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From:Frank Miller , DC Comics ,
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 Insane and Wildly Entertaining, 2008-11-13
This book is absolutely insane, and I loved it!
What we have here is a Batman story free of any previous or current continuity. Writer Frank Miller is taking Batman and starting his story from scratch. (Or is he? More on that later.)
The Batman in this storyline is testosterone fueled, immature, and more than a little nutty. Miller takes him so over the top that I really and truly hope the writer is poking fun at his previous incarnations of the characters and his previous, ultraviolent works such as Sin City and 300. The fact that both Batman and most other characters in the book refer to him as "the g--d--n Batman" can only lead me to believe Miller didn't want us taking this too seriously.
However, Miller is also proving a point. We'd always heard that Batman needed a Robin to take the edge off the man--to bring him back to humanity. However, as a Batman fan of over twenty-five years, I'd never really seen an incarnation of the character that had him in DIRE need of a humanizing sidekick. That is, until now. Miller's All-Star Batman is a whack-job, and it's only through his dealings with Dick Grayson that he slowly begins to realize he's turned into a monster. Despite all the sex and violence in the book, Miller actually does a wonderful job evolving Batman's character--there is real character development taking place that is rarely seen in the comic book medium.
And because this is an all-star title, the artist must be as equally as big a star--enter Jim Lee. Jim Lee has always been a mesmerizing artist, but he truly outdoes himself with All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder. His figures look amazing--as always--but the settings are what really blew me away. His attention to detail is nearly genius-level, and I found myself studying every building in the skyline, every poster on the wall, every tread on a tire. He is absolutely astonishing.
So while I'm glad this book isn't the definitive and mainstream interpretation of the character, I am so glad we have this Batman as well. I couldn't put the book down. It was ludicrously fun and breathtaking to look at and had me addicted within the first few minutes of reading it.
Now, if you'll allow me a slight digression: Does anyone else think this is a prequel of sorts to The Dark Knight Returns? As I started reading it, I noticed some thematic links between All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder and The Dark Knight Returns, as well as The Dark Knight Strikes Again. This is nothing unusual with writers, many of them tend to have certain passions that they return to (consciously or not) in their work.
However, as I continued reading, things began to seem like more than just coincidence. For example, in the huge spread from Episode 4, doesn't that look like the Dark Knight Returns Batmobile being built? Also, we clearly see the cover to The Dark Knight Returns collected edition as a poster on Barbara Gordon's wall in Episode 6. The Wonder Woman design in Episode 5 is very similar to the Wonder Woman in The Dark Knight Strikes Again, as his her basic personality and attraction to Superman. I would also argue that Superman, Plastic Man, Green Lantern, and Jim Gordon all seem tonally the same as they are in The Dark Knight Returns and The Dark Knight Strikes Again.
But, the real cinchers for me occurred first in Episode 8 where the Joker's henchwoman was the same lady with the swastikas covering her nipples (wow, there's a sentence I never thought I'd construct) as from The Dark Knight Returns: Book Three.
And then, the big one--the HUGE one--happened in Episode 9 where Batman tells Green Lantern, "Of course we're criminals. We've always been criminals. We have to be criminals." Now compare that to Superman's internal dialogue from The Dark Knight Returns: Book Three, which was written roughly twenty years earlier: "When the noise started from the parents' groups and the subcommittee called us in for questioning - - you were the one who laughed ... that scary laugh of yours ... `Sure we're criminals,' you said. `We've always been criminals. We have to be criminals.'"
In my estimation, it seems Frank Miller is using All-Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder to build upon his mythos originated in The Dark Knight Returns, and I think that's both incredibly entertaining.
Of course, if I'm right, knowing what we know about the end of The Dark Knight Strikes Again certainly makes his developing relationship with Dick Grayson seem bittersweet.
~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant
 Disappointing, 2008-11-09
This book just makes Batman seem like a jerk, not hardcore. It also contradicts many other parts of the Batman continuity. Dare I say that both Miller and Lee were arrogant with their approach. They thought that we would buy and like this storyline just because of the names on the cover. When one sees Miller or Lee we have come to expect great storys and artwork. The artwork was good, but since these books are usually collaborative efforts, they are both to blame for this utterly disappointing effort. I hope we see some new material from both of them so they can redeem themselves.
