On Batman: Damned #1

Batman: Damned #1
Written by Brian Azzarello, art by Lee Bermejo
$6.99; 46 pages

*So, has anyone heard anything about this book yet...?

*I like the fact that Batman's name is the same size and font as that of Azzarello's and Bermejo's. It makes it look a little like maybe Batman inked this comic or something.

*The first page of the book is a nine-panel grid featuring a close-up of the electronic monitor of Batman's pulse in an ambulance, bleeding into an image of his eyes in the bottom tier of panels, the only words being narration. The narrator is Alan Moore's co-creation Jonh Constanine, and he references a line from the climax of the Alan Moore-written Batman: The Killing Joke and my heart sank immediately, as I feared this could turn into a game of Alan Moore Allusion Bingo. Thankfully, it does not, although it's a rare week indeed when the publisher is able to ship a slate of books that doesn't refer to or depend upon the relatively small amount of work Moore did for them in the 1980s.

*The Enchantress in her Suicide Squad design appears, which was unexpected...but she talks in a supernatural font/lettering style, so maybe she's not the actual Enchantress, but a different character with that design...? In addition to she and Constantine and Gotham City regulars Commissioner Gordon, The Joker and Batman's Mom and Dad, this issue also features appearances by Zatanna and Deadman.

*While I'm not a fan of Bermejo's style when applied to Batman and his city and cast, I did kind of like his take on Deadman. The character was an unusual one, a circus acrobat who wore a corpse-like mask and performed under that name until he was murdered, at which point he became a ghost that looked just like his disguised self. Kelley Jones' take on the character was to draw him as an actual desiccated corpse, and in Kingdom Come, Alex Ross offered his own alternate design, in which Deadman was a skeleton wearing the Deadman costume.

Bermejo's Deadman looks more-or-less like artist and creator Carmine Infantino's original design for the character, but the red of his costume is here drawn like the layer of muscle one sees in medical drawings of a human body just beneath the skin. The elevated collar of his costume is also made of what looks like red human muscle tissue. I don't know that it's necessarily a better design of the above-mentioned three--I probably like Ross', then Jones', then Infantino's, in that order--but it's definitely different.

*The bit with the penis is weird. It's there in three, maybe four panels and it's semi-shadowed, so you can see the outline of it, but not any great detail. If it were a movie, the guy playing Batman could have easily used a body double, as his face and penis are never in the same "shot." The nudity isn't erotic in any way, and doesn't seem to be meant to be titillating. It doesn't seem to be fan service of the sort that 90% of the nudity in the manga I've read is. It's not the source of in-comics jokes or dialogue, like Goku's penis in the earliest Dragonball comics.

Rather, it's completely incidental to the story. Batman strips off his costume--which he apparently doesn't wear underwear with, and given that Bermejo's Batman costume seems to be made out of leather, I have to imagine chafing is an issue; Batman should at least have on a jockstrap--and wanders around the cave and manor in the nude for a bit, having a psychotic breakdown.

That's part of what is so weird about it. I can't tell you how many times I've seen Batman take off his costume, or wander around the manner in a state of undress (he's usually wearing a bathrobe), or seen him in the shower. And yet we've never seen his penis. So it's weird that Bermejo goes to the trouble to show it here, apparently just because he can (this is on DC's brand-new "Black Label" mature readers imprint), and I suspect this is something of a publicity stunt. And one that has worked quite well.

*Because DC shipped the initial orders for this book with Batman's penis in it, and then decided to cover it up digitally and in future printings (which it is now guaranteed to get), they have created artificial demand for the un-censored edition. Retailers, please tell me when this has increased in value enough for me to sell it for enough money to order that $150 Detective Comics Before Batman set that was just solicited.

*I'm all for superhero comics in which characters get their cocks and tits out, though. Why not? It would be nice if DC having a mature readers imprint for their DCU characters now meant that Black Label will be the place for violence, gore, swearing and semi-nudity among the superheroes, and the DCU line will become more of an all-ages friendly place, but somehow I don't see that happening in the near future. Honestly, maybe Black Label needs penises in its comics; otherwise, what really differentiates Batman: Damned from, you know, any other Batman comic on the market?

*Honestly, the idea of sainted dead father Thomas Wayne conducting an affair while future World's Greatest Detective Bruce  is around was more shocking to me than the nudity--which was, as I said, just sort of weird--and the placement of the graffiti on the last page seemed like the sort of thing that would have once been considered more taboo than whether or not you can see Batman's penis in shadow or not. Like, I remember when Madonna's video for "Like a Prayer" made people all over the country completely lose their shit.

*I really like this format. It's about 8.5 inches by 10.5 inches, it has a spine and no ads, and it has more than twice as many pages as the average 20- or 22-page DC comic. And it's only two or three more dollars than those comics. Now, the fact that these are more magazine-sized than comics-sized might make finding a place to keep them in your collection a bit of a challenge, and it is for that reason I would probably recommend waiting for the hardcover collection. But this is an all-around nice package.

*Sigh...I just said "package", didn't I? Guys, it's really hard to talk about this comic without sounding like you're talking about Batman's dick, sin't it? Dammit! I just said "really hard" too...! Difficult! It's really difficult to talk about this comic without sounding like you're talking about Bamtna's dick!