Comic review: JL- Gods and Monsters- Batman #1- Dangerously Stupid

Writers: J.M DeMatteis & Bruce Timm
Artist: Matthew Dow Smith
Colours: Jordie Bellaire
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 22nd July 2015



Justice League- Gods and Monsters- Batman #1 is a very dangerous comic book.

Why is it dangerous?

It’s dangerous because of the following assumptions that it makes:

1- Villains are those who break the law.
2- Following the law makes you a moral person.
3- Breaking the law makes you an immoral person.
4- Villains are those who operate outside of the corporate/state control system.
5- Villains carry out their immoral actions within ‘organised crime.’
6- Murder is justified, along as you are murdering the ‘villains’ who operate within organised crime.

These assumptions give the woefully ignorant and anachronistic impression that there are two sides to society:

A- The respectable, law and order side, with morally decent people working within the system to make the world a better place for everybody.
B- The criminal underworld, down the docks, where immoral gangsters operate their criminal empires, working outside of the system, and making the world a worse place for everybody.

The superhero (Batman) in this contemporary comic book targets group B. Of course he does, why wouldn’t he?

Do you see the problem here?

After all that has happened over the past ten years, with the illegal wars, surveillance, banker bailouts, and government authorised criminality, you’d think that comic books would start to point out that the real big-shot criminals of our era operate within the law, not outside of it, wouldn’t you?

Real world criminal gangsters don’t hang out down the docks, they operate within corporate and banking boardrooms, doing perfectly legal business, not breaking any laws, because they made the laws in the first place.

Nice colours, bad art.

JL- Gods and Monsters #1 gives readers the impression that criminal masterminds work outside of the structures that have been erected to accommodate rampant corporate criminality. What kind of an idiot would do that?

What kind of an idiot criminal would work outside the law and allow himself to be arrested like a common, petty criminal? It doesn’t happen. The top criminals of our era are the most respected men in town. They operate within government, within banks, within corporations, and the entire neoliberal consensus structure is designed to let them get away with their criminality, and to be rewarded and lauded whilst doing so. That’s how it works, and we all know it by now.

The narrative in this book doesn’t really care about all of that pesky real world reality stuff. Instead it features a vampire (bat) who needs to drink blood to live, and because he’s a nice vampire (bat) he hangs around the docks looking for old movie villains (Circa Humphrey Bogart) to have a nibble on.

This hero/villain bat/vampire-thing has a temper tantrum in a restaurant, and finds a new best friend through talking to a stranger in a public art gallery. Yeah, that’s how you meet best new friends, by hanging out in art galleries. I should try that one out myself.

The book features a ‘twist’ at the end that’s not very surprising, and does nothing but further empathise the comedic stupidity of the main protagonist. All of the dialogue is heavy laden with exposition, and none of it reads like real people talking to each other. The art is very loosely pencilled, and the heavy inking and colouring attempts to disguise the lack of detail throughout. It’s a one shot story that you will have read many times before, and this time next week you’ll have completely forgotten about the entire book. If that’s what you are after, get the book. Have fun with it, if you can.

What I am reading here is a deliberately stupid comic. It reads like something designed for children, in the 1930’s. There are no mobile devices, no izombies walking down the street, head down, oblivious to those around them, no references to the Internet and no references to anything contemporary actually.

The protagonist is a laughable Cartman-esque clown who tells his story first person, loading every sentence with a bucket load of exposition as he plods through his ridiculously inconsequential adventures.

The entire book is completely laughable, even more so because it’s written with a pofaced seriousness and inability to recognise just how babyish and stupid it all is.

The art looks rushed, the facials are lacking in expression or movement and it’s all washed in a thick pallet of heavy colouring in an attempt to put some life into the dead and rushed pencil work.

It’s the seriousness of the book that really kills it. If it was scripted with a wink, nod and a sense of irony, then it could have been fun, it could have been a laugh, and it could have been worthwhile. But no, it’s as serious as cancer, and about as much fun as staying up all night and watching the latest suicide inducing election results.

This is a really, really stupid book, and the underlying assumptions that it makes about criminality and morality make it a very dangerous book as well. I wouldn’t want a young kid to read something as dangerously stupid as this comic book. It’s going to do nothing for a delicate young mind other than to lead him into a slave job working within the corporate system, thinking that he’s a good person just because he is following orders and obeying corporate laws.

That’s not good, all it’s doing is preparing the next generation of compliant worker slave drones for the corporate/banking ‘elites’ prison camps.

JL- Gods and Monsters #1 won’t be read by many kids. The majority of it’s readers are going to be adult statists, stuck in the matrix, hiding from reality, not because they are unable to look at reality, but because they don’t want to look at reality.

It’s a comic book for people who want to forget the world and read something stupid that will distract them from the mundane horrors of the everyday, uneventful lives. If stupid and ignorant is what the writers were going for then they’ve succeeded with this one. Well done lads, you’ve done it again. Poop out the story, extract the money, poop into the minds, poop into the landfill. Hey man, it’s the American way.


Rating: 2/10 (For the colours. Nothing else about the book has any merit)