Tuesday, August 23, 2005

My Favorite Birthday Present, part 2



In the mid '80s I stopped reading comics. Prices went up and I was saving money for my car and gas (it was a whooping $1.28!)

Several years later I started getting interested in comics again. When I was in art school in the late '80s one of the student instructors was Mike Kennedy. Mike (and John Hunter) later became infamous as the owners of Planet Comics which got busted for selling 'indecent' comics.

Mike was also the manger of Planet at the time and he was constantly talking about comics. I was totally out of the comic loop and being a newly married student had no extra money for comics.

(Mike was my first exposure to anime. He brought an untranslated bootleg of Akira to school one evening because he felt the art students should see it. Our minds were truly BLOWN.)

Anyway, when the first 'Batman' movie came out, I kept hearing about 'The Dark Knight Strikes Back" and how it influenced the movie.
So for my birthday I asked for and got a copy of the trade.

I was blown away! To be honest, I thought the art was sloppy. But some of the images were AMAZING!

The panel with Batman kicking in Superman's teeth was mind boggling.

I've got a lot of graphic novels over the years, but the impact of this one has never been topped.

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