[Comic Books] Hey kids, wanna see Batman commit unspeakable atrocities while using slurs? Also, boobs, and the shaming of a beloved writer. The saga of All Star Batman and Robin

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Before we start, fair warning: This comic isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. You may want to stop reading and participate in a more enjoyable, relaxing activity instead, like hitting your genitals with a meat tenderizer, or asking your parents to tell you how you were conceived.

The year was 2005. Youtube had just been created, and was already becoming a vortex absorbing people’s free time. John Paul II had died, and a new pope won his hat through single combat. Shows like American Dad and Avatar the Last Airbender premiered. And DC comics had a great new idea.

It was amazing. It was exceptional. They were going to create alternate universe versions of all their most popular characters, with simplified backstories for new readers. This was the first time anyone had thought of that, not counting Batman: Year One, Robin: Year One, the entire Ultimate Universe, Elseworlds, and the other 27 times that comic creators had done this. If you ignore all those times, it was super original.

But skepticism be damned, because All Star Batman and Robin was going to be created by the dream team: Frank Miller and Jim Lee.

Who the hell are these guys?

Frank Miller is a legend among comics fans, even though his star has fallen somewhat. And in 2005, he was legendary. Among many comics, he wrote The Dark Knight Returns (and Batman: Year One).

For us now, it’s hard to understand why that was such a big deal. Batman is a gritty, dark hero, so Miller wrote a dark and gritty Batman story. Big whoop. Except… he wasn’t. Just look at the old Adam West cartoon, or some of the wacky old Batman comics where his gimmicky villains would rob banks with exploding penguins. And now, Batman is the poster child for a dark and brooding hero. It’s hard to say that one person was 100% responsible for the change, but Miller’s writing for The Dark Knight Returns had an undeniably massive impact on that. And Batman: Year One has since become the defining Batman origin. On a bigger scale, he shaped comics, pushing them more towards the dark and gritty side that we know and love tolerate generally accept today.

To put it simply: If you’ve ever watched any modern Batman movie – from gravel voice to Martha to ex-vampire – they all took a massive amount of plot points and design from Miller.

Jim Lee is an excellent artist, and general cool dude, who has since gone on to become Chief Creative Officer of DC. He has a stunning history of work both and Marvel and DC, as well as helping found Image Comics. His career has gone remarkably without major scandal or issue. Which unfortunately means that we won’t discuss him much further. Sorry Jimbo.

Making a good first impression

As we all know, the opening pages of a story are vital. You have to hook people, draw them in. Make them feel like this is a narrative they want to be immersed in. The first two pages do this pretty well, showing off Robin with his parents at the circus. And the third page is… ah fuck, it’s porn. Yeah, that’s just straight up lingerie shots of Gotham reporter Vicki Vale speculating about Superman’s dick.

OK, kinda weird start, but they can recover and nope, it’s more porn. And she’s still waxing poetic about the Super Schlong. Still though, it’s not like they’d dedicate a third page to it and of course they would, fuck you.

The plot gets thicker than Vicki

Once everyone is fully clothed, the story moves to the circus, and things get back on track. Dick Grayson’s parents are killed by mobsters – not due to a sabotaged trapeze, but by being shot. Mild changes without destroying the beloved characters, that’s the key, and HOLY FUCKING SHIT, BATMAN IS TORTURING A MAN WITH SNAKE VENOM.

That wasn’t a quick change for comedic effect by the way. The story goes from “Batman sees Robin’s parents die” to “Batman just hit a dude with batarangs tipped in snake venom which will cause him agonizing hallucinations for a month”.

But there’s no time to digest the many fucked up parts of that, because the plot is moving fast. The cops arrive! The cops punch Vicki, and take Dick Grayson! And also the cops are either pedophiles or abusers, so at least they did their research. Vicki chases the cops, and Batman chases Vicki!

And then, as a legion of bats scares off the cops, Batman rescues Robin. This is the foundational father-son moment, a broken man reaching out to a child. Batman takes an orphan under his wing, so that he doesn’t go down the same dark path.

Or he lifts him into the air by the neck and screams “ON YOUR FEET SOLDIER, YOU’VE JUST BEEN DRAFTED. INTO A WAR.” Yeah.

I guess either option works.

The Batmobile lost its wheel (and Vicki lost her arm)

I know this comic may seem crazy as shit so far. But I promise you: as weird as it sounds, the first issue was the most mild one.

