And so, my friends, I ask you on this fine day in February: what was the first comic book you read this year? Because I’ve read a few. Started off with 1998’s What If...? #98, a staggeringly beautiful comic book drawn by Leonardo Manco whose subjects matter is completely immaterial. Then I read Panic #6, from the tail end of 1954. Al Feldstein’s humor: ever so much less evergreen than the Kurtzman MAD, but drawn by Bill Elder, Wally Wood, Joe Orlando and Jack Davis, so who’s counting? A very bitter comic book in every way, still extraordinarily gratifying.
It occurred to me at that point, feeling somewhat on a roll, that I hadn’t actually read Batman: Year One in a very long time. I certainly reflect upon it often enough. I also just reread The Elektra Saga recently, so I can’t say Frank Miller hasn’t been on my mind. Why not just sit down and treat myself? Share the experience with you, on this fine evening.
And so, my friends, I did.
To be more precise, I read Batman #404-407, cover dated February through May, 1987, sold October through January, '86-87, written by Frank Miller and drawn by David Mazzucchelli. Even more precisely: DC’s recent Facsimile Editions of same.
Have you encountered the current Facsimile Edition trend? It qualifies as a trend, I’d say - a new staple of both Marvel’s and DC’s publishing slates. Smaller outfits have dabbled as well. Part of a general and surprising resurgence of reprint formats in periodical comics. Some of them actually chart, as these mortal sums are measured. I’m surprised Fantagraphics hasn't gotten in on the act. DC just got me to buy yet another copy of Batman: Year One, give us facsimiles from the original run of Love and Rockets. The market is manifestly there.
And I confess, I love them. About two months ago I waxed poetic on the virtues of the contemporary Marvel Tales anthology, a truly satisfying package from a corner of the industry that often struggles with outrageous pricing for low-end reprints. If you had asked me a few years ago whether I thought periodical reprints were ever going to become hot in the direct market, I’d have laughed in your face, and so would anyone else. Marvel Tales got canceled the first time in the '90s following the implosion of the newsstand system. Because the direct market had no need for regular reprint books, they just quit doing them, for the most part. Marvel put out the occasional Special in the '00s. Very occasional special projects. They tried to give the original run of Avengers the X-Men Classic treatment back in 2007. New Art Adams covers, backup stories, nicer paper. Was about as competent an execution of the concept of an ongoing reprint book as the industry was capable of producing, and did a polite year before its demise ushered a permanent end to the format in the American market.
And yet, within the last few weeks, I’ve come home from the store with new reading copies not just of Batman #404-407, but Batman #5, Adventure Comics #260, Doom Patrol #99, Wolverine #1, among others. Image put out a new printing of the first issue of Marvel’s venerable G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, to celebrate Larry Hama resuming his never-ending search for a new publisher. Do you realize that within the very near future, Larry Hama will have written more issues of G.I. Joe since leaving Marvel than before? Wild stuff. They haven’t said anything about continuing the reprint program for that series, but it seems as likely as anything. They’ve already been reprinting The Walking Dead, after all, with color. Do you know what number The Walking Dead Deluxe is up to? They’re going on #82!
And, not for nothing, but it’s been forever since anyone tried to serialize any manga in stapled form for comic book shops. Might even be an opening for that as well, in this climate. Imagine Berserk... in color!
Of course, there’s a crucial difference. Marvel Tales has new ads, after all, as did that issue of G.I. Joe. These Facsimile Editions preserve all or most of the original ads and text pages, which is not a completely new idea. The early '90s Marvel Milestone format had a silver border on the cover, but was otherwise a facsimile. The modern examples don’t need the silver border. They just change the price and put a barcode on the back.
It’s not perfect. They reprint Golden and Silver Age books at modern trim, which is a serious demerit, and not just because those stories are almost never reprinted at their initial dimensions. The ad pages almost always look a little off, like really good scans. Marvel insists on using garish, shiny paper that does no favors to anything from before the turn of the century. And, this must be emphasized especially at DC: it is abhorrent that Golden and Silver Age books would ship without creator credits in 2024. They replace the indicia, clearly, and find room for a tiny corporate little masthead, but no discrete credits boxes are proffered.
Is it a sign of a healthy market, to be selling periodical reprints again? When has anything ever been a sign of health in the Direct Market?
