InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "edit style"

thanekos (thanekos) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-10-27 00:39:00

Current music:	Trip Like I Do - Crystal Method
Entry tags:	char: batman/bruce wayne, char: mr. freeze/victor fries, creator: j.h williams iii, creator: seth fisher, title: legends of the dark knight

A group of specalists, assembled to combat general crime? It'll never work!
once upon a time, Batman realized stemming the tide of crime wasn't a one man fight.

It's never been, really, even for a Batgod- so for a man who's been at the job for 1 1/2 years, it's almost impossible to be effective one hundred percent time.

Criminals like the afro-sporting something-planning Peter Scotta can get lucky, and Batman can't defend himself against that luck. He needs to mitigate that factor with help...

Like Jim Gordon's:

or Harvey Dent's:

anyhow, Batman decides that relying on the police department for info is not the most optimum of ideas.

Better to build his own team of operatives, he thinks, reporting to him alone.

People who can collate information for him, make the leaps and do the legwork his single brain can't so that he can be much more efficient at the crime fightings.

And so, he brings this varied team together:

From top to bottom, we've Mira Charan, skilled criminal psychologist; David Rubens, brilliant-but-shy electronics tinkerer; Gerard van Daalen, ex-Green Beret on a thinning hair trigger; Amy Ross, idealistic FBI analyst; and Luis Diaz, ex-con looking to go on the straight and narrow.

perfect material for your support staff, isn't it?

an autonomous crime-fighting cell of interested folk. might almost work, Bats.

the team, surprisingly, proves equal to the task:

Sir.

a-heh.

but alas, everyone needs a challenge. and so, enter Victor Fries in this semi-kinda-sorta-I-guess-oh-whatnever canonical Legends of the Dark Knight arc, here a scientist who tried to save his medical disorder'd wife with his cryogenic effect device, only to discover the settings'd been tampered with in a bid by his bosses to weaponize it:

... look, Seth Fisher's on art, whaddya expect?

Fries, newly enmaddened, dons a protective suit and cryogenic gun and kills all his co-workers with the exception of his weaponizing boss Derek Parke.

Batman and co. find out about it:

this won't bite you in the ass, Bats, not at all...

the initials thing works, somehow.

Jim Gordon: smarter than the average bear.

donuts, bats? well, i suppose the amount of energy you expend on a daily basis.. either that, or leftovers from days on end at your terminals.

but when they go to find out how Peter Scotta's mixed up in this (turns out he was trying to pay off Fries' boss to sell him the cryotech under the field, in a bid to up his own power), they kinda fuck up a Gordon-run sting operation by being detected by the cops and having Daalen try to resolve the situation in his own way:

oh, Bats.

alas, Scotta gets off the hook and Jim Gordon goes off on Batman.

they are.

as Scotta threatens Parke over how he hasn't gotten his cold ray yet and the group listen in, Fries enters:

and Scotta's written out of the plot (I did say he had an afro):

Batman is soon on the scene:

TRACKER!

back at said office, the team is frazzled by Fries, and considers breaking it off.

Daalen, however, decides to go after Fries on his own thanks to that TRACKER!:

But the poor-condition roof comes down with a KRAK!, so:

and:

anyhow, divorced of Batman, the team set out to stop Fries on their own, but not before leaving a note:

Batman goes after Fries, reconciling with Jim in the process:

while the soon-to-be-fired team discovers Fries's device:

looks like a glowing light bulb.

... oh, that's not gonna end well for her arm.

Only a few more pages left in the plot, so exit Victor Fries:

And the notion of Batman's support team:

we close on Bruce deciding that a subordinate team isn't so good for him, that maybe he needs a trusted partner... while he looks at an article about the Flying Graysons.

(hey, atleast it wasn't about the Red Hood's crime sprees or a hamhanded attempt to show Harvey's face half-shadowed.)

bonus: Red Eyes shows us that no matter how elite a mook you are, you'll still be dumb and expendable.

(Post a new comment)

	bluefall 2009-10-27 06:44 am UTC (link)
	... bandaged severed limbs don't work that way. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	manofbats 2009-10-27 01:54 pm UTC (link)
	You mean with most of the jacket sleeve tucked in and wrapped inside along with the limb, which seems kind of small considering it looks like it has a jacket sleeve tucked inside of it? (Reply to this) (Parent)

statham1986
2009-10-27 06:53 am UTC (link)

As downright trippy as this is in parts, I somehow like Fisher's depiction of Nora as this weird muse who Victor hallucinates and essentially gets told what to do by. It's not as powerful as say, the Animated Series version initially was, but it is an interesting idea. Plus, I just love the visual contrast between the two - Victor's all cool blues and she's warm yellows.

I also like how they call bullshit on 'Batman and Robin', in that someone who gets frozen is still going to be really messed up by being thawed. 'Bat-lasers' my ass.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

(Anonymous)
2009-10-27 07:06 am UTC (link)

Would the messup be that bad though? I mean... frostbite in general takes time to set in and do real cellular damage. Most cold-based weaponry we've seen in comics (very much aware that I'm inviting trouble by trying to work real-world physics into a comic book, bear with me) seems to work by freezing water vapor around a target... you'd shock their system badly by having them immediately suspended in subzero temperatures, I imagine, but there shouldn't be significant tissue damage just by being flash frozen for a bit?

