readcomicsonline getting nuked is bad for all the obvious reasons but also its insane considering those artists/writers confessions that they get sent pages with the readcomicsonline banner at the bottom bc dc and marvel dont have any kind of internal reference or register for most shit. shooting themselves in the dick
DC Pride Special 2023 should be the characters getting into pride discourse for 50 pages before the Joker shows up on the last page and calls himself a faggot and everyone blows up
DC Pride Special 2024 should be the characters getting into pride discourse for 50 pages before the Joker shows up on the last page and calls himself a faggot and everyone blows up
DC Pride Special 2025 should be the characters getting into pride discourse for 50 pages before the Joker shows up on the last page and calls himself a faggot and everyone blows up
DC Pride Special 2026 should be the characters getting into pride discourse for 50 pages before the Joker shows up on the last page and calls himself a faggot and everyone blows up
Okay, so my last ask had me looking back into the "Death of the Family" editing controversy, and I mentioned that several years ago, Snyder had talked generally about revising the trade version on Kevin Smith's podcast.
There are examples of the edits in the post (and for fun here's some more), but I want to share another before we get to the clip, because it's referenced in the conversation.
If you've read DOTF, you may recall that after Joker has tried and failed to get Bruce to kill the batfamily, and waxed poetic in front of them all about how Batman only really cares about his murderclown, the team is supposed to get together at the manor. Then they all find excuses not to show. Dick is the last person to bail, and his conversation with Bruce is what got changed from floppy to trade.
Initial version:
Both trades:
During Fat Man on Batman #48 (September 18, 2013), in which Kevin Smith interviews Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo together, Snyder basically says that revisions like this were intended to better express the characters' reactions to the dark truth of Batman and Joker's relationship. He gets into it when Smith asks about the reception to the DOTF storyline.
(Side note: Why is #48 such a big batjokes number?? Somebody do the numerology!)
SMITH: What was the feedback from the audience on "Death of the Family?" Overall? If you had to sum it up in a few words.
SNYDER: Overall, it went over really well.
SMITH: It did. All I heard on Twitter and the internet, people like, "I'm diggin' it, I'm diggin' it!" And then we all thought for a moment that Alfred was gonna get killed--
SNYDER: Well, that, yeah--
SMITH: -- and then there was a bait and switch of sorts.
SNYDER: That was the thing-- I was-- actually caught me off-guard a little bit, was that-- some people being so disappointed that we didn't kill Alfred or kill somebody in the family, but I think partly the reason was because I had always thought of it as this story that was really vicious where the Joker is basically saying to Batman-- without too much spoilers-- just saying to him, "Why are you pretending to love this human family when all they do is, you know, sit at this table that-- you're the Bat King and they kind of sit at your table like these sycophants and pretend to love you, but they just make you feel that you're more human. When in fact the whole reason you got into this was to be something timeless, and we've transformed ourselves into these timeless villains for you, and you love us. Without us, you'd be nothing. With them, they just remind you that you're headed for the dirt, and your body's gonna deteriorate and all this stuff. And I'm the Peter Pan, you know. I'm the one that-- I'm the greatest of all of them. I'm your court jester." And all that stuff, and um… The sort of penultimate moment wasn't meant to be a death of Alfred or of anyone literally, and in the trade I tried-- Actually I do a lot of work between when the issues come out in floppy form and then the trade, and try and, you know, clean things up.
SMITH: Really, so you go in there and re-dialogue a little bit?
SNYDER: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, a lot.
SMITH: Really! Have you been called on it yet? Somebody on Twitter or someone on social media like, "Hey, man! This line was different than in the book!"
SNYDER: No, and now I'm sure--
SMITH: Everyone's gonna be looking at every line now.
