Like most comic-book fans, I can't get enough of classic British satirical novels, and one of my favorites is Laurence Sterne's eighteenth-century curiosity Tristram Shandy. The central joke is that Tristram, the nominal protagonist, is writing his memoirs, but he keeps digressing so severely that he's hundreds of pages in before he even gets born. Instead, he keeps going off on tangents about his father's clock and his uncle Toby's love life and his own bizarre theories about genetic heritance and interesting features of the European countryside and the scale model Uncle Toby has constructed in his front yard of the battlefield where he received his embarrassing war injury in the testicular region. At one point, Tristram realizes that, since it took him four or five years of writing just to get from his conception to his birth, he will never be able to finish his memoirs, because in the time it takes him to write down part of his life, even more of his life will have happened.

Another of my favorite novels gave us a name for this problem: the Red Queen's Race. "A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

But you know all this, because, as I said, comic-book fans love them some Tristram Shandy.

And here I am deep in the same descending oubliette, starting a column called "All the Comics in the World," about, well, all the comics in the world. Every two weeks, I've promised Comixology.com with my fingers crossed behind my back, I'll write about a comic. New comics, old comics, books, strips, from anywhere in the world. It seemed like the easiest way to run a column, right up until the moment I turned off "Super Mario 2" at the ice world (the most advanced gaming console in my home is a Super Nintendo) and sat down to actually write something. Then I realized the depth of my problem.

I write a column every two weeks. In the time it takes me to write about one interesting comic, somewhere between five and fifty other interesting comics will appear. There's just that much stuff churning out of the presses, coming back into print, sliding down the Intertubes, and showing up in my neighborhood used bookstores every day.

Of course, some of it is interesting in the good way, and some is interesting in the bad way. Which presents another dilemma: which should I write about? Should I devote more space to celebrating the comics that engage the mind, fire the imagination, and kindle love for the art of graphic storytelling, or making fun of the comics that totally suck donkey balls? I can tell you right off the bat which is more fun.

I face this dilemma now, in this very column, because this past weekend I a) went to the wonderful Stumptown Comics Fest in Portland, Oregon, and b) read the latest issue of All-Star Batman and Robin, insane script by Frank Miller, bootylicious art by Jim Lee.

I ought to clarify right off the top that I'm not one of the haters. I wouldn't have opened All-Star Batman and Robin #7 if I hadn't enjoyed issues #1-6. It's a bad comic, sure. But it's gloriously bad, bad in a way most comics would never have the cojones to be bad. A writer has to be very gifted indeed to write scripts as toweringly, imaginatively awful as these; their badness stands as testament to Frank Miller's genius. Jim Lee isn't quite gifted enough to produce bad art on par with Miller's bad writing, but he comes close; he knows the bar has been set high, and he strives to clear it.

Strives very slowly, admittedly. Normally I don't notice if a comic book ships late; I cut my nerd teeth on indie/alt-comics, which tend to run on a schedule of Whenever, and in fact All-Star Batman and Robin hit the shelves on the same week as Peter Bagge's Apocalypse Nerd, one of my other regular reads, which started at around the same time as All-Star Batman and Robin and is only up to issue #5. (I have to admit that I'm not enjoying Apocalypse Nerd as much. It's worth buying for Bagge's lovely, loopy, brilliant art, but five issues in I still have no idea what the point of this comic is. Is it supposed to be funny? Dramatic? A realistic account of what would happen to the Seattle area after a nuclear apocalypse? Like someone who started reading what looked like a perfectly decent Rescue Rangers comic, only to discover that it was actually furry porn, I've increasingly come to suspect that Apocalypse Nerd is some kind of libertarian/survivalist fap material and I just wasn't the target audience from the start. But the Founding Fathers Funnies in the back are pretty good.) Still, even I can tell that Miller and Lee are taking their sweet time. Months, years, entire presidential administrations pass between issues, and the plot creeps along like molasses in winter: famously, it took several issues and the better part of a year for Batman and Robin to get out of their car. Issue #7 averages a whopping two panels per page.

