STRACZYNSKI & MANDRAKE'S SIDEKICK

'After all, they're just sidekicks.' Life changes for Flyboy when the Red Cowl is killed during a victory parade. Once the sidekick to a super-hero, Barry Chase now finds himself unable to transition to hero himself, and his life descends into a pattern of loss he can't overcome with 'dreamstarter', or with a change of identity and city. Sidekick is an audacious twist in the kind of meta-comics we've seen since Watchmen, in which writers untangle and examine the conventions of the superhero comic and use their innate contradictions as the basis for their stories.

The point of sidekicks was always pretty obvious in comic books: to attract the even younger audience and provide a fantasy outlet for them. Over the decades we saw some revision taking place, most notably first in 1971 when in Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams' famous story, 'Snowbirds Don't Fly' the Green Arrow discovers his sidekick Speedy is a junkie. Then we saw iterations of the Batman/Robin relationship. In real life, millionaires and wards are not all that common, and in real life youngsters grow up. And in this sense, J. Michael Straczynski's script translates second-banana stories from movies or comedy or music into the super-hero world, and does it with panache.

Flyboy's decline is almost shocking. His attempts at reinvention are first pathetic (robbing a jewellery store in order to solve the crime) and then almost doomed to hubristic failure. And finally, in the shock revelation that turns the story around, his final growth into a full-fledged 'adult' super-hero takes the twisted shape that's been molded through the story. It's a neat piece of writing, not least for the fact that it ends on a 'to be continued' which makes perfect sense.

It's complemented well by Tom Mandrake's art, which tries to combine some of the 'innocence' of golden age styles with the steroid dynamism of the modern era. Mandrake is best on expressing bursts of emotion, often in extreme close up, Chase/Flyboy's despair, self-pity, anger, grief, in essence a full run of adolescent reactions to life, jump off the page, and finally become something more. It's as dynamic internally as in the external action, and that's rare.

Sidekick, written by J. Michael Straczynski art by Tom Mandrake
Image Comics $12.99 ISBN 9781607068617

MIKE MIGNOLA'S HELLBOY: MASKS AND MONSTERS

Masks and Monsters consists of two team-up stories. In the first, written by James Robinson and drawn by Mignola, Hellboy meets Batman, but actually teams up with the modern Starman, in a tale which involves modern day Nazis and a plan for world conquest set in the rainforest jungles of the Amazon. The original Starman has been kidnapped, because his research is crucial to the Nazi plan, and it is a tale of rescue, both of a father and the planet. It also reminds us who our real monsters are.

The second story, written and laid-out by Mignola, but drawn by Scott Benefiel and inked by Jasen Rodriguez, teams Hellboy up with Ghost, a spirit avenger armed with two non-spectral .45s, to fight another plan for world domination. This one comes from a resurrected spirit of an ancient Babylonian god, but derives from some brutal murders back in 1939. Since Hellboy is the world's greatest paranormal investigator, this is paranormal worthy of his talents.

Both stories are entertaining, showing different sides of the Hellboy character, which is a facinating one: The Thing combined with a hard-boiled detective perhaps. But I couldn't escape the idea that they would have been better had the drawing assignments been switched. Benefiel's art works best with highlighting the combination of spectral qualities and pin-up looks of Ghost, but might have been even better suited to the rumble in the jungle, although I accept the early part of the story set in Gotham City is perfect for Mignola's own art. Mignola's darkness, the hard-angles shadows and hard-edged almost abstract figures, is in a line that goes from Kirby through Steranko, and Chaykin, and I couldn't help but feel it might have adapted itself to the almost Dr Strange quality of the Ghost tale.

But the other thought which I couldn't escape was that the better team-up of these characters might have been Batman and Ghost. They are both driven by the urge for venegeance, to an almost sociopathic level (of course Ghost is a ghost). The Ghost's costume aims more at the flesh than the ectoplasm, but you see the point. It's a natural team-up, and a woman already dead is perfect for The Batman, if not Bruce Wayne. But when I looked at her twin .45s I could not help but thinking of The Shadow, the most obvious stylistic precursor of The Batman. And I discovered quickly that Dark Horse had indeed done a team-up with them: that's something I now will have to check out.

Hellboy: Masks and Monsters by Mike Mignola et al
Dark Horse Books 2010, $17.99,  ISBN 978595825674

JERRY ROBINSON: THE INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

My obit of the comic-book artist Jerry Robinson, who created The Joker, Robin, Two-Face, and Alfred the Butler for Bob Kane's Batman, is in today's Independent; you can link to it here. The paper has a wonderful layout of Robinson and his Batman art. And I ought to point out my own mistake, as the first Superman movie appeared in 1978, not 1975.

I was fascinated to learn that Robinson had taught Steve Ditko, because you really can see the link between their thick, expressionistic inking, and the way they exaggerate to create realistic characters out of somewhat unrealistic drawings. And also because their political world-views couldn't be more diametrically opposed!

It's also rare to write an obit of someone so universally admired. He helped artists in myriad ways, guys like Siegel and Shuster in particular, in the fight for the rights to Superman, but many others in general, by helping them win the fight to retain copyright to their work (and here Neal Adams stands as the other beacon), syndicate their material, and fight for the human rights of political cartoonists. He also deserves for credit for his early history of comic art, one of the first books to take it seriously and do it well.

