Crisis in the Basement

The Basement Tapes

The long shadows of Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns" and Alan Moore's "The Watchmen" continue to affect comics in strange ways. It seems more often than not these days that the better writers out there are the ones who balance both the grim and gritty aspects with the bright and flashy ones. James Robinson and Geoff Johns have both renewed my passion for the bright colors and bright attitudes of 1930s and 1940s characters while Grant Morrison and Brian Michael Bendis continue to put those bright characters into dark and ambiguous situations. 'Realism' in comics is only good insofar as it shows both the good and the bad. The transition from Grant Morrison's "New X-Men" to Joss Weadon's "Astonishing X-Men" is probably the best current example of this balance. Morrison dirtied the cleanest characters by making them alive. Weadon, in turn, shows why those characters were clean in the first place.