{"id":29755,"date":"2024-04-30T08:00:29","date_gmt":"2024-04-30T08:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/?p=29755"},"modified":"2024-04-29T12:00:48","modified_gmt":"2024-04-29T12:00:48","slug":"batman-year-one-the-deluxe-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/2024\/04\/30\/batman-year-one-the-deluxe-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Batman: Year One – The Deluxe Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nBy Frank Miller<\/strong> & David Mazzucchelli<\/strong> with Richmond Lewis<\/strong>, Todd Klein<\/strong> & various (DC Comics)
\nISBN: 978-1-4012-3342-6 (HB\/Digital edition) (978-0-29020-489-0 TPB)<\/p>\n

Happy Bat-Anniversary! <\/em><\/p>\n

Batman\u2019s first ever origin moment came in Detective Comics<\/strong> #33 (November 1939, on sale from September 30th<\/sup>). Scripted by Gardner F. Fox and Bill Finger, \u2018The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom\u2019<\/em> included 2-page prologue \u2018The Batman and How He Came to Be\u2019 <\/em>which first revealed how a young boy witnessed his parents\u2019 hold-up and murder by a petty thug and dedicated his life to becoming a perfect human specimen to avenge them and punish all criminals. Those 12 panels were reprinted at the beginning of Batman<\/strong> #1 (Spring 1940) and – with occasional minor tweaking – stayed the official version for 50 years.<\/p>\n

However, comic book heroes are all about fashion and revisionism, and on the back of DC\u2019s multiversal continuity adjustment Crisis on Infinite Earths<\/strong> the hero voted Best Comic Book Character of the 20th<\/sup> Century completed a long-enacted but gradual readjustment: completely reverting to his gothic noir roots. The process actually started almost immediately after the Batman <\/strong>TV show was cancelled, and hit its pivot point in two 1980s\u2019 tales: Alan Moore & Brian Bolland\u2019s Batman: The Killing Joke<\/strong> and the revolutionary series-within-a-series here.<\/p>\n

This classic tale is available in a variety of editions. Batman:<\/strong> Year One <\/strong>is a joy to read and its pulp fiction fuelled reinterpretation of the hallowed origin literally changed the way Batman was produced – much more so than Frank Miller\u2019s apocalyptic \u201cImaginary story\u201d The Dark Knight Returns<\/strong>. The effects of the revisualisation still echo through Bat-titles and every single screen iteration from animated cartoons to box office blockbusters.<\/p>\n

When Superman<\/strong> and Wonder Woman<\/strong> were similarly re-tooled, each got to start fresh with a new number #1s, but Batman\u2019s evolution simply crept up on fans in the regular run of comics. The tale radically reimagined Catwoman<\/strong> and Jim Gordon<\/strong>, introduced believable human-scaled villains with organised crime figures such as Carmine Falcone<\/em> and comprehensively rebuilt Gotham City as a hopeless hellhole of endemic corruption.<\/p>\n

It began in Batman<\/strong> #404 – cover-dated February 1987 and on sale from October 21st<\/sup> 1986. Over four issues the bleak serial utterly altered the comic landscape as scripter Frank Miller and illustrator David Mazzucchelli (fresh from an astounding collaboration resurrecting Daredevil<\/strong> in Born Again<\/strong> please link to Daredevil: Born Again July 26th<\/sup> 2016) made Bruce Wayne<\/em> and Batman simultaneously more human, vulnerable, formidable and credible.<\/p>\n

With art based on the stylisations of Alex Toth and a story lensed through iron-hard detective and crime procedural dramas \u2018Chapter One: Who I Am. How I Come to Be\u2019<\/em> opens on January 4th<\/sup> and focuses on Wayne and recent transfer Lieutenant James Gordon<\/em> as both arrive in Gotham ahead of personal scandals. Gordon is joining the crookedest constabulary in America, and the young heir to one of the City\u2019s biggest fortunes has a desperate wish, a poorly formed plan and no method of getting what he wants.<\/p>\n

