THE ARTICLE

Happy new year, everyone. Been scanning some photos on vacation. Here's one.

Tired of Facebook. Went back after some time away this summer, but it is what it is. Going to post more here instead. See you soon!

No, not that specific issue.

Saw the new Batman movie tonight. Not bad.

Years ago, after most of high school, during early college, and before everything else, I collected comics. A friend taught me all the local snob laws, and I started picking up things when they came out. Couldn't afford much else. Still, we would hit the comic shop across Budd from Campbell Plaza, next to the 7-11, buy a few titles, play a few video games, and then the double feature across the street.

No booze, none of the other chemical vices either, and no girls. I remember that it mattered then, but at first I don't remember that, like I don't remember at first how bad the movies were at Campbell Plaza at the time, or how little fun it all actually was. Like a lot of things, it was the idea of being out that mattered. Next weekend go to any of the packed places on Santana Row, and you'll see the same thing. Dig the dancers, especially the ones who look like they have dates, or want to. You can't say they look like they are having fun, or the next round is on me, whatever they are charging.

Adapting what Sally said about Joe in the other movie, they idea that they are having a good time is the thing. It's all about the feel-good water cooler story of the next morning. "Do we have a hit," they're subconsciously asking themselves, in the pitch meeting with the restroom mirror. Did we "go out", "have a good time", "meet up with some people?"

Children, adolescents, they're adults with an excuse. And yes, I do digress.

So I started with Spider-Man, because McFarlane, duh, but it was the late Eighties, and Batman was ascendant. It had started a few years before, with The Dark Knight Returns, a graphic novel where Frank Miller drew and wrote Batman as seething, vengeful vigilante emerging from retirement in the Regan era. The Joker as a patient, not a prisoner, Superman as an equivocating collaborator with the establishment, the batmobile is a tank, the suit not black yet, but the armor from today's movie is nascent, if not extant.

Then they killed Robin, and things were swinging into high gear. That summer I bought all four of the Death In the Family titles from the stand. Paid cover, and never hit a sure thing like it since. The shop had one copy of each on the wall in a few months for $25, and I traded my four to the guy plus $20 cash for an Amazing Spider-Man #9 that I still have. The one in the photo was one I got later after the price deflated a little.

But the Tim Burton movie came out that summer, Nicholson as Joker, Prince with the soundtrack, Keaton in the scuba suit, and the first of the four feature-length music videos was out there printing money. It wasn't enough to cast well, a story helps a movie a lot, but nobody cared in 1989. They cared later, and Michelle Phiffer, Danny DeVito, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, Uma Thurman, they all got paid, but some of them probably don't want to admit it now.

Or they do, or they don't care one way or the other. Whatever. The current movie, and the one that came before it, are much better. They shot on location, in this case, Chicago standing in for Gotham, and everything is a little more real in a similar way, and yes, I just said that about a superhero movie. In most ways, they improved on everything.

I went with a friend who didn't know the character well, and I filled her in on the origin story, and the whole He Should Kill The Joker But He Can't And The Joker Knows It and Torments Him With It thing. I forgot to fill her in on Harvey Dent as Two Face, and the fact that Wayne Manor had burned down in the last installment.

I liked the Tony Stark-like update on the Batcave, as long as it is temporary, and I liked that the movie did not feel the need to do the whole origin-story thing. This movie counts on you to remember the last one, and forgives you when you don't. The soundtrack is heavy on a climbing buzzsaw whine that paint-by-numbers telegraphs the tension. Mostly it works though. Predictably, probably, I also liked the ending. You can almost hear Spenser, in A Savage Place, saying "Some bodyguard," in an oil field in the rain, if you're me. There's only one thing I didn't really like about the ending, and I'll spare the spoiler.

Whoever you are, you'll probably dig this movie. It's fast, it's got Bond-style gear and effects, and you understand the complexity of the villan without ever being asked to empathize. My friend said she liked it too, that it wasn't the "just another guy movie" she expected.

I agree, and yet, as summer movies go this one isn't afraid to be heavy. It is almost afraid not to be. Bats has me plugged into every cell phone in Hollywood, and I can hear the Entourage-style suits making sure it stays dark, that they have got to keep it real, or it is Batman on ice skates again and the whole movie being crushed by comic fans and the Tyranny of the Grit.

Good to worry, guys, and glad you did. We know now we were wasting our money in 1989, probably, and we know a little better about all of it now in hindsight, but we still have the books and Frank Miller's Year One and Dark Night Returns Batman takes weren't the problem we did not know we had yet. There are two decades in there somewhere. Probably means it was a good movie.