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 Batman, Robin and the End of Democracy, 2008-11-02
Frank Miller stunned the world of comics when, back in 1985, he created a new vision of Batman in his "Dark Knight Returns" graphic novel. The image of a psychopathic Batman stalking the streets of a gigantic, crumbling Gotham, and resorting to terrorist tactics in order to capture criminals was totally fresh, and rather disturbing. Miller penned a couple of sequels to The Dark Knight, such as "Batman: Year One" and "The Dark Knight Strikes Again," which further explored the deranged psychology of his noirish hero. Now, with "All-Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder Volume 1," Miller returns to the creation that made him famous, in an attempt to explain - in his own gritty way - the means whereby Batman came to acquire his famous sidekick.
In Miller's version, Batman meets Robin as Dick Grayson, a twelve year old boy who performs as an acrobat in the circus along with his parents. During the performance, a hired gunman kills Grayson's parents, and Batman, who has had his eye on him for a while as a possible protégé, seizes his opportunity and abducts Grayson from the circus, making off with him in his Batmobile. He takes Grayson to his bat cave and leaves him there to fend for himself - apparently intending him to have some sort of a vision quest experience, as had once happened to himself - and Batman tells him that if he wishes to become a superhero, he must come up with a mask and a persona.
When Batman leaves him alone in order to set out across the rooftops of Gotham in search of criminals upon which to prey - and he does indeed "prey" upon them, often breaking their bones and mutilating them - Grayson decides that one of Batman's compound bows reminds him of Robin Hood, and so he decides to become the masked and hooded character known as "Hood." When Batman returns, he yanks away the hood and tells him he will be known as "Robin," not "Hood."
The Justice League, meanwhile, has heard about Batman's abduction of a twelve year old boy, and they are very concerned about how this will further damage the reputation of the superhero community. Green Lantern is selected to become the liaison, and he summons Batman to a meeting. As Miller imagines it, Batman despises Green Lantern (envying his super-powerful ring) whom he considers to be even dumber and more shallow than Superman, but he agrees to the meeting. He makes the mistake, however, of taking Robin along with him, for during a heated argument between the three of them, an overzealous Robin nearly destroys Green Lantern's windpipe, and Batman is forced to do an emergency tracheotomy to save his life. He realizes that he has failed as a protector and teacher for Robin, and that the two have a long road ahead of them if Robin is ever to become anything like a suitable sidekick.
This is only the first volume of what promises to be a much longer series, and so it is mostly concerned with setting up a larger plot: the Joker, for instance, puts in only a brief appearance as a serial killer who summons Catwoman to a meeting; Batgirl shows up as a wannabe superhero who annoys Batman, while on another occasion he has to rescue Black Canary from being murdered by a gang of thugs.
According to Miller's masterful portrait study, Batman is a borderline personality who prefers his own company and absolutely despises all other superheroes (indeed, he can barely even tolerate Robin's company). He is not a joiner of any group whatsoever, and will have nothing to do with the Justice League. (Miller portrays Wonder Woman, too, as something of a loner, for she hates men and can barely stand the company of her former lover Superman, whom Miller depicts as her castrated errand boy).
It is all great fun, for one can see how Miller deliberately enjoys reversing all the traditional comicbook stereotypes and giving them something akin to depth, if not exactly three dimensionality. For these characters are actually displaced tropes and types out of noir detective novels, like those of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Miller has simply crossed traditional superhero comics with literary noir figures and the end result is rather pleasing to behold.
The genres are slowly coming to resemble each other more and more, a phenomenon that typically occurs during the end phases of cultural cycles, when gods and cults go crashing syncretistically into one another and stealing each other's attributes. At the end of classical music, Wagner creates opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total art" that crosses theater, music, literature and painting into a polygeneric synthesis. At the end of the Classical Civilization, likewise, Christianity emerges as a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk religion that incorporates rites and motifs from all the competing mystery cults. Now, with the graphic novel under the sure hand of Frank Miller, it, too, is becoming something of a Gesamtkunstwerk that is devouring all the other genres.
In Miller's universe, there is not much difference between superheroes and supervillains. Indeed, when Green Lantern says to Batman, "You've already got half of them calling us criminals!" Batman's response is: "Of course we're criminals. We've always been criminals. We have to be criminals."
