thats one of the major threads running throughout the years.

At least until Tom Vietch and Frank Gomez decided to turn him into Charlton Heston.



I like to think this is how our gun posters imagine themselves.

Go to about 1:00.

He didn't want it damaged by hitting his invulnerable body

Batman is a gun grabbber...

I saw the movie on Sunday with my girlfriend and he said it during the roof scene where Catwoman and Batman were fighting Bane's henchmen.

BTW, GREAT MOVIE!

and this is not a spoiler. She has a comeback a bit later but I forget exactly how she phrased her thoughts.

He's a hell of a guy.

(In the movie, not in the comics)

He leaves him hanging by his foot for the police to take him away.

that some media outlets are saying was the inspiration for the theater shooting. (Oddly, it is the only comic book I own, it was a gift)

Batman is extremely anti-gun in the comic. Pleasantly, he is also anti-Reagan. (Or Frank Miller is, whichever way you want to interpret it)

Great series...I think the new batman films are predicated on Frank Miller's version more than any other.

yes, it does sound that way. I do want to see the movie, but I think I'll wait for the crowds to die down first.

His follow-up, The Dark Knight Strikes Again was atrocious and ended with Superman effectively declaring himself dictator (and this was presented as a good thing) and his Holy Terror! was so racist that DC refused to let him use Batman in it.

As I said before, that is the one and only comic I own, so that is interesting to know.

Miller sounds like a piece of work. I think he also penned '300' and 'Sin City', right?

Libertarian anti-Islamic we need to kill everyone to stay safe idiot.

"300" was his warning to us about the coming hordes from the East...except the Spartans were a actually bunch of jerks who willingly would change sides when deemed necessary.


Here's what he thinks of Occupy, in his own words...this from a guy that made his living in comic books, it's rather slightly ironic.

http://frankmillerink.com/2011/11/anarchy

Never would have guessed he'd morphed into something like that. What a hideous and hateful person he's become.

I was encouraged by the first comment, which took him to task. 4615 likes, 15 dislikes. Hell of a righteous rant.

Miller had a real gift as a comics writer. He grasped the possibilities of the medium. The original Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One are both superb pieces of work, returning Batman to his pulp roots without over-simplifying the character and succeeded in penetrating the popular conception of Batman in a way that hadn't been done since the Sixties TV show. Daredevil: Born Again was excellent as well, re-interpreting the character as more down-to-earth and more human than before.

And then you read Dark Knight Strikes Again or All-Star Batman & Robin (which Miller claimed was parody after everyone panned it) and you see a gun who's so lost the character's core that his Batman wantonly kills (this is a character that, at core, is about a little boy not wanting to see anyone die), kidnaps Dick Grayson and abandons him in the cave to eat rats and turns Superman into a drooling moron (while never up to Batman levels, Supes has always been portrayed as fairly smart).

Miller has become the worst sort of comic writer, the kind who lets his own beliefs write the story. Characters commit actions not because they make sense for the character but because Miller thinks they should. For some reason, conservative writers tend to be especially prone to this, perhaps because they perceive the comics business as much more liberal than it actually is. Bill Willingham's Fables is an example that started and gradually came to incorporate more and more of the writer's conservatism to the point where it was writing the story. I can put up with a little bit of soapboxing but when two main characters in Fables halted the action for two pages to lecture one another (and thereby, the reader) about why gun control was bad, I felt well within my rights to drop the book.

Incidentally (and because I'm a complete geek), good Batman books I'd recommend include Hush and The Long Halloween.

Bookmarking for future reference.

And I agree with you, sometimes artists get in the way of their art. When a story is suspended for an inordinate amount of time so the creator can pound a point home really hard, I reflexively recoil a bit. Especially when the medium is escapist in nature, such as with comic books and action movies.

All fantastic. Sad about Miller.

Kitten and squirrel

He used a gun in the first few stories but it was pretty quickly decided that he wouldn't and those stories were retconned out of existence. Since then, Batman has been portrayed as very anti-gun (to the extent where it's been a plot point several times) and absolutely does not kill. He has carried and used a gun exactly once in modern continuity (against the god of evil, Darkseid in the very confusing Final Crisis event). Now, most superheroes avoid killing when they can but Bats is pathological about it. He refused to even kill the Alien-infected captives in Batman Vs. Alien. Even Superman tried to kill Doomsday but with Batman, it's never even a question.

Yes, I am a complete geek.

in the late 1920s, iirc.

The Bat knows all about guns.

Holmes was pretending to be the Joker, not Batman.