So what’s all this add up to then, you ask. I thought we were here to talk about Year One. Of course we are. This is one of the most frequently reprinted superhero stories. No cult object. Slightly overshadowed in the public imagination by The Dark Knight Returns, it must be admitted - and it frankly doesn’t do either book any good to be so twinned, though twinned they are. That’s what happens when you do two of the most influential Batman stories of all time within the space of a year.
A literal year, I smash the italics for pointed emphasis. Not figuratively speaking in any way: The Dark Knight Returns #1 is cover dated June 1986, Batman #407 May 1987. Imagine having a year like that. And this hot on the heels of Born Again, in Daredevil #227-233, later portions of which overlapped with the beginning of The Dark Knight Returns on the racks.
I don’t even think of myself as someone who likes Frank Miller all that much. My favorite Miller is the young Miller, the hungry beast on 1980’s Marvel Team-Up #100, working with Chris Claremont and Bob Wiacek - one of the most perfectly drawn comics in the company’s history. To say nothing of those delightful Amazing Spider-Man Annuals he produced with Denny O’Neil around the same time. He works well with a strong collaborator. I don’t always care for what he gets up to when he’s off on his own.
Now, the first copy I had of Year One—the way I experienced the story the first few times I read it, and the version I loaned to many people in my distant youth—was an early printing of the trade collection. A thin paperback, slightly nicer paper, no extras. An austere presentation of the story. Perhaps similar in presentation to how you encountered it, if you weren’t around to pick it up originally.
* * *
In grad school I read a book called Dickinson’s Misery, written by Virginia Jackson. I can remember not thinking much of it at first, which only makes sense considering Emily Dickinson was never a particular favorite of mine. But few things I read during the period have stayed with me as much, in terms of actually changing the way I read. What Jackson does is excavate the actual physical archive from which we derive Dickinson’s corpus. She didn’t publish much. What we have from her are often notes scribbled on the back of envelopes, memos in margins. Small pieces of paper pressed with flowers, or even dead insects. For a long time, punctuation and formatting for her work owed more to the whims of editors than any resemblance to the record, because the record we were left was a pile of private scribbles on small pieces of paper.
That’s kind of important to know. It changes your relationship with those poems when you come across them. Makes you realize just how much of intrinsic value is leveled when work is excerpted, taken in isolation, shorn of context like a sheep stepping to the barber.
And that’s why it’s also important to understand, at the very least, Batman: Year One was not published as an austere standalone graphic novel, or even a squarebound Prestige Format limited series. No, the story was published in four consecutive issues of one of DC’s flagship monthly books, sold in supermarkets and gas stations from sea to shining sea. Monthly comic books, filled with advertisements and editorials and reader mail. Bought in droves for small children.
Take, for example, the cover to Batman #404 - one of the most famous pieces of Batman art ever drawn. The canonical staging of the death of Bruce Wayne’s parents. What’s on the other side of that front cover? Why, an ad for Legends! You remember Legends, right? It was the first crossover they did after Crisis on Infinite Earths, a really tepid yarn that nevertheless formally launched the Giffen & DeMatteis Justice League, John Ostrander’s Suicide Squad and George Pérez’s Wonder Woman. Good books that are still read and discussed today, if at a slight remove from Year One.
Does it stick in your brain that the inside front cover of the first chapter of Year One has John Byrne art on it? It’s the truth.
As strange as it may seem, Year One owes as much to Crisis on Infinite Earths as any immediate precedent not involving Frank Miller. It’s not a spin-off of Crisis, in any way, except for the fact that it is manifestly not something they’d have published in that form without Crisis: an absolutely gorgeous series that also represents, for many readers, an experience similar to diving into an empty swimming pool, both dry and injurious. And yet, a great labor was required on their part of Marv Wolfman & George Pérez to create the internal conditions at the company by which DC could remake itself. When Crisis was over the deck was cleared for a new beginning, and if the series itself had been far too “inside baseball” to make any kind of splash outside the world of comics, the same could not be said for the next logical move: revamping Superman. That got headlines in 1986.
If you go back to the moment of publication, Year One was as much intended to compliment John Byrne’s The Man of Steel as anything else. That may not have been at the forefront of Miller’s thoughts at the time, yet he couldn’t possibly have been ignorant of the situation. The Man of Steel itself is an underwhelming read, even relative to good work Byrne did with the character later in that same period. He stuck around for a couple years, and even if many aspects of his run are still controversial, there’s no disputing the fact that his changes were generative for other creators. Superman had a very good 1990s. This was not a period where the character was destined to do well by any means, and yet it was undeniably a top and consistent seller across the decade. This surprising state of affairs was as much as anything else product of the refurbishing the character received in the late '80s.
