Give things a bit of a zing or to add some satire.
We've had Jon Pertwee's third Doctor in Doctor Who reminiscing about how he marched with Chairman Mao (and presumably forgot to try to stop some of the horrific consequences of the Cultural Revolution).
And then, in '88, we had this.
The above panels featuring The Joker and Ayatollah Khomeini are from Batman : A Death In The Family by Mike Starlin and Jim Aparo which my ten-year-old self adored because it was grim and gritty and set in the middle east (where I'd spent large chunks of my primary school career).
I especially enjoyed the sequences of Batman hunting down bad guys in the souk in Beirut (?).
What it's most famous for now (and some would say it's sole redeeming feature) is that it killed off a Robin (Jason Todd, the street urchin one). And the public got to vote as to whether Robin died or not.
Anyway, for something I remember as being very hard edged and big proper serious stuff, it hasn't aged well. Robin is off looking for his birth mother in Arabia and is told she could be one of three and so spends half of the book talking to each one. Eventually he goes to Ethiopia and finds her and, lo and behold, she betrays him to the Joker who just happens to be in the area for reasons of plot convenience. ('cos Ethiopia and the Lebanon are right next door).
And the Joker kills them both.
To be fair, this is where the story improves no end, especially when the Joker is granted diplomatic immunity by Iran and appears at the UN, hunted down by a powerless but grief-stricken Batman.
But, yeah, it's not the most thought-out examination of the Middle East/North Africa (though, unlike DC's Suicide Squad it doesn't portray Dubai as being a jungle....)
No comments:
Post a Comment