Batman: Broken City
- targetmediawebs
- Jun 21, 2016
- 3 min read
Batman: Broken City, by Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso, Titan Books/DC Comic
THE PACING of modern comics is a curious commodity; often so little story content (ie. basically things happening) for something that equates to far more than loose change in a kid’s pocket, repackage it as a book at something less than what the total of the individual comics would have cost and the purchaser feels more satisfied, and the publisher recoups costs compared to the kind of sales they used to make.
Wouldn’t the publisher make the kind of sales they used to first time round if they got the creative personnel to put more actual story value in and so produce the story in a shorter time, or is it because sales are comparatively so small these days that they need to pad things out, to get a small return in advance that then allows for the book version to get printed too?
The crux of the matter here: Batman’s looking for someone who killed a kid’s parents, Killer Croc keeps coming in and out of the story playing the role of too obvious a red herring and then having us expect the old double-bluff routine will be revealed, but it doesn’t so his character turns into rather a camp comedy one with a little over-the-top violence from him to compensate; the Penguin plays his role of mouthpiece a little more pivotally, Scarface and his operator the Ventriloquist fall between the cracks of pathos and black comedy as if rehearsing for a James Ellroy novel but their role is required, less so The Joker who cameos near the end (because you need a big name villain to clutch back some of the falling ratings in a serial?).
The book just never feels quite right to me. The back cover tag proclaims it has been produced by the “hard-boiled team” who “demanded attention with their critically acclaimed Vertigo title 100 Bullets.” Sure, but putting One Show evening hosts on Daytime TV breakfast shows has failed big time in the UK, why should this?
Visually, Risso is too enamoured of Frank Miller’s dark nights out with Batman here, when he brings some David Mazzuccchelli to the table it gets convincing, likewise when he gets round to drawing a cityscape background we’re reminded of the kind of graphic symbolism Marshall Rogers achieved but within Risso’s natural style and a modern edge. Frankly, the Miller-imitisms don’t work, or maybe that’s because Miller’s no longer the darling of the American comics industry and I too am affected by proxy?
Azzarello’s narrative starts potentially, it drifts off occasionally but generally keeps it together, in an honest to goodness classic pulp crime fiction of the Raymond Chandler variety; but what grates is Batman speaking like some barroom hoodlum – it’s a clever idea that Bruce Wayne puts on a tough guy’s voice when he becomes Batman, but I always presumed he just talked slower, more determined in a well spoken business voice talking down to the crooks he fought and used that as a psychological tool. Who knows.
For me, it would’ve taken far too long to get to the end over a six month wait – too much padding an editor should’ve saddled of for a future project even – but there are some convincing twists and turns and the flow of it feels right as one single book. However, you can only go so far with the hard-boiled sub-genre in Batman for me, much as others will disagree – the creative team should’ve bent their considerable talents to the character not the other way round,. Some really excellent moments but more personal glitches in it for me as a reader.
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