2 crampons out of 5

Yeah man.  Who knows what was going on here.

I like Gerard Jones.  He has some degree of old fogey when he’s writing, which made him a good match for the Green Lantern run which introduced me to him, but it’s not so blatant as to be all Chris-Claremont-I-swear-I-know-what-cell-phones-are, but rather it imbues his writing with a sense of age and weight that’s an interesting match for spandex-clad galaxy hoppers.  Fortunate Son has this to some degree, but where it worked for GL, it does not work for Batman and Robin, brushing this off as an “early” Batman story as an excuse for overt father / son roles the leads inhabit is silly.  Fortunate Son could’ve been a bit more digestible if it had just carried an Elseworlds tag, but someone made the call that it wasn’t weird enough for that and so la dee da.

Who’s top on Bats shit list?  Joker?  Penguin?  Nah, it’s a budding rock and roll star who may or may not be being controlled by his manager to live hard and die young, rallying the youngsters into occasionally murderous frenzies while singing some jams that – gasp – Robin is into.  The murderous frenzies are just for overkill.  We rarely get a sense that things are going too off the rails.  Instead this is a loose narrative about different generations’ views on music and how it affects us.  While Bat’s stance seems like the book is taking a firm “rock is evil” stance, the incredible amount of references – visually and in the dialogue – to classic rock and classic punk let us know that Gerard loves his tunes, and is probably up to exploring things in the same type of poetic fashion he used to explore race in “Mosaic.”

Mixing this with Batman is a strange blend, though.  He sounds like no other Bats we’ve read, Year One or pre-crisis or anything like that.  His origin gets a tweak in that it seems partially motivated by being unable to stop Sid Vicious from killing Nancy (for real), and this is all wrapped up in his lumping the power of music in with evil.  We visit Arkham and apparently all the baddies are music fans, quoting their musical heroes and leading us to suspect that they, too, were led down their paths by music.  Top that off with Gene Ha’s particular art style, where everyone seems posed, and costumes sit uncomfortably atop bodies as the extra layers of padding they are, and trying to swallow this as any real part of the DC universe is difficult.

That being said, if you could close your eyes and read it, maybe subtract some of the overt Batmanisms, it does fit in with Gerard’s style and interest.  Purposefully preachy and opinionative to swing us back around to equally opinionative counterpoints, hopefully leaving us with some extremes to bounce our own thoughts between.  It’s not a new topic, but the surreal stream of music lyrics and drawn representations of luminaries keeps it oddly readable, and compelling in a “where the hell is this going?” fashion.  But you can’t read with your eyes closed, and it is a Batman book, and so it just doesn’t make it past the starting gate without seeming pretty silly.  Old folks who don’t read comics might find it interesting.