By Frank Miller, Jim Lee and Scott Williams
Color by Alex Sinclair, Letters by Jared K. Fletcher
Published by DC Comics. $2.99
Rumor has it that ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN has seen a full year pass between issues 4 and 5. We here at Sequential Heart do not concern ourselves with such things as “release schedules” and “mathematics.” We are interested in the comic books and what is inside of them!
What is inside of this comic book is Wonder Woman getting really mad and saying things like “Shut up. You call yourselves men? Shut up,” and Superman being all “Damn you, Diana! Damn you and your Amazon arrogance! You don’t know anything!” and then Wonder Woman being like “I hate your guts. You make me sick,” and then Superman totally grabs Wonder Woman and kisses her and the narrator goes “Then Zeus stabs the world of man with thunderbolts and somewhere Poseidon roars with laughter. The thunderbolts. They stab them both,” and then Wonder Woman stomps off and goes “I hate you all.”
I picked up the first two issues of ALL-STAR BATMAN & ROBIN just like most everyone else did, and they were pretty much awful. Not just as “All-Star” titles, and not just as superhero titles, but as comic books and things that I trade money for. They were lousy. But the internets whispered that with this new issue, the title crossed from “bad comics” into the realm of “supertrash bad comics,” and I’m a pretty big fan of supertrash. Like that old issue of Superman where a tiny Superman grows out of Superman’s hand, with all the powers and abilities of big Superman, and it makes big Superman feel bad about himself that everyone loves tiny Superman just as much as him? Awesome. I don’t even know that it counts as supertrash, it’s so awesome. There are beans behind the beans in a thing like that.
But ALL-STAR BATMAN & ROBIN 5 doesn’t have any beans behind the beans. I’m not so sure there are even any beans in front. It’s just Frank Miller coming indoors for a few minutes after swimming in his Scrooge McDuck pool of gold coins, smearing Batman-shaped crap on a computer screen, and laughing maniacally as he sends it to Jim Lee to draw. I mean good for him for being able to write the kind of stories he wants to write and all … but as much as he or other readers might feel like there’s subtext and commentary and Art Worth Seeing in this title, there’s just nothing in this book for me to take away, except perhaps for the warning that “there but for the grace of God, etc. etc.”
Tell me more: DC Comics: All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder
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