"What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the Hell do you think I am? I'm the Goddamn Batman."
If you aren't familiar with the comic series All-Star Batman and Robin being written by Frank Miller, than you probably don't know that
the previous line is indeed an actual quote from the second issue. Apparently Frank Miller is completely fucking insane now, and I love it. While some of the dialogue gets a bit comical, such as Batman yelling at Black Canary for disliking the name "Batmobile", and explaining
that he's the Goddamn Batman and if the Goddamn Batman wants to call his Goddamn car the Goddamn Batmobile, then the Goddamn Batman...well you get the idea,
this book shows a much darker, almost psychotic, version of the classic comic character that is really intriguing. The book is also notorious for lengthy delays at this point,
which is extremely disappointing. Issue #9 ended with an intense confrontation with the Green Lantern, as well as the first signs of
Bruce Wayne becoming the Batman we're all used to, rather than the Goddamn Batman. It's been many months since that issue came out,
and finally issue #10 was supposed to come out yesterday. You may have seen the news, but there was as problem.
I went into work yesterday and was very excited about this book finally coming out. When I got there, my boss was talking to a customer about it,
and said that we received a letter from the distributor saying that if any retailers accidentally got these, they were to destroy them.
Naturally, I had to find out way. Frank Miller has clearly shown a total disregard for what everyone thinks, and is going to write
whatever the fuck he wants, which is fine. As a result, each issue is riddled with profanity that is then censored out. The problem
with this particular issue is that the printer was supposed to put a black bar over all the vulgarity, which they did, but the printed the
vulgar words in a font that could be read. DC did not want to release this book effectively uncensored, especially because they don't like
all the potty mouth coming from Batgirl, who refers to herself as "the fucking Batgirl".
As someone who really wanted to read this book, my question is now simply this: if they're censoring the profane words with black bars,
why even print the profanity to begin with? If one person had used their fucking brain and said "Wow! This is really stupid and a waste of ink!"
then none of this would have happened. It just goes to show you that people don't like to think things through. Another good example of
not thinking things through is the group of people running around saying how this was all a publicity stunt. You know what? You don't
spend a shitload of money to print a bunch of comic books that are already several months late, then destroy them and have to pay
to print them all over again as a publicity stunt. Even if they were to sell twice as many copies as they normally would now, they'd
still be paying for three times as many copies as they normally do. That's really not good planning.
So what is the moral of this story? I guess it's that I'm pissed that I don't get to read this book.
Wait a minute, that's not a good moral at all! I guess I'm just a whiny little asswipe.
© 2008 by Dr. Jeebus