I wanted to include this quote from Stan Lee, for whom he worked at Atlas in the 1950s, but cut it for space. In retrospect, I wish I had. 'Jerry Robinson was not only one of the finest artists ever to illustrate comic books, but he was also the head of an editorial syndicate which made cartoons available worldwide, as well as being an inspiration to young artists whom he always found time to help and advise. A genuine talent and a genuine gentleman, he was truly a credit to the arts.'

JOKERS ARE WILD

When Bob Kane and Bill Finger were producing the Batman, the villains were influenced heavily by Chester Gould's Dick Tracy. They were often bizarre, barely human creatures which reflected a perception that criminality was an aberration, out of pace with normal human behaviour. In one sense, they were ogres from children's bedtime stories; think of the Riddler, the Penguin, or Catwoman, yet not really threatening in a real-world sense. Yet even in those days of more straightforward comic books, and even through the Sixties rebirth of the Batman as an icon of ironic camp culture, there were a few villains who hinted at darker depths, and touched more sensitive areas. Two Face is a brilliant creation, a basic psychological trauma personified, but the key adversary for every version of the Batman has always been the Joker, and no matter how camply the caped crusaderwas portrayed, no matter how comic the Joker became, he was the one villain who can never quite hide the basic frightening instability that serves as the perfect foil to the Batman's obsessive quest for revenge against crime itself. He was and is the one villain who personifies the chaos which is what we all ultimately fear.

This is the spirit which is captured brilliantly in Batman: Going Sane, written by JM DeMatteis and drawn by Joe Staton and Steve Mitchell, in which the Joker, having 'killed' the Batman, discovers both 'normal' life and love. DeMatteis' story pulls no punches, but is based on the perilous ying and yang between hero and villain; without the Batman, the Joker remains haunted by an emptiness even love cannot fill, while the 'reborn' Batman cannot conceive of a world in which a Joker reborn as an ordinary man can exist. The artwork plays this dichotomy well: often harkening back to the simplicity of 'comic' books, but always bordered with darkness that occasionally is allowed to take centre stage, as in the dramatic moment when the Batman announced to Jim Gordon 'I'm back'. But the studied plainness of the Joker's life as a citizen makes a strong contrast, and the way he edges back to his Joker-madness is an intercut sequence of rough brilliance.

The real key to the modern Joker is the embrace of his madness; some of the artists who've approached him recently assume there is no top over which they cannot go. But he's such a brilliant creation, such a representation of the appeal of the madness, that they may be right. But notice the story's title: this is not really the story of the Joker's 'going sane', it is the struggle of the vengeance-stoked Batman to regain his sanity, and not surrender to the Joker's world. Mitchell's heavily-inked lines remind me of Frank Robbins, and serve here to remind us of the harsh borders of the world these two antagonists inhabit, and the equally wide lines that delineate order from chaos. It's that response to chaos that makes this such a touching, and indeed powerful, story.

Appended to it is a story called 'Gotham Emergency', written by From Hell artist Eddie Campbell and Darren Sears, and drawn by Bart Sears in a style nearly as dramatic but somewhat slicker as Going Sane, which draws on the thing that has lain at the centre of all Joker stories—the Batman's need to inhabit the Joker's mind in order to defeat him—this is Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter stuff, and like Lecter the Joker is the more flamboyant character. The other connection with Going Sane is the presence of an attractive woman doctor who is drawn to the Batman, and who can be used, if only for an instant, to establish his own somewhat tenuous humanity.

With the Joker stowed away safely at Arkham Asylum, it was another stroke of brilliance to make him the narrator of short stories. These stories work best when we remember, or indeed forget but are reminded, that they are told from the Joker's own unstable and untrustworthy perceptions. In Volume Two of Joker's Asylum the most impressive tale features the Mad Hatter, and is drawn by Keith Giffen and Bill Sienkiewicz in a wonderfully tormented style that only dimly recalls Tenniel. Like Going Sane, it revolves around the Hatter's efforts to make himself 'normal' through love, and of course it fails for the same crazy reasons the Hatter is what he is. What brings it to a bravura conclusion, however, is the Joker's own presence as narrator, as writer Landry Quinn Walker catches his function perfectly. In other stories the Joker presents you with a riddle in a story about the Riddler and leaves you to figure it out...or not. Penciller Andres Guinaldo reminds me a lot of Gil Kane. There's also a little comic relief from James Patrick and Joe Quinones, when Harley Quinn breaks out of her asylum to spend Valentine's Day with the Joker, and a rather familiar film noir version of Beauty and the Beast with Killer Croc playing, of course, the Beast. I was also taken with Kelly Jones' art in Kevin Shinnick's tale of Clayface, 'Midnight Madness'. But it's the Joker who unifies all these stories, and makes them work.

Batman: Going Sane DC/Titan Books 2008 £9.99 ISBN 9781845768638
Joker's Asylum, Volume 2, DC/Titan 2011 $10.99 ISBN 9780857681676