I thought it was the better of the two comics, and not simply because of the fact that it was what a reader might expect from a crossover of the two characters. The creative team also seemed better suited to the task, with the art especially being of a magnitude greater than that of the previous comic, at least according to my own personal tastes.
That creative team was writer Chuck Dixon, pencil artist John Romita Jr. and inker Klaus Janson.
By 1994, Dixon was both a prolific Punisher writer and a prolific Batman writer, and thus an ideal choice for a book in which the pair cross paths with one another. While I've never read his Punisher output, I have read a lot of Dixon's Batman comics (and those featuring other members of the Bat-Family, particularly from his long run on the first Robin ongoing).
While not my favorite Batman writer (that would have been, at the time, probably Alan Grant), and never one for particularly inspired, imaginative, wild stories, Dixon was still an incredibly solid comics writer, a stalwart whose name on a book guaranteed a certain level of competency and quality.
I always thought he excelled at coming up with plots for his heroes to challenge and foil, often with interesting crimes that seemed perfect for action movies (And yes, as a fan of his work, it saddens me that his personal politics seem to have alienated him from much of the mainstream industry, and lead to him working on truly bizarre comics like 2016's Clinton Cash: The Graphic Novel, a comics adaptation of Peter Schweizer's election cycle hit book).
JRJR was an extremely familiar presence at Marvel Comics and had drawn Punisher War Journal, but this comic was his very first time drawing a DC Comics character officially. That was, in and of itself, rather exciting at the time.
And as for Klaus Janson, not only was he a frequent JRJR collaborator, but his work with Frank Miller on 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns meant his was a name every Batman fan would know.
So the art, which was colored by Christie Scheele, was obviously great, and the intense, dynamic cover of the two characters wrestling the pouring rain you see above is but a small taste.
Romita's drawing of the lead characters' figures are big, blocky and imposing...muscular, but with a sense of animated grace about them. His many mobster characters that populate the panels of the book are similarly big and bulky, with jagged edges to their suits and faces.
Under Janson's heavy inks, there's a tactile sense of grit to the art, and lots of blackness, from busy crosshatching to the rings around the stalactites in the Batcave to the wrinkles and shadows on the suits to the driving black rain of the climactic encounter.
Dixon's script gives a few great opportunities to really show off the Romita and Janson art, too, and they do not waste it.
Both characters are introduced in interesting splash spreads that require the reader to turn the open book from the standard horizontal orientation to a vertical one (no easy feat with a 1,000-page hardcover omnibus!) and read them that way, not unlike a pin-up in an old girly magazine.
The Punisher is introduced first, in a low angle standing atop some crates, a series of muzzle flashes and arcs of spent bullet casings emanating from the guns he has in both hands (They look like uzis to me, although he calls them "MACs" in narration later in the story; are those different things? I am not a gun person).
JRJR's Frank Castle is bigger and thicker than Barry Kitson's was, and his face is covered in stubble and shadow. A strip of two inset panels along the bottom of the image of Castle keep it from being a true two-page splash; these panels feature regular Batman supporting characters Harvey Dent, Renee Montoya and Commissioner Gordon.
Batman appears a few pages later, in similar fashion, although he's on the "bottom" of the spread, with a strip of panels above him. He's shown leaping into action, seemingly falling from the sky, with his hands outstretched like claws (and his fingers looking particularly, peculiarly flat, as JRJR tends to draw hands), his face and cape all black.
Later in the book, at the climax, when the pair come to blows for the second time, there's another two-page spread requiring one to turn the book to see it right-side up, featuring The Punisher punching Batman in the face.
I'm not sure about the image, as it affords the moment of biggest impact in the entire story to that particular blow in a fight, and it's not exactly the most dramatic moment of their conflict. It also devotes all that comic page real estate to a moment in which Castle "wins" the fight with Batman, although in both of the instances in which they fight one another in this book, Dixon's script makes clear that Batman would ultimately be victorious in a hand-to-hand fight with Castle (Actually, Lake of Fire also presumed the same about a fight between Punisher and that Batman, although the Punisher won the conflict by resorting to using a gun and a bit of trickery).
It's perhaps worth pausing to consider JRJR's Batman, as this was his first time drawing the character (He would of course get another crack at the character during his 2016-2020ish stint at DC Comics, where he drew the first arc of writer Scott Snyder's All-Star Batman).
This is, of course, Batman in his "classic" costume, blue and gray with a form-fitting utility belt and a yellow circle around his bat-emblem (Batman would debut his new, all-black, brief-less costume the following year; that's what he would be wearing in his next Marvel crossover, a 1995 team-up with Spider-Man). I say "blue" of course, but it may look black to you, given how many lines Romita and Janson use, and how heavy the inks are; it does appear to be the same color as The Punisher's costume in this crossover, so I guess one could say they are both blue-black or, perhaps, comic book black.
JRJR's Batman is as big and imposing as his Punisher, but, in the few instances where we see him with his cape unfurled and flying behind him, he's also a bit more lithe and athletic, his waist looking almost comically slim below his huge barrel chest.
