The setup for Battle Hymn: Farewell To The Golden Age is the stuff of fanfic: obvious analogues for well-known Marvel and DC superheroes are placed in a more realistic world, where morality is always gray, and people are always fallible, even if they wear costumes and have super-powers (or inhabit high political office). I do not mean to insult the creators with this observation. B. Clay Moore and Jeremy Haun are clearly professionals; the work has every bit as much surface polish and pop virtuosity as the best contemporary “mainstream” comic. It’s not amatuer hour, by a long, long shot. I’m just speaking to the apparant motivations and goals of creators, as exposed in the work itself, which seems solely to exist in order to tell a story “tweaking” established superhero characters in various ways (most of them harsh). Of course, by my lights, contemporary “official” comics featuring well-established superhero characters are also fanfic. The average Marvel or DC creator isn’t shy about telling you that his or her motivation for working in the field is to tell stories featuring beloved characters from his or her own childhood, and maybe, just maybe, reinventing them for a new generation. There’s nothing wrong with that, really, as far as it goes. There are far worse things to want to do with one’s life. Besides, the impulse to take a character like, say, Captain America (even if he’s going by the name “Proud American”) and reinvent him in a grittier, more realistic and cynical context, is one that has given us plenty of good stories in the “official” comics (Steve Englehart’s Nixon-era run on the character comes to mind). Marvel and DC would never quite be able to go as far with their icons as Moore and Haun have, though — I can’t imagine Captain America hitting a whore, or even calling her one — which is probably why this book wasn’t published by them, and why thin disguises had to be draped over all the characters. Readers who are familiar with the templates upon which these characters are based (Captain America, The Sub-Mariner, The “Golden Age” Human Torch, The Flash, Dr. Mid-Nite, Hourman, and so on, and so on) will immediately “get” what Moore and Haun are doing. And those are probably the only readers who have any chance of enjoying this book. Unfortunately, those same readers will have seen this kind of thing before, at least a hundred times, since the publication of the seminal Watchmen miniseries by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons way back when. Marvel’s own The Ultimates and DC’s Identity Crisis, to name just two very recent examples, mine similar veins. Even the mostly-happy animated Hollywood hit The Incredibles played with some of Watchmen’s darker tropes.

So, in conclusion: Battle Hymn is a well-wrought and reasonably entertaining example of the grim-n-gritty superhero sub-genre, and a slick piece of professional pop in its own right — but it’s neither original enough, nor an interesting enough variation on familiar themes, to make it recommendable to the hardcore fan, and it relies too much for its effect on a knowledge of existing superhero mythologies to make it something the casual reader would find meaningful or enjoyable. So I can’t recommend it. That is not to say that Moore and Haun don’t have great books in them: they clearly do. I’m looking forward to whatever they put out next.

Title: Battle Hymn: Farewell To The Golden Age
Creators: B. Clay Moore and Jeremy Haun
Publisher: Image Comics
Cover Price: $14.99 (softcover)

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!