Thursday, October 01, 2009

"F---ing Dick [Grayson] has a girlfriend, why can't I have a girlfriend? I f--- a lot, but why can't I be involved with somebody?"

That's filmmaker turned comics writer/filmmaker Kevin Smith talking to Rick Marshall at MTV's Splash Page about his current DC series, Batman: The Widening Gyre. Or, more specifically, that's Smith paraphrasing Batman's thought process during the series, in which the Dark Knight wonders if maybe he could scale back his never-ending war on crime enough to accommodate having a relationship.

I kinda wish Smith actually wrote Batman's narration boxes and dialogue like that. I don't know if it would make for better comics, but I'm sure it would make for funnier comics (Disclosure: I haven't read Smith's Batman comics yet, so maybe they're brilliant already). I guess that doesn't really sound like Batman though. Maybe for an All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder spin-off...?

Anyway, the Splash Page piece contains an "exclusive" reveal of which character from Smith's series will get his or her own ongoing title from DC in the future. It's not really hard to guess, since from what I've seen by flipping through the first issue there's only one new character so far, but Smith does reveal that character's name, so follow that link to find out, if you're interested.

I think it's pretty interesting, if only because it would be hard—if not impossible—to even imagine an ongoing DC comic book series starring a title character with that particular name in, say, the 1980s and maybe even early '90s, back when so many people were so worried about things like Dungeons & Dragons and heavy metal turning children into Satanists.

I'm not sure if that means DC is less concerned with being perceived as a publisher of comics for kids any more (they've publicly stated that the majority of their books are for teenagers and up), or if it reflects the fact that the people who used to expend so much energy worrying about how the occult in pop culture might effect the nation's youth have moved on to other concerns, like stopping gay folks from ever being able to get married or making sure affordable, universal health care never ruins our great nation.

Between the new Smith character's book and Magog though, DC sure will have a lot of comics named after the enemies of God...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I wish DC had this "pump out random-ass ongoings and see if they do well" mindset a few years ago, so we might have gotten some more comics with, say, any of the characters from Seven Soldiers. Then again, those comics probably would have sucked...