In no uncertain terms, DC got their money’s worth from The Man of Steel, an underwhelming read because it’s a blueprint, retelling the origin and reorienting the concept to fit then-contemporary mores. These are Superman’s parents, this is what Lex Luthor acts like now, this is the new design for Krypton, etc. And in fairness to Byrne, he gave DC precisely what they wanted - and he did stick around for a couple years to play out some of the consequences of his choices.
Now it seems a bit clearer what a project like Year One would have meant to the company, internally. The Man of Steel was first because everything else naturally flows from Superman. But in no time the rest of the line followed suit. Wonder Woman, as I said, received the attention of Pérez - it’s the most highly regarded writing work of his career, and still one of the characters’ most popular runs. The Justice League, the Flash, Green Arrow - all down the line, all subjects of successful reboots.
But if Byrne and Pérez stuck around to steer the ship for a while, Frank Miller was never going to write another couple years of Batman comics. His days of open-ended runs on monthly books were over. Already, since leaving Marvel in the early '80s, he had transitioned to limited runs. Whatever he said about Batman in Year One was most likely going to have to stand on its own for other creators to parse.
* * *
There’s another party to this story, however, and a familiar name to this narrative. Perusing the Facsimile Editions and their letter columns, Year One is revealed to be the tip of a spear wielded by its editor, Denny O’Neil. Newly transplanted from Marvel and Batman’s shepherd for the next decade and a half, he kept up a lively exchange in that first stretch of mailbag pages. I’ve written about O’Neil’s tenure at the helm of the Batman books before, a significant period not just for those comics and the comics industry but, fatefully, much of the culture downstream. He was a man with a very clearly defined image of what and who Batman should be, and in this regard he stood hand in glove with Miller.
Miller’s & Mazzucchelli’s Batman was also, effectively, Denny O’Neil’s Batman. They stripped the character almost to the bone, and that sparseness reflects the priorities of the new regime. This version of the character represents a composite of a number of factors. First and foremost, there was to be reckoned an image in the popular imagination of Batman’s earliest adventures. The first year, pre-Robin. In the popular imagination at the time—it goes without saying, before these stories were as available to read as they are today—this era was believed to be excessively violent, hard-boiled noir. An Eden for a rough & tumble Batman, disrupted by the arrival of the child wearing bright colors. Of course, if you go back and actually read the early Batman comics, that’s only partially true. Those early stories are weird. Certainly, they go harder in many respects than the later post-Robin material. But they’re also filled with goofy pulp villains and horror stylings that were subsequently filtered out. Year One doesn’t have Hugo Strange or hulking henchman hanging out in gothic castles; its villains are almost entirely of the mundane variety. Crooked cops and politicians, mostly, with a handful of petty criminals scattered throughout. The one other costumed character who shows up does so as a direct response to Batman’s instigation.
In the plainest terms, I am not a fan of O’Neil’s writing. His stories strike me as unnecessarily astringent, mixed always with some handful of truly preposterous elements. This is significant because the person who would go on to make the most use of Miller’s new invention, the “Year One Batman,” would be O’Neil himself. In 1989, flush with the success of Tim Burton’s Batman film and cresting a wave of Batmania even bigger than the tsunami of 20 years prior, O’Neil launched a third ongoing Batman title in the form of Legends of the Dark Knight. An anthology title consistent of rotating creative teams all tackling the blueprint given in the pages of Year One: young Batman, no Robin, sparse use of familiar villains, the minimizing of any sci-fi or fantasy elements. O’Neil wrote a few arcs of the early run of Legends, including one story designed as an immediate follow-up to the original Year One. Issue #50, released in 1993, picks up from the last panel of Miller & Mazzucchelli’s book, offering a new version of Batman’s first meeting with the Joker. Drawn by Bret Blevins, it’s a good one, even given my usual caveats about O’Neil’s writing and the Joker both.
The desire to return the Caped Crusader to a prelapsarian imagination met a significant impetus towards modernization. The same exact impetus, it must be emphasized, that galvanized Byrne’s efforts. Both Byrne and Miller came up at Marvel around the same time, Miller a little. And they remained close enough professional associates to launch the Legend imprint at Dark Horse together, in the early '90s, alongside the likes of Mike Mignola and Art Adams.
