Comments on: Batman Reborn

By: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:46:44 +0000

Made perfect sense to me – I was going to include it in the next linkblogging post. And I agree with pretty much all of it. Very good stuff, but not much to add.
(The reason I so rarely comment over there, BTW, is because I usually read the posts through a feed-reader at work, and Google Reader looks a lot more like work than blogs do…)

By: Zom

Zom — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 15:06:43 +0000

Andrew, I was just wondering what you think of my review. Does that stuff to do with momentism make sense to you? Not sure I argued my case clearly enough

By: Mindless Ones » Blog Archive » Yet more bloody thoughts about Batman and Robin #2

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:01:29 +0000

[...] People have made the usual gestures towards Quitely’s wonderful art, and highlighted the elegant conceptual economy evident in Morrison’s character work and its meta-textual dimensions. And here we get to the first object of this droplet of criticism – [...]

By: Zom

Zom — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:23:07 +0000

Oh, possibly, yeah

By: Holly

Holly — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:09:03 +0000

I gave up asking him that years ago :)

I have even had to stop asking “But why do you read them out loud sometimes and spout your reactions to your long-suffering wife?!”

By: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:07:15 +0000

Absolutely, although I think there’s also an element of “EVERYONE can be Batman” in there…

By: Zom

Zom — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:58:50 +0000

On the question of that scene, the metacommentary is transparently: Bruce Wayne is Batman, this is just pretend, but we can have some fun with it nonetheless. Which is a pretty great and economical way of framing things for the audience

By: Zom

Zom — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:49:19 +0000

I’m not sure that it’s only true of his work on this title, although I think it’s *more* true of his work on this title, but looking at that quote I think I come across as being perhaps more critical of his art than I actually am. I’ll get to this in my Batrob thoughts, but instead of focussing on the word momentism, I’d want to talk more about fetishization.

I love JHW3, just for the record!

By: Andrew Hickey

Andrew Hickey — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:36:49 +0000

That’s true – but it’s only true of his work on this title, which I think needs it. He’s capable of a lot more depth when the writing allows for it. And on another day I’d possibly put Quitely ahead of Williams, but either way I think it’s great that we have two artists about whom we can have that discussion on two such big titles…

By: Zom

Zom — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 20:18:34 +0000

That was a wonderful, sensitive, surprising and truthful character moment, Andrew. Just the sort of thing that most writers of super-pants couldn’t manage in a million years.

But more importantly, and quite weirdly, the moment in question was the subject of a conversation between Amy and I just before I came to this blog.

Great mindless think alike, and all that.

On the art, I prefer Quitely to Williams (but only marginally). I will get into it when I tackle Batrob, but it has something to do with this quote from Jog:

” If superhero writing is often powered by ‘momentism’ — the pursuit of moments that most keenly encapsulate the iconic status of superhero characters — Williams’ storytelling not only agrees, and indeed casts superheroism itself as superficially nothing other than attention-grabbing instances”