Absolutely Iconic: A Review of Batman and Robin: Year One

written by Mark Waid (plot and script) and Chris Samnee (plot)

drawn by Chris Samnee

colored by Mathew Lopes

One of my absolute favorite creative teams in all of comicdom is the duo of writer Mark Waid and artist Chris Samnee, whose work I first discovered in the pages of Marvel Comics' Daredevil series, on which the duo collaborated from 2011 to 2015.  I've diligently followed their collaborations, from their twelve-issue Black Widow run from 2016 to 2017, to their brief run on Captain America in 2017 and even their work for other companies, like IDW's four-issue miniseries The Rocketeer: Cargo of Doom. While some of their stories have inevitably been better than others, their work was almost always engaging, crisp and supremely entertaining, a tragic rarity in modern comics.  They appeared to go their separate ways just before the COVID-19 pandemic, with Waid doing various books and Samnee going on to co-create a comic book for Image with Robert Kirkman. 

Little did I know that they had a truly memorable collaboration still to come, for DC Comics and for arguably one of the most iconic comic book characters in existence. It was to my surprise and delight that I found out last year that they had teamed up, after YEARS apart, on a twelve-issue miniseries titled Batman and Robin: Year One, 

As the title suggests, the series chronicles Bruce Wayne's and Dick Grayson's (untold) early adventures together as Batman and his newly-minted Boy Wonder, Robin. In particular, they have to team up against a formidable threat to Gotham City, the conniving and corrupt General Grimaldi who seeks to upset the tenuous balance of power between the existing crime families in Gotham by pitting them against each other. To help him do this, he has a secret weapon: a man who can change his likeness on a whim, or none other than Clayface. To make matters worse, former District Attorney and now wildcard criminal Harvey Dent, aka, Two-Face wants in on this action. Amidst all this, will Batman and Robin be able to save Gotham City from a brewing gang war, especially since Child Protective Services is watching Bruce Wayne like a hawk to see if he's fit to be a parent for his new ward, Dick Grayson?

As someone who only sporadically reads DC Comics as opposed to my regular Marvel fare, I couldn't say if this story hasn't been told before in some other form, but it seems likely that this is the first time both Batman and Robin have gotten the "Year One" treatment, and to my mind, there's no better creative team to do it. Waid, of course, is a veteran of DC Comics, having written volumes of DC Comics for decades, including seminal work like Kingdom Come, and Samnee, I would argue, is one of his very best collaborators, whose work evokes the Silver Age brilliance of the likes of Bruce Timm and the late Darwyn Cooke. It's almost like these guys were born to tell this story, and they bring every ounce of the creative energy that made their runs on Daredevil so darn memorable.  They have a knack for marrying propulsive narrative, snappy dialogue and visual flair that just makes it impossible to put this book, which is a fairly hefty 264 pages, down until the very last adventure.  Reading this was just pure joy from start to finish.

Now, if only Marvel could lure these guys back to do a run on Spider-Man...

10/10

Meaty: A Review of Batman/Deadpool

written by Grant Morrison (main story), Scott Snyder, Tom Taylor, James Tynion IV, Joshua Williamson, Tom Taylor, Mariko Tamaki and G. Willow Wilson (back-up stories)

drawn by Dan Mora (main story) Hayden Sherman, Bruno Redondo, Amanda Conner and Denys Cowan (back-up stories)

After my distinctly unpleasant experience purchasing and reading the Deadpool/Batman crossover as published by Marvel Comics, I took my sweet time in buying its counterpart published by DC Comics, Batman/Deadpool.  I was loath to spend the premium that the crossover special would inevitably exact if it meant putting up with another anthology of stories whose creators basically sleepwalked through creating them. However, the excerpts popping up on social media showed promise, especially in terms of what they showcased of Grant Morrison's dialogue and Dan Mora's art, so about a full month after the comic book's release, I took the plunge.

Boy, I am glad I did.

To get this out of the way right now, this book, like its Marvel-published counterpart, consists of one main story and several shorter, back-up stories. The difference, however, is that, each of them is head and shoulders above the stories contained in that book.

The main story features Batman and Deadpool, whose universes collide as a result of a dalliance between Marvel's Eternity and DC's Kismet, fighting (of course) and then teaming up to investigate a mysterious presence in Greece, which may prove to be too much for either of them acting alone. The threat is so great, in fact that for all of Batman's skill and preparation and Deadpool's near immortality thanks to his healing factor, the pair of them will need help from a most unlikely source.

I have read quite a few of Grant Morrison's stories, including the breakthrough graphic novel Arkham Asylum, a good chunk of their remarkable run on New X-Men in the early 2000s, the landmark 12-issue series All Star Superman, and the brief but memorable original work WE3. This work actually showed a new side to the writer that I hadn't seen before: they have a good handle on the humor needed for a Deadpool comic books. Unlike Zeb Wells' clunky script, Morrison's jokes are actually funny, and they don't shy away from Deadpool's dubious origins as a thinly-veiled parody/ripoff of Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke.  Unlike Wells, Morrison actually bothers to come up with an explanation of how Batman's and Deadpool's universes have managed to collide, with a somewhat tongue-in-cheek framing device involving cosmic entities Eternity and Kismet having a one-night stand. The villain, whose identity I will not spoil, is a real treat as well. 

As much as I enjoyed Greg Capullo's work on the Marvel version of this book, I absolutely adored Dan Mora's work here, and I desperately want to see him work on a flagship Marvel book sometime soon, preferably Spider-Man or Daredevil.   Mora is a bona fide superstar, and I can really see why Morrison was keen to work with him after they collaborated on a graphic novel featuring an alt-version of Santa Claus several years ago. His work is gloriously dynamic and slick in its detail at the same time. He's got a flair for visual storytelling akin to the likes of John Romita Jr., but I daresay, he draws considerably prettier pictures. 

Unfortunately, however, as with Deadpool/Batman, the page count for the main story is distressingly short at 27 pages. Given how good these collaborators are, I would have loved a few extra pages, like a nice, round thirty or forty, but it is what it is.

Fortunately, though, the slew of backup stories here, which feature crossovers between Constantine and Doctor Strange, Nightwing and the Wolverine formerly known as X-23, Harley Quinn and the Hulk (!) and Static Shock and Ms. Marvel, come surprisingly close to making me forget that this is an anthology because each one is remarkably well-done. I thoroughly enjoyed each and every one of them, because the creators involved, writers AND artists, are very obviously firing on all cylinders. Each of these stories made me yearn to see these artists strut their stuff on Marvel books. 

These anthology books, for me, are always a compromise in storytelling quality, but to draw a food analogy, if a proper story is a full-course meal, Marvel's Deadpool/Batman was the equivalent of a bag of chips, whereas DC's Batman/Deadpool was at least the equivalent of a couple of good burger sliders. Still not a fully satisfying meal, but a definite step up from the last crossover book featuring these characters.

This was worth my money; I'm just sorry there weren't more pages of crossover goodness.

8.5/10