One reason I believe I rate Year One so highly is, I believe, the degree to which it marks a pure throwback to the stylistic concerns of Miller's Daredevil run, alongside his other work from that period. Miller’s great insight is as a storyteller. His vaunted reverence for Eisner is no mere pretense; you can see the lessons right there on the page. You can argue as to whether or not he uses those lessons well, as I often do, but there’s no doubt that he’s someone who put a great deal of deep thought into the matter of how to draw a comic book page. Through his Daredevil he reveals himself to be a keen and eager student not just of Eisner, but of Krigstein as well, and Jack Kamen - any number of influences wholly alien to the Marvel Way. All alongside the ever-present Steve Ditko, of course, and maybe even the occasional flash of Gene Colan. Everything but John Buscema and Jack Kirby. He’d certainly get to Kirby later.
We’re left, however, with the dissatisfying assertion, repeated down the blind aeons, that Miller got to be so good at telling stories in part to compensate for his deficiencies as a draftsman. Do you agree? I know you’ve heard it. Miller understands narrative and design better than just about anyone - does it matter if his knees look worse than Kirby’s? I don’t think Miller ever quite got the knack of drawing women's faces, in a manner similar to the aforementioned Ditko. I just reread Elektra Saga the other week, as I mentioned. Gorgeous storytelling, wonky looking broads. Miller is capable of dizzying feats of technical prowess - Elektra Lives Again is an overlooked book, but one of the greatest performances of his career. Certainly a mark against the “Frank can’t draw” crowd. He knows how to draw a lot of things very well. The problem is that he draws like Frank Miller, and how he draws gets more and more like Frank Miller as he goes on. And that’s about all you can say about that, for better or for worse.
* * *
Miller is, however, blessed with one of the most important skills any comics writer can ever have; possibly the most important. It’s a true skill he shares with Alan Moore, the single biggest commonality to both their oeuvres. Neil Gaiman has it, in spades. So does Chris Claremont. What gibberish am I talking about? I’m listing the most commercially successful comic book writers of the last half-century. But why are they so popular? Because they know how to write to the strengths of different artists.
That must really be important, since I placed it in italics, though it sounds like a really basic and completely unexceptional observation. Any writer worth his salt will do that. Yes: but how many of them do? It’s a hard thing. Look at The Sandman, which becomes a completely different book for each new artist over the course of those 75 issues and change. Similarly, look at how Uncanny X-Men changes over the course of Claremont’s very long run, adjusting and growing to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of its artists. For the comic book writer, there is a difference between sitting down to write a story and sitting down to think of interesting things for another person to draw.
Miller is an excellent writer for other artists, clearly knows what makes them tick. Think about what an excellent job he did with Bill Sienkiewicz in the late '80s, on both Elektra: Assassin and the Love and War graphic novel. Miller sat down in front of a typewriter and had to figure out the absolute coolest thing he could ask The Sink to draw. That’s the animating impulse behind Elektra: Assassin. Boy howdy does it succeed at that, and righteously. Miller cracked Geof Darrow right open with Hard Boiled. And maybe we don’t talk as much about the Martha Washington books as we could, but they’re certainly very beautiful, filled with the kind of elaborately detailed, politically trenchant human-scale sci-fi environments Dave Gibbons loves to draw.
And so with Mazzucchelli. Denny O’Neil had actually worked with Mazzucchelli first, during O’Neil's tenure as writer on Daredevil, prior to Miller’s return with Born Again. And, please, accept my word that these are some of the worst Daredevil comics you will ever read. O’Neil and Mazzucchelli worked together for about a year on the book, and the main villain of that period was a fellow named Micah Synn. I could derail this essay to go on a rant about how terrible a character Micah Synn is, but I won’t. Just Google the goober on your own, consider it a gift from me to you when you’re on the can later tonight.
Given that Mazzucchelli went from Micah Synn to Born Again in the space of one year, it’s difficult to imagine that even Miller knew how precious an opportunity he had been granted. No one could have guessed how profoundly short this career in comics was going to be. David Mazzucchelli was never going to work with Alan Moore - crazy, right? Never came close to happening. He was long gone from the industry before he ever had the chance to draw a book like The Sandman. What did he do after Year One? One more Marvel story, with Ann Nocenti (which I’ll mention in a moment), but not a very long one at all. He did a groundbreaking “art” comic that has been allowed to fall deleteriously and expensively out of print - Rubber Blanket, of course (1991-93). He did a literary adaptation - City of Glass (1994). And of course, many years later, he dropped a weighty graphic novel - Asterios Polyp (2009). Other than those major works? A literal handful of other projects - kids' stuff, a few short stories here and there, some inking jobs for friends.