SNYDER: Well, no, I changed a lot actually-- to make this clear-- I think partly 'cause I didn't read a lot of the tie-in, uh, I read all the tie-ins but I didn't read, I guess, the expectations and the reviews around a lot of the tie-ins. And what happened was DC asked, "Would it be okay if we brought in a lot of the other writers to do Joker stories?" And I at the time was like, it worked great on "Owls," let's do it, sure, you know? And I love all the Bat writers, we're all friends, and they wanted to do it, and what I didn't realize is that it created this expectation around the book that something massive was gonna change in the status quo of Batman, because my story was the same as I had pitched it from the beginning. Um, and so--
SMITH: You're the victim of circumstance. Especially, you're comin' off what a lot of people go, "This is a masterwork! How do you fuckin' top this?" So for you guys it's good enough to be like, "You know how we top it? We do the fuckin' Joker story, and we do all the other Bat characters and stuff." But everyone wants the ante to be notched-- ratcheted up to like, "Someone's gotta fuckin' die."
SNYDER: Yeah, with Joker, they wanted to top Barbara Gordon getting--
CAPULLO: It is America. We want blood.
SNYDER: -- her spine shot out.
SMITH: Yeah, blood and circuses, for heavens' sakes. So you can see where some people were like, "Yeah man, somethin's comin'," but you went--
SNYDER: Oh, sure.
SMITH: -- with a classier way. You're like, "Look, anybody could fuckin' kill a, you know, someone in the family. Anybody can kill a character in comics.
CAPULLO: I'd like to kill family members.
(All laugh.)
SNYDER: Well, we have plenty of time.
SMITH: You're like, "Shit, I'm only Year Two, I'll get to more death." But anybody could do that. A good writer finds a way to really get at Batman's soul without like, "I killed your fuckin' buddy! Doesn't that fuckin' hurt!"
SNYDER: Yeah.
SMITH: And the way you found to do in that storyline was pretty ingenious, by the virtue of the fact that the Joker is reminding Batman that "all these people that help you are only hurting you, and if you wanna be who you wanna be, I'm your best friend in the world." This twisted logic that absolutely makes sense. It works.
SNYDER: Thanks. And in the way you'll read it, in trade, I darkened it a bit as, uh, the editor-- Actually, I had some blowback, a little bit, from DC because they were like "this is pretty dark." I was like, "This is what it was always meant to be, and I'm gonna make it clear," because I think part of the problem was just that-- or not problem, but part of the trouble was just that, um, people were looking for a consequence in the next month, and so what happens when the family realizes that what the Joker is saying might be-- have some truth to it. Okay, well, they don't hang out with Batman anymore for six months. We know that's gonna correct itself. But to me it was always about a darker truth between them, which is Joker saying to him, "They all know, deep down. I'm gonna prove it, that you love me more, and us more-- your villains-- than you love them, because deep down when they look in their soul, they know that twenty years from now or thirty years from now, they'll all be rotting in their graves, dead and cold and worm-eaten, and you'll still be playing this game with us. And if they believe that, if they know that that's true, they'll leave tonight, at this table, unmasked and faceless, and I will have cut off your face for them the same way I pretended to cut their faces off." And so when they don't show up, it's clearer now at the end of the story, not to spoil it, but whatever-- in the penultimate moment when Batman's expecting them and they're not there, you see it means something that's timeless for them. It's not about, "Oh, are they gonna show up the next day for breakfast? Are they gonna show up the next week? Are they gonna team up with him?" It means they saw something horrifying, which is that something that the Joker said to them--"
SMITH: They glimpsed their own fuckin' demise.
SNYDER: Yeah, they did, and they saw--
SMITH: By being in Batman's fuckin' presence, by being in the Batman family.
SNYDER: He won't save them at the end of the day but he'll save the villains-- and that doesn't mean he won't try to save them, but it means that some day they'll end up dead, just the way the Joker could've killed all of them. And that's the cruelty of the story to me, is that he's saying, "I could've killed them right here and now, but I decided to let you do it as a mercy to them, so that twenty, thirty years from now, they don't go down in some horrifying way to some other villain. Do them that courtesy, please. Like, give them the fuckin' dignity of lighting the match yourself, and kissing them goodbye, and saying you all get to die as a family."