Issue two opens with Batman kidnapping Robin. That’s not me trying to dramatize it, he straight up uses the word “kidnap” as he pins down a struggling child and drugs him with sleeping gas. He then races off in the Batmobile, hitting Vicki Vale’s car with his butler Alfred in it. Vicki is horrifically injured, and has a rib puncture her lungs. Batman doesn’t give a shit.

Batman then goes on a monologue, which… holy fuck, it’s so edgy. It’s like Edward Scissorhands shaving himself in a discount machete shop. I tried to find the words to do it justice, but I can’t, so I’m just gonna type the full thing out here. To the brain cells that are about to die, we salute you.

My world.

Welcome to MY world Dick Grayson. BATS and RATS and WARTS and all.

You poor boy. You poor little bastard. Welcome to HELL. Hell. Or the next best thing.

The GAS calms him down in the space of SECONDS. He won’t be having any NIGHTMARES. Not the kind that aren’t TRUE, anyway. Then he starts FUSSING.

(Robin tries to ask completely normal questions, like “Why am I being kidnapped by a furry with drugs?”)

(Out loud) Sleep kid.

The GAS was supposed to knock him OUT. He should be sailing past the MOON, right now. What’s this brat MADE out of?

(Out loud) SLEEP. The world I’m gonna wake you up to is no better than the world you already know – but it’ll make a lot more SENSE than that one did – once I’ve put you through holy HELL, it will. It’ll make sense. A LOT of sense. Holy Hell or the next best thing. So sleep TIGHT punk. Sleep TIGHT, my WARD.

And then it happens. The iconic panel that still rocks the world today. It pops up pretty much weekly on r/Comicsoutofcontext. Batman says “I’m the goddamn Batman” while calling Robin a slur. He’d go on to use the phrase “goddman Batman” at least once in every other issue of the comic. This image would also go on to become one of the Internet’s earliest memes. So, silver lining I guess?

So that’s when the edgelord energy peaked. I mean, bad as the writing was, it’s not like they’d have Batman go on a cop killing spree as he laughs maniacally.

Batman goes on a cop killing spree as he laughs maniacally

Some cops catch up to Batman and shoot at him. His (very mature and grounded) response is to think “I guess somebody on the force put out a KILL ORDER on me. Cool. It’s about damn TIME.”

He then proceeds on a brutal destructive spree, ramming the Batmobile into cars as Robin screams and he laughs like a madman. Words genuinely cannot do this scene justice, so just read it yourself. Gotham cops are some of the most corrupt and vicious monsters in superhero media, so the fact that Batman genuinely seems more evil than them speaks volumes.

A moment of clarity

But as Batman soars off, and the blood of the corpses he left behind begins to congeal, he stops, and becomes pensive. Is he just perpetuating the cycle of abuse? Can he really expect a child to fight a war on crime?

And then he decides “NAAAAAAAAAH, that’s pussy talk”, and slaps Robin.

The rest of the series

Believe it or not, that was just the first two issues. This wasn’t me cherry picking the worst parts out of hundreds and hundreds of pages of content. Alllllll of that bullshit was crammed into roughly forty pages, which were the first forty pages shown.

It’d take way, way too long to cover the entire rest of the series, so I’ll give you a highlights reel

• Joker has a Nazi henchmen, who is topless except for swastikas on her nipples. No, seriously.
• Batman locks Robin up in the Batcave. The only food he is allowed to eat are the raw rats he catches and kills with his bare hands. He sleeps on the rocks.
• Batman canonically tries (and fails) to make his voice sound like Clint Eastwood
• Every single woman Batman meets canonically wants to fuck him. Black Canary. Batgirl. Catwoman. The rape victim he meets for two seconds. All of them.
• Batman uses improvised napalm to burn men alive and laughs as he does so. He then has sex with Black Canary on a burning pier as they scream.
• The word “goddamn” is used at least 17 times on each page. If you took a shot every time you saw it, you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning within minutes.
• Batman forces Robin to paint an entire building yellow in a few hours. Why? To fuck with Green Lantern. Batman then painted himself yellow too for good measure. And also drank lemonade.
• Green Arrow is a sexual predator who pervs on Black Canary. My boy Ollie deserves better.
• Speaking of Black Canary, they take an iconic female hero, give her the most terribly written “girl power” moment ever, then reveal that the only reason she ever had the bravery to do anything was because Batman inspired her.
• She also decides not to get too much money, because carrying it around would give her muscles, which are for men. No, I’m not kidding.
• Wonder Woman hates all men (the nicest thing she calls them is “sperm banks”), and is an utter and complete psychopath who holds herself above any government or moral standard. But she’s also dominated by Superman, because of his masculine aura. Pardon while I retch.
• Everyone uses the Q-slur a lot. A lot.