He did an issue of X-Factor, did you know that? Issue #16, dropped right after Batman #407. Think about that: Batman #407 isn’t even the only comic book David Mazzucchelli had on the stands in February of 1987. It’s not a bad comic, by any means. Written by Louise Simonson, so a competent piece of work. Simonson in her Claremont mode. Fundamentally a very different kind of comic than what he drew with Miller. It’s a fun book to flip through, don’t get me wrong. It reads very much like him consciously bashing one out in the classic Marvel style, if just to prove he still could. Joe Rubinstein on inks, if you can imagine such a thing.
Maybe he had fun with it. Mazzucchelli did actually come back to Marvel again, after Year One, for one gem of a story done in his later style. Marvel Fanfare #40, featuring Angel, of the X-Men. Of all the characters! Written by the aforementioned Ann Nocenti, in 1988. It’s surprisingly sweet, and gorgeous - no reservations. Funny thing about Angel: I can only think of two Angel solo stories off the top of my head. The first one is Mazzucchelli’s, the second is Leonardo Manco’s 1996 one-shot Phantom Wings with Peter Milligan, a story so stunning Marvel accorded Manco the rare honor of being printed in full black & white. There’s that Leo Manco again. Good solo track record for ol’ Warren Worthington.
Then, of course, the wheel turned and David Mazzucchelli said goodbye to the world of superhero comic books forever. More power to him, clearly. I’m sure it seems like high school days. Maybe we’ll see him pop up on some variant covers at some point, when Marvel puts out their colorized Berserk that ships with 20 different covers. That might be fun.
Marvel got Frank Miller to do a series of covers for them recently, and he turned in some very striking pieces. Surprisingly controversial, which certainly proves the old boy can still get them out of bed. But controversy was never the problem. I don’t care for much of his solo stuff. Miller’s temperament when left to his own devices is a far cry from my own. I don’t own a single issue of Sin City, I won’t let it in the house. There are times in the commission of criticism when it is incumbent upon the critic to be mindful of the seventh proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
And we must never forget Holy Terror. An extraordinarily awful book to which Miller was absolutely and with his whole heart committed. I know people who still won’t touch anything he does, and I can’t say they’re wrong for it. With the shape of the world today? Those aren’t ideas to forgive lightly, or at all. Like I say, I only really get excited about comics he drew during the Reagan Administration.
Because he’s central, especially the material at the front end of his career. I didn’t start out with a strong affinity to him, and truth be told, I actually spent a lot of my life actively disliking Miller. But I eventually came around to the understanding that Miller peaked, for me, sometime around 1981. He certainly does a lot of work after he leaves Marvel for the first time, in the early '80s, but I like watching Frank learn how to put together a comic book page. It’s fascinating watching him learn the ropes.
* * *
Did you know that David Mazzucchelli wasn’t Miller’s first choice to draw Year One? The first person Miller asked was Trevor Von Eeden, who politely declined. At that point Von Eeden was an old hand at the Caped Crusader - as recently as issue #401, which hit the stands earlier that same year, written by Barbara Kesel. Issue #401 of Batman was part of a crossover, incidentally, with the aforementioned Legends, featuring the obscurity Magpie. That most forlorn of creatures: a Batman villain created by, yes, our old friend John Byrne. Before that, Von Eeden had been a fill-in artist on Batman and the Outsiders. That’s where I first encountered him, in any rate, as Batman and the Outsiders was inexplicably a favorite of mine when I was very small.
There is much Von Eeeden in the mature Mazzucchelli, I believe. Von Eeden’s maturation over the course of the 1980s is one of the great developments of the period. The closest his generation came to Toth. Von Eeden is a more effortless storyteller than Miller, his mastery of the placement of the reader’s eye simply inimitable. He could have drawn an absolutely gorgeous Year One, and I’m certain we would have been none the wiser. But Miller got the guy he’d just worked with on Daredevil to step in, and that turned out pretty alright too. Perhaps the first draft of these ideas that existed in Miller’s head would have worked out slightly differently had Von Eeden accepted the job. Certainly Mazzucchelli’s work on the series doesn’t seem an ill-suited job by any means. On the contrary, it’s one of the greatest comic books ever drawn.
