Previous Post > > Personally I think it is an amazing story.I think it helps to take into account the time of its release.At the time Batman NEEDED to be brought back to street level.That book did it. > > > > > > It wasn't like Batman wasn't "Street Level" before this. Previous writers had Batman as the Dark Knight long before Miller decided to give his version. What I meant is that he had lost his street level focus if you ask me.Sure in the 40s we had a street level Batman fighting gangsters,but after the 50s and 60s sci fi campy stuff,and then the 70s Neal Adams supernatural stuff(great stories by the way),it needed to be brought back to the forefront.Year One accomplished that. The unhinged part is correct though.Very true.Batman hasnt been treated the same since Frank got a hold of him.

> What I meant is that he had lost his street level focus if you ask me.Sure in the 40s we had a street level Batman fighting gangsters,but after the 50s and 60s sci fi campy stuff,and then the 70s Neal Adams supernatural stuff(great stories by the way),it needed to be brought back to the forefront. Year One accomplished that.

Well, it's not like they were exactly contemperaneous. After the 70's Neal Adams stuff, there was around 13 years before Year One.

During that time we had a pretty much sensibly grounded Batman, though as magic is a fact of life in the DCU, he did face it a few times, we had a Joker who could be lethal or not as the whim took him, a socially functional Batman, the maturation of Dick Grayson into Nightwing (With Batman being the "proud father" about it rather than raving control freak) and the intro of Jason Todd #1 as Robin #2. A lot of it wasn't terribly memorable perhaps, but it was good solid Batman storytelling.

I was never a huge fan of YO, mostly because of the art, but also because I felt it needlessly messed with Batman's origin because of some need to make him both flaky and relevant, which aren't his most interesting personality traits to me.

I can appreciate that Mazzuchelli has an interesting style, just never one that appealled to me, I found it annoying for example, that his art was so murky (for want of a better term) that it was a matter of some debate at the time as to what ethnicity Catwoman now was.