By March, both have almost died but found their own way to hit back\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2018Chapter Two: War is Declared\u2019 <\/em>opens in April with Gordon hailed an honest-to-goodness hero cop. It\u2019s the only thing saving him from being murdered by his own corrupt colleagues and mob-owned Police Commissioner Gillian B. Loeb<\/em>: that and his high-profile hunt for a costumed vigilante who dresses like a bat\u2026<\/p>\n

When the masked maniac graduates from thugs, pushers and burglars by declaring war on Gotham\u2019s criminal aristocracy, Gordon\u2019s hunger to catch him falters. Isn\u2019t the Bat doing exactly what Gordon would do if he didn\u2019t have a pregnant wife, secret mistress and pitiful career to protect?<\/p>\n

His conflicted quandaries are put into sharp perspective in \u2018Chapter Three: Black Dawn\u2019 <\/em>when Loeb submits to pressure from Falcone and unleashes Gotham\u2019s brutally gung-ho SWAT forces on the vigilante: a move costing countless civilian lives when they raid a tenement in hot pursuit of \u201cThe Bat\u201d. The assault is live televised, triggering one witness to begin her own costumed career, plundering Falcone\u2019s shaking empire even as the mystery man categorically proves he\u2019s no urban myth but a force to be feared\u2026<\/p>\n

Spanning September to December 3rd<\/sup>, \u2018Chapter Four: Friend in Need\u2019 <\/em>finds our mismatched heroes finally joining forces after Gordon at last sees the kind of man The Bat is. That comes when GCPD attempt to destroy the by-the-book cop by targeting his wife and newborn baby and leads to the beginning of a major clean up in Gotham\u2019s government\u2026<\/p>\n

The sequence was heavily promoted from the start and immediately reset The Dark Night\u2019s monthly continuity. From this point on this was what Batman was ALWAYS like\u2026<\/p>\n

A high design style was created from the start – by Chip Kidd – to match the fully immersive impressionist reworking. This story was treating the material like a grownup book not a kid\u2019s throwaway pamphlet: boldly declaring \u201cless is more. Less is enough. Less is what you get. Work with what\u2019s here.\u201d The whole point of the exercise was to give creators that followed plenty of raw material to work with and it paid off big-time as the Dark Knight began his second Golden Age.<\/p>\n

Various collected editions include up to 40 pages of extras such as mood setting preface \u2018The Crime Blotter by Slam Bradley\u2019<\/em>, an Introduction<\/em> by Denny O\u2019Neil, Afterword<\/em> by Miller and Mazzucchelli\u2019s wonderfully drawn \u2018Afterword(s)\u2019<\/em> – a comic strip commentary on Batman. There is a wealth of development material, promotional art and selection of script pages, thumbnail sketches and layouts providing a fascinating intro into the artistic process. Colourist Richmond Lewis completely reworked the printed newsprint pages for the higher quality graphic novel and examples of her process are here, plus a full comics cover gallery and large selection of book cover designs.<\/p>\n

Batman: Year One<\/strong> is a story every comic fan should own, and if you are and you don\u2019t, fix that situation now, Now, NOW!
\n\u00a9 1986, 1987, 2005, 2007, 2012, 2017, DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Frank Miller & David Mazzucchelli with Richmond Lewis, Todd Klein & various (DC Comics) ISBN: 978-1-4012-3342-6 (HB\/Digital edition) (978-0-29020-489-0 TPB) Happy Bat-Anniversary! Batman\u2019s first ever origin moment came in Detective Comics #33 (November 1939, on sale from September 30th). Scripted by Gardner F. Fox and Bill Finger, \u2018The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Batman: Year One – The Deluxe Edition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,33,76,225,156],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-batman","category-catwomman","category-dc-superhero","category-mystery","category-world-classics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4AFj-7JV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29755"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29760,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29755\/revisions\/29760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.comicsreview.co.uk\/nowreadthis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}