Review: Batman Hush (DC Compact Comics Edition)
Rondo of Blog - Published: August 6, 2024
People don’t buy comics. Not like they used to, anyway.
It’s been an issue for years, and it’s bigger than that people are uninterested in a given title. The market itself is drying up and publishers are trying to soak up as much cash as they can get on the way down (see: variant covers, increased number of useless one-shot specials, etc.)
But DC’s trying something new! The home of such classic comic book characters as Wonder Woman, Superman, and Batman is now asking the question: What if comics were smaller?
It’s a gimmick, let’s get that out of the way first. Comics have been trying whatever gimmick they think will help a book along for decades, no matter how shallow it might seem on the surface. It’s a lot less drastic than killing Superman for a year, though, so let’s be grateful for moderation.
So this year DC’s been releasing various compact little paperbacks of beloved storylines - they’ve got Watchmen, they’ve got All-Star Superman, and they’ve got Batman: Hush! They also reprinted Batman: The Court of Owls, for some reason. Probably a clerical error.
I kid, but Batman: Hush is by far the one that caught my eye. I read it a while ago with Cluster, out loud and in character as we do, and loved it. It’s easily one of my favorite Batman stories, up there with the likes of Year One, A Lonely Place of Dying, and The Joker: Devil’s Advocate.
I’ve never owned it physically, my initial read-through was courtesy of the excellent DC Universe Infinite streaming service, so getting a copy with the novelty of essentially a Manga’s form factor for $9.99 seemed like a good idea to me.
If you aren’t familiar with the Batman: Hush story but are curious to know, it’s a treat. Rarely does a comic cast such a wide net with its cast, showcasing so many iconic characters from the world of Batman and even the larger DC Universe, and manage to tell a real bonafide story of any substance. Hush doesn’t just settle for surviving the perils of its own ambitions, though, it excels.
To anyone reading that hasn’t read it already, I won’t spoil a word of it. I’ll just say that you can do a whole lot worse than picking this version up. That, or reading it on DC Universe Infinite like I did at first, is perfectly valid. The animated adaptation wasn’t as good, I think, but you do what you want regardless.
As for this compact comic, “cute” probably isn’t the word they were hoping I’d reach for in publishing it but it’s the one that comes to mind anyway. It’s a nice size, feels solid without being too heavy, and the readability of speech bubbles isn’t hurt by the size reduction as much as I feared.
However…
In the comic, as a little flourish, whenever Batman narrates it’s contained in a little box with a blue-to-white gradient over it. It’s, again, cute. But it also, at this scale, sacrifices just a bit of the legibility. Not prohibitively so, I can parse it all well enough without my glasses on if I focus enough, but the reduced legibility is noticed.
Wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit the faults! I don’t think it ruins it, but I wouldn’t blame anyone for whom this is a bigger concern for skipping this version because of that.
DC has also claimed that the stories they’ve selected were picked for being especially good for new readers to pick up. I personally feel that most comics could or at least should work well enough on their own without an encyclopedic knowledge of all that came before it, and that the fear of needing prior knowledge of comics is disproportionate to how much you actually need, but I’ve read a lot of comics so I’m no voice for the non-reader here.
I can’t say with authority whether this story is good enough to read on its own or if what previous continuity is baked into it is just too much for someone who hasn’t picked up a Batman comic before.
Regardless, with Batman: Hush, you still get an excellently-told Batman story that shows how it’s done to all the self-satisfied snore-fests that’ve been printed with Batman’s name on them. It doesn’t content itself with showing off how clever it is, by giving you cheap moments of tension to try and trick you into thinking you’re reading a serious story, it knows how to do comic book storytelling well and it looks fantastic while it does it.
Yes, even at this size, the art is still a sight to behold. It’s really kind of bizarre to look at the art here and think the man who drew it all is now the literal President of DC Comics, but he is! Not only that, but he is an absolutely legendary artist in his own right! Enough can never be said of Jim Lee’s impeccable skill, as not a single line in the script is failed by his pencil.
On another note, in an industry that so often loves to arbitrarily shake up the appearances of various characters to give off the impression that they’re doing anything original whatsoever, it’s refreshing to see Batman look like Batman and to say the same for everyone else in the comic. Even as they’ve enlisted Jim Lee’s help in redesigning various iconic comic book characters over the years, some with famous success like the X-Men, he proves that you don’t need to reinvent the batsuit to love every scene you see the Dark Knight in.
But at the end of the day, could I call this a success? Do I think people will all run to their comic shops and buy compact copies of their favorite stories? I can’t speak for everyone else, and I’m probably not quite the correct audience for this as I’ve bought many comics over the years.
That having been said, I don’t usually buy these paperback collections of stories and I hadn’t bought a copy of Batman: Hush for myself before this. They put this thing out, I bought it, I don’t think I could reasonably argue that they didn’t succeed by at least some metric!
So buy the book, or get a subscription to DC Universe Infinite. Do whatever makes these stories accessible to you! Creators have been putting their hearts into these things for decades, and if this is the thing that gets you to look at this story? Go for it! It’s never too late to read a comic. :)