Now, as it turned out, the late '80s are generally considered a high-water mark for the Batman franchise. This was due to a series of remarkably successful special projects, following in the direct wake of Dark Knight Returns—all the usual suspects, Year One, The Killing Joke, Arkham Asylum—a movement which feels as if it crested at the moment of the release of the 1989 Batman movie. That was the year Legends of the Dark Knight launched, too. All of these things were occurring not because or despite but in absolute isolation from anything that was happening at the time in the regular Batman titles.
Do you know who followed Miller & Mazzucchelli on Batman? It’s not a gotcha. The answer is Max Allan Collins. Wait, that Max Allan Collins? Yeah, the Road to Perdition guy. Massively prolific mystery author. An unbelievably vast bibliography - and he wrote a not insignificant amount of comics as well. Cocreated the immortal Ms. Tree, with Terry Beatty. And how long has it been since we saw Ms. Tree in new comics? Has it been 30 years? How is that even possible? How is she not still being published? A unique character unfairly forgotten.
So, no slouch! You’d think people would want to see the mystery guy writing the detective character. Not so much, apparently. They hyped up a new artist for the title, to take over after Mazzucchelli - kid named Chris Warner. He lasted one issue. Do you know who they got to step in for #409? Ross Andru. And they followed him with Dave Cockrum for three issues. And Kieron Dwyer even managed a fill-in, but that was before he was anybody. Then the new new creatives were brought on, Jim Starlin & Jim Aparo. Two very familiar faces. Starlin’s Batman is remarkable for the degree to which it's a very straight-faced and action-oriented book. Unusual for Starlin in many respects. Tonally seems to owe much to what had become the most quietly influential title of the immediate post-Crisis period, Ostrander’s Suicide Squad. Fit work for Aparo, my personal favorite Batman artist, just then hitting what would become a late career bloom.
So, within half a year of David Mazzucchelli, Batman fully reverted to his Bronze Age status quo ante. Two months after Year One they were back to Ross Andru.
Do you know what was going on in sister title Detective Comics during Year One? Alan Davis was drawing it, for Mike W. Barr. A reunion of the team from the latter half of Batman and the Outsiders. Replaced by a succession of teams, a process which began in Detective Comics #575 - Batman: Year Two. Oh, you groan. That’s rude. Farting in a church.
Have you read Year Two? It seems perverse to even mention it in this context. It is, bluntly, not very good. It’s not really any kind of diamond in the rough, even if I’ll say it’s worth at least flipping through so you can see Todd McFarlane’s Batman. Yeah, it’s drawn by a very young Todd McFarlane, alongside the quickly maturing Davis. It’s gorgeous in its own way, but imagine rounding up those two artists and Mike W. Barr to follow up Year One.
The one thing that can be said about Year Two, and a not insignificant factor in its favor, is that somehow, inexplicably, the bare bones of it were used as the scaffolding of the far superior Batman: Mask of the Phantasm animated film in 1993. The vision in Batman: The Animated Series was only one or two steps removed from Mazzucchelli’s interpretation to begin with, and certainly closer to Denny O’Neil’s sharply defined aesthetic as a writer and editor than anything else. If you haven’t seen Phantasm in a while or at all, give yourself a treat. Dark horse but defensible candidate for best Batman film.
But: there is nonetheless an interesting and often overlooked connection here relating to Year Two, and why its existence is relevant to Year One. Do you know, off the top of your head, how long after Year One they did Year Two? If you were around at the time, you probably do: they started Year Two the very next month. Batman #407 was cover dated May of 1987 but dropped in late January of that year, while Detective #575, cover dated June 1987, arrived in early March. The way comics work, it’s almost impossible to imagine that kind of coordination in monthly comic book schedules without significant lead time. What does this mean, and why does it matter? It matters because Year One was initially conceived, at least at some point in the development process, by editorial, as part one of a series. And, by extension, Year Two was never intended to be as much a direct sequel to Miller’s & Mazzucchelli’s masterpiece as it was another segment in what was conceived as an anthology.
Make no mistake, Year Two is bad on its own merits; not just because it’s a sequel to a much better comic. In hindsight you can see the design: if Year One was a lean, noir-soaked action story with hard boiled overtones, then Year Two could embrace the character’s more macabre elements, horror-tinged motifs, and even occasional romantic grace notes. The problem is not just that the story wasn’t any good, it’s that Year One was good enough by itself to be its own brand. It wasn’t part of any series, it didn’t need a direct sequel. We shall pass lightly by the shattering realization that Batman: Year Three was attempted in 1989.
