Holy Terror ... Batman? A writing Blog.

Frank Miller is a name you might be familiar with.  He wrote the comic books that would spawn the movies 300, Sin City, several Batman titles, including the annoyingly omnipresent Batman: Year One, and he had a very popular run on Daredevil, and even created the character of Elektra, the assassin with father issues.  Miller was also the director on The Spirit-- and has a small lynch mob after him for that, I'm sure.



So, Miller gets around.



Several years and a few lifetimes ago, Frank Miller said he wanted to write a graphic novel called "Holy Terror, Batman!" a play on a line from the 1960s Batman TV show with Adam West.



Miller has debuted his Holy Terror and ...



It doesn't have Batman.



Miller decided to work with a new hero, it wouldn't be a DC comics project, etc, etc.



On the one hand, I can understand that Frank Miller has had issues lately with DC.  His All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder was, as I understand it, universally panned by reviewers, except for those who seem to want Frank Miller's baby. They weren't pretty, either way.

Miller's version: it was more Dirty Harry than Batman. It just didn't work with Batman.....

Really?

I guess Miller has a bit of a point. After all, why would al-Qaeda want to blow up Gotham city? Aside from the fact that it's a major metropolitan area, high-population density, the potential for massive body counts if they did it right .....

Oh wait, that would make Gotham a perfect target.

My friend Jason said that it wouldn't work because the larger DC universe would make it impossible for al-Qaeda to exist. After all, there's "The Society," Lex Luthor, Ra's al-Ghul, and a whole bunch of others who operate on an international scale.  It's like the problem someone had with Straczynski's Amazing Spider Man 9-11 issue, where he wrote that even the villains like Doctor Doom were offended by 9-11 .... to which someone replied online that "If Doctor Doom were offended by al-Qaeda, they'd be dead within 48 hours. All of them."

However, I must disagree with Jason in one respect -- this is Frank Miller, the continuity of the DC universe means about as much to him as it would to Franz Kafka.  He plays fast and loose with the universes as he pleases. The only hard and fast rule he would have to adhere to would be the layout and rules of engagement of Gotham city....

At which point, that becomes one of my short stories.... It would take too long to explain here, but for the Gotham universe, an al-Qaeda attack would probably go as follows.

Within the week, they would be out of money .... Catwoman would have robbed them. Repeatedly.

The first time they blew up a building with any amount of plants ... Poison Ivy would hunt them down and feed them to her vegetable garden.

The Joker would probably meet up with al-Qaeda .... for about five minutes. And then he would gas them because he didn't like their sense of humor, since, from what I can tell, they don't seem to have one.

And then, after the Joker starts killing them en mass, the organized crime outfits of Gotham would machine-gun the rest on the principle that al-Qaeda was muscling in on their territory.

Then, if al-Qaeda was really lucky, Batman would arrest whoever was still alive.

So, I guess I could see Frank Miller's problem. Gotham city would eat the terrorists....

And now that I've suggested it, I'm fairly certain that someone is already starting to write the fan fiction (If that's true, then I ask you to please link to the blog. Other than that, have fun.)

Right now, I'm just hoping that Miller's writing ability hasn't completely failed him. Because if he puts out another piece of quality work like The Spirit, I think the lynch mob after him might get larger.