Jeph Loeb - Batman: Hush

Jeph Loeb’s Hush is intense. If you are going to go into the book knowing one thing, make it that. This book is painfully difficult to put down, every scene flowing into every other with all the momentum of a train speeding off a cliff.

Of course, Hush is more than a collection of fun action scenes, though the main plot’s development due to it occurring almost entirely in the shadows of explosions and grand gestures. A large part of this is the narration of Batman’s thoughts which frequently color the scene and give information that would be otherwise impossible to convey.

Generally, these work quite well, but they bring up two problems. The first is the presence of Batman’s thoughts in scenes where Batman is obviously not present. Here, they act as more of an omniscient scene setter, but they are presented in the same style as the monologues, so telling the two apart is impossible. More important is Loeb’s tendency to litter fight scenes with thoughts, which works for the most part but can occasionally lead to the odd moment where the action is frantic and Batman’s thoughts are contemplative and, by comparison, almost bored, making it hard to really care about the action (you'll have to click the picture to read the text):

For reasons not completely clear to me, Jeph Loeb decided that Hush needed to include every single character to ever see a bat shaped light go off in the sky. As someone relatively unfamiliar with the Batman mythos, I saw a huge number of new faces, but familiarity isn’t required as Loeb does a great job of bringing you up to speed in a few quick lines. The characters themselves generally come off quite well, even though most are only given a limited space to develop, and though none of the sub plots are particularly important on their own, they each do a good job of keeping you interested while the main story slowly builds behind them.

Of course, there’s the inevitable straining of suspension of disbelief that occurs whenever you’ve got more than one guy in tights on the page at once. For the most part, this is handled well enough with the standard Batman characters. It is at times hard to see how the seventeen sidekicks that Batman’s had over the years don’t bump into each other all the time, but Loeb focuses on the character’s on screen well enough, and gives them enough depth, that I can forgive that. What’s harder to forgive are the characters that come from elsewhere, namely the Superman mythos. I’ll just say it right here: I don’t like super hero crossovers. It just seems silly. Still, when Batman was in Metropolis, I was able to tread the whole thing as a mildly enjoyable cartoon, but even that slight connection was blown apart when a super dog came on stage, and I laughed the rest of the way to the issue’s end. Thankfully, superdog didn’t make another appearance.

By far the most important of the side characters, and the only one to really stay with the story for more than five minutes, was Catwoman, who begins a romance with batman towards the beginning of the story. Their relationship is more commented upon than acted upon, which can be fairly annoying, though fitting with Batman’s character, but their interactions do lead to several good scenes and do serve to lend both characters more of a human side than they might have otherwise have had, as well as providing the lion’s share of the text’s rare breather moments.

In the final issues, the main plot that’s been, we’re told, slowly building the whole time starts to emerge. I specify “we’re told,” because, despite a few out of place events, most of Batman’s theories come across as pointing fingers at random and seeing Cthulhu in the shadows behind his dresser. Still, the last issues do a good job of trashing our expectations, and the several layers of reveals at the end had me quite interested in who the villain would turn out to be.

As for that villain’s actual identity (I won’t spoil the particulars for you), I’m unsure if it’s a brilliant turn or a cheap trick. If this is one of your first Batman comics, try as hard as you can to guess the villain. You’ll never get it, because the villain’s scheme relies on an ability wholly unknown to the newcomer, but obvious to the veteran. At the time, I was more than a tad annoyed, but, in retrospect, I’m not sure that’s fair. How much of bringing us up to speed is really Loeb’s responsibility? If the device is already established in the Batman mythos, I guess it’s fair game, so I won’t hold the trick against him.

The best word for Jim Lee’s artwork is iconic. Every frame and character that the man draws is larger than life, including the monolithic muscles under Batman’s suit to the fight scenes, which are just choreographed enough to have the feel of a martial arts master but just frantic enough to feel dangerous and unpredictable. Lee’s style is, in no real way, realistic, but none of his characters ever devolve into caricature, and he’s fluid enough for his super models to feel natural and powerful, fitting into the world rather than sticking out like an overly buff sore thumb:

Besides, the athleticism of the characters makes a degree of sense. Providing you weren’t immediately shot in the face, jumping from building to building to knock out criminals night in and night out would shape you up pretty well, I think. (Of course, that only explains one aspect of Lee’s universal male anatomy, and damn little of his female equivalent, but we’ll just let that slide).

When it comes to scenery and fight scenes, Lee is equally competent, blending subtle hints that bring the scene to life amidst the more boisterous elements of the artwork in much the same way that Loeb does with the plot.

At several points in the storyline events break into several strands, some operating in different chronologies, with the majority of the work of differentiating between them falling to the artwork. For the most part, different color choices keep the scenes distinct and provide each with its own feel, though the washed out palette of the recollections can make telling the details of the scene difficult. That could, of course, be argued as intentional – after all, it’s not like we really remember every part of that day twenty-five years ago equally – but whatever the intent, things have certainly gone too far when I mistook the two boys for each other on several occasions.

Hush can be a bit hard to take seriously at times, and not all of Loeb’s ideas work out with quite as much finesse as one might hope, but the ride is fun from beginning to end. If you’re willing to suspend your disbelief for a few hours, you won’t want to stop reading until the ending, and you’ll enjoy (almost) every minute of it. I wouldn’t recommend this to someone looking for their first taste of Batman, but if you’ve got a few Graphic Novels under your belt, Hush is an entertaining read.

