|
|
Join us each Tuesday as Bob Ingersoll analyzes how the law
is portrayed in comics then explains how it would really work.
Current Installment >>
Installment Archives |
About Bob |
General Forum
THE LAW IS A ASS for 12/24/2002
DOCKET ENTRY
"The Law is a Ass" Installment # 176
Originally written as installment # 156 and published in Comics Buyer's Guide issue # 791, January 13, 1989 issue
There are bad stories and then there are stories which so utterly transcend the concepts of good and bad that the only way to describe one's reaction to them is to quote a passage from a far better writer than I: Harlan Ellison in "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."
"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE
Okay, so the character in question, AM, was a computer and it was talking about hatred for the human race. Pretend I'm a computer talking about comic book stories. And then two guesses (and one doesn't count) as to whether I think the comics I analyze in today's column are simply bad or something horribly worse.
******
THE LAW IS A ASS
Installment # 176
by
BOB INGERSOLL
So they took a vote. And Robin died. And of those people who voted--those who could vote, a class which excluded all those who buy their comics on the newsstand; more traditional comic readers who might have wanted to save Robin but were disenfranchised by the fact that they buy their comics at the newsstand not in the direct sales market, so by the time they bought their copies, the vote was over--nearly one-half were unhappy with the outcome. Because, in what must have been a surprise to the DC Editorial Offices, the margin of "victory" for the Kill the Kid Kamp was only a little over seventy votes.
There is, however, one group that was probably delighted with the outcome of the "A Death In the Family" storyline: the guards, doctors, and staff at Arkham Asylum. After Batman # 429, they think the Joker's dead and they won't have to institutionalize him in their facility any longer. They think they got the greatest Christmas present in the world.
Now I have to play Scrooge. The Genocidal Jester isn't dead. He's a comic book super-villain who had comic book bullets hit him in the chest and then had his helicopter blow up in a comic book pseudo-violet explosion. But we never saw the body. And you know what it means, when we don't see a super-villain's body.
The Joker should be dead. In Batman # 429, Page 20 Panel 5, he caught two slugs in the chest--one headed directly for the heart--from what looked like an FNC 223 caliber auto rifle with the stock removed; a weapon so powerful one slug from it was enough to, "take off the back of the pilot's head."
Don't believe that quote, by the way, the story knows nothing from firearms. The pilot was shot from behind. Exit wounds are substantially bigger than entrance wounds. The slug wouldn't have taken off the back of his head; it would have taken off his face. It would also have taken out the contents of Joker's chest cavity and decorated the helicopter cabin with them. Still, another slug from the same weapon hit the Batman squarely in the upper arm and didn't blow his arm off his body as it should have. The gunman was obviously using George Bush Bullets--they used to be described as wimp bullets, now they're referred to as kinder, gentler bullets. You know the brand; they're the ones bad guys use on TV--ammunition specially designed to shrink on impact so they miss vital organs and pass harmlessly through the body.
Joker isn't dead. He'll turn up in a story at some future date. Arkham Asylum isn't worried about this possibility either. It remembers federal laws enacted under Article I, § 8 of the United States Constitution which state that citizens lose their citizenship if they do things like vote in a political election of another country or accept a governmental position in another country. Arkham remembers how the late Grace Kelly was expatriated, when she married Prince Ranier and became the Princess of Monaco. Arkham thinks that the Joker lost his citizenship, when he became the ambassador from Iran, and will be deported anytime he is caught in the future.
Now I have to play Scrooge again and to an organization which has enough problems already, because it just lost its liability insurance due to the frequency with which its patients escape. Joker wasn't expatriated, when he accepted the post of U.N. ambassador from Iran.
In the 1967 case of Afroyim v. Rusk, the Supreme Court held the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution precludes Congress from revoking the citizenship of any citizen, natural born or naturalized, unless the citizen voluntarily renounces said citizenship. We don't automatically lose our citizenship by accepting a position with another government; we must renounce it.
I'm sure the Joker didn't renounce his citizenship. If he had, he would have needed an entrance visa to get into the country to address the U.N. and the United States could have denied him the visa as it recently did Yasser Arafat. As we did not see this scene, we can safely assume Joker didn't need an entrance Visa, which would have been denied. And, if he didn't need an entrance visa, it can only be because he's still an American citizen.
Of course, there's another group who's happy with the outcome of "A Death In the Family": the current editorial/creative regime on Batman, who think they gave us a creative, wonderful, worthwhile Batman story just in time for Christmas. Now I have to play Scrooge to them.
They didn't. "A Death In the Family" stank. On ice. On the snow that's drifting across my driveway. While immersed in liquid nitrogen. It accomplished the impossible: it was worse than the other major Batman event of 1988, The Cult.
I hated The Cult. It was a whimpering, plodding poor-cousin excuse for a story which, thanks to Batman # 429, Page 6 Panel 4's incorporating it into the regular continuity, I can no longer pretend took place on Earth Not-Quite-the-Batman. It was so similar in plot elements and page layouts and writing style to The Dark Knight, that reading it gave me a stronger feeling of déjà vu than Ghostbusters II.
