How do you rate the "Hush" story arc?

[paulski]

It was most definitely 'good'. For the longest time, it was the story that was on the tips of everyone's lips.

In fact, I feel it was only the letdown ending that tended to sour people on the story. As much as Loeb might write mostly crap these days, he was on the money for the majority of the Hush storyline.

[Choppa]

Originally Posted by brundlefly

Truth. I think I'm more bothered by other factors associated around Hush than the story itself (which was harmless fluff; more a Jim Lee artwork flip-book than anything).

Hush was hyped as some kind of unnecessary resurgence/resuscitation of the Batman titles, when in actuality it signaled their decline. The story itself was a 90s-Image throwback, all style/no substance, the polar opposite of the great storytelling that we were getting during the preceding 'New Gotham' era. It was then followed by the one-two punches of mediocrity that were the runs of Winnick (Under the Hood) and Lieberman (Hush Returns). Things wouldn't improve in the Bat-books until after Infinite Crisis/OYL with Morrison and Dini. Even now, Hush is inexplicably still recommended as some kind of "jumping on point" for readers, when it should rightly be described as the jumping off point, beginning the dead zone in the Bat-books that existed between the end of the awesome Brubaker/Rucka era and the beginning of Morrison and Dini's runs after IC.

You gotta be kidding me. HUSH signaled a decline that has yet to be undone. Maybe Morrison's stuff is a sign of moving in the right direction, but Robinson, Dini, and all that other nonsense has been terrible.

[Lemurion]

I enjoyed it: though I read it first in the Absolute Edition (I'd got back into comics shortly after it ended). It wasn't great, but it was pretty good and getting an Absolute for about $30 was a good deal.

[brundlefly]

Originally Posted by Choppa

You gotta be kidding me. HUSH signaled a decline that has yet to be undone. Maybe Morrison's stuff is a sign of moving in the right direction, but Robinson, Dini, and all that other nonsense has been terrible.

I disagree. Dini and Robinson's post-IC work on the Bat-books was head and shoulders above the unreadable dreck that Winick and Lieberman produced. Still not back at the quality level of pre-HUSH 'New Gotham' under Rucka/Brubaker, imo, but a definite improvement.

[Lorendiac]

I posted copies of this Poll on 5 forums. Just now I used Excel to add up the numbers from all five of those threads. 331 votes have been cast (including mine). Here's how it breaks down:

Excellent: 19.0%
Good: 34.4%
Medium: 32.9%
Inferior: 10.3%
Bad: 3.3%

Or to put it another way -- a hair under one-third of us think the overall quality was just Medium; a hair over one third of us think it was Good, as in visibly better than average, but not outstanding! The other one-third of us (give or take) are split between those who think it was Excellent -- 5 stars out of 5! -- and those who vote for Inferior or Bad.

Several people commented favorably about Jim Lee's art; some of those voters stated or implied that fond memories of Lee's contributions to the finished product raised their rating of the entire story arc by at least one notch on the Poll! I began to realize that if I had just asked: "How would you rate Loeb's writing on that story -- dialogue, plot twists, resolution of loose ends, etc., and never mind the artwork!" then I probably would have seen rather different results. But it was too late to change course in mid-voyage! (And what the heck -- comics are a visual medium, after all! If Alan Moore's "Watchmen" only existed in script format, with no illustrations whatsoever, I don't think it would be regarded quite so highly as it still is today!)

Now that I've gone to all this trouble, I'm going to indulge myself by reminiscing a bit. I bought the loose issues of "Hush" when they were new on the stands, and I was very disappointed by the time I finished the final issue. I had been hoping all along that various apparent plot holes would be explained away in the last installment . . . and a lot of them weren't! But I found a way to make good use of my disappointment -- by reading the arc later, taking notes on various things which really annoyed me, and adapting those notes into a parody, done in roughly the style of Mad Magazine!

Then I joined a bunch of comic book forums, around the spring of 2004, in order to post my parody in places where many of the prospective readers would actually be familiar with what I was mocking! Some people actually replied in ways which suggested they had not fallen asleep from sheer boredom before finishing it, and that was enough encouragement to make me become a semi-regular participant on various comic book-themed forums ever since! So in a way, you could say I owe it all to Jeph Loeb's ridiculously loose plotting in that 12-part epic!

If you're interested in taking a look at the parody, about five and a half years after I wrote it, so as to see what my major complaints about the plot actually were at the time, it's still available at:

Bratman: Shush (Part 1 of 2)
Bratman: Shush (Part 2 of 2)

[Moses Morrison]

**

Overrated trash saved only by Jim Lee's artwork.