InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "What is a champagne supernova?"

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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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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