Because my job involves diving into pop culture and making Michael Keaton references, every day I wade up to my neck into a pool of entertainment news. There, I splash around a little bit until my bosses tell me that it's time for adult swim. And for the most part, I like what I see -- although that's no surprise, considering that 90 percent of modern entertainment news is about Chris Evans' facial hair. There are worse lives.
That said, every once in a while, I see a news story that would sound really, really extraordinary if it had shown up around a decade or two ago. Some ideas would just be better if they had been followed through on during Clinton's first term. For instance ...
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Frank Miller Is Writing Superman: Year One
By the time Frank Miller wrote The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One in the mid-'80s, the Caped Crusader was already in the middle of a slow transition away from the colorful, outlandish stories of the '50s and '60s. Gone were issues of Detective Comics emblazoned with things like "BUT I CAN'T VAPORIZE THE BATCAVE, ROBIN. ALFRED IS ON THE MOON!" In their place were grittier stories featuring a Batman who was equally at home taking down vicious mob bosses as he was making out with Ra's al Ghul's hot daughter. But Frank Miller figured that this evolution wasn't moving fast enough, so he put on a pair of grim, dark spurs and kicked the BatHorse as hard as he could, sending it racing into the next era.
The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One are great, great Batman stories. And the former is also a decent Superman story. In it, the Man of Steel is a pawn of the government, working for a Ronald Reagan caricature and generally being the biggest fucking buzzkill, especially when it comes to Batman's whole "Return to Gotham and beat up most of the population" solution. But he's also a Superman who retains some of his glory and a bit of his humanity, and if you've only read Dark Knight Returns, you might get the sense that Miller enjoys the character. And if he'd written Superman: Year One right after that, I would've cried because it's just so beautiful, you guys.
Of course, that delusion goes away immediately if you creep outside of the pages of Dark Knight Returns and read anything else that Miller has written with Superman. In the Miller world, every woman is a prostitute, whatever Batman says is immediately added to 1 Corinthians, and Superman is a mighty buffoon. You could lead him into a pit of lava if you put a sign that said "America Inside" in front of it. And he's wrong about everything. He can't be forced to grasp concepts more complex than "Fly directly into that tank" until Batman beats them into him. Batman is Miller's raging hard-on, something that he refuses to call his doctor about as he swings it through the fabric of the comics industry. Superman, on the other hand, is a Miller armpit fart.
"You ever hear the one about how Superman is, like, soooo dumb?" Pfbbbt. Pfbbbt. Pfbbbt.
Daniel Dockery
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