Over the last three years, comic book fans have already acclimated themselves to the reality that All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder is only ever going to show up when Frank Miller and Jim Lee get around to finishing an issue, but now they’ve got to wait an extra two weeks for #10—as Heidi MacDonald reported Tuesday, DC Comics asked retailers to destroy all the issues they’d received for selling this week, because the black ink used to mask out all the profanity in Miller’s script was a different shade than the black ink used to letter the dialogue, which meant that not only does Batgirl run around calling herself “the f—ing Batgirl,” but the drug dealers she’s beating up refer to her by a word you’ll frequently find in Mamet. (This in a comic where, several issues back, one title character introduced himself to the other as “the goddamn Batman,” a phrase that has since entered the fandom argot.)
Variety comics blogger Tom McLean notes that issues of the comic which were not destroyed are already rating bids of $150 on eBay… for a comic that was to have cost $2.99. And Valerie D’Orazio raises a critical point about the potential blowback of the way in which work like Miller’s has been published and marketed, which one might summarize as: WTF, DC?
(artwork via Lying in the Gutters)