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

[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.