The issue of Batman DC didn't want you to see

[cyberghostface]

A little trivia bit: a while back DC had an event called "This issue: Batman dies" across the Bat-titles which basically amounted to villains fantasizing about killing the Dark Knight. The issue of Gotham Knights was told from the perspective of Victor Zsasz but the issue was pulled at the last minute because it was too gory. Recently the artist posted some of the pages on his Facebook here.

Comments

[shadowpsykie]

huh... as... grotesque and uttered fucked up this is.... i can't help but appreciate and LOVE the art.... it's almost mesmerising.

[crinos]

Really? This got pulled.

DC is releasing a comic where someone cut of Black Canary's head and stitched it onto a guys chest. And THIS is going too far for DC.

Really.

[icon_uk]

This is from about 10 years ago.... the slippery slope was a bit further uphill back then?

[q99]

Yea, this is dark, but, well, isn't simple shock factor.

[obsidianwolf]

Isn't it closer to 13 wasn't this back around 2000/2001.

[icon_uk]

Yeah, early 2001 it would seem. How time flies...

[cyberghostface]

Yeah. Back in the 80s Elektra being impaled was graphic by the standards of superhero comics and now we have Sentry ripping people in half with their entrails splattering everywhere. Times change.

[cypherfdp]

Wait. Wait what, what the fuck?

[chrisdv]

Future's End.

Don't ask. It's for the best.

[crinos]

Pretty much yeah.

Its basically like DC said "Hey, you know what no one has done before? A post apocalyptic story with killer robots. And lets make all the DC heroes horrible murder cyborgs. Except for Black Canary, we're gonna chop her head off and graft her head to Frankenstein's chest so he can use her sonic scream as a weapon. I mean that's being respectful to women right?"

[silicondream]

I dunno who it's respectful to, but I'm pretty sure no one has done implanted-Black-Canary-chest-death-face before. So...kudos! Originality!

Painfully stupid originality, because if you want to weaponize Canary's scream, you just have to remove her vocal cords and put them in your own throat, like one villain did back in JLA: Year One. Cutting her head off and sticking it on your chest doesn't really get you anywhere. I mean, this is like cargo cult surgery.

But...originality!

[kurenai_tenka]

The Canary thing? Yeaaaaah http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/4676348.html

[darth_cloudo]

...............yikes

[darkknightjrk]

I don't know if I'd say that's the same. I mean, that bit in Future's End is grotesque, but very over the top, and there isn't an ounce of gore there.

[crinos]

Yeah, but its a WOMAN'S SEVERED HEAD SEWN TO FRANKENSTEIN'S CHEST.

I mean the above comic with Zzaz doesn't bother me, but the Canary thing is too much for me. And Its not like I have a weak stomach, I read Junji ito comics for crying out loud. But the Canary thing makes me real uneasy.

[darkknightjrk]

Okay, let me put up an even gorier example--ever see the movie From Dusk 'Till Dawn? That movie has a lot of gory scenes in the second half, but they are so over-the-top--like, say, a vampire playing a guitar made out of human meat-parts, that it starts becoming cartoony, funny.

While what we saw in Future's End wasn't a joke, it did get a choked laugh out of me in a "holy shit wtf" kinda way.

But hey, YMMV.

[crinos]

Yeah I saw that, and the corpse guitar creeps me out too.

But, as you say, YMMV.

[mrosa]

"DC is releasing a comic where someone cut of Black Canary's head and stitched it onto a guys chest."

?????

[icon_uk]

Well, whilst the art is decent, this is one I'd have left on the shelf without a qualm.

The "In this issue Batman dies..." theme was in most cases a bit of an OTT fantasy of the villain.

This highlights that Zsasz is such a shallow character (he's a remorseless, emotionless mass-murderer and that's really all there is too him) that you can't really have an OTT story with him in it, so it's just... more generic mass-murder.

[doctor_spanky]

This is why the murder-clown version of Joker is so deeply uninteresting. Snyder's whole face-removing arc is one of the dumbest things I've read. Not to be a total h8r, but it said nothing new or interesting about the characters or the genre (and it certainly says nothing about, y'know, real life), and it was too unpleasant to be any fun.

It's as ridiculous and silly as the 60s Batman show, but without any stabilizing morality or joy. Really hoping his run doesn't last much longer.

Sorry, all the poison's out now. I'm not a Snyder fan, or a fan of all these self-serious grimdark comics that seem to be so popular nowadays. Don't get me started on Hickman's Avengers and it's pretentious turgid cosmic nonsense. Ok now all the poison's out.

[espanolbot]

The face-removing part isn't something Snyder thought up, from what I read, more something done in a different Batman book that he was kind of stuck with.

The actual Death of the Family story I enjoyed, as it seemed to emphasise how smart the Joker was over just killing people, though I much prefered the Owls and Year Zero storylines.

