Is Latest Batman On Crack?

Neal Adam’s Batman: Odyssey 6

Happy Friday the 13th! Ready for something weird?  

Check in for a psychiatric evaluation and check out some spreads from the latest issue of Batman: Odyssey #6. With anticipation already building up over the Dark Knight Rises, scheduled for July 2012 release, I can’t help but wonder what a movie based off of this issue would be like. Neal Adams is certainly pushing boundaries of convention on this one, with Batman cracking uncharacteristic jokes and spewing nonsensical dialogue, as the story unfolds through a persistently bare-chested Bruce Wayne.

Most of us are more or less familiar with the criminally insane (cue Joker laugh track) but the heroically insane? That ought to be a new defense in court. This is sort of like Batman pulling a reverse-Overkill move (read up on the anti-hero from Incognito comics here), but this time, it's not the supervillain picking up some habits from the good guys.  In this, our superhero…well,  he might have confused Two-Face with Scarface and picked up some expensive habits.

So is this how we should expect crime-fighter Batman to behave from now on? Moreover, would the film version be a pulp-tastic mash-up of the campy absurdism of The Tick and the melodrama of a sappy telenovela? That actually sounds kind of awesome!

Comments

  1. Megan Frampton

    Sorta on track, but not really, is the Irredeemable and Incorruptible comic series, the former which feature a Superman-type hero gone bad, and a villain who can not longer be corrupted doing good. So maybe comic authors are interested in blurring the lines between sane and not, as well as good and evil?

  2. Elisa

    I am waiting for Dark Knight Rises release.

  3. Cathy Zhu Chen

    @MFrampton. I think you are on to them! The changeability and unpredictability of human (and superhuman) nature are definitely common tropes in comics. Even though there seems to always be a clear good v. bad divide, I find the moments when that line gets blurred to be the most insightful character-developing moments.
    @Elisa. 2012 is so. far. away. -_-

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