* * *
Following Year Two, and a period of flux similar to that experienced by its sister title, Detective settled on writer Alan Grant and penciler Norm Breyfogle. One of the better creative teams in the character’s history. Between Grant & Breyfogle and Starlin & Aparo, the character finally had stable and consistently creative teams for both main books. Though hindsight would suggest that Crisis had very little effect on the Batman family, both series stumbled into that era nonetheless. The presence of Year One at the outset of such a turbulent creative period seems anomalous and destabilizing.
The matter wouldn’t be completely remedied until 1989, and the addition of a third regular Batman title, Legends of the Dark Knight. A series dedicated, in essence, to producing more or less direct sequels to Year One. DC was lucky here, inasmuch as the company had its arms tied in terms of using the older Batman from Dark Knight Returns until and unless Frank the Tank deigned to return to do something about it. And, wouldn’t you know, he actually did, eventually, but that’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax. As far as this ball of wax is concerned, the Year One Batman was a shitty way to launch a renewed comics line because it really just launched a whole new franchise within the franchise.
That wasn’t something writers like Jim Starlin and Alan Grant were able to respond to. They had to write Batman stories set in the present. People liked everything about Batman but the main titles, which sold well heading into the annus mirabilis of 1989 but were generally considered to be mired in a conservatism relative to the company’s other Batman releases. Starlin’s Batman isn’t nearly as weird as you'd need it to be, aside from the whole 'killing Robin' thing, which was perhaps another downstream consequence of Year One being such an appealing vision of the character. Starlin actually succeeds quite well as a more straightforward and dry kind of action writer. He barely uses Robin at all, prior to killing him. Grant, for his part, would go on to be one of the most prolific Batman writers of the era, and one of the main architects involved in laying the bricks for what the character would eventually become in the new century. A creatively rewarding and eventually quite popular era for the main titles would dawn in the 1990s. It took a while for O’Neil’s vision to clarify.
But as far as sequels go, they got the balance right with Legends of the Dark Knight. There’s a lot of good stuff buried in the first few years of that title, all people explicitly working with the version of the character shown in Year One. Gil Kane did a three issue run with Howard Chaykin - issues #24-26. Kevin O’Neill gave us the first post-Frank Miller Bat-Mite in issue #38, and there was even a special by him a couple years after that. The two strongest candidates if you want an actual, genuine attempt at a quasi-sequel to Year One are probably the second and third arcs of LotDK: “Gothic,” by Grant Morrison & Klaus Janson, which ran in issues #6-10, and Doug Moench's & Paul Gulacy’s “Prey,” in #11-15. "Gothic" throws the version of Batman seen in Year One into a genuinely spooky yarn about ghosts knocking around great sprawling castles, with narrow escapes from elaborate deathtraps. These moody parts of the early Batman were elided by Miller & Mazzucchelli, but not explicitly precluded. "Prey" plucks at the psychosexual tensions undergirding the early stories: Hugo Strange and Catwoman both pop up and sadomasochism is suddenly an explicit factor in the proceedings. A pile of very readable comics, all from the acknowledgment that there are many interesting stories to be told in the first year of Batman’s career. Morrison and Moench, it should be noted, were already or would go on to be extraordinarily significant Batman writers, Moench across the '80s and '90s, and Morrison, having already released Arkham Asylum in '89, in the decade following O’Neil’s departure.
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But Catwoman... she’s integral to the whole thing. As much as I revere Year One, I admit I hadn’t read it in a while. My memory of the plot wasn’t that good anyway, but Catwoman’s role didn’t really make a lot of sense to me for the longest time. It seemed very much tertiary to the rest of the story, a subplot with little payoff. And I really underrated the ending too. The final panel - you know the final panel, with Gordon sitting on the rooftop waiting for his new best friend to arrive because some freak is threatening to blow up something or other, some freak called the Joker: boom! Bring down the curtain! The crowd rises to their feet! Corny. Inevitable. A sop to the series’ vestigial debt to Man of Steel.
This time, however, when I sat and thought about it, it occurred to me that the story works just as well as a last Batman story as a first Batman story. There’s a note of abject futility in those final words. What we’ve just seen is the absolute beginning of the Batman myth, the foundation of the most important bond of his adult life: Batman’s bond with Gordon, the first person in the entire world outside of Wayne Manor who trusts him. Convincing Gordon to trust a man in a mask is the hardest challenge of his career.
The hardest challenge Gordon faces is not dying, considering his dogged resistance to the corruption in his new hometown. The last set piece in the story is Batman, in a leather jacket on a motorcycle, saving Gordon’s newborn child from an assassin sent by corrupt cops. A precise and technically demanding sequence for an artist to draw, involving as it does a car chase. One of those things you’re supposed to struggle with as an artist.
