NERRRRRD! vol. 109: RIP Denny O'Neil

Legendary Batman writer, Denny O'Neil dies at age 81

now this one hurts.

i remember when i was 6 years old my dad bought a copy of the 50 Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told. this was the summer of 1989, known colloquially as the Summer of Batman. we weren't allowed to see the film, as my mother felt it looked "too scary", so the trade paperback had to satisfy my tingling bat-sense. i spent almost the whole summer with my eyeballs fixated on the pages of that collection, which spanned the book's then 50 year history. i found something to like about all the eras, but when the collection began to cover the 70s - 80s iteration of the character and his world, something shifted. it was darker... more menacing and mysterious... more words on the page that i didn't all together understand, but i read until i did.

these were of course the works of Denny O'Neil (with the art of Neil Adams).

when i finally got to see Tim Burton's film upon its holiday-timed video release, i of course liked it as everyone my age did, but it didn't command my attention the way that the comics had the months prior. it had its moments, but it still felt beholden to the campier aspects of the TV show that never really resonated with me.  this pattern of reaction would reprise itself with each subsequent iteration outside of the comic book medium.

so i dove deeper into the comic book milieu, acquainting myself with as many of the corners of these universes i could, training my sight to keep an eye peeled for certain names, Denny O'Neil being one of the most prominent on that list.

the seismic impact of his contributions to Batman are innumerable, but his work on the Question remains my personal favorite, as well as his time the Shadow, which paved the way for enfant terible Howard Chaykin's overlooked deconstruction of the character, which was then followed by Bill Sienkiewicz's reliably warped hypnagogia (early exposure to these iterations made my disappointment with the 1994 Shadow film was infinitely more immense and unbearably more naive than my bugaboos with Batman, but i digress).

O'Neil brought the superhero narrative back to its penny dreadful roots, fusing film noir atmosphere with Jungian pathos indebted to gothic horror and monstrous tragedy, all while indulging in the gonzo terrain of unfettered imagination that can only be actualized within the panels of a comic book, never losing balance.... never slipping into nihilistic cynicism or lapsing into saccharine overkill.... never insulting the the intelligence of the reader or pandering to their near-violent entitlement.

simply put; he made this shit feel cool. 

RIP