BW Media Spotlight

Chapter By Chapter (usually) features me reading one chapter of the selected book at a time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.

Yes, we’re doing two chapters, which still beats three chapters last time, where we mostly just brought Tim in, showed more of Batman’s arrangements with Commissioner Gordon, and Bane stole some missiles in between killing prostitutes because apparently Venom doesn’t boost ALL his muscles. Chapter 9 is only a few pages long while Chapter 8 is about normal chapter length so I’m going to do both together this installment.

Going back to Bane’s…other missile, this is kind of what bothers me about 90s comic. The entire length…sorry, Bane…of the Knightfall/Knightquest/Knight’s End arc is good from a technical perspective but dark and gritty was becoming the norm and they were pushing kids away from comics. My theory remains that they were so annoyed at comics being looked at as solely a kids media format that they pushed things more adult like this to prove it wasn’t, the end result being chasing away kids. If it wasn’t for the DCAU tie-in comics and the “Johnny DC” line of kid-targeted comics I wonder if the problem of finding new readers wouldn’t have happened a lot sooner.

It’s hard to find new comic book readers when it’s tough for those audience to find those comics, especially in their formative years. I can find video games, DVDs/Blu-Rays, and even books easier than I can find comics or magazines so it’s not a surprise to me that they’re dying even before you get into over-deconstruction, ruining classic characters, “representation” activists who can’t write a story to save their lives and hide behind the “bigot” tag rather than give those characters a story the genre’s target audience will enjoy, and corporate owners who couldn’t care less so long as they have a movie idea that costs them less money. This is the state of comics currently and it started in the 1990s. As fascinating as the Knightfall storyline is to someone my age, and I do remember enjoying this book in my initial readthrough years ago when I bought it, I still see the huge downsides of it overall, just like Watchmen and its fallout. But enough about that. Homepage jump is satisfied so let’s see what happens in these two chapters.

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