Blogs Don't Burn

When reading this book, I often imagined Frank Miller reading aloud from one of Garrison Keillor’s Guy Noir scripts to a live audience; I would listen to Miller butcher every joke in a Tom Waits-like croak, and pause to wonder at the laughter he drew from the audience in the house of the Fitzgerald Theater. A lot of Miller’s fans feel that the lighthearted take on the World’s Greatest Detective à la Adam West blatantly betrayed the character’s gothic overtones. Unfortunately, by veering so far back in the opposite direction, Miller makes the character a target for laughter just as often as the old T.V. series did, but this time without meaning to. By writing the Dark Knight in such an unironic fashion, he just goes to show why the character was so ripe for parody in the first place. A man as single-minded and uncompromising as Bruce Wayne cannot help but be brought down a little by an idiosyncratic and surprising world. A writer who wants to write the character convincingly has to treat him a little irreverently, whether through means comic or tragic. Miller’s mancrush on the Caped Crusader is so overwhelming that anyone not as childishly trusting in Wayne’s psychopathic vigilantism as he is, cannot help but cringe ever so slightly. That said, there is still enjoyment to be had from the book. Even though Miller has a blind fondness for his subject matter, the character of Batman is still compelling, and the Chandleresque hard-boiled detective prose has its moments.