On the ears front, JRJR is on the longer side of the spectrum, which was the fashion at the time. Unusually for many Batman artists, however, his bat-ears are very thick at the base, forming two big black triangles atop his head.
As for Dixon's plot, it's pretty straightforward, and somewhat perfunctory, basically maneuvering the pair into a rainy Gotham City alleyway so they can hit one another and focus on their differences in crime-fighting philosophy in as perfect a test case as possible: Unrepentant mass murderer The Joker, put a bullet in his head or beat him up and take him to Arkham?
There's no big supervillain plot like Jigsaw's plan to turn the Gotham City reservoir into a lake of fire as in Lake of Fire, nor is there any focus on the interior lives of the characters, as with Valley's struggling with his delusions, and the conflict between his religious programming and his inherited crime-fighting mission.
There's also, perhaps surprisingly, little real connective tissue between Deadly Knights and Lake of Fire. The characters make passing references to it (The Punisher noting that Batman's fighting style seems as different as his costume, for example, or Batman noting that The Punisher was in Gotham while he was "absent"). It obviously doesn't matter now that the two comics are collected back-to-back in the omnibus, but one could easily have read Deadly Knights in 1994 without ever having read Lake of Fire.
We open with The Punisher in a massive firefight with generic gangsters in a Gotham City paint factory, his narration telling us he's returned to the city looking for Jigsaw, who never returned to New York as he had expected. Just as Castle is about to execute the last surviving gunman, Batman lands on the back of his head and they fight for a few pages.
"Something different here," Castle narrates. "Last time I was in Gotham this guy was a reckless brawler. Now he seems more skilled. Something refined about him."
Batman, meanwhile, is somewhat dismissive of The Punisher's abilities: "Punisher's tough. Strong. At heart he's just a brawler. All rage and brute strength."
Though The Punisher gets in a few hits, including breaking a crate over Batman's head, Batman is in the process of throwing him across the room when the burning building collapses, and The Punisher escapes.
Meanwhile, Jigsaw, now drawn with his face bandaged up like a mummy, the work of "the best plastic surgeon that extortion could buy" in the words of his new partner The Joker, is trying to consolidate power around himself, and become the new leader of Gotham's criminal underworld.
It is perhaps here worth noting that JRJR's Jigsaw looks entirely different from Kitson's. He's a great deal smaller, his hair far longer and shaggier (and a different color, although I suppose that's between the colorists), and he's lost the weird metal neck brace he had seemed to be wearing.
As for The Joker, I really like JRJR's version, which manages to convey a full range of emotions through the eyes and brows alone, despite the smile being fixed.
Dixon writes The Joker more as a typical gangland figure than he's usually portrayed, even if a crazy one with something of a schtick. Here he's not as wild or theatrical as in most of his other appearances, even those that Dixon himself had written. And there's no real plan that he's executing here, either; he's simply working to help Jigsaw consolidate power because...well, because Dixon wanted both title characters' archenemies in the relatively short, 45-ish page story, one assumes.
While the two vigilantes pursue parallel investigations—and their respective computer-savvy sidekicks Micro and Robin have a computer fight, leading to this immortal panel—they both end up in a nightclub with The Joker, Jigsaw, a local crime boss and a whole bunch of generic guys with suits and guns, leading to a big, long 12-page fight scene ("The caped choirboy is holding his own, but he's throwing fists in a firefight," The Punisher observes).
At the end, the crime-fighters end up facing one another's villains, which means The Punisher putting a gun in The Joker's face and saying, "I've got all the therapy you need right here, comedian."
Batman, of course, would appear just before Castle could pull the trigger, leading first to a brief argument, and then that splash of The Punisher decking Batman.
A short fight ensues, in which Dixon has Batman assure us he could totally kick Castle's ass, if so inclined: "I let you have that one because you probably think I deserved it," he says, and when Castle throws another punch, Batman catches his fist and tosses him into a pile of boxes. "I said one...Don't test me, Castle."
Batman threatens him that if The Punisher ever comes to Gotham City again he'll see him locked up with "the other murderers," but seems awfully complacent about The Punisher's last few nights of killing a dozen or two guys in his city, and, rather uncharacteristically, seems content to just let The Punisher go (To be fair to Dixon, he had run out of his allotted pages).
The Punisher, meanwhile, gets the last word in, but otherwise slinks away. And, to date anyway, has obeyed Batman's command and never returned to Gotham.
This would be the pair's final meeting...unless you count an off-panel scene in JLA/Avengers, wherein the Justice League, visiting the Marvel Universe, are apparently delayed in their mission by some 20 minutes when Batman stops to beat up The Punisher. But, again, that was off panel.
If Deadly Knights was what we might expect a DC/Marvel crossover of the mid-1990s to be—two popular, top-tier headliners with interestingly opposing philosophies running headlong into one another by a creative team perfectly suited to the occasion—the next collaboration between the two publishers was anything but.
Which isn't to say it wasn't interesting, of course, just not predictable.
<i>Next: 1995's</i> Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger #1
No comments:
Post a Comment