{"id":1559,"date":"2008-12-28T19:26:25","date_gmt":"2008-12-29T02:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=1559"},"modified":"2008-12-28T19:26:25","modified_gmt":"2008-12-29T02:26:25","slug":"matts-fave-comics-2008-batman-gotham-after-midnight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/?p=1559","title":{"rendered":"Matt&#039;s Fave Comics 2008 &#8211; Batman: Gotham After Midnight"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a sucker for Batman comics, even half-baked ones, but I don&#8217;t think this Steve Niles\/Kelley Jones maxiseries is half-baked at all. It&#8217;s pretty fully baked. It probably helps to be baked when you read it. I wouldn&#8217;t know. Just a guess.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/alertnerd.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/12\/bmgam-cv4_solicit_medium.jpg\" alt=\"bmgam-cv4_solicit_medium\" title=\"bmgam-cv4_solicit_medium\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1560\" \/><br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nI read some of Jones&#8217; original run as artist back in the day, when he was paired with writer Doug Moench, but I don&#8217;t think I was mature enough to understand what he was doing, which is taking Batman in a completely unexplored artistic direction.<\/p>\n<p>His Batman is literally a &#8220;creature of the night,&#8221; distended and macabre, bearing no relationship to the reality of how human beings look or behave. He inhabits a shadow city that&#8217;s a descendant of the outrageous distortions created by Dick Sprang and others in the 40s and 50s&#8211;the giant typewriters, cash registers, and the like. Except Jones&#8217; Gotham and his Batman are defined by &#8220;gothic&#8221; and exploit that visual style&#8217;s heightened emotional states to dynamic, occasionally disturbing effect.<\/p>\n<p>Jones is a perfect fit for Niles&#8217; script, which leans heavily on the supernatural, the strange, and the horrifying. The total package is a reliable, sumptuous dose of dark, ghoulish Batman every month, and that&#8217;s nothing to be sneezed at.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m a sucker for Batman comics, even half-baked ones, but I don&#8217;t think this Steve Niles\/Kelley Jones maxiseries is half-baked at all. It&#8217;s pretty fully baked. It probably helps to be baked when you read it. I wouldn&#8217;t know. Just a guess.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[10,413,11,116],"class_list":["post-1559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comics","tag-batman","tag-comics","tag-dc-comics","tag-matts-fave-comics-2008"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alertnerd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}