Bat Lash - RIP

As I was starting to collect comics in a big way during my early teens, I had the good fortune to live in a town with a used book store that sold used comics at about half the cover price. (This was before the comic specialty stores proliferated and prices of old comics were higher than cover price.) It allowed me to reach back in time five or six years and buy magazines I'd missed during the time I was focused completely on the Superman family magazines. It allowed me to discover the wonderful experimental comics of the late sixties, especially from DC.

Bat Lash was one of those comics, and I had the further good fortune to find a complete run of the short lived series.

Mind you I have a deep aversion to the western genre because during my childhood we watched television as a family on a single black and white TV, and my father watched all the westerns -- Gunsmoke, Bonanza, the Virginian, the Texas Rangers, etc. It meant I missed the youth oriented shows of the era like Land of the Giants, Laugh-in, and Get Smart. Over the years I tired so much of the formula that I find it difficult to read or watch anything remotely like a western. (The same is true of doctor, lawyer and detective shows, which wore out their welcome in my mind in the seventies.)

What I loved about Bat Lash however was first the lovely, sketchy artwork of Nick Cardy, and second the whimsical nature of the stories. Bat didn't set out to do good. In fact he was generally no good -- self-centered and conceited. He tried to avoid trouble, but trouble kept finding him, and in the process of escaping it, he almost accidentally managed to help out a few folks around him.

I was hopeful that DC's new Bat Lash series might recapture some of that magic. After Sergio Aragones, who was responsible for much of the original tone, was involved, and John Severin was drawing it. John style is much tighter than Nick Cardy, but still he is a master and is particularly adept at westerns.

Unfortunately the six issue mini-series that finished this week is -- in constrast to the original -- leaden and dull. Six issues to tell an origin story that might have filled a few pages if told in the pace of the original series. Six issues sqaundered. Six issues and no fancy, no magic. Now Bat Lash will slip into limbo, perhaps for another forty years, perhaps forever, and the opportunity to revisit all the original fun is lost.

Can someone explain to me how it is possible in an era that in many ways prefers its entertainment to move faster and faster and constantly change, comics and television stretch out simple plots for months and years? Isn't this counterintuitive? Am I the only one who feels cheated?