Reading in September

The concept behind Shine is interesting, but the stories are uneven, to say the least. In addition, it’s hard to tell what Vries means when he talks about Optimistic SF. In the introduction he says that it’s not just a tragic, or even an average, world that people learn to adapt to or prosper in, but rather something where everyone is truly better off, and yet a good majority of these stories don’t fit that definition. Not that that makes those bad stories, of course, some of those are the best in the collection, but they further muddy the waters of whatever Vries was trying to say. There’re also an annoying number of stories that are either purely didactic or incredibly obvious allegories.


Visions is a short story collection from one of Russia’s premier writers in the early twentieth century. Andreyev’s writing is dark, precise, and evocative, and his use of the supernatural to show his ideas in stories like The Red Laugh has convinced me that, if he had lived twenty years later and published in England, he would be mentioned in the same breath as many of Lovecraft’s contemporaries (Machen, Blackwood, etc). In fact, his story Lazarus has been in a Famous Modern Ghost Stories collection. Anyway, review on the way.


Matter is an enjoyable book that likes the building up part of its story so much that it really doesn’t do anything else, going from transit to conclusion in only a few dozen awful pages. Still, I will be reading more of Banks’s work. Review here.


Last Days is so taut that putting down the book at any point, whether it’s a chapter break or the middle of a sentence, feels like physically prying yourself away from some addictive drug. The narrative has its problems, but they’re comparatively minor. Review on the way.


It was enjoyable when Heinlein was actually trying to, you know, tell a story. The two hundred pages of tensionless philosophizing that followed, however – not to mention the painfully predictable sacrifice scene – did not help. Neither did the irony of “Nine out of ten times, if a woman gets raped it’s her fault,” appearing in a book about equality and free love. Neither did the other fifty-five sexist or otherwise offensive quotes and situations that crop up. Nor the playboy super-genius author insert.


There are certain things that you expect when going into a classic. Powerful writing, interesting themes, deep characterization, you know the drill. The Odyssey delivers on all those fronts, as well as being something I didn’t expect: a page turner. It may have been written a few thousand years back, but it’s still a damn fun read.


Though I’m always comparing King’s later books to his earlier classics, I’d almost forgot what it was like to read him when he’s actually firing on all cylinders. This is, without a doubt, one of King’s best novels – though not one of the very best – and a frightening and acomplished horror novel no matter the standards you hold it to. Review coming.


May as well continue the Policy of Silence on Breaking New Ground posts, because it amuses me. Review on the way.


The Folding Knife is the personal tragedy that lies at the heart of an epic. Parker’s characterization and prose are impeccable, and, even if the conclusions and events are bleak, the book is impossible to put down due to the sheer charisma that every word of dialogue brings with it. Review on the way.


I think that just about everyone has heard about the Way of Kings at this point. In my opinion, it’s quite good, but not great, and it’s reviewed to death. So I’ll be adding yet another review, just because. Until then, there are a huge number of great reviews of this out already, including Niall’s for Strange Horizons.

Graphic Novels

[This is a Breaking New Ground post]

Graphic novels are a bit different from Urban Fantasy in that, if I’ve ever truly looked down upon them, that period ended long ago. Still, for the longest time, they just didn’t seem like something I’d be interested in. Why would I want to read a book where half the imagining was done for me? It almost seemed like a worst-of-both-worlds between books and movies, where the images hamstring your own mental picture, while the lack of motion leaves said images static and unimmersive. Besides which, I just wasn’t sure that there were any stories told in Graphic Novels that I would actually want to read. From my ignorant outsider’s perspective, all I could see was pretty much super heroes. Now, I used to love super heroes – and perhaps I still do, because I think that The Dark Knight was several hours of sheer perfection – but I wasn’t convinced that you could make a convincing book out of a guy who beats people up while wearing tights and a cape.

Then, back in April, I read Watchmen. Well, that was the end of any real prejudice on my part. The story was excellent, and the super hero framework made it quite plain that it would never have succeeded in another form. At the time, I said (in my Reading in April post) that Graphic Novels were: “something I’m going to definitely try and do more of, now.” Months later, I’ve read followed that initial success with…nothing.

So, unlike the Urban Fantasy challenge where I’m trying to go from distaste to some degree of enjoyment or at least a position of knowledge, here I’m just trying to read some fun stuff. But, seeing as this was a challenge, I did decide to jump in at the deep end of my old apprehensions about Graphic Novels. It is, it seems, superhero time.

Now, I originally did the same thing as I did for the other Breaking New Ground post. The problem is, there I actually researched the books. Here, knowing nothing about the field, I figured out what to read by the highly scientific method of emailing someone I’d seen reading a book with pictures in it, specifying that at least some of the five had to involve super heroes. In the end, I decided that writing several hundred variants of she said to read this one. And this one! would get sickeningly old, so just pretend it says that under the pictures if you want.

Anyway, the five lucky novels are:



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Seeing as I doubt I’m going to really hate any of these, I’m not going to bother with the Breaking New Ground posts that are following the Urban Fantasy reviews and just stick to the tried and true schedule of reviews broken up by random musings.

And yes, I’m aware there are seven titles here. Blame the person who picked them.