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Rating: Frank Miller (writer) - Jim Lee (pencils) - Scott Williams (inks) - Alex Sinclair (colors); published by Planeta DeAgostini, hardcover, 18x3x27, 6, C, 256 pp. Col., 20 euro.
All Star Batman & Robin is a controversial work.
It has divided both the audience and critics. Some consider it one of the most obscene things ever published about the character, while others see it as a fairground of excess in an absolutely positive way, representing the most recent deconstructionism.
The fundamental point, the reason for such clamor, is primarily the authors involved: the (former?) superstar Jim Lee on the drawings, serving the scripts of one of the greatest contemporary American writers, creator of the modern Batman... Frank Miller. It's obvious that just hearing Uncle Frank's name associated with Batman creates immense anticipation.
Let's start with the story.
Billionaire Bruce Wayne, who secretly dons the mantle of the vigilante Batman, witnesses the murder of the parents of a young circus boy, Dick Grayson. The boy is promising, and Wayne wants to make him his sidekick in the fight against crime. Thus rescuing the boy from corrupt policemen who were trying to kill him to prevent his testimony, his slow training begins, not before discovering the orchestrator of the young boy's parents' murder. In the background, the corruption of Gotham, and the emergence of criminals like Joker and imitators like Black Canary and Bat Girl.
But the most interesting aspect of the work is certainly the description of the protagonist.
The Batman in All Star Batman & Robin wouldn't even be Batman. He is not a hero. He is a poor madman who finds in the mask his reason for living, his outlet (from what?). It is Alfred who tells us: Alfred suggests that this Batman's madness has always been a part of him, not generated by his parents’ murder but amplified and exploded by it.
He sets criminals on fire, kidnaps and tortures children to make them his "big-mouthed and quick-handed" minions, in line with his life experience. This Batman is a hypocrite and a fascist, if you will, arrogating the right to judge the world by filtering it through the reflection of his life. He talks about heroism and fighting crime, but they're excuses. Just because he reacted to his parents' murder that way doesn’t mean it should always be that way for everyone. It’s not a rule, except for him. And he applies it with force, arrogance, and violence. He extends his tragic life experience to the world. Gotham's police, perhaps guilty of being absent at the time of the tragedy, thus inevitably become the Evil. Always and anyway.
There is no positive vision of life and normality, of goodness. For this Batman, nothing matters but himself and his bestial needs for violence, for him, freedom. Hence, the common superhero, a Superman, a JLA, is a farce because it channels society into rules dictated by morality and the true-sense-of justice, truth, and honesty, abstract and absolutely childish principles. Batman arrogantly returns to the world what the world has given him. And he's wrong, because by doing so, he doesn't distinguish himself from it but becomes part of it. He becomes a hero only because he opposes what is perceived as Evil by common people, tired of criminals' violence, rapes, murders. How many, if they could, at first glance, would follow the instinct to kill, to harm murderers, rapists, mafia members? Batman does this. He is a brutal, primordial, violent force, terrifyingly simple. In this, he is indeed coherent. Not a hero, because he doesn’t carry high values, of Justice, except in appearance.
The Joker is also interesting, which many say is distorted. He is an individual with a completely flipped vision of the world, for whom dressing eclectically, eccentrically, frighteningly does not cause terror or laughter ("They call me the Joker, but I’m not very funny"), and brutality like murder is acts of love towards the outside. What is Joker? Essentially a cynical mad assassin dressed ridiculously with distorted morality. Can we say this characterization was respected in All Star Batman & Robin? Yes. Therefore, the Joker that Miller presents to us IS the Joker. A different, apathetic, terrifying version of the same character. Indeed, this change is welcome. Already the insertion of the Joker as the main villain who orchestrated Dick's parents' murder for some unknown reason is banal, I would say ordinary in itself, but at least it's vitalized by this different version of the character— in my opinion, very interesting, albeit still very sketchy.
Technically, however, it's not an excellent product. If on one hand, it manages to entertain with force, energy, explosively and slightly—if not simplistically— iconoclastic, it is also an incredibly decompressed story. Wanted or not? I don't know. Surely amusing is Miller making self-irony on this matter in the batcave episode.
The countless—and almost never functional—splash pages don’t help but rather leave a sense of emptiness, of "soap bubble," perhaps wrongly where there is a project in the author's mind (the desire to explore, to see more realistically the Batman/Robin relationship and the process that turns the latter into the bat's sidekick). Obviously, the concept of fun is rather fragile and extremely subjective: vulgarity (But which one? I would define that of Authority or Ennis that way, but that of All Star Batman & Robin is at most a friendly and raw provocation), the flaunted violence, and the thousand excesses we witness made the reading pleasant and extremely fun for me, but I realize that for others it may have given a sense of nausea, annoyance, of "poorly made." And a series cannot rely solely on subjective elements like fun, or humor, or the ability to provoke emotions. There must be a capability, a fundamental seriousness. A solid scheme. And it is for these absent elements that All Star Batman & Robin is not an excellent comic. Mediocre, good—and for me, personally and entirely subjectively, it is—at best.
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