But then, Mazzucchelli isn’t like most artists. I believe we’ve established that.
The joy at the heart of Year One is the first shaping of incorruptible men. Batman is many things in the popular imagination, and many things in Frank Miller’s imagination - but the greatest thing to imagine here is that Batman is a man strong enough to not be afraid of the cops. He doesn’t care, and he protects his friends. His enemy is crooked cops and rich people dining well. The enemy isn’t kids stealing TVs.
The most harrowing action sequence in the book, incidentally, is actually the brawl between Batman and some kids on a fire escape stealing a TV. Our man learns as much from that one fight than anything else in the story, I’d wager, and it’s a remarkable subtle thing to see.
Specific to Miller, but radiating outwards in the circumference of his influence, we find paranoia: key to his understanding of the world. A reflexively oppositional nature. Politically, Miller is almost illegible. There are some frighteningly reactionary passages in some of his greatest works, and much of that work is marred by the tendency. It’s a streak visible all the way through Holy Terror.
But he’s no friend of corporations or social conservatives. His stories simply have to be against something, and the results across a long career seem about as scattershot and occasionally regrettable as you’d expect. Perhaps one of the reasons I prefer his work with collaborators to his later solo material is that collaborators almost always temper Miller’s more, ah, Millerish tendencies. When writing for other people he’s scrupulously generous to the needs and strengths of his collaborators.
Go back to that last panel. Think about this moment. Gordon and Batman have just formed an unshakeable bond. How did Miller make Gordon a sympathetic character? DC’s Serpico, a good man against a crooked city. Someone who would be, frankly, completely overwhelmed by the corruption around him were it not for one factor: the new guy on the scene. The guy able to run rings around the cops in broad daylight. Gordon knows as long as this Batman sticks around he’s always going to have someone at his back.
And that moment, when we see Gordon call Batman for help the very first time, is the pinnacle: it’s the very first time Sisyphus gets that rock up the hill. The threat Batman and Gordon together pose to the corrupt interests of the city is ameliorated somewhat by what follows. Batman’s example has just created a whole new kind of criminal and a whole new type of crime. The Joker is just the tip of an indescribably large iceberg. That’s why Catwoman is so important. Because the decision to follow her throughout the book, to make her a crucial reaction character, a witness but not a participant in the most crucial fights, means that we can follow her thought process very easily when at the end of the story she pulls on her own costume and takes to the night on slightly less selfless pretenses. As soon as one freak comes out, the rest come out to play as well. When we hear about the Joker it sinks in the stomach in the same way as hearing there’s been a third confirmed case of a uniquely deadly malady. The weirdness is spreading.
Gordon has just finished the worst ordeal of his life, but he’s about to be dragged into an immortal inferno. People like watching Batman and Commissioner Gordon wriggle around like bacteria in the Petri dish of Gotham City - hell, people love it. They’re not going to stop thinking up weird shit to happen to Batman, not any time soon. And that moment on the roof? That’s the most confident Gordon will ever be.
Maybe my reading of that last panel came to be informed, however unfairly, of the fact that I quite like Legends of the Dark Knight #50, Denny O’Neil’s explication of the first meeting between Batman and the Joker. Picking up right where Miller & Mazzucchelli leave off. It all fits together perfectly. It all flows into the same never-ending battle.
But it was an ending battle for the two men who made Year One. Miller wasn’t saying goodbye to superhero stories, or even to Batman, but he was most definitely saying goodbye to the demands of ongoing monthly comics. Mazzucchelli, turns out, was most definitely saying goodbye to superhero stories. Neither of them were ever again going to have anything to do with telling people how to make monthly Batman comics.
Have fun in hell, boys. It will never end.
And what a remarkable thing, to read the story again in this periodical form. Facsimiles don’t feel quite like the original thing, mind. Cover stock is different. Paper’s better. It looks the same, more or less. But I own many comic books DC published in 1986, 1987, and they’re thinner affairs, on awful paper. Feels different in the hand. This is a historical reproduction, a replica fashioned to modern standards. A glimpse into context for such a vital artifact. A quality photographic reproduction of rose petals pressed into an ancient diary. Batman: Year One was first printed as four regular issues of the Batman comic book, and proved so successful in that capacity the rest of the company forgot how to make Batman comics for a significant amount of time. Just imagine.
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