I understood Chip Zdarsky’s Daredevil to be crime noir, a realistic, character-driven take on Matt Murdock and his friends and foes. I realize now I’ve been expecting the same thing from Zdarsky’s Batman, and it’s probably why this run hasn’t quite sat right with me. But Batman Vol. 3: The Joker: Year One is so all over the place, so fantastical, so devoutly weird that it’s finally clicked for me. This is not, nor is it ever likely to be, street-level Batman detective fiction; rather Zdarsky’s is dark, Silver Age-infused sci-fi/fantasy Batman, and I think I’ve finally picked up the rhythm of it.
[Review contains spoilers]
Cynically, Joker: Year One struck me as a cash grab; with the popularity of the Joker character and the ubiquity of “Year One” among the DC canon, “Joker: Year One” seems a natural perennial seller. Even Flash has his own “Year One,” a storyline in the midst of a series but packaged by DC to sell on its own, easy to trot out not coincidentally around movies and big media appearances.
[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]
That assessment of Joker: Year One might have been a little hasty, however, if only for just how — again — weird this book is. Indeed, though the book is Joker-infused, the actual three-part “Joker: Year One” story is sandwiched between the three-part “Mind Bomb” and the “Savage Garden of Gotham” backup story, not something that can easily be pulled out to stand alone. Not to mention the frame story of a zombified Gotham sufficient to rival DCeased and drawn with chilling photorealism by Andrea Sorrentino. Though none of this is wholly disqualifying, it doesn’t have the marks to me of a book primarily focused on being evergreen.
And so we have what begins as a typical Batman story — the Joker sets a trap and calls Batman out — and then becomes increasingly more elaborate — the Joker is actually trying to draw out Zur-En-Arrh, not Batman; the Joker fights Zur while Batman, trapped in his own mind, battles Zur-Batmen from across the multiverse; Batman has to stop the robotic Failsafe again, now controlled by Zur; and then we learn the Joker’s connection to Zur from the perspective of the aforementioned zombie apocalypse. My head was spinning by the end, and that’s even before Zdarsky reveals that Vandal Savage was not just a drop-in villain in Batman/Catwoman: The Gotham War but rather seems poised to be a fixture in Gotham.
It’s a lot, and I can’t even claim to fully understand what’s happening (as we may not be meant to yet). Zdarsky’s stitching together a lot of sources, including the allusion in Geoff Johns' Justice League: The Darkseid War to “three Jokers,” addressed by Johns in his Black Label book but never in continuity. Supposedly there are three Jokers, by way of the multiversal experiment seen in Zdarsky’s Batman Vol. 2: Bat-Man of Gotham. In this book, however, “our” Joker both sees people who turn out to be hallucinations and there’s reference to the one Joker having three personalities, such that I’m not sure if Zdarsky is definitively indicating just one Joker now or if there’s still more explanation to come.
Among other sources Zdarsky’s citing, “Joker: Year One” picks up immediately after — is nearly a sequel to — Scott Snyder’s Batman: Zero Year, while also integrating aspects of Zdarsky’s own early-set Batman: The Knight. I’ve no problem myself negotiating the continuity in my head, but imagine again the poor Joker fan who picks this up on a lark. Editors' boxes around the “three Jokers” conversations cite Justice League #50 without specifying that’s the 2011 Justice League series and not the 2016 Justice League series, which never had an issue #50, nor the 2018 Justice League series, which did. Snyder’s story was 10 years ago now, and unsure as I was who some of the warring gang factions were here, honestly it seemed too much a lift to reread that for this.
Again, though, Sorrentino’s art in the “Joker” frame story is really astounding — his ghoulish, skeletal, painterly Joker images are creepy enough to make me want to drop everything and go read Bone Orchard Mythos. Zdarsky poses a fantastic dystopian conflict between Batman and the Joker, ending with the clever notion that perhaps the Joker has always let Batman win, rather than Batman beating him. It’s also nice to see Batman and Jim Gordon teamed up again in the “Year One” era, as drawn by Giuseppe Camuncoli; given the tease of Vandal Savage as Gotham police commissioner elsewhere in the book, I wonder if that’s a herald of Gordon finally (inevitably) returning to the title.
For me, the third “Mind Bomb” chapter dragged; it’s Batman fighting Failsafe again (a la Batman Vol. 1: Failsafe), even if now it’s Zur in Failsafe’s body. Equally Batman fighting multiversal “ghost” personalities within his mind is too fantastical for my tastes, though I acknowledge some thrill in Batman trading blows with a Zur-ified Dark Knight Returns Batman. But I continue to like the bizarre thought experiment at the root of this, the question of whether Batman is so smart that he can even beat himself, and I appreciate Chip Zdarsky sticking with it, taking an easily dismissible aphorism and mining every inch of it for story potential.
Batman Vol. 3: The Joker: Year One is ultimately a good Joker story, better than how Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing petered out, even if not quite the Joker story I was expecting. Neither does this run check all the boxes of a Batman story for me, but it’s surely going to make a fine omnibus one day.
[Includes original covers, 30+ variant covers]
I would put scare quotes around the word “drawn” by Sorrentino. At the time, there was some controversy about his use of AI-generated images, and I don’t believe he has worked for DC since. A disappointing mar on a story which is, as you note, abundantly weird.
