Last week, DC release two hardcover collections, “A Celebration of 75 Years” – one for Batman, and one for the Joker. DC took on a hell of a task to try to compile an affordable capsule of Batman and Joker stories that feels complete.
Spoiler alert: these collections don’t do that.
To be fair, they probably never could. You’d need three times the space to even begin to scratch the surface. However, what DC has done with their “75th Anniversary Celebrations” is to provide readers with the most basic introduction to these characters, and both books do a fine version of this – even if, again, it feels partial.
The Batman book, with a “Hush”-era cover by Jim Lee, starts at the very beginning – “Detective Comics” #27, and tries to hit, more or less, all the big eras of the last 75 years. That means that we get some Neal Adams, some Carmine Infantino, some Jim Starlin, some Chuck Dixon – just a taste of what some of these master creators can do.
Surprisingly, because of their reputation (and reality) of inherent cheesiness, the earliest stories in this book work the best excerpted. Partly, it is because these were designed as one and done stories, and so even if you can’t get all the context, you can still follow the story well enough.
Pieces from “Knightfall” and “Court of Owls,” suffer because of the fact that they are incomplete stories; to reprint the entire “Knightfall” story would take almost as many pages, and wouldn’t give nearly the overview that this book does, but it is almost not fair to excerpt just one chapter from it.
Stories like “Year One” and “The Dark Knight Returns” get no such excerpts at all – they are simply left out. It is an odd decision to partially excerpt some stories and not others. Odder still is the fact that there is nothing from Grant Morrison in the book at all – perhaps the important Bat-creator of the 21st century is totally left out. Again, part of that is due to the nature of his epic, but surely there is a story or two that could stand alone (like, say, “Batman” #666?).
The Joker book is a little less egregious in its omissions (save, obviously, “The Killing Joke”), but suffers in a different way. The Joker, perhaps more than any other DC character, has been transformed completely over the years, from almost genial clown to horrific sociopath and back again. While Batman certainly changes throughout his tome, you always get the sense that there is a core undercurrent of who Bruce Wayne is – you get no such consistency from the Joker.
The Joker book also collects stories that are far from “essential” – you get the feeling that DC really wanted to put this book out, regardless of whether or not there was enough to really fill it. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed, on some level, just about every single story in the book. That doesn’t mean, though, that each one belongs in a volume such as this. For every “Death in the Family” there is the “To Laugh and Die in Metropolis,” a rare Superman/Joker story that, while fun, is forgettable as soon as the page is turned.
My biggest problem with these books is the question of who they are for – if they are for new fans, then the new fans are going to miss out on the most iconic stories because of issues of space – they’d have been better off showcasing 2 or 3 arcs in their completion if a “greatest hits” was what the goal was. If the goal was simply to show how these characters have changed and grown over time, that is fine, but again, who is the audience for that? Big fans of both characters will, no doubt, already have stories from all eras in their collection.
But more of a question as to who it is for, the biggest question of these books involve the final story in the Batman installment – a “reimagining” of the first ever Batman story from “Detective Comics” #27, with a new script by Brad Meltzer, with graphic design legend Chip Kidd reworking the images. This falls flat in just about every conceivable way, and feels like a rushed, weird faux-tribute, while also diminishing its value because of just how cheap it feels.
Overall, the collections are lovely to look at, fun to read and, even if they’re a little puzzling at times, a fine addition to the shelf of any self-respecting Bat fan, if only to laugh at Bruce Wayne calling Alfred a tyrant, to see just how damn goofy the Joker once was, and to be reminded of one of the most versatile and important characters in comics history.
