Sorry this is a little behind the bouncing ball (I had some
e-mail problems), but I see there's still some meat left on
the crime comic bones, so... Rebecca wrote:
>There are other books that don't seem to be part of
the Burke series -- two
>collections of short stories. There is a Batman:
Ultimate Evil listed in the
>library collection. I looked it up on Amazon. Vachss,
indeed, wrote a book
>based on the Batman character - which seems unusual
for the writer of the
>Burke series which is so grounded in the bleak urban
life.
Not so unusual, actually. Vachss has written several comic
books over the years, and in fact had his own comic book
anthology limited series called HARD LOOKS, published by Dark
Horse back in the nineties (or was it the eighties?) He's
also written a few stand-alone graphic novels, and another
mini-series about mercenaries, the title of which escapes me
right now.
As for writing Batman, you've obviously been away from comics
for quite a while. Much of the Batman continuity is very much
grounded in
"bleak urban life" these days. The current writer of the
flagship Bat title, Detective Comics, is none other than Greg
Rucka, whose novels have been discussed here recently. And
the current back-up story in Detective Comics is a revival of
hard-boiled P.I. Slam Bradley (who actually predated Batman
as the arguable "star" of Detective Comics), brought up to
date by Ed Brubaker, who's written several great hard-boiled
comics, including one of my faves, SCENE OF THE CRIME.
Vachss also wrote a two-issue Batman mini-series dealing with
child abuse, that echoes the book, ULTIMATE EVIL, but is a
different story. It was pretty good.
Of course, an argument could be made that even without
pictures, Vachss is writing comic books. A lot of his Burke
books slide rather quickly into that area. I mean, secret
hideouts, secret headquarters, secret identities,
over-simplistic black-and-white depictions of good and evil,
and endless ends-justifies-the-means arguments? Really. And
some of those characters seem right out of comic book central
casting. Max the Mighty. The inscrutable little Asian woman
with the soup. The tricked-up car (ࠬa Batmobile). The Wonder
Dog.
Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Despite the
heaviness of the topic (evidently, child abuse isn't nice),
and the fact Vachss is a rather heavy-handed stylist, they're
actually sort of light-weight fun, in a pulpy, Gee-whiz!
comic book way.
And to add to the irony, much of Vachhs' actual comic work is
less cartoonish than his fiction. I think, in fact, that I
prefer Burke's short stories. They're less predictable than
the Burke series, and he manages to pull some rather clever
and nasty tricks on readers.
-- Kevin -- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
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