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Funny Books

Spinning Tales: Collaborators Kurt Busiek and Paul Lee return to the frivolous roots of 1960s Marvel in their Spider-Man story.

Artists draw on the lighter side of the Dark Knight and Spider-Man

By Richard von Busack

A little more than ten years ago, Frank Miller's story of Batman's last case, The Dark Knight, was a breakthrough--not only in sales but in style. It popularized cinematic shadows in the superhero comic book, bringing grimness and darkness into an untold score of comics that followed. Now, that same breakthrough has become a hoary cliché. It's become laughable to see otherwise affable vigilantes or mutants of the 1940s dug up and revised with a big bad attitude and a sadistic back-story.

Recently, three new comics have been shaking loose the usual noir stylings--the pop-art version of the "brown sauce" that seemed to glaze every English Victorian painting. Even the big-name superheroes are starring in stories that bring back a certain playfulness and move away from monochromatic themes.

Especially interesting among this somewhat merrier crop of comics is the graphic novel The Joker: Devil's Advocate ($24.95, DC, 92 pages), in which the lovable mass murderer is framed, denied the usual insanity defense that's saved his hide previously, and ultimately shipped off to await the electric chair. In the face of eternity, the Joker is perhaps most miffed by having his fine head of green hair shaved for the electrodes.

Batman, his sense of justice riled as usual, needs to find out who is really behind a spate of poisonings for which the Joker is about to ride the lightning. He must ferret out the truth without any help from the Joker. Boring fight scenes fail to dampen the sick cheerfulness of the story, as evidenced in one scene. A priest is running, blind with terror, from the Joker's cell. What had the Joker tried to do to him? Nothing--he was just confessing his sins, that's all.

Authors Chuck Dixon, Graham Nolan and Scott Hanna have snuck in a subtext without disturbing the general light comic tone or lethally injecting a message. The threat of the death penalty does indeed fail to wring remorse out of some peculiar types; thus, as either deterrent or punishment the hot squat could be considered just the type of joke the Joker enjoys.

The pinpoint-eyeballed, death's-headed villain seems to bring out the best in mainstream cartoonists, and Batman can be but a straight man for him. The Batman Chronicles (DC, $2.95) is a new title for Batman, who has about 65 titles presently. The Batman Chronicles' angle is its format of short stories about Le Batman, published perhaps on the theory than a short story is harder to bollix up that a long one--although you won't see this rule followed in either the mediocre Riddler story or in the origin of Mr. Zsasz, a garden-variety emotionless serial killer. (Zsasz is DC's colorless answer to Hannibal Lector, and a bore and a monomaniac.)

Actually, the best in the new installment was a story of Croc, a sort of man-alligator, in a dialogue-free story of the sort that The Batman Chronicles is intending to deliver one of in each issue. Just as silent comedy seems to refine coarse gags, the pictorial storytelling is mostly humorous, ending with Croc well-fed and happy back in his ancestral sewers.

You may remember that Marvel was shamelessly marketing Spider-Man as "the Dark Arachnid" as a play on "The Dark Knight"; Kurt Busiek is returning to the frivolous roots of 1960s Marvel in Amazing Fantasy #16 (Marvel, $3.95), about the early days of Spider-Man. Busiek had earlier collaborated with painter Paul Lee in last year's Marvels, in which really surprising and even beautiful illustrative art was yoked to some very prolix story-telling. By ditching the boring humans that overran Marvels, Busiek's work is much more pleasing here--even if he is just tracing over Spider-Man's origin, shortly after the introverted Peter Parker, nipped by a radioactive spider, has been given the power to cling to walls.

Parker's early inspiration was to use his powers to be a professional masked wrestler, his filial duty to his elderly Aunt May, painted by Lee to look like Norman Bates' mom. Busiek's inspiration is to see how the new identity might free a shy nebbish like Parker. Lee's superb style is a treat for the eyes, and it's a rare gracefulness for mass-market comics to see the young Spider-Man frisking like a spring lamb over the streetlights of Flatbush, enjoying his new powers and thinking, "It's peaceful, it's ... lord help me, it's fun."

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