ReplyDeleteI haven’t seen Sorrentino work on anything since this controversy, in fact. Even his longtime creative partnership with Lemire seems to be in a state of suspension.
DeleteI’d seen the stories with questions about Sorrentino’s work early on, but I guess since I heard about DC pulling some covers but not pulling this, I hadn’t fully processed there was some validity to it. As everyone notes, we haven’t seen him working for DC since. (That this is interior contents for _Batman_ sure puts DC in a bind!)
DeleteI suppose I have to ask — and understand this is not necessarily me disagreeing so much as just trying to see all the angles of it — we know Sorrentino is an accomplished artist, right? I, Vampire wasn’t done with AI, we know that. And here we’ve got some stuff that’s supposed to be weird, supposed to be a little off, yeah? (Joker’s imperfect anatomy, etc.)
So if Sorrentino did use AI but then, like, touched up the images himself, or gave AI a bunch of prompts but chose between them himself with his expert eye, or even trained an LLM on his own work and said, do something in this style, is it grounds for “you’ll never work in this town again”? Was it just denying it that’s the problem?
On one hand I instinctually know why this isn’t OK. But on the other hand, if an artist draws something but then uses a computer to take out imperfections, or if an artist “draws” something but they’re a digital artist using digital “paintbrushes” to make something painterly … are we so far away from that?
I guess I’m trying to figure, in regards to an artist whom we know has actual chops (their entire portfolio has not been AI), where is the line between “this is just another digital tool” and, essentially, this is fraudulent?
Yeah, the whole thing is just more icky and suspicious than any proven use of AI. From the comics artists I follow on social media, they are all pretty vociferous about even a whiff of artificial intelligence, and lots of more qualified assessors pointed out things like identical brushstrokes and inconsistent anatomy.
DeleteAnd I think, had Sorrentino been a little forthcoming in his response, along the lines you describe, the reaction might have been different. But to empirically state that he used absolutely no AI, when the finished product doesn't really look like the rest of his portfolio, when the evidence was starting to pile up... well, as Norm Macdonald would say, the worst part is the hypocrisy. And there probably was an interesting way to use AI to illustrate a story about a broken dystopian future, but as I tell my students -- you have to cite ALL your sources.
I don't know that DC ever issued a statement beyond "We'll look into it," but Sorrentino's absence is doing the speaking. And I think most people's reaction /was/ that Sorrentino is talented enough not to use AI, which most regard as the theft of actual art (scanning/mining existing copyrighted art).
The idea that AI art can't ever be original because it's all sourced from somewhere else (that any use of it is by definition plagiarism) is a compelling one. How true or false that is, I don't know — there we have to take the LLM as a middleman that learns from all those sources and then returns something ... new? I'm not sure.
DeleteI've used those tools to spin up or refine code, and I'd like to think everything that I'm getting doesn't exist in the same form somewhere else. If I say, "Help me write code that does X," does the LLM give me something original based on the fact that "X" is an original idea (that, counter to the norm, the originality in the endeavor is in the question and not the answer)?
Freddie Williams was one of the first artists I recognized doing purely digital work — issues that were wholly done on computer, without pen ever touching artboard. Inherent plaigiarism questions notwithstanding, I wonder if at some point we'll see DC or another company lean in — artists whose tool is specifically AI or a specifically AI-generated series.
Yes, I'm genuinely curious about where the AI art conversation goes in the next ten years. The reaction against Sorrentino was immediate and pretty much unanimous, and I'm reminded of similar backlash when Colin Kaepernick announced he wanted to make AI comics with Lumi.
DeleteIf an artist feeds their own work into a custom AI model, I would imagine there might be less problem; it seems akin to tracing/swiping or even using clip art in the way that, for example, the Scooby-Doo comics do. But when you tell a broad-sweeping AI to make a Batman comic, and it identifiably swipes Jim Lee and Neal Adams -- that, I don't think the comics community would ever embrace.
"This is not, nor is it ever likely to be, street-level Batman detective fiction; rather Zdarsky’s is dark, Silver Age-infused sci-fi/fantasy Batman, and I think I’ve finally picked up the rhythm of it."
ReplyDeleteBingo. You succinctly nailed why I struggled to enjoy to enjoy Zdarsky's Batman vs. his Daredevil (and again, I'm still catching up).
It's the old paradox of Batman. I don't mind seeing Bats in extraordinary and otherworldly fantastical situations in the pages of JUSTICE LEAGUE or a DC crossover event. That's part and parcel of those stories and taking Bruce out of his comfort level is half the fun.
But when he's down on the streets of Gotham in his own book(s)? It's another matter and I know it's a double standard, but I just... I don't mind some fantastical elements (ex. Ra's al Ghul and his mysticism).
But I prefer Batman ultimately remaining a street-level crime book at its core.
Going all sci-fi and fantastical in Batman itself -- It's one of the things I hated about Morrison's run back in the day (even if I've since made my peace with it). I just wasn't really crazy about Zdarsky embracing Morrison like that again.
I too am a street-level Bat-fan. I don't mind a high concept — the great expanse of No Man's Land, or Contagion or Cataclysm — but even then the action was mostly ground-level. Fortunately, between Batman: Dark Patterns and even some of the new upcoming creative teams, it does seem like grounded Batman is making a comeback.
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