[icon_uk]

There's "The Joker's smart" and there's "derailing every other Bat title for two months (plus a month of follow up) for a crappy one-gag pay off which wasn't even funny and shouldn't have needed a single issue between them to cover"

[mrstatham]

Which, to be fair, is more of a problem with editorial pushing for these crossovers. When Snyder essentially dealt with the rest of the Family in a couple of pages prior to the finale, I thought that would have been just fine - because that didn't really say 'Joker himself is everywhere at once', more 'Joker's really thought this one through'.

But.. Yeah. None of the crossover issues were really justified at all.

[mrstatham]

Snyder supposedly agreed to the face-removing, although how much of that is editorial pushing him to be the face of the Batman line is difficult to say, but there was some confusion over who thought what up, but... To me, it seems like Snyder got saddled with it, frankly. He did his best to spin it as a 'look how ridiculous this is that I'M wearing a mask, just like you, Batssssss' in-story, but the complete lack of focus for it just suggests that, again, it wasn't his idea.

[lego_joker]

High-five, man. You've said everything I've always wanted to say about both Snyder and today's Joker.

[michaelhealy]

Even as a fantasy sequence I can't accept Zsasz being able to walk calmly down the street like that.

[razsolo]

This art is amazing! Also Zsasz is kind of hot which is creeping me out :|

[silicondream]

God, Zsasz is boring. Art's great, the character is just...hey, let's have someone who likes to kill people! And his personality is, likes to kill people. And he has the proportional speed and strength of, a guy. What's the point? He's almost as bad as Murmur. (Who is actually more interesting than Zsasz but the fact that he fights the Flash is just painfully stupid.)

Is there some amazingly-written intro story that totally justifies his existence?

[espanolbot]

There's a reason why in the Arkham games he's pretty much just a mook of the other villains... heck, in Arkham City had actually has to commission the Riddler's help to arrange his villainous scheme.

[lego_joker]

Pretty much no writer's ever written Zsasz like the guy's creator, Alan Grant, did. Zsasz, as depicted in "The Last Arkham", was as smart as he was brutal, and there's even a scene where he discusses Enlightenment-era philosophy with Jeremiah Arkham. He actually thought his murders through, instead of just randomly butchering the first people who caught his eye.

Grant's Zsasz didn't randomly wander around shirtless, either - he put on clothes as soon as he was free, so he could blend in better. The only times he showed bared skin was when he was incarcerated, and that was because Arkham wouldn't LET him have clothes (they were deemed potential weapons).

I really oughta post those stories someday (BTW, Grant was very aware of Zsasz's limited potential as a character - he worked on the Bat-books some eight or ten years, but limited Zsasz to only two stories and a handful of cameos).

[espanolbot]

That reminds me, what's the site's policy on comics that were completed, but never released, even in trade?

I have the last issue of Anarky's solo series where he goes to Arkham to ask the Joker if he's his dad or not, and I was wondering if people were interested in seeing it.

[doctor_spanky]

I would like to see that!

[bradygirl_12]

I dunno, somehow the words 'too gory for' and 'DC' put together just makes me laugh, considering, um, quite a few books are gorefests now.

[kenn_el]

Was that Barbara?

[icon_uk]

I don't see how or why it would be, since she was in her wheelchair when this story came out.

[kurenai_tenka]

Didn't they mean the woman at the beginning lying on the floor?

[icon_uk]

The one who is lying in the middle of the park with no wheelchair whilst her (presumably boyfriend/husband) is suspended from the tree?

[kurenai_tenka]

I'm not saying I agree, just that as she's on the floor (rather than stood up) I'm guessing that's who they meant.

High chance that I'm wrong though!

[halloweenjack]

Nice art. Too bad it's put into the service of sexualized violence. Who wrote... ah, right.

[cyberghostface]

How is it sexualized?

[lego_joker]

IMO, I've always thought the "This Issue... Batman DIES!" crossover (one creator jokingly called it a "cross-under") was highly underrated. As crossovers go, it's probably one of the most character-based events in Batman's publishing history. I mean, you had:

* Ed Brubaker's Penguin story, which highlighted how Ozzie feels genuinely, unfairly maligned by his foes, and his flourish for the romantic (his extensive imagination sequence on how to kill both Batman and Bruce Wayne is worthy of any Bronze Age supervillain's plan).
* Greg Rucka's Two-Face story, which emphasized how Harvey views his darker self as his true arch-nemesis - Batman is only an obstacle. A highly competent and seemingly omnipresent obstacle, but not the true enemy.
* Chuck Dixon's Joker story, which... hell, it's Dixon writing the Joker. The sheer comedic value is pure gold, but it did also tap into the idea that the Batman-versus-Joker feud is so eternal that it actually defies the words "beginning" and "end". They could have killed/reformed each other a dozen times over, and the cycle would just KEEP ON GOING.
* Chuck Dixon's Catwoman/Nightwing team-up, which explained in a handful of pages why the Bruce/Selina romance could never really work.

[zaqari_waliz]

Is Zsasz aware that Batman is prepared to kill Superman and frequently saves the world, by beating space gods? Because as fantasies go, this strikes me as something of a stretch.