For many years I have been a fan of Frank Millers work. From his run on Daredevil through Dark Knight Returns to Sin City and 300, I enjoyed them all. In my book he could do no wrong.
Until DK2, that is.
That highly anticipated book was (pun intended) Frankly terrible. It was poorly written, badly drawn and garishly colored. In fact, the only positive thing that I could find to say about it was that it was professionally bound. But, hey, everyone has a bad day! I thought that Miller would surely bounce back with his next project. I was sure that it would be great. It was going to have to be to make up for DK2.
So along comes All Star Batman And Robin: Frank Miller writing with Jim Lee providing the art. Can't miss, right? The first issue was passable. Not great, mind you, but decent. The art was very pretty and the story, while thin (actually, barely there would probably be more accurate) was not offensive. So issue two hits the stands and I start to read. Now, they say the normal human reactions to any tragedy are: Shock, Anger, Denial and Acceptance.
Shock! What in the world? Did Batman just refer to Robin as "Punk"? And then as that "Brat"? Is this really the work of two of the top talents in comics? This book includes some of the worst dialog that I have read in years - and that a some really bad comics! Each page seemed to be more appalling than the page before it.
Denial! Honestly! About a third of the way through the book I started thinking "This must not be Batman. Can't be! It is one of those thugs that has kidnapped Dick Grayson and the real Batman will come along and save him." No kidding! I really thought that must be the case.
Anger! Eventually I realized that wasn't the case. This was the supposed to be the real Batman: Laughing maniacally as he plowed through a police roadblock (they were crooked, of course), telling Grayson "Swallow it kid, I don't need the grief" as the Batmobile sprouts wings and takes to the air (so then, why does he need a Batplane?). I was irritated that after all the hype and anticipation we couldn't get anything better than this. I was angry at myself for being fooled again, for allowing myself to get excited about a comic with Frank Miller's name attached to it. I was angry about being ripped off of two dollars and ninety nine cents!Acceptance! Eventually I realized that this was simply a terrible comic. No getting around it, this one reeked worse that month old cheese. So towards the end of the book I started to just enjoy the book for what it was: a book so bad that it must have been conceived as a parody. You don't get work this awful without some serious effort. It is just not possible. No matter how low Frank Miller might have sunk in the past couple of years, he at least used to be a professional. So he has to realize that this dialog is so over the top, so ridiculously absurd that no sane person is going to read it and not eventually fall into fits of laughter.
So that is how I finally enjoyed the book: as the worst of the worst, a comic so bad it is fun to quote lines from it just to see the shocked look on peoples faces. As the story really doesn't progress much from the first page to the last you can open the book to almost any page and start counting cliché's. This is possibly the most testosterone fueled book that has ever been printed. I found myself expecting to see rusty nails holding the pages together instead of staples.
So is All Star Batman And Robin #2 worth reading? Absolutely! Grab a copy, kiss your three bucks goodbye and have a laugh. And then it will time for some serious reevaluation of the career and work of Rob Liefeld.