31 Days of Scans - Character you used to hate/dislike, but now you don’t: Black Mask

[lego_joker]

For the longest time, I'd always thought of Black Mask - especially the 2000s-era take on him - as Hush, but even worse. Hush might have been a huge Villain Sue with artificial competence and a wholly unoriginal composition, but at least he had the grace to leave the Bat-books (temporarily) as soon as Loeb was done with his debut story. Black Mask had all of the above (possible exacerbated by the fact that he was previously an unremarkable C-lister in Batman's rogues gallery) with the added caveat that editorial was in love with him for some reason, so we got him shoved down our throats as TEH MOST BADASS CRIMELORD EVAH for most of Gotham's mid-2000s status quo.

I'm not going to recap the disgusting mess that was "War Games" here - there are plenty of posts on this community devoted to covering that already - but suffice to say, BM got very little love from the female readership, and his fans in the male readership basically amounted to people impressed that he'd killed a Robin.

But then I sat down to Judd Winick's run on Batman, and realized that holy shit, apparently the newbie writer on the block agreed with me.

Seriously, almost every issue during Winick's run seemed to have someone making life harder for Ol' Roman, to the point of being a running gag - later on, even Winick's fellow Bat-writers Anderson Gabrych and Bill Willingham got in on the act. I know that some of it comes with the territory of being the biggest name in the underworld, which just made Black Mask the biggest target in the underworld, but you can't look at these pages and tell me the writers weren't having fun with kicking him around.








To be fair, Winick in particular sometimes had Roman fight back... with sass. Under Winick's pen, Black Mask's sadism and torture porn-y personality was mostly swept under the rug and replaced with... this.







Ah, well. As the old saying goes: an editorial big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have. Incidentally, most of Black Mask's best moments during Winick's run were adapted into the DTV movie Batman: Under the Red Hood, with the addition of Wade Williams' high-energy scenery chewing, and I urge you to check out that delightful little performance.

So let's hear it for ol' Roman, everybody! Going from a character we just plain hated to a guy who we kinda loved to hate!

... okay, just this once:



Happy holidays, everybody!

Comments

[burkeonthesly]

Some of these are sized oddly, or pixelated as if they've been resized from really small. Of the ones I can read, I laughed at several.

Unrelated note, Kryptonite must be really light, if one hundred pounds is the closest round figure for a batch that big.

[lego_joker]

I did have to finagle a couple of these images, but I can read them fine from where I am right now.

[icon_uk]

I'm afraid I can't read many of them either, especially the last one.

[tugrul]

I've always wondered, because I've posted too big images here before, is there a code to resize images?

[icon_uk]

Yup, though it's not quite standard code.

If you use the Rich Text method of posting, then you can either use your mouse to click on the bottom right hand corner of the image and expand or contract the image size by dragging the corner... it should shrink in proportion to the images original size.

If you prefer a more manual version then click on the image, and then click on the little picture icon on the post editing menu and the "Image Properties" box will open up and you can use the width and height files to control the dimensions.

Hope that makes sense...

[tugrul]

I'll have to learn by trying it out now. ^_^

Kr 83.798 u

[7dialsmystery]

Well, it is a gas, so....

[crinos]

The Under the Red Hood movie made me like Black Mask a lot.

Plus the fact it was revealed he really didn't kill Stephanie after all.

[mrstatham]

He still tortured her in a manner that was completely gratuitous and exploitative, in contrast with the admittedly squicky scenes of a similar nature in Brubaker's run. I could never really quite enjoy Black Mask as a character after that - very much the Doctor Light effect, as someone else has suggested.

[drtechnobabel]

Man, that movie was awesome all around, and I agree that it definitely made Black Mask incredibly entertaining to watch. Shame he got sidelined so hard in Arkham Origins, though.

[reveen]

Now I want to know what his mother is like.

"Roooman! Did you put out that hit on the Falconi's yet!"
"Ill do it in a minute, mom! Goddamn! I got a criminal enterprise to run, I don't need you on my back!"
"You'll never have a mafia princess of your own if you speak to your mother like that!"

[althechi]

Dead in a fire, probably set by Roman himself.

[kurenai_tenka]

BM was very entertaining in Winick's run, agreed. His role in War Games operates kind of like Dr Light's in Identity Crisis, unfortunately.

[alschroeder3]

Total agreement with this version of Black Mask: the "it's like trying to run a criminal organization with my mother" cracked me up the first time I read it. He looks like the Red Skull, but his dialogue in that stage was like David Letterman running a criminal organization.

[icon_uk]

My issues with this take on Black Mask were that he was SO different from his old character with no explanation, they might as well have used another character altogether. Plus his character seems to like what the Joker used to be. A wisecracking, gang running, psychopath... which is a fine thing to be in Gotham, it just seemed to be a bit...derivative.

In fact I do wonder if there might have been an intention to use Joker here. Jason trolling the Black Mask works better in my head if I imagine he's trolling the Joker, which given Jason ID as the Red Hood, works much better on so many levels.

[lego_joker]

Let's face it: almost no writer cares about how the generation before them wrote Black Mask. Winick's turn more or less ignored the crap out of Ed Brubaker's, who ignored the crap out of Greg Rucka's, who ignored the crap out of Doug Moench's...

I can *kinda* see Nicholson!Joker in Winick's Black Mask here, and who knows? Given the fact that the mid-2000s Bat-books were well into the throes of "the Joker is NO LAUGHING MATTER, BUB", possibly with editor pressure to keep it that way, maybe he was trying to have his cake and eat it too.

[zapbiffpow]

Winick's Black Mask was wicked hilarious. The way he trades barbs is solid entertaining.

Nice choice here, sir.

[ablackraptor]

Black Mask has always been weird for me, because I could never actually hate him even despite what he did to Steph; I think part of it was that I was introduced to him by The Batman (where he was pretty cool as far as villains on that show go) and Under The Red Hood (where, well, that's already covered), so for the most part its those that I think of for him, and I enjoyed those so much. Its kinda like how I can enjoy Joker despite what he did to Barbara, I guess.
Saying that, still wish Steph got the chance to kick the shit out of him when she came back to life; would have been an awesome story.

On that note, am I the only one confused by Joker name-dropping Steph here? I mean, why is her identity as a former Robin publicly known, and wouldn't that make things super difficult for her when she came back? I wasn't actually reading DC at the time so I don't remember if it was a thing that they outed her identity when she died, but that seems like all-kinds of stupid and disrespectful.

[lego_joker]

Name-dropping Steph was canon as of War Crimes, but... well, it's War Crimes. That was far from its dumbest moment.

And yes, I loved Black Mask's debut episode on "The Batman", even if it had almost nothing to do with his comics incarnation.