Mitigating circumstances though -- this comic specifically states it was done on the cellular level. But the only villain I'm aware of who could do immediate damage in the short term is Captain Cold, and only because it specifically states (at least in a recent revision) that his weapon works by inducing a state of absolute zero.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	halloweenjack 2009-10-27 02:31 pm UTC (link)
	I don't know about the relative properties of the cold guys' guns, but I do know that the damage done by freezing is due to ice crystals forming within cells that are big enough to rupture the cell walls. Freezing very quickly should avoid most of that damage. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	freezer818 2009-10-27 06:56 am UTC (link)
	Mmmm... that's vintage Batdickery! (Reply to this) (Thread)

	aaron_bourque 2009-10-27 07:59 am UTC (link)
	. . . What? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

freezer818
2009-10-27 11:24 am UTC (link)

What what?He's a rude ass to pretty much everyone here (including Gordon, who rightfully calls him on it), treats his handpicked support team like minions, is shocked (SHOCKED) when one of said minions goes predictably crazy, then cuts them all loose without so much as a "I wish you well in your future endeavors."

Unless there's something else in the pages we don't see that tempers any of this: I stand by my initial call of "Vintage Batdickery".

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	jeyl 2009-10-27 01:34 pm UTC (link)
	"I stand by my initial call of "Vintage Batdickery"." I stand by it too. Mira risked her life confronting freeze and got her arm frozen off! (Reply to this) (Parent)

	manofbats 2009-10-27 01:55 pm UTC (link)
	Cuts them loose after one of them loses a limb no less. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	arilou_skiff 2009-10-27 06:58 am UTC (link)
	The art! It's so.... Bright and cheery! (Reply to this)

	squirle 2009-10-27 08:44 am UTC (link)
	Batman has cameras in the toilet, the perv! (Reply to this)

psychop_rex
2009-10-27 09:15 am UTC (link)

My computer is pissing me off. I'd REALLY like to read these scans in their entirety, 'cause they look pretty damn cool, but most of 'em are all stretched out like bubblegum. Feh. The Internet would be so much better if computers didn't need to be involved.
That being said, did anyone else note the similarity between Batman's support group and the Secret Six? The original group, I mean - they were pretty much like this. Six specialists in their respective fields, coordinated and given instructions by a guy in a mask via a TV screen. Of course, there are five people here, not six, and the guy in the mask is Batman, not Mockingbird, but otherwise, the similarities are pretty notable. Is it a reference, do you think?

(Reply to this) (Thread)

stratosfyr
2009-10-27 03:04 pm UTC (link)

It's not your computer. They look OK if you right click and select "View Image".

The IMG tags the have wrong values for the "height" and "width" attributes ... they should either be absent or in the same aspect ratio (if not size) as the original. 640x980 is about right for comics to display at almost original size (on a 96dpi monitor -- they always say 72 dpi but such low-res screens are rare these days). But it depends on the scan and how it was cropped, so it's best to 'maintain aspect ratio' and just resize by resolution or width.

(Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	psychop_rex 2009-10-27 09:03 pm UTC (link)
	I cannot do that, unfortunately - my mouse doesn't have a 'right click' button. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	pi216 2009-10-27 01:41 pm UTC (link)
	Other than the sometimes-odd perspective angles, I'm loving this art. Straightforward and clean without being overly reductionist. Even the occasional "here's an oddity" swirliness kind of works, for me. (Reply to this)

	manofbats 2009-10-27 01:56 pm UTC (link)
	I really hate the blue costume. (Reply to this)

halloweenjack
2009-10-27 02:36 pm UTC (link)

There are some things I really like about the art (the way it seems to blend Williams' own style with some aspects that remind me of Glenn Fabry, the hallucination scenes with Nora) and some things I don't like (the weird things that he does with the hair, the stack of squished heads, the literal steam coming out of Jim Gordon's ear--they're all pretty but also very distracting), but overall I like this artist a lot.

(Reply to this)

yaseen101
2009-10-27 04:16 pm UTC (link)

I can understand why Batman's very amateurish in this since this appears to be very early on in his career. I'm glad that they avoided the common trope of making him competent from day one.

You know I think the 'Outsiders' would work a lot more if it was compromised of a team like this. More of a secret police force compromised of relatively normal heroes rather than the tired old 'superhero team whose willing to cross lines/make dubious choices, etc' cliche. No matter what he says, Batman is an ideologist like Superman at heart.

(Reply to this)

	foxhack 2009-10-27 07:38 pm UTC (link)
	Goddamnit, Seth Fisher died way too soon. (Reply to this)

	taggerung301 2009-10-27 08:58 pm UTC (link)
	not a big fan of this art just seems off to me (Reply to this)

	kingrockwell 2009-10-28 12:36 am UTC (link)
	Love the art, this is an interesting story. What's the issue number? Also, as goes Freeze, Legends of the Dark Knight was always a title that danced around the continuity line, except for issues that were specifically tied in to events (#100 explicitly celebrates this fact on the letters page). The closest equivalent we have these days is Batman Confidential. (Reply to this)

	autumn_lily 2009-10-28 12:49 am UTC (link)
	Page 2, last panel: Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah BATCROTCH! (Reply to this)