Incoming: ABSOLUTE BATMAN YEAR ONE

Image © DC Comics.

Just arrived is this two-book slipcased set, each book measuring 12.5 by 8.25 inches. This often-reprinted story ran originally as four issues of the monthly BATMAN comic (see example above right), in 1986-87.

Book One of this set is an excellent oversized reprint of the collected story with blue-line painted color by Richmond Lewis. I approve of it in every way. Lots of extra material including new forewords by editor Denny O’Neil and writer Frank Miller, and drawn afterword and comments by artist David Mazzucchelli, plus house ads, cover art, etc.

Book Two attempts to recreate the original newsprint comics version of the original issues larger, but in my opinion fails completely. The covers, on glossy stock, look great. The rest is on newsprint and each page is scanned from copies of the original comics. The result is mushy blacks (with four colors of ink dots in them) rather than the crisp, if grayed down, blacks of the original printings. The colors may be somewhat close to those seen in the original comics (and different from the ones in Book One), but the newsprint paper color is also in the scans, and the original large dot color separations are now mushy small dot separations that blur everything. The right way to do this would have been to reprint the original four-color separations on newsprint. Possibly they no longer exist, I don’t know, but this version is not very much like the original comics. Frankly, I hate it, and think it makes everyone involved look bad. The one saving grace of Book Two is the inclusion of every Miller script page and every Mazzucchelli pencilled layout, as well as some inked pages.

The suggested retail price for this box set is $125. I hope at some point DC will consider offering the contents of Book One with the added material from Book Two in a single volume. That one would be welcome on my own bookshelf.