But if the plot never progresses, at least lots of stuff happens. Batman makes a bleach bomb and blows guys up real good! Batman and Black Canary have sweaty masked sex out on the docks! Robin gets locked in the Batcave and goes insane! Robin hacks at a dude with an axe! There's a character named "Jocko-Boy"! That's more than happened in seven issues of Civil War, and the dialogue's a lot funnier—whether intentionally, I have no idea. I think Miller's caught on that "I'm the goddamn Batman" is considered the comedy line of the decade in the better parts of the Internets, because he's started running it into the ground in every issue. Actual line from #7: "I've taken enough grief about calling my goddamn car the goddamn Batmobile. I'm the goddamn Batman and I can call my goddamn car whatever the hell I want to." Come on, you've gotta laugh.

It all comes down to this: Frank Miller could never do another Dark Knight Returns, because every hack in funnybooks spent the past 20 years doing it for him, so he has nowhere to go but upward, ever upward, into stratospheric heights of comic-book insanity and inanity. And All-Star Batman and Robin is giving the fans everything they thought they wanted in a comic book, just to show them how awful their tastes really are. You want Frank Miller back on Batman? And Wizard fan-fave Jim Lee drawing it? And the original Robin and the original Bat-mythos (plus whatever parts of the movies the nerds really dug) and the ultra-dark, mega-badass Dark Knight who could totally beat up Superman and lots of swearing and lots of tits and a flying Batmobile and gritted teeth and fights in the rain? You got it, assholes! You got it in spades.

As for my favorite moment so far: I'm torn between Superman reading about Batman in the Daily Planet, burning a hole in the paper with his heat vision, and saying, "Damn!", and Alfred the Butler stripping to the waist to do chin-ups, revealing a six-pack and a set of rippling pecs. I had troubling dreams about Alfred the year that one came out.

In other words, All-Star Batman and Robin is like a high-speed freeway crash between six gold-plated Rolls Royces, but enough about that. I want to talk just a little about the great time I had at Stumptown, which is saying a lot for me, because I tend not to have a great time at conventions.

I think—no, I know—that I liked Stumptown better because, unlike most comic-book conventions, it contained comic books. Even small-press conventions like APE in San Francisco, which I still enjoy, keep getting suffocated in vinyl toys and plushies and T-shirts and prints of ironic My Little Pony fanart and other geegaws that are NOT COMICS. The stuff is nerd kudzu. And at APE I invariably score a booth adjacent to some sideburned hipster (again, not selling comics) who insists on picking out guitar chords for six hours in the hope of impressing girls in cat-eye glasses and plastic barrettes. Not that Stumptown didn't include plenty of non-comics merchandise—I bought a sweet Holy Artichoke T-shirt from Jenn Manley Lee of Dicebox fame (that's dicebox.net, my favorite webcomic along with Achewood and Templar)—but there seemed to be more comics than anything else, which was a nice change.

Also, Stumptown introduced me to Sarah Oleksyk, a hell of a cartoonist and illustrator. She's doing a graphic novel called Ivy, about a crabby teenage art student; go read it online at saraholeksyk.com. And I had dinner with my hero Carol Lay and bought Finder art super-cheap from my hero Carla Speed McNeil, and I got there the way you ought to get to an indie comics show: on a twelve-hour road trip with six other penniless cartoonists, stuffed into a minivan reading paperback romance novels out loud. And we stopped for homemade pumpkin bread and peanut brittle at a roadside eatery with an entire counter of free-sample baked goods and, I kid you not, bottomless soup-in-a-bread-bowl.

But the pumpkin bread, regrettably, has nothing to do with comics, and if I start writing about that I'll never manage to write about all the comics in the world. Which I can't do anyway, any more than Achilles could outrace Zeno's tortoise. But I've got to keep running the race.