Batman
Presented for the first time with stark, stunning new coloring by Brian Bolland, BATMAN: THE KILLING JOKE is Alan Moore's unforgettable meditation on the razor-thin line between sanity and insanity, heroism and villainy, comedy and tragedy. According to the grinning engine of madness and mayhem known as the Joker, that's all that separates the sane from the psychotic. Freed once again from the confines of Arkham Asylum, he's out to prove his deranged point. And he's going to use Gotham City's top cop, Commissioner Jim Gordon, and the Commissioner's brilliant and beautiful daughter Barbara to do it.
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- Funny you mention superhero films, because that's also what killed the American comic book industry.
If you go to a bookstore and ask someone not particularly familiar with the industry to go find a comic book; you are very likely to have them hand a manga or manhwa tankobon[0] back to you. Trade paperbacks[1] are sold in bookstores, but the western comics section will be a small fraction of the manga & manhwa section.
The root cause of this is that in the 80s, comic book companies - say it with me, folks! - underwent massive amounts of consolidation to chase efficiencies at the expense of their ability to innovate and their ability to withstand systemic shocks. The particularized version of this is that the comic book companies ceded their cultural ubiquity to milk comics fans dry.
The efficiency being chased was "direct sales" - i.e. selling comic books to dedicated comic book stores, rather than in mass-market areas like grocery stores. A key thing to note is that the mass-market sellers retain the right to return unsold inventory and get a refund[3], but comic book stores bought on "all sales final" terms. What this ultimately meant was that comic book publishers didn't have to worry about the quality of the books anymore.
There was a long-standing cultural stigma in the US that comic books are for children. This was itself downstream of a push to censor comics that was partially successful and resulted in the Comics Code stunting the growth of the medium[4] in the US. Eventually, thanks to - among other things, Marvel wanting to publish an anti-drug PSA in a Spiderman book - the Comics Code Authority lost their power and we were able to publish comic books for adults in the US again.
Anyway, Alan Moore wrote a really gritty Batman book and kicked off a rush to capitalize on a growing adult comics wave. This, along with a bunch of people realizing that old #1s of comics published during Baby Boomers' childhoods[5] were super rare kicked off a huge speculator wave. The comics publishers - who at this point were just DC and Marvel - saw the dollar signs and started flooding the market with slop to meet the demands of speculators who were buying #1s just because they were a #1.
This continued until it could not. In an act of supreme hubris, Marvel decided to buy a comics distributor in pursuit of extreme vertical integration and wound up completely destroying their ability to correctly print a book. Then they went bankrupt, got bought out by a corporate raider, and sold their movie rights to anyone who had a buck. DC wound up in the hands of WB (lol), Marvel became a Disney property.
Yes, the 2010s comic book movie wave was directly caused by the 1990s comic book industry's death. And, for that matter, the exact same extreme consolidation that killed comics is coming for Hollywood. Disney bought Fox, Larry Ellison bought Paramount and WB and merged them into Skydance. The entirety of America's cultural industries are looking more and more like DC and Marvel fighting over the ashes of a culturally dead country.
[0] Japanese for trade paperback[1][2].
[1] English for tankobon[0].
[2] Okay, this term actually has two meanings:
1. A paperback that is not printed to mass-market standard. Publishers don't really do mass-market paperbacks anymore, even manga that is printed to mass-market sizes isn't priced like the mass-market books they are in Japan.
2. Anthologies of previously-published comic books - floppies in the western case, massive pulp-fiction magazine bricks in the Japanese case. Sometimes they're not even in paperback!
[3] Which, funnily enough doesn't even usually require returning the whole book, just the covers.
[4] The shit the Comics Code did to US comics makes the censorship changes in the 4Kids dubbed version of One Piece look liberating in comparison.
- > a block universe
I first encountered this theory and the related "eternalism" philosophy via Alan Moore [1] (Watchmen, V for Vendetta, The Ballad of Halo Jones, Swamp Thing, Batman: The Killing Joke, From Hell, etc.). Watchmen and its non-Moore-affiliated sequel have a lot of riffs on time and determinism.