SMITH: Isn't that awesome? That's a good monologue right there. That's a good-- That's a good villain point right there.
SNYDER: And that's what he's saying. He's saying, "Do it now, because otherwise it's gonna end much worse." And to be totally honest, and I haven't said it, but I mean this is true, like to be totally honest, we fully intend to bring him back worse, to be like "I gave you the chance."
SMITH: So when the Joker returns, under your guidance, he's gonna be even more vicious.
SNYDER: Well, yeah, that whole storyline was about love. I mean, if he comes back, the next one will be about hatred.
(All laugh.)
SMITH: Cool.
SNYDER: So yeah, a hundred percent will he be more vicious.
🦇🃏
There's not really anything in there that you can't derive from the story itself and Snyder's other interviews at the time, but I think it stresses that the revisions to Dick's dialogue were to emphasize how unsettled the family is by Bruce's relationship with Joker, and how they don't want to confront it again. Whether or not Joker said anything when Bruce was unconscious-- because he sure said plenty when Bruce was awake-- they are always in the dark now. They are left to wonder if Joker is looming out of sight, ready to strike, and if Bruce will see fit to warn them when he is.
last summer i found a book of historic gay fetish art in a thrift store and there was an ink drawing from 1960 of batman and robin getting their dicks cut off and eaten by cannibals. and it doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else. is this like a historic artifact
my post was gonna be this image with ‘etienne from the 1960s would have made it big on ao3 dot com’ but now it does appear to me that i have found some sort of print that is not available anywhere online. anyway shoutout to my ancestors doing insane things to batman’s cock
Batman’s implicit identification as a white American, as the ultimate fantasy of unassailable hegemonic masculinity, helps normalize whiteness as a racial and cultural ideal. The assumption of white privilege is camouflaged as heroic adventure through stories of young Bruce Wayne’s world travels to acquire exotic skills, and the more mature Batman’s recruitment of foreign costumed agents to expand his war on crime. The character of Batman is complicit in perpetuating an Orientalist world view in which white Westerners easily master even the most difficult of foreign skills in a remarkably short period of time, and naturally assume command of more feeble nonwhite figures and guide them to be better allies and to adopt a more sensible (and Western) perspective. Cultural appropriation and neocolonial colonization are two of the central tenets of Orientalist thinking that privilege the civilized West over the mysterious East, whiteness over the nonwhite Other. The premise that Batman acquired or appropriated his physical skills while traveling the Orient has been part of the general Batman mythology since the late 1980s. But the constant retelling of specific events whereby young Bruce Wayne trained with foreign masters continues to reinforce assumptions about white privilege. Batman’s effort to recruit foreign operatives to work for him is a new trope that has not been explored in the past, but rather than authentically diversifying the Bat-universe, this accumulation of Other Batmen only served to further validate the superiority of the white American character. The cumulative result of Batman’s appropriation and colonization of Otherness in the 2010s is a strained attempt to incorporate diversity within the character’s fictional world, and an unintended perpetuation of America’s assumption of normative whiteness as the pinnacle of achievement.
Jeffrey A. Brown, The Dark Knight: Whiteness, Appropriation, Colonization, and Batman in the New 52 Era. Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics.
We here at Arkham Asylum want to wish all of our LGBTQ+ inmates a Happy Pride Month. While homosexuality is no longer considered a mental diagnosis, we still make room for Insane People across the Queer Spectrum. Every day this month we will be celebrating an individual from this wonderful group of diverse souls, giving you their name, gender identity, sexuality, and the mental diagnosis(es) that are the reason for their stay. And for those of you who have your own Queer family members struggling with (non-sexuality based) abnormality, remember, Arkham is the top rated facility in the entire Greater Gotham Area
Chuck “Blacklisted from both Marvel and DC for being racist” Dixon having a one-sided beef with Tom Taylor for stating objectively canon DC facts because it’s “woke” on twitter and Tom Taylor ragebaiting him by @ing Gail Simone to confirm that Black Canary would kick Batman’s ass.
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