The Four Color Media Monitor

The leftist Polygon site wrote about Bryan Hill's new volume of Batman and the Outsiders, and it sounds like he could be channeling the same approach, however subtly, as Tom King, the latest notorious writer at DC whom he apparently sees as the perfect inspiration:

In their original incarnation, Batman formed the Outsiders out of frustration with the Justice League’s rules and reticence, but in Hill’s new revival of the team — with artist Dexter Soy — things are much more personal for the Dark Knight.

“I try to always find the emotional way in on these stories,” Hill told Polygon. “And I remember talking to Tom [King] — his writing has always been a big inspiration for me. Especially [Sheriff of Babylon], which was such a watershed moment for me. It was really the book that made me want to come back to comics.

When a writer/artist/editor goes all gushy about a man obsessed with exploiting corporate-owned characters for his bottom of the barrel ideas of how to explore mental issues, you know something's wrong, and the following attests to that as well:

“And I thought, ‘OK, well it would be silly to think about this book not existing in the same dimension with what Tom is doing emotionally,’” he continued. “And because Tom does a good job of destabilizing Bruce Wayne and exposing his vulnerabilities, his frailties, I was like, ‘Well, you know what, if we’re going to an Outsiders thing, I think first and foremost for Bruce, it would be a place to exert himself.’ To prove that he still has that kind of classic Batman mojo. And that’s where it started for me, was thinking about what would Bruce want out of this.”

The other half of that emotional equation is the team’s field leader, Black Lightning, who, Hill says, was chosen because of Batman’s interest in molding the powerful but isolated hero, and Lightning’s ability to mold young minds.

I'm sure that's not going to work out either. Nor is whatever plans he has in store for Black Lightning. I think there's a lot of potential in Jeff Pierce becoming a leader for the Outsiders, but somebody who thinks King makes the perfect "inspiration" as a scribe leaves no reason to feel confident he knows what he's doing. King's already turned out one of the biggest snoozers of the year with Heroes in Crisis, so we can't expect any different from this Hill.

And then there are the two kids: Cassandra Cain and Duke Thomas. Duke Thomas is an inner-city Gotham kid whose parents are in a mental institution, never having recovered from a Joker-gas attack. He came to the notice of the Bat-Family after he leading an ad hoc movement of teens known by their homemade red, green, and yellow outfits and the rallying cry “We are Robin.” Since then, he’s gotten some Dark Metal precognitive superpowers and taken on the code name Signal, but has yet to have had a consistent ongoing series to appear in.

Cassandra Cain has been around DC Comics history for 20 years, originating as the second Batgirl in 1999 (she’ll also feature in Margot Robbie’s upcoming Birds of Prey film). Her four years-late post-New 52 reintroduction kept her basic origin story — the mute child of assassins, potentially the greatest martial artist on Earth — but jettisoned all of her history with the Batfamily. Rather than Batgirl, she goes by the rather on-the-nose codename of Orphan. Both Signal and Orphan have both been somewhat adrift in the larger editorial world of Gotham City.

Hill wants to fix that in Batman & the Outsiders.

Well I'm sorry, but with what he's said so far, I don't see any reason to expect he'd do that. As I've said before, not when such an awful man as Dan DiDio is still around either.

“My specific creative goal is to make sure that we also give these characters room to make mistakes,” Hill says. “We give these characters room to not be perfect. If you look at my work, you’ll notice that I am interested in taking what I believe is a realistic snapshot of the world I see everyday and putting that into my stories with the way I cast and the characters I write. But at the same time, I’m not interested in making someone perfect, because that to me doesn’t feel like the kind of reflection that will give people self esteem.”

I often find it funny how such pretentious scribes are the ones permitted to make all the arguments we the realists in the audience want to make - that of course providing room for the cast of characters to make mistakes and be imperfect is a good way in itself to build a story. But when somebody like King comes up with contrived situations where the heroes are put in forced scenes where they have to deal with "emotions" like he put Mr. Miracle into, then it's just simply not realistic, and it goes without saying this whole obsession with flawed heroes has long gotten way out of hand. Hill may have already done some work for Marvel, and they've published quite a few books for the SJW vision where the leads don't have any flaws, if at all, and are written more like Mary Sues.

“You don’t have equality if you only have virtue, right?,” he continued. “Equality is when you have equality of virtue and equality of error. That’s something I’m focused on creatively.”

And now that Year of the Villain #1 has hit stands, we have a good idea of who might force those errors. In the same way that Bruce Wayne might be interested in the potential of Black Lightning, Signal, Orphan, and Katana; Ra’s al Ghul will be as well.

“He has designs of his own on the world,” Hill says, “and the belief that it is his responsibility to shepherd the evolution of the world to where it should go. Which oftentimes runs counter to the ethics of Bruce Wayne [laughs].”

If this is tied in with a crossover emphasizing villains, then the ones forcing the errors are none other than the editors themselves, along with Hill since he obviously goes along with it. Ra's al Ghul was a fine creation when he first appeared in 1971, but the way they're going about this is not. Combined with such an overrated writer at the helm, and it's clear this is not worth looking forward to.

Labels: Batman, dc comics, moonbat writers, msm propaganda