad guy whilst growling you don't have to do this. Somehow it feels like a bad fit, given that Abigail Arcane probably isn't quite so essential to the founding mythology of Swamp Thing as, for example, is Lois Lane to that of Superman; but maybe I'm just too ingrained with the previous version of the story. Maybe I need to let go.

Actually, the story as spread across the seven issues of the comic collected here does seem to have a pace and dynamic closer to certain Hollywood conventions than was the case with the previous incarnation - just to squeeze out my penultimate winnet of objection-poo; but, for what it is, taking the new Swamp Thing on its own terms and ignoring the recycling, this is a more than decent effort. Excepting the intermittently wonky faces drawn by Marco Rudy for the fourth issue, the art is mostly fucking fantastic, and the writing is mostly pretty darn great, despite my reservations regarding some of the plot across which that writing is draped. I suppose, most importantly, the horror is at least as horrible as anything from Moore's run, which is after all the point of this title.

So yes, possibly better than Mark Millar's Swamp Thing - which I liked a great deal as it happens - and not quite up to Alan Moore standards, and whilst I have some minor reservations, this is a very respectable effort and an absolute pleasure to read.