"Afraid of the Dark" -- or: the big Superman / Batman split
Jul 7, 2019 5:13:37 GMT -5
chadwilliam likes this
Post by kasparhauser on Jul 7, 2019 5:13:37 GMT -5
The Batman/Superman friendship ended in World's Finest #323 - pre-crisis. The story is nothing to write home about, something about vampire-werewolves who use magic that affects Superman.
First of all, it is interesting that this is not made out to be some sort of big event. Instead, it just happens in the last three pages. You don't really get any impression before that Batman is kinda pissed off at Superman, or is there some tension introduced in the titles before? The end is completely random to me, and could have been attached to any of the dozens of stories where Superman somehow makes a mistake (but Batman makes them, too, it's kinda there to get a story, you know):
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This is how DC ended a decades long, iconic friendship back in the day. Feels more like, well, now we have kinda solved this in continuity, so we can continue with post-crisis (where this scene, chronologically, couldn't have happened as in the post-crisis world Batman and Superman never had been real friends until a lot of years into the reboot).
So I am interested, has there some progression towards this state in previous issues? Batman appears "Frank Miller"-ized in those last panels. I know that in 1983, Batman and the Outsiders came out that had Batman acting like a jerk towards the Justice League and in the end comments with a dry "I like the way your mind works" when one of his new Outsider team members throws the dictator into a mob of his people who then lynch-kill him. Regular single-title Batman would not have acted like that, considering this is 1983...
First of all, it is interesting that this is not made out to be some sort of big event. Instead, it just happens in the last three pages. You don't really get any impression before that Batman is kinda pissed off at Superman, or is there some tension introduced in the titles before? The end is completely random to me, and could have been attached to any of the dozens of stories where Superman somehow makes a mistake (but Batman makes them, too, it's kinda there to get a story, you know):
This is how DC ended a decades long, iconic friendship back in the day. Feels more like, well, now we have kinda solved this in continuity, so we can continue with post-crisis (where this scene, chronologically, couldn't have happened as in the post-crisis world Batman and Superman never had been real friends until a lot of years into the reboot).
So I am interested, has there some progression towards this state in previous issues? Batman appears "Frank Miller"-ized in those last panels. I know that in 1983, Batman and the Outsiders came out that had Batman acting like a jerk towards the Justice League and in the end comments with a dry "I like the way your mind works" when one of his new Outsider team members throws the dictator into a mob of his people who then lynch-kill him. Regular single-title Batman would not have acted like that, considering this is 1983...
