InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "16 right, 11 left."

mysteryfan (mysteryfan) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-05-23 09:14:00

Entry tags:

char: batman/bruce wayne, char: black canary/dinah lance, creator: frank miller, creator: jim lee, creator: scott williams, publisher: dc comics, title: all-star batman and robin

"Tough love from some crazy Irish chick."

psychop_rex requested ASBAR, Black Canary. Specifically, the scene with the car...

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jlroberson
2009-05-23 05:45 pm UTC (link)

If you've read Miller long enough, you've seen enough signs that he may be gay and doing everything in the world to hide it.

I would post examples but I haven't a spare two weeks.

I'd just offer that the hints Bats might be gay extend to Miller's Joker. You could easily read the whole of this and Dark Knight as one man trying to kill his self-awareness.

And I'd also offer that Miller has no goddamn idea how women act or think. That they all exist only in relation to Batman, even WW. That Miller thinks an assertive woman is also necessarily a ballbuster.(of course, he was recently divorced) That kind of thing.

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parsimonia
2009-05-23 06:42 pm UTC (link)

I'd appreciate if we could get back to framing this discussion around Miller's writing, rather than his personal life.

I do think that Miller has difficulty writing female characters, because most of his female characters existences tend to have something to do with sex: they're prostitutes, they want to have sex with Batman, they want to go on a date with Bruce Wayne and talk about in their underwear, etc. And, as you say, because they only exist in relation to Batman.

Mind you I haven't read enough Miller to be able to tell, but would you say the same is true of all his supporting characters in ASBAR? IIRC, with characters like Green Lantern and Superman and Commissioner Gordon, their lives all seem to revolve around Batman as well in ASBAR.

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jlroberson
2009-05-23 07:20 pm UTC (link)

All the male characters are feckless and only Batman has the answer, and all the women are hot for Batman. Pretty classic Mel Gibson framing.

I'd also offer possibly the most disgusting thing in the whole book: Gordon can only become a man by cutting loose his horrid(well, he made her that way, but does a real man take consequences? Does he hell) wife that even his daughter wants him to leave to die.

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mysteryfan
2009-05-23 08:03 pm UTC (link)

Well, you got me on Mrs. Gordon. But she's a holdover from his original work twenty years ago. It's disturbing and gratuitous--the way she is built to be a villain. But he was supposedly trying to go for continuity, and he did already build her that way twenty years ago, right? It may be a case of a creator being too stuck with their own creation. Or misogyny. Or writer laziness. It is badly done, because of the level of gratuity. I THINK maybe it would be just as bad/the same if the character was a male character. It's definitely too over the top re: she has no redeeming features.

All the male characters are feckless and only Batman has the answer, and all the women are hot for Batman.

But if we're seeing it through the Goddamn Batman's point of view, and I think we are, that's exactly the way he'd see all of the other characters.

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jlroberson
2009-05-23 08:15 pm UTC (link)

>>But she's a holdover from his original work twenty years ago. It's disturbing and gratuitous--the way she is built to be a villain. But he was supposedly trying to go for continuity, and he did already build her that way twenty years ago, right?

Absolutely not. She was a perfectly nice lady whom we first saw giving him a massage. While pregnant, which she was almost all the way through YEAR ONE. And said pregnancy, plus the blondness of Essen, is what made him wander, and blackmail made him stop, and he broke his wife's heart.

In YEAR ONE it was just sad and human. Here it becomes monstrous.

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	jlroberson 2009-05-23 08:32 pm UTC (link)
	And here are some scenes to illustrate my point. And keep in mind, I do realize this reflects how hard cop marriages are. That's how it came across in the original and was done well. THEN. It's how Miller is framing it now that I find disturbing--YEAR ONE was good. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	parsimonia 2009-05-23 09:44 pm UTC (link)
	Gordon can only become a man by cutting loose his horrid(well, he made her that way, but does a real man take consequences? Does he hell) wife that even his daughter wants him to leave to die. Wait, in which comic does that happen? (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	jlroberson 2009-05-23 10:02 pm UTC (link)
	I believe it's ASBAR 10, as that's the only one I don't have on hand and can't seem to find the page. It's there though. And even the (also very hot, and at first i thought Vicki Vale had changed professions, they look so similar) doctor seems to be trying to persuade him she's a bad bet. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	parsimonia 2009-05-23 11:07 pm UTC (link)
	Hmm. I'm not actually sure if I've read all of that one. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

jlroberson
2009-05-23 11:52 pm UTC (link)

It's pretty easy to miss some details in the scene(which takes place after Babs gets caught and confesses to her Dad) because it's superfucking crowded and infodumpy, because I guess Miller or Lee miscalculated the number of pages and had wasted too much space on the Big Panels. But go back and look. The issue, I believe, ends with Gordon calling Essen. On his daughter's specific insistence.