In fact, The Cult wasn't content with merely being similar to Dark Knight. First it lifted the armored Batmobile bodily from Dark Knight # 2 and plunked it into an idiot plot that asks us first to believe that Deacon Blackfire can mount an army of insurrectionists made up entirely of winos and that said army can take over Gotham City by stalking the sewers and shooting people from the storm drains; and, second, that Batman is the only costumed hero who would try to reclaim Gotham City from Deacon Blackfire's wino insurrectionists. Then The Cult, Book Four: Combat, Page 9 reproduced Frank Miller's stylized, personal, and original rendition of the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne from Dark Knight, Book One: The Dark Knight Returns, Pages 14 and 15 so painstakingly, so precisely--so exactly--I figured the current Thor artists surrendered the light box and tracing paper they're currently using to "pay homage" to Jack Kirby, so someone else could have a crack at it.
If that weren't bad enough, The Cult ignored all the long reaching repercussions of its own story. Gotham City is a major eastern seaboard industrial and economic center for the country. Captains of industry live there, work there, and run national, international, and multi-national corporations from there. It was taken over by armed insurrectionists and occupied for a week. Imagine what that would have done to the eight million citizens of Gotham City who were either uprooted from their homes or forced to work in Deacon Blackfire's slave labor camps. Imagine what it would have done to the Dow Jones Average or the country's sense of security and military preparedness against terrorism. Imagine.
Actually, you have to imagine. Neither The Cult nor any subsequent Batman story has shown us any of these inevitable consequences. The creators took the low road of ignoring these consequences, admittedly easier than having to deal with them.
And as impossibly bad as The Cult was, "A Death In the Family" was worse. I have in a previous column described the vileness of "A Death In the Family" setting up the gratuitous death of Robin, then exploiting it as a cheap promotional ploy. In the same column, I also detailed the stupidities found in Batman # 426 and 427. I shan't repeat them here. There are more than enough new stupidities in Batman # 429 to cover.
Iran has appointed the Joker it's ambassador to the U.N. and Joker's is going to make a major announcement to the General Assembly on behalf of Iran. Bruce Wayne wanted to see this address but was turned down as a U.N. delegate, because he's a playboy dilettante. So he uses political connections to become an unofficial observer to the Joker's U.N. address (Page 5). This despite the fact that the address was closed to the general public for security reasons (Page 7). What is an unofficial observer, if not a part of the general public? How did unofficial Bruce sneak past the guards and get to observe this closed session? Maybe he didn't sneak, maybe the guards figured, heck let the Joker kill Wayne, he's only a playboy dilettante.
On Page 9 Batman tells the Joker that he killed "Jason." Note the name here. Not "Robin"--who the Joker knew he killed--but "Jason." Joker's supposed to be some sort of genius, and it would hardly require genius-level intelligence to figure out, "I killed Robin. Batman called him 'Jason' not 'Robin,' so Robin's real name must be Jason. And Bruce Wayne, who certainly has enough money to bankroll Batman's operations had a ward named Jason." Why didn't Batman just save time, and appear without his cowl? Calling Robin "Jason," was like giving out your unlisted phone number to obscene callers.
The Joker was able to breach the security in the U.N. Building and plant bombs in the General Assembly Chamber (Page 16 and 17). The story didn't show us how Joker accomplished this miracle of modern science. I'll leave it up to you to figure out. Me, I'm still trying to figure out how he got his hands on, then disassembled, and reassembled, a cruise missile back in Part One.
But the most stupid point of all was why Iran appointed the Joker its U.N. ambassador. Get this--and if you haven't read the story, I swear I'm not making it up: Joker tells the General Assembly he was appointed because he and the Iranian government share, "insanity and a great love of fish," an admission which must make those delicate international negotiations much easier for the Ayatollah. Then Joker admits he was sent to kill the General Assembly as part of Iran's plan to get back at all the countries that branded it the, "home of the terrorist zealot." That's like a murderer proving his innocence by killing the jury.
What the story never bothered to explain--maybe what the story couldn't explain, because no one bothered to think the plot through to its logical conclusion--was: what did Iran hope to gain by killing every U.N. ambassador in the world? New found respect? A sincere and abiding belief that it no longer condoned terrorism? Maybe a lifetime supply of that fish is so greatly loved?
I don't know what Iran hoped to accomplish, but I know what it would have gotten.
War.
Every member country in the U.N. would have declared war on Iran for killing its ambassador without worrying about what the rest of the world would do--because the rest of the world would also have declared war. They could have banded together, gone in, and divided up Iran with its plentiful oil reserves. In fact, every member country should declare war on Iran anyway, for even attempting to kill its ambassador.
I wouldn't hold my breath waiting to see this war, however, or even any increased international tension. If no one thought out the obvious long-range consequences of taking over a major city, it's doubtful they thought about the long range consequences of killing the U.N.
It's easier to ignore them. That way the writer and editor don't have to think about the consequences. They force the critics to do it instead.
******
BOB INGERSOLL, Cleveland lawyer, comic fan and legal analyst says if you think this column was nasty, you should have seen it before I caught the Christmas spirit and revised it. At least in this draft I didn't call anyone brain dead.
Bob Ingersoll
<< 12/17/2002 | 12/24/2002 | 12/31/2002 >>
Discuss this installment with me in World Famous Comics' General Forum.
Recent Installments:
Current Installment >>
Installment Archives |
About Bob |
General Forum
|
|
|
Anything Goes Trivia
