Archetypes!

Batman strikes me as one of those characters that somehow tapped into a vein of… *SOMETHING* that the creators had no idea why or how. They found a lost chord and strummed it and, golly, they found a mine that still feels like it’s only barely been excavated.

Part and parcel with this is the periodic revisiting (retconning, I suppose) of origin stories to make them fit with how we understand the characters as they’ve evolved. Sometimes they fill in gaps, sometimes they re-write the past, sometimes they just give details that were never given before (if you read Detective #33 or Batman #1, you’re shocked to see that they take a page and a half and that’s it). Given that any character evolves over issue after issue and year after year, it’s usually interesting to see how the origin stories evolve alongside.

Frank Miller’s Year One is probably my favorite of all of the various re-imaginings of any superhero origin story. First off, it’s written by Frank Miller at the height of his game… good enough to work with whatever characters he wanted, new enough to still have to listen to editors.

A great story where we meet Bruce Wayne prior to figuring out what he wants to do, we meet James Gordon when he’s just a Lieutenant getting on his feet in Gotham, and before they know what they want to do with their lives.

Well, recently, they’ve made a movie out of it. Direct to video (or DVD (or Blu-Ray)) or whatever they call it now.

Batman: Year One takes Frank Miller’s comic and uses it as a storyboard. While, yes, the book was better, the movie is impressive in its attention to detail and its faithfulness to the comic. If you have never read it, you probably should… but if you don’t have time, you won’t be disappointed with the movie. (And if I was disappointed with the movie, it’s possible that I was doing nothing more than really missing Kevin Conroy.)

Check out the trailer here:

So that’s my recommendation for you this week.