Q: Jerusalem deals with the idea of eternalism: everything that has happened is happening right now and forever. Could you explain your views on this?
A: My conception of an eternity that was immediate and present in every instant – a view which I have since learned is known as ‘Eternalism’ – was once more derived from many sources, but a working definition of the idea should most probably begin with Albert Einstein. Einstein stated that we exist in a universe that has at least four spatial dimensions, three of which are the height, depth and breadth of things as we ordinarily perceive them, and the fourth of which, while also a spatial dimension, is perceived by a human observer as the passage of time. The fact that this fourth dimension cannot be meaningfully disentangled from the other three is what leads Einstein to refer to our continuum as ‘spacetime’.
This leads logically to the notion of what is called a ‘block universe’, an immense hyper-dimensional solid in which every moment that has ever existed or will ever exist, from the beginning to the end of our universe, is coterminous; a vast snow-globe of being in which nothing moves and nothing changes, forever. Sentient life such as ourselves, embedded in the amber of spacetime, would have to be construed by such a worldview as massively convoluted filaments of perhaps seventy or eighty years in length, winding through this glassy and motionless enormity with a few molecules of slippery and wet genetic material at one end and a handful or so of cremated ashes at the other. It is only the bright bead of our consciousness moving inexorably along the thread of our existence, helplessly from past to future, that provides the mirage of movement and change and transience.
A good analogy would be the strip of film comprising an old fashioned movie-reel: the strip of film itself is an unchanging and motionless medium, with its opening scenes and its finale present in the same physical object. Only when the beam of a projector – or in this analogy the light of human consciousness – is passed across the strip of film do we see Charlie Chaplin do his funny walk, and save the girl, and foil the villain. Only then do we perceive events, and continuity, and narrative, and character, and meaning, and morality. And when the film is concluded, of course, it can be watched again.
Similarly, I suspect that when our individual four-dimensional threads of existence eventually reach their far end with our physical demise, there is nowhere for our travelling bead of consciousness to go save back to the beginning, with the same thoughts, words and deeds recurring and reiterated endlessly, always seeming like the first time this has happened except, possibly, for those brief, haunting spells of déjà vu.
Of course, another good analogy, perhaps more pertinent to Jerusalem itself, would be that of a novel. While it’s being read there is the sense of passing time and characters at many stages of their lives, yet when the book is closed it is a solid block in which events that may be centuries apart in terms of narrative are pressed together with just millimetres separating them, distances no greater than the thickness of a page. As to why I decided to unpack this scientific vision of eternity in a deprived slum neighbourhood, it occurred to me that through this reading of human existence, every place, no matter how mean, is transformed to the eternal, heavenly city. Hence the title.
1: https://alanmooreworld.blogspot.com/2019/11/moore-on-jerusal...
- There's an old Justice League Graphic Novel by Alan Moore (I think) I read about 20 years ago. I don't remember the plot, but I remember a scene where most of the heroes - excepting Batman - are in the Pentagon addressing some threat. J'onn J'onzz (Martian Man Hunter) notices Batman lurking in a shadow somewhere who wanted to see what was going on without interference. MMH asks him how he got in. Batman replies that it's just another lock, just a different kind of barrier to get through.
While that's fantasy of course, I find the premise of an "unpickable" lock to be inherently faulty. I acknowledge that the design makes sense in terms of be unable to pick it by nature, but I can't help but think that the correct pick hasn't been invented or the appropriate technique hasn't been discovered. At the end of the day, it's just another lock, a different kind of barrier.
I also want to say that lock picking seems mostly to have become a parlor trick, and a genuine nefarious attacker approaches the problem by going around the lock...
- On a completely unrelated, but way less scary note....
"Doomsday Clock #3" is out today from D.C. comics.
It's a mega event that crosses characters from Alan Moore's The Watchmen with more traditional D.C. characters like Batman and Superman. I'm enjoying it quite a bit even though its exploitative and somewhat tarnishes the legacy of the greatest comic book of all time.
