Atop the Fourth Wall (TV Series)

All-Star Batman & Robin #1 and #2 (2009)

Lewis Lovhaug: Linkara

Quotes 

• Batman : Sleep tight, my ward.

  Dick Grayson : Huh? What's that? What the hell is a ward?

  Batman : Shut up. I'll do the talking here.

  Linkara : Ooh, bat owned.

• Batman : What, are you dense? Are you retarded or something? Who the hell do you think I am? I'm the goddamn Batman!

  Linkara : Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an Internet meme!

• Linkara : Say...

  [looks at his watch] 

  Linkara : It's Miller time. Welcome to Miller Time, a new segment on the show where we chronicle the ever-growing insanity of comic book writer Frank Miller.

• Linkara : And so our first issues ends, and somewhere Bob Kane and Bill Finger are crying.

• Vicki Vale : I'm having a date with Bruce Wayne.

  Linkara : Wait, I can't follow this plotline. Is she on a date or something?

• Vicki Vale : Brutally. Brutally. It was brutal.

  Linkara : So, was it brutal?

• Batman : But first, the kid. Dick Grayson, age 12.

  Linkara : No, you asshole. Don't interrogate him, interrogate the shooter!

• Batman : I knew these cops would take the boy to the gulch, so I set up my sonics. Bats like my sonics.

  Linkara : Personally, I always thought Knuckles was kinda cool, but I haven't played in a while so... what's that? Oh, well I much prefer talking about old Sega games than I do about this.

• Linkara : So only a scant hour from his parents being shot in front of him, Batman announced to Dick Grayson that he'd been drafted into a war. We open the book on a confusing angle of the Batmobile driving up a really tall hill, or a mountain, none of which I knew were near Gotham, overlooking the city below. Frank's schzophrenic writing is in full force here as he begins.

  Batman : From up here, Gotham City is beautiful.

  Linkara : Aw, well isn't that just nice and...

  Batman : Beautiful, like Edgar Allan Poe's sweet Lenore, before her small cough brought a spot of blood to her lip and the poet knew she was plagued. Doomed.

  Linkara : Show of hands, anybody else really freaked out right now?

• Linkara : The narration caption explains who this is: "Vicki Vale, columnist. Bearing witness"; Lewis Lovhaug, comic book reviewer. Bearing the pain of this comic.

• Batman : I guess somebody on the force put out a kill order on me. Cool. It's about damn time.

  Linkara : Ack, how many things are wrong with those sentences? First off, Batman NEVER says cool. He doesn't have to. He's so cool he doesn't need to acknowledge coolness anywhere else, besides the fact that he's too freakin' serious for it. Next, he's never going to be happy that the police are chasing him down. He wants to have a good relationship with the Gotham PD so they don't get in his way when he's trying to take down criminals.

• Batman : There's only one cop worth a damn in Gotham City, and he's nowhere near this case.

  Linkara : What's this? A reference to Jim Gordon in this fiasco? And here I was hoping he didn't exist anymore in Frank's confused little mind. Because there is no way in hell Gordon would ever agree with anything Crazy Steve has been doing here.

• Linkara : Crazy Steve, there's no place in the world that needs you. They need Batman, not the lunatic who's using his name.

• Linkara : In 1985, Frank Miller said that Batman is as good and pure a superhero as you can find. Well twenty years later, he seemed to have forgotten that. The Batman in this book is unheroic, psychotic and at some parts seems pedophilic even.

• Linkara : Dick Grayson echoes my own sentiments as he cracks and then the Batman that Frank Miller wrote, the guy who caught Carrie Kelly in the air and told her she was a good soldier, the guy who once tried to rescue a cat from some shooting police officers, promptly slaps Dick Grayson!

• Linkara : As if Frank suddenly realized that nothing so far has made us want to empathize with the hobo wearing Batman's costume, Dick speculates in his thoughts that Batman is so lonely in his world and that when he doesn't talk, it's so quiet in the Batmobile. More Sin City inspired lines ensue. He sucks air and for a second, it looks like he's got a razor blade stuck between his teeth. Um... eww. Then he talks and it sounds like every word he says is a jagged chunk of glass that scrapes his throat on its way out. And if you ever wanted a reason to not start smoking, kids!