Without delving too deep into a Manos-style predictation, I'd wager that by the time you're reading this column you've had a chance to gather up a copy of both
Captain America #50 and
Batman: Battle For An Owl #3. (For those of you who haven't and wonder why you're being addressed in such a fashion, take a quick glance at the "Most Pulled" comics for the week: those are the top two. You, my angry friend, are bucking the curve.)
I follow both of these series on the regular. In the case of Batman, it's the only comic I can point to where I just read it all the time, whether I like it or not. I've long stopped trying to create a reason why I do this--there isn't a logical one, and my only real defense of spending money on something I only "like" about half the time is that "defending" one's comics purchases is a singularly stupid thing to do. Some things are just what they are, and while I never planned to be somebody who reads Batman comics on a near-weekly basis, I am, and I don't care why.
Sequential comics, serialized television, fantasy baseball, donkey punching--all this stuff is just a hobby, it's just another way to fill the time, from cradle to grave, and arguing about the technical qualities of a time-killer is a luxury pastime, one only available due to the fact that none of us have to hunt our own food anymore. If you're lucky enough to have "free time", you find a way to fill it. Batman happens to get a portion of mine. Maybe yours is
Star Trek. Maybe it's
Starjammers. Maybe I don't care.
Captain America though--that book is a little different. I didn't grow up with starry-eyed mornings spent reading about Steve Rogers and his candy-colored adventures in patriotism; to be honest, I'm not even sure that's an apt description of what the guy did. I didn't dislike him or anything. I just happened upon a different flavor of the spandex hero first, and it wasn't Steve. Coming at comics the way I did--with no peers who read them, and a brother who found them inherently stupid--I didn't have any reason but to follow my own whims, all of which were determined by whatever comics the one store I went to carried.
Besides that--I wasn't
really a comics fan. Sure, I liked to read
Calvin & Hobbes and
The Far Side, I had an old copy of
Doonesbury (the Beirut hostage stuff), but those weren't comics. They were "funnies". For me growing up, comics meant two things, and one was super-heroes. The other thing it meant was obsession--the desire to fill in the gaps between issue 587 and issue 594. It meant that I learned really quick what anybody else does with super-hero comics, which is that having long runs of serialized comics feels like some kind of chest-swelling moment of nerdish pride, and also that a lot of super-hero comics are somewhere between god-awful and carve-your-eyes-out I hate myself nonsense. Serialized super-heroes--they'll break you quick, especially if you're damned to be one of those kids who cares about liking the stuff you spend your "allowance" on. (I wasn't, thank god. Nobody likes cynics when they're young cynics, Werther notwithstanding. Wait, I don't think anybody liked Werther either.)
Nowadays, I'm a card-carrying Fan O' Comics, all shapes and sizes. Heckfire, I've got a couple that are even in foreign languages, and I bet I could make up some buried-up-my-own-ass reason why I like them, too! I've got some neat-o "Underground" comics that show naked people doing stuff they shouldn't, I've got some newspaper strip collections that I memorized a french word to talk about, an actual set of "Bookmarks" on my work computer so I can read
Achewood on company time, and I've even got some manga! (I keep the manga in a drawer at a friend's house, so No One Will Know I'm a Cheater.) On top of that, I still read
Captain America and
Batman! It's Like Everything Has Changed While I Was Standing Still.
Both
Captain America and the
Batman line have been chasing around the same dragon for the last few years. Ed Brubaker's extensive fifty-issue run on
Captain America has seen him resurrect some character I'd never heard of--to the horror of a few haters--so that he could replace Steve Rogers as Captain America, who was killed in a fashion big enough to get actual newspapers to pay attention: always a sign of success. Over in
Batman--and
Detective, sixteen other books, and
Final Crisis--Grant Morrison followed up Judd Winick's similar "you can't do that" resurrection of a dead sidekick by killing off Bruce Wayne. In Batman's case, the "replacement" hasn't been made official yet, although by the time this column goes to print, we'll know for sure: my money is on Ron Jeremy, but I made that bet when I was really tired.
The similarities between the two comics pretty much ends with those two run-on sentences. Whereas
Captain America has read like a book set up to tell an actual story--one that included hints and references and a unity of style dating back to Ed Brubaker's first issue, the
Batman arc has played out across a multitude of books of divergent qualities.
Captain America had a colorist who forcibly kept a bunch of similar-in-style pencilers under the same aesthetic roof.
Batman had a super-star team, and then it had an adventure of Old Home Week, and then it settled on a guy capable of drawing about 4 distinct poses.
Captain America delivered one issue of story a month, building its overall narrative through the use of concise dramatic arcs.
Batman had anywhere between 2-6 spin-off related titles a week, each of which varied widely in the amount they had to do with the general story.
In other words: one of these comics read like it knew what it was doing. The other one read like it was thrown together by a pack of hyenas being screamed at in a foreign language. That doesn't mean that everything about those
Batman issues was bad--somebody might say that, but that person is a liar who wants your parents to get divorced, so you'll be depressed and sad like they are. Some of the
Batman books were pretty good. One of them was about crying. But when you look at the two comics from a distance, one of them looks like a streamlined car you'd be proud to own, whether you can afford to drive it or not, and the other one looks like that car that Homer Simpson designed.
There's a temptation on my part to attribute
Captain America's supremacy solely to Ed Brubaker, with a nose of credit to Marvel for allowing him the freedom to do with the character what he thought was best. Personally, I just like the idea of singular authors over art-by-collective. But it isn't really accurate to give all the credit to Brubaker, who was helped immensely by a striking team of artists, and I think that part of my motivation for wanting it to be true is because I don't care that much for the idea of saying Marvel > DC, because that's a stupid, boring argument to be had by people who are...well. Stupid. And Boring.
This time though, I guess I have to admit that it's kind of true. Marvel did the right thing by
Captain America. It let a writer and a team of artists work together to create a strong, smart story, and when it came time for the requisite capitalization spin-off--those moronic "Fallen Son" comics--they didn't force them into the main narrative. DC's mistakes with
Batman were legion, and they went far and beyond the basic "get the comic books out on time" complaints. Whereas Marvel played things tight, DC vomited out comic books with no eye for longevity, with no concern for whether or not the non-Morrison writers had any idea what was going on, and they're still pumping out new spin-off titles at a rate of 2-3 a week. Whereas the
Captain America issues screamed with consistency, the quality barometer for the
Batman titles was set at a level where the only thing that mattered was that a salable product was created. There's really no other way to put it: they screwed this one up.
At the end of the day though? It doesn't really matter that much to me, and I'll tell you why.
I read
Captain America for fifty issues because I'm a fan of comics.
I read
Batman because I don't give a shit.
Tucker Stone's writing may be found in print in Comic Foundry and online at The Factual Opinion, where he frequently reviews new releases.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2008
