If thewe’s one fing I weawwy wuved about —
Okay, that’s gonna get on your nerves and mine really quickly, isn’t it? Let’s start over.
I won’t kid you; when these DC/Looney Tunes crossovers were first announced, I was scratching my head a bit. Some of the team-ups (Marvin The Martian and Martian Manhunter, for instance) made more sense on paper than others (I’m looking at you, Bugs Bunny and The Legion Of Super-Heroes), but at five bucks a pop, they were going to have to offer something more than an intriguing novelty to get my money. The just-released Batman/Elmer Fudd Special #1 certainly meets that criteria by featuring an “A-List” creative team — Tom King on scripting chores, Lee Weeks on art — and a damn nice-looking cover, so what the hell, right? You only live once, and if you’re as broke as the average comic book collector, you gotta take your adventure where you can find it. I decided to give it a shot.
To call this a “pleasant surprise” would be an understatement. It’s no secret that I’ve been less than impressed by most of what King’s been serving up since taking over as scribe on the regular Batman series, but freed from the tight editorial strictures that no doubt sway his hand (and steer his plotlines) in those pages, he does something here that he by and large hasn’t been able to do there — he has fun. His iteration of Fudd is a less-than-fearsome assassin, the classic down-on-his luck noir anti-hero, and Weeks’ always-stylish art, combined with Lovern Kindzierski’s dripping-with-atmosphere colors, conveys the mood and tone of the far-less-absurd-than-you’d-think premise perfectly from page one onwards as our dual protagonists converge toward a surprisingly touching confrontation for the heart and, perhaps, hand of Silver St. Cloud. It’s simple, straight-forward, and admittedly derivative stuff (right down to the big “twist” that’s really nothing of the sort), but who can argue with even the most time-worn tropes when they’re executed this well? Certainly not me, especially in a book littered with this many gratuitous references to Fudd’s own WB animation “universe.”
Oh, yeah — Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Michigan J. Frog, Foghorn Leghorn, ACME, carrot juice, Marvin The Martian, The Tasmanian Devil, Sylvester, and probably one or two other characters/things that I missed are all present and accounted for here, and almost always in ways you’ve never seen them before and never will again. One would think a mash-up of Raymond Chandler and Chuck Jones either wouldn’t or shouldn’t work, but damn — it does. And rather beautifully, at that. Throw in a fun little backup strip told in “classic cartoon” style by King and artist Byron Vaughns and what you’ve got is a comic that hits all the right notes, at all the right times, for fans coming into this from either end of Warner Brothers’ sprawling entertainment empire — hell, maybe even for folks who aren’t all that crazy about either one but just enjoy a good (make that very good), old-fashioned slice of detective fiction peppered with a healthy dose of the absurd.
I’ve been far less enthusiastic about the “DC Rebirth” initiative than most, but I have to hand it to ’em — they’re hitting far more than they’re missing with their cartoon revamps/adaptations these days. Mark Russell and Steve Pugh’s recently-concluded revisionist take on Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones was the best thing to come out under the publisher’s auspices literally in years, and the Batman/Elmer Fudd special can stand proudly alongside it in terms of high-quality, pitch-perfect, obvious labors of love. I could go on and on about this book’s merits for who knows how long , but hey — why do that when it’s just as easy, and probably for more effective, to just say “that’s all, folks!” and call it a day? Buy this comic now — that’s all, folks!
Tags: Batman, Bob Fingerman, Byron Vaughns, Comic Books, Comics, DC Comics, Lee Weeks, Looney Tunes, Lovern Kindzierski, Tom King
No Comments