Comics Fondle

Pope likes to call his longer works “graphic movies,” so I suppose it isn’t peculiar I felt like I’d just watched a movie when I finished Batman: Year 100. I’m a big fan of Pope, so I was really looking forward to Year 100, which–in an interview–Pope described in a way suggesting V for Vendetta, but with Batman and in the United States. Then, when the big day arrived, I was nonplussed. Pope intends his work to be read whole (he described Year 100 as a 200-page story, for example) and the first issue was a nice enough setup, but it was essentially one long chase scene. The second and third issues, when I read them on release, actually worsened my view of the work, as it became obvious Pope wasn’t playing to his writing strengths and was also filling Year 100 with gobbledygook references to the mainstream Batman comics. The Pope I love is the Pope I can recommend to anyone, not to people who’ll get references to comic books, Batman being an icon and his general story well-known, I had those hopes for Year 100… but they failed to materialize.

However, when I sat down this afternoon and read the whole thing, Batman: Year 100 read better… it read like a movie. It’s not a bad piece of work. The art is wonderful, but I’m not fully sold on the colors. Unfortunately, Pope fills the book with half-page establishing shots so he doesn’t have to tell too much story. The present action of Year 100 is a few days, which is either too short or too long. It’s not an action story and it’s not a dramatic story. It’s a misguided story. Pope plays with the reader. He teases and works himself into corners and, when I got to a certain point, I realized the only way he could get out of it. And then he did (though he did surprise me a little). Unfortunately, he raises some questions in the first issue and they go nowhere–are even seemingly reversed in the second issue–and does the same thing in the last issue. Bits and pieces enter the story when they’re needed, not for any other reason. The Lieutenant Gordon of Year 100, in the third issue, becomes the grandson of the original Commissioner Gordon. This factoid isn’t a revelation or a previously withheld piece of information, it’s a necessary plot-point to keep the story moving. Pope made him the grandson not because the character was the grandson, but because he needed him to be the grandson. It doesn’t work. There’s a lot of those devices in the story.

The other thing missing from Year 100 is the character relationships. There’s one and it doesn’t appear until the fourth issue and it happens in a panel. One character says something and the other looks at him and, wham, there’s a great, Paul Pope character relationship. Then they disappear. If Pope can do such great work in such little space, he should have been doing it throughout… but he didn’t, because there’s no feeling behind Batman: Year 100. It’s not a story Pope needed to tell. When he talked about it–when I got excited–he said it was going to be about the United States after thirty-eight years under the Department of Homeland Security. It isn’t. I don’t know why it isn’t, maybe DC Comics didn’t like where he was going (I find some of the references hard to believe coming from Pope and imagine someone at DC sent a memo with the corporate-dictated gobbledygook tidbits), maybe he just had an idea and it didn’t pan out. Ideas sometimes don’t work out.

In the end, Batman: Year 100 isn’t terrible, isn’t bad, is even pretty good… for a Batman comic. It’s just not a good Paul Pope comic.

B-

Technorati Tags: Batman, DC Comics, Paul Pope

Recommend on Mahalo