It’d be way to hard to dive into all the complexities and fucked up parts of Batman and Robin’s relationship, so I’ll just repeat what a number of fans have pointed out: This Batman treats Robin like Rick treats Morty. And honestly, probably even worse.

How could this comic possibly get canceled?

Even before it was formally canceled, the comic went through major difficulties. After the fifth issue came out, they switched it to a bi-monthly release. At one point, in 2006, there was only a single new issue of the comic. Then, issue #10 was delayed for four months, then delayed for another month. And then once it was released, they forgot to censor the word “fuck” (but the slurs were fine I guess), so they had to be recalled, delaying it even further.

Jim Lee has talked about how part of this was due to him having too many responsibilities with the DC Universe Online game. However, fans have speculated for years that, more likely, DC and Lee just really didn’t give much of a shit about the comic.

Incredibly, this comic managed to run for ten whole issues before DC decided to scrap it. They ended it in the middle of a major storyline, which I’d say would be a loss… except it’s more like euthanasia. In 2011, they announced that Miller and Lee would be coming back to finish the story! Twelve years later, and absolutely jack shit has happened, so I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it’s not gonna happen.

The comic had started out with massive sales, which quickly plummeted as it was revealed just how far Miller had fallen. It still sold fairly well, but nowhere near the 300,000 issues that the first one sold.

Fan reception

I’m not gonna lie: When I was first reading this comic, I thought it was a parody. I genuinely didn’t believe that a professional writer could write this and not be making fun of pointlessly edgy superhero stories. Even after realizing it, it was still a hilarious read, just because of how stupidly terrible it was.

There are some movies that are so bad they’re good. And there are some movies that are so bad that they can never be good, but that badness is entertaining. This is the comics equivalent of that. Rob Bricken said it best, commenting “All Star Batman is such a magnificent asshole.” If you’ve seen The Room, imagine that in comic book form. Many fans will still recommend it today, just because the pure shittiness of it all is hilarious. Miller was completely, 100% serious about everything, which just made it even more funny.

Critically, the comic has been widely panned, and is described as “one of the biggest train wrecks in comics history”. When said history involves a story where Ms. Marvel gets raped, and the Avengers congratulate her rapist, you know that shit is fucked up. Other critics have said things like

it’s as if Miller was secretly trolling DC, trying to create the least ultimate Batman of all time

As I recall, there wasn’t much of a throughline in the original book. Various superhero-related things just sort of happened.

Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely took on All-Star Superman, while Frank Miller and Jim Lee handled All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder. One of these series is regarded as one of the greatest superhero stories ever told. The other is All-Star Batman and Robin.

Remember All-Star Batman and Robin? I Sure Wish I Didn’t

The worst part is, the art is truly stunning. It’s some of Jim Lee’s best work, and genuinely still holds up today. It’s just a shame that the art needs to have words on it.

Oh Miller, my Miller

Remember how I mentioned back at the start that Miller’s star had fallen quite a bit? Again, blaming a single comic for that is hard, but these ten issues damaged Miller’s legacy more than anything else. Fans were impressed by Miller’s original idea to “make Batman darker and edgier”. And then they saw him write another comic where he decided to make Batman darker and edgier, and realized that the man had exactly one go to option.

On top of that, fans started to become disillusioned with the grimdark era of comics. There’s still room for heroes like Daredevil and Batman, but fans lamented the need to make everything dark and edgy all the time.

It also doesn’t help that Miller genuinely cannot write women. This prompted the now infamous whorewhoreswhoreswhores comic from Shortpacked (SFW). And nowhere is this more prominent than in All Star. Every woman in Gotham is either a prostitute or rape victim. Women are portrayed as sex objects, and absolutely never anything else. They have a level of depth and complexity that would make Alison Bechdel quit comics forever.

All told, All Star was a perfectly terrible storm for Miller, that came across more as a parody of his work than an example of it. All of his worst traits were put on display, and he became a bit of a laughingstock. He’s had other comics that did this (Holy Terror anyone?), but All Star was the most widely known, and thus, damaging to his reputation. He’s still Frank Fucking Miller, and wields a tremendous amount of clout in the world of comics, but he is no longer the unparalleled champion that he once was.

I guess at the end of the day, the moral of the story is simple: Don’t have Batman say slurs. And abuse children. And murder bystanders. And use chemical weapons…

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here