It's Babs I really don't get. We're given no basis that her mother abused her or anything like that. At worst from what we have to go on, to her, her mom's an embarrassment. And yet she actually tells her dad to go find another woman, one with which he has a history, a history that doomed her mother and father's marriage. It's weird, and it's cold, and it's hard to watch. The mother, meanwhile, prior to ending up in the hospital, sounds nothing like the woman Miller introduced us to, but rather the wife of TRANSMET's Spider Jerusalem, who was a loudmouthed, aggressive, drunken and violent whore. Not that we ever see her firsthand in this boy's fantasy.

And Miller taking forever to do the next one only makes it more glaring.

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	jlroberson 2009-05-23 11:56 pm UTC (link)
	Oh, and as long as we're on about disposable characters: that baby in her belly? That's not Babs, unborn and unconceived during YEAR ONE. That's Gordon's son, who Batman saves and then...poof. Gone. IS he ever once mentioned in ASBAR? (Reply to this) (Parent)

darkknightjrk
2009-06-04 01:40 am UTC (link)

"I do think that Miller has difficulty writing female characters, because most of his female characters existences tend to have something to do with sex: they're prostitutes, they want to have sex with Batman, they want to go on a date with Bruce Wayne and talk about in their underwear, etc."

Eh...it's more balanced out in his original work, I find. His Martha Washington is a very competant character, as well as Casey McKenna in Ronin, as well as Miho and Nancy in Sin City.

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mysteryfan
2009-05-23 07:04 pm UTC (link)

To be fair about women only existing only in relation to Batman, that looks to me like every character, male and female, in this story. Dick, Alfred, Gordon, Supes, Hal don't fare any differently. We're seeing them all through Batman's eyes anyway, more than anybody else's.

I don't know if we can tell what Miller thinks about how women act or think from this title.
an assertive woman is also necessarily a ballbuster.
Again, I don't think we can tell from this title. Everybody's extreme here. Bizarre, even. Everything's amped up to 11 plus plus. WW, if that's who you're specifically referring to (I'm thinking you don't think BC falls into that category) she does have the one issue where she's absolutely bizarre and manhating crazy, then suddenly she and Superman are making out. So she doesn't end up assertive or nonassertive, imo. Just wouldn't know her if she didn't have the tiara on, ooc WW.

Black Canary is bizarre here too, but I would never say she's unassertive. She's bizarre, and often unheroic, but so is Batman.

Vicki Vale is frighteningly excited about her date and only dressed for extreme fanservice, but she takes care of business with the crooked cops and holds her own. Again, strange, fanservicey, is an idiot, but stands up to the cops and does her job.

Selina is treated more like an equal here (so far) than I've seen her treated in any of his previous work.

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jlroberson
2009-05-23 07:38 pm UTC (link)

>>Black Canary is bizarre here too, but I would never say she's unassertive.

And this is balanced out by her fucking the Goddamn Batman.

>>and only dressed for extreme fanservice

You don't know how "only" until you read some of the script of the opening pages of this thing. Look it up. He's actually telling Lee to get the fanboys drooling.

>>Selina is treated more like an equal here (so far) than I've seen her treated in any of his previous work.

We see two scenes. One where she lets the Joker stroll right into her room while saying she's aware of what he does to girls, and another where Lee gets to re-use a layout from HUSH and where she drags her bleeding, beaten body to Batman because only he can help her.

I'm looking for anything implying "equality" here. Not finding.

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	mysteryfan 2009-05-23 07:54 pm UTC (link)
	It's this: http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/321946.html#cutid1 Compared to this: http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/259389.html#cutid1 In the second scan, from twenty years earlier, she is humiliated and has to be rescued. In the first scan, from ASBAR, she's an equal. "We lunatics look out for each other," and she rescues herself. (Reply to this) (Parent)

	mysteryfan 2009-05-23 07:57 pm UTC (link)
	Not one bit surprised about the fanservice notes. It's not subtly done in any way. And this is balanced out by her fucking the Goddamn Batman. They both fuck each other. She seems okay with it. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

	jlroberson 2009-05-23 08:17 pm UTC (link)
	I didn't say I object. For heaven's sake, some of what I draw is smut. What I'm saying is her assertiveness becomes acceptable because of that. And not for long. He doesn't like her being mouthy afterward. (Reply to this) (Parent) (Thread)

mysteryfan
2009-05-24 02:27 pm UTC (link)

I'm saying that sex* does not diminish a woman's assertiveness.

*or whatever level of fooling around they do, because it's not graphically shown, and I'm not at all convinced they have out and out 'traditional' sex, not in the least because of the book's art, and their costumes.

And Batman doesn't like anybody, period, in this book. He barely tolerates Hal or Superman. He has three moments of tenderness or sudden human kindness in this whole title. We don't even see them until the ninth and tenth issues. One happens with Selina, one with Dick, after Dick almost beats Hal to death.

This Batman's an emotionally stunted childman, with an emotional age of ten or eleven. (He's much less socially and emotionally mature than Dick Graysonage12) and I believe we were supposed to see him as that, probably to see that he's been stunted by his childhood trauma, then watch him grow into someone more moral and human. We won't know, because it ended, but that's what I think.

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