Miller's "superheroes" are rogues, vigilantes and outlaws who break the law just as much and just as often as the "villains" whom they hunt. They are essentially fascists who have circumvented due process and all its carefully linear, rational processing that has been designed to preserve the idea that citizens have rights. But in the universe according to Frank Miller (and others) villains have no rights, for they are brutally beaten and maimed on the spot by the superheroes who hunt them. It is important to notice this, because these stories seem to be recording a collective impatience with legal machinery, and a readiness to use force and brutality as a means of solving our problems.
What Frank Miller's universe is showing us, then, is the decline of democracy and the spiraling down of its values in an age when America is increasingly coming to resemble Rome during the period of the disintegration of its Republic into civil wars and the anarchy that gave rise to the Caesars.
We need to pay attention to the graffiti on the walls of our crumbling inner city streets that comicbooks represent, for they are communicating more than just slick "entertainment," but are accurate forecasters of coming changes in the political and social weather patterns.
But then, who wants to read comicbooks about law-abiding superheroes who carry criminals to jail cells and leave them there? Where's the fun in that?
Comicbooks and graphic novels serve as us as vital extensions of the Id, dramatizing "forbidden" scenarios that the innermost depths of the psyche would like to participate in (at least vicariously). They open up portals to the dark recesses of the collective American psyche, revealing in the forum of a "public" medium what it would most like to see happen. To fulfill a similar purpose, the Romans invented the Colosseum. Let's hope that comicbooks will fulfill this need and not exacerbate it into an ever increasing desire to see these rehearsals played out in the world of reality. The Romans didn't have comicbooks, but maybe if they'd had, they wouldn't have needed gladiatorial spectacle.
At least, let's hope so.
--John David Ebert, author of Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons: Film as the Mythology of Electronic Society
I would give it no Stars if I could!, 2008-11-01
The art is great and the story is garbage. Torture Porn is what I'd call this. Disgusting depictions of some of the most Iconic characters in Comics. The writing is overly repetitive and just plain bad. Don't walk away from this one, run.
Frank, I take back everything I said, 2008-10-14
My introduction to this series of stories by Frank Miller was when I bought issue #4 at the local book store. I took it home, read it, and promptly HATED it. Not being a big fan of Frank Miller anyway, I thought who the hell was he to step in and turn my beloved Batman into a psycho blood shedding, violence loving S.O.B. who not only terrorizes Dick Grayson upon kidnapping him only hours after Dick's parents are murdered, but then makes him eat RATS??? I chalked it up to my dislike of Frank Miller, in my eyes a psycho himself who has an annoying penchant for turning every woman in his stories into a prostitute, and ditched the comic book on the bottom of my book shelf and there it lay, dusty and forgotten. Until a month ago when I had a gift certificate to use up at the bookstore. There it stood on the shelf, All Star Batman & Robin, The Boy Wonder. That despicable book. Ten minutes and fifteen dollars off later, I brought it home. It still sat on my shelf for a month, still encased in plastic. Until this weekend for some reason I ripped off the plastic, propped myself on the bed, opened the offending pages - and LAUGHED OUT LOUD! A small still voice inside told me "It's a satire, dummy!" I hate to say it, I mean I reeeally HATE to say it, but this is one of the best Batman stories I have ever read. This Batman does no brooding, does not hang out at night at his parent's graves, this Batman "LOVES BEING THE G**DAMN BATMAN!!", in his words. He's a jerk, he's arrogant, he thinks Superman is a Candy Pants and Green Lantern is a moron. And he'll tell them to their faces. If you do not laugh insanely at the scene where Batman meets the Green Lantern privately to talk, in a room painted entirely in YELLOW, and not only that, but Batman and Robin are also dripping in yellow paint, then you do not love comic books. Everyone is a little warped here. Even Alfred seems to be harboring some deep inner sexual conflicts, punching his frustrations out on a punching bag down in the bat cave, in his underwear, and talking about his dark-eyed angel, Bruce. Hmmmm.... But for once, I love Frank Miller's interpretations of the women. Black Canary is an Irish bar tender in Gotham until she cracks one day and can't take the male jibes and groping anymore. Let's just say don't call her "Love Chunks." She kicks so much butt even Batman is impressed. And Wonder Woman, emasculating Superman with a few sharp words and her stinging assessment of manhood, only to literally spit her disgust at him, and then swap that same spit in the next panel in a liplock with him. Awesome. These women are tougher than the men, inside and out. This is an awesome book, people. I highly recommend it, I am going to be reading this several more times just to get a good laugh, and I hope you do too. Somebody tell me - is there a SEQUEL????!
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