Superman, Batman and Co. through the Eyes of a Creative Giant

Comic book writer Alan Moore is best known as the author of the stunning Watchmen, in my own words "the story that changed comic books forever"; he also wrote the original comic book version of V for Vendetta back in the 1980s (and subsequently refused to have his name attached to the movie adapted from it due to artistic disappointment). Moore also took on Swamp Thing for DC in the 80s. But this collection is a book of a different sort; it contains the stand-alone pieces that Moore wrote for a variety of DC's "canon" titles, including Superman and Batman, without the luxury of totally revamping the established characters. How does the iconoclastic Mr. Moore handle the greater strictures imposed by working with characters who have decades of tradition behind them? Not surprisingly, he manages to adapt--creatively--the established storylines in unexpected ways.

This 300 page collection includes several brief pieces featuring Green Arrow (a modern-day Robin Hood), members of the Green Lantern Corps (a sort of interstellar police force), the Phantom Stranger (a weird mystical ghost), and other "minor" comic book heroes. These succeed in being thought-provoking at the very least. The Phantom Stranger's short origin story contains parallel tales of a member of an underground street gang and a reluctant angel who can't quite decide whether to throw in his lot with a Miltonian Satan. Tygers, another short origin story, shows in grotesque detail a nightmarish hell-dimension and explains how it leads, indirectly, to the creation of Earth's Green Lantern, Hal Jordan. But these are trifles that merely soothe the palate in between more substantial courses.

The lengthier tales here are all emotionally arresting. Rather than describing all of them, I will focus on three. Father's Day features a hero named the Vigilante who is rather obviously modeled on Marvel Comics' antihero, the Punisher, a man unafraid to use brutal violence in dealing with the sick and twisted members of society. His nemesis in this tale is a murdering, molesting kidnapper who returns from prison to terrorize his wife and daughter. But the disquieting ending is utterly anti-Hollywood in its brutality and twisted logic. The bad guys may be punished, but the good guys certainly won't rest easy at night.

The famous Superman tale, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, is one of the earliest appearances of the "What If?/Elseworlds" concept in comic books (a rough analogy to science fiction's alternate history--"Ever wondered what would happen if Superman's baby creche landed in Gotham City instead of Kansas and he was adopted by wealthy billionaires? Well, wonder no longer!"). This tale looks into the future to posit the end of Superman--what would it take to finally defeat the mightiest superhuman of them all? And how would this affect the people he loved? This bittersweet story was written to mark the retirement of Julius Schwartz, the longtime editor of the Superman group of comics, and is a favourite of many fans.

Finally, the Batman story The Killing Joke takes on that greatest of comic book supervillains, the Joker, and looks into his past to present him in a somewhat sympathetic light even as he commits the particularly heinous crime of crippling Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) by shooting her through the spine and then attempts to drive her father, police chief James Gordon, insane. Comparisons are drawn between the singularly obsessed Joker and his great nemesis, asking whether one is truly more sane than the other, a theme revisited in Watchmen.

This collection contains a number of exciting, interesting and thought-provoking stories. There are moments of humour in the shorter tales which serve as a counterweight to the weighty subject matter of the longer ones. Conversely, the disjunct nature of the stories can by overcome by reading them individually. Overall, this collection is not to be missed either by fans of Alan Moore or by those comic book enthusiasts who pride themselves on reading for other reasons than the over-the-top action and superhumanly endowed females.