Batman - Death in the Family & Lonely Place of Dying

A nice thick double feature here of late 80's Batman in hard covers, a book collecting two Robin-centered series, Death in the Family and Lonely Place of Dying.
At this point Dark Knight had Returned already, and while darker Batman was nothing new there's a demand of going even further. And yet we are not quite yet in the full doom'n'gloom of coming years, much of which would only end up a tad boring once the novelty and shock effect wears off.
Speaking of novelty and shock effect...
...in retrospect Death in the Family is best remembered from the phone voting deciding if Robin, the Jason Todd version, would survive or not. The public demanded blood, and Jason died in an explosion set up by Joker. One could say that remembering the series just for that is doing it justice, for otherwise the story has plenty of...curious logic to start with and has not aged gracefully (Ayatollah? Really?) Aparo's art is of course enjoyable.

Lonely Place of Dying comes off as the better half of the book. The story is sprawling to many directions but manages to pull it off, new fresh take to role of Robin is done with Tim Drake and the Batman-Nightwing-Tim Drake personal dynamics work well. Two-Face is also dramatic but at the same time amusingly bonkers villain, and having Batman and Two-Face trying to double-guess each other was just great fun. And as something of an anti-Frank Miller I can see why some friends of mine are vocal George Perez fans: the world is clearly a better place when he is in it.

But it must be said that innocence once seduced can never be regained: it's probably impossible for me to read a Batman-Robin story without imposing a pederasty layer in it.

The Brave and the Bold Showcase vol 3

As far as superheroes go, I have been mostly on the Marvel side. As a kid I started from Spidey and Hulk and moved on to Fantastic Four, X-Men and Daredevil, and to this day those are my primary idea what superhero comics are like (Supergoof and Phantom Duck are of course there too, but that's another thing).

I did read some Superman comics, because my local library had them, and they were sort of entertaining but not particularly gripping, and I do have a vague recollection of going through some Batman comics and finding them boring and smudgy.

In time I started to get less enthustiatic about Marvel and notice that DC was putting out some interesting books, things like Watchmen and books which would in time become Vertigo. And for several years now of the big two it is them I have paid more attention to, but my knowledge of actual DCU has been very limited, drawn mostly from those early Vertigo books, occasional Batman standalone miniseries and some of the more marginal series like Chase, Young Heroes in Love and Manhunter (yes, me getting interested in a superhero comic more often than not equals cancellation), or second-hand information received from DC enthusiasts like good folks of GLA.

So why does a DC neophyte like me read a showcase of Batman team-up stories from 70s? It was in the local library. Is it good? Ehh, not really if you are not in the target group.
I do think Batman is an interesting superhero, as a character, the type of the stories he is involved with and what kind of visual style often goes with his stories. Of course there's plenty of crap he has starred in but as an idea he is pretty much my favorite of DC big ones.
Unfortunately here the stories are pretty sraightforward, Batman meets another superhero and together they deal with whatever problem has been thrown their way. Slightly more intricate than having two people hit each other for twenty pages but only slightly.
In individual doses this might be sort of entertaining, or if I had some background I could care about these teamup partners and get geekgasms of Batman and Sgt Rock being in the same story.
But as it is, going through this book is a bit of a chore, the highlights being marveling at some of the more outre teamup partners (that postapocalyptic Planet-of-the-Apes-ripoff seemed pretty interesting) and looking at the art by Jim Aparo. Pretty.

I should look at some other Showcases though, I enjoy the format (as well as Essentials of Marvel) but they have been concentrating mostly on Silver Age and what I have seen of Silver Age DC has not impressed me. Well, I did enjoy House of Mystery and Batgirl Showcases, Superman one I tried took forever to read due to almost every story making my brain hurt and stuff like Green Lantern or LSH I haven't even dared to touch.