Jimmy Olsen’s Blues

Once upon a time, DC could have announced Kevin Smith writing a new Batman miniseries and then a monthly series to follow and I would have eaten that shit right up.  I liked his Green Arrow fine and really enjoyed his Daredevil, and of course I really liked his movies up through the mid-2000’s or so.

But then Smith blew most of his comic-writing cred with me by writing a couple of series he never bothered finishing for Marvel.  (Or Marvel never bothered asking him to finish them, maybe.)  Further, I didn’t much care for the issues that did come out.  And then he did a recent Batman miniseries which turned the Joker — in theory one of the scariest, most bat-shit (so to speak) insane villains DC has — into a Clerks-style innuendo-filled fop.  And on top of that, he had one of his cronies (Walt Flanagan, previously best know as the owner of the small priapic dog who bedeviled Jay and Silent Bob in Smith’s comics of the mid-90’s) do the artwork, which just feels a little more obviously nepostistic to me than I might care for.

So, yeah, totally not excited by this announcement (nor, particularly, the Green Hornet book he’s going to write based on his aborted film).  Even with the gaps built into the schedule to allow him to complete this thing, I have no confidence it’ll actually get done on any reliable schedule, or at all.  Note that I’m not necessarily speculating as to the quality of these books, mind you — they could be perfectly entertaining.

As long as he leaves the Joker out of it.