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The floppies are where my love of comic books lie. Hardcover collections, Absolute Editions, and deluxe hardcovers are all well and good, but there's nothing like the going to the shop and picking up on a story where you left off the month previous. Sometimes though, a story is simply better suited to be read in one sitting - and Kevin Smith and Walter Flanagan's three issue mini-series, Batman: Cacophony, is testament to that. In its initial release last year, I found myself enjoying the first issue - if not a bit taken aback by some curious character treatments from Smith - but as the series went forward, I began to loathe reading it. I felt that the pacing was all wrong, characters were uneven, and the tone changed midway through the story.
However, when I revisited the tale in the form of this nifty little hardcover, my opinion changed. Admittedly, I'm the type of comic reader that has so much on his plate, often times my "to read" stack gets piled high with months worth of titles to catch up on. And while I'm of the mindset that a good story will stay fresh in my mind regardless of the time I spend away from it, perhaps Cacophony would have benefited from a re-read before I read the subsequent issues. Reading it straight through, I found that the story is not thematically fractured as I had remembered, but instead entirely cohesive.
Cacophony finds Batman caught in the middle of a vile gang war between an escaped Joker and C-list rogue Maxie Zeus, who has turned Joker's signature poison into Gotham's new designer drug. Along with dealing with his age old enemies, a third party enters the fray in the form of Kevin Smith's own creation from his run on Green Arrow, Onomatopoeia, and Batman is left dealing with figuring out what role the newcomer plays in the events unfolding before him.
Originally, I chastised Smith for starting out with what I thought was an exploration of his Onomatopoeia villain, and being unable to resist the urge of exploring the oft-explored Joker/Batman dichotomy. Instead, I found that relationship to be the point of the entire mini-series all along. From the Joker's initial appearance in the book to his last, the story comes full circle, paying off in a cleverly written dialog between Batman and Joker. Though the lasting effect has nowhere near the potency of something like The Killing Joke (referenced by Smith himself as a direct influence to write a Batman tale), the end result is still a thought-provoking look at what these two characters mean to each other; perhaps Smith sums it up best with Joker's best line when talking to Batman: "I don't hate you because I'm crazy. I'm crazy because I hate you."
