Metropolis Mysteries and Eye-Popping Body Horror: FUNNYBOOKSINREVEWAREGO!!

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Reboot Shmeboot! Funnybooksinreviewarego!!

Alright. Now it's time to start talking about funnybooks we actually like again.

Not that we didn't enjoy our two-month look at the DC Reboot. That's exciting, heady stuff for fans of super hero fiction, and they even managed to make as much as 10% of the line good enough to spend money on. But while we were focused on the shiny new thing, all kinds of amazing-ass funnybooks hit the stands, and it's time to turn our attention back to those. It'll take a few posts to work through it all, so I figured we might as well start with something current. Something really fantastic and not related at all to the Reboot. Something like... oh, shit...

Action Comics #2
by Grant Morrison and Rags Morales

Okay, so this book pretty much defines the Reboot as far as I'm concerned. Sue me.

I really will get to other stuff tonight. I'll be talking about my three favorite books of the week, and this is the only one that comes from DC. But it's also the only Grant Morrison we're getting right now, so I really can't help but lead with it. Plus, look at this cover:

　

That kills, man! That fucking kills! Has there EVER been a picture of Superman that bad-ass? If that cover doesn't make you want to read this comic, you hate everything good.

(Remember this over-statement. It'll come back again, and there will be a test.)

Three Outta Five Ain't Bad: The DC Reboot, Week One

Say one thing for the DC reboot, it's got me buying more DC funnybooks in September than I've bought in many a moon. How many will I be buying in October? Well, that remains to be seen. We're two weeks in now, and even being selective, very little has blown me away. Of course, as I said when looking over the solicitations this summer, that may not be a bad thing in regards to the wider market.

Or, as Warren Ellis put it: The New DC comics stuff looks so much like stuff I would never read that it oddly fills me with hope that they are targeting the core audience they want. If a 43-year old man looks at most of this promo stuff and goes meh, then that’s very probably a good sign for them.

So there you go. With that in mind, I'll be reviewing each of the new books (the ones I bought, anyway) in two parts: my impressions, and my thoughts on how the book might do with an audience that's... not me. And, since I missed writing about week one in a timely manner due to a vacation, I've got lots of ground to cover. Today we'll deal with the first week's books, and try to get to week two before week three hits the stands this Wednesday. So let's get started with what many people are seeing as the real flagship of the reboot...

Action Comics #1
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Rags Morales

I joked that I'd only be truly satisfied with Grant Morrison's "back to the beginning" take on Action Comics if Superman went after corrupt landlords and threw wifebeaters out windows the way he did in his early adventures. Well consider me truly satisfied, then, because damn if that's not exactly what he does in this issue! Okay, so the wifebeater thing happens off-camera. But I didn't expect it to happen at all, so it counts.

But I'll get to all that. First impressions first. On the surface, this book is a pleasing action-oriented thrill ride that establishes some surprising things about its star. It opens with Superman going after a rich developer named Glen Glenmorgan (the afore-mentioned corrupt landlord), bullying a confession of wrong-doing out of the man, and declaring in no uncertain terms that he has no faith in the criminal justice system. It's quite an introduction, and quite a far cry from the bastion of the status quo we've been conditioned to expect.

Bats, Gods, and Other Assorted Freaks: FUNNYBOOKSINREVIEWAREGO!!!

Lots of really fascinating comics material has come out in the last little bit: Grant Morrison's Supergods, Ray Fawkes' One Soul, Dave McKean's Celluloid, Jim Woodring's Congress of the Animals, the new League of Extraordinary Gentlemen... All great books deserving of in-depth reviews. But honestly? I'm a little too tired from my day job right now to discuss them with the sort of intelligence they deserve. So instead, I think I'll just engage in something we haven't seen too much of around the nerd farm lately: straight-up reviews. That's right. It's that time again: FUNNYBOOKSINREVIEWAREGO!!!

Batman Incorporated #7
by Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham

You knew I had to start with Batman, right?

With all the over-arching plot and mysteries in this book, surrounding not only the evil bad guys' schemes but also Batman's own, it's easy to forget that, really, Batman Incorporated is all about Grant Morrison having fun with some of the goofier aspects of the Bat-Myth. Nowhere is that more clear than in this issue, which is a low-rent re-working of RIP, on the rez, starring Chief Man-of-Bats. It's touching and funny, and embraces the ridiculousness of the character...

Riding. A. Buffalo.

...while still acknowledging the very real problems facing the Native American population. I came away from the issue feeling like Man-of-Bats, for all his limitations, might just help more people on a real, personal level than Batman himself ever has. As Bats himself says, "It doesn't have to take millions... The idea just works."

Grade: A-

Detective Comics # 879
by Scott Snyder and Francesco Francavilla

Decided to give Snyder's Detective run another try, and was impressed. The story, about Jim Gordon looking into the supposed rehabilitation of his son, James Jr, was a tense, low-key little mystery story with a sad and kind of terrifying ending. I did spend much of the story kind of confused, since I was under the impression that James Jr was dead, when he's instead, apparently, a psychopath. The Wikipedia didn't entirely clear things up for me, either; it confirmed his not-deadness, but said nothing about him being crazy. Of course, the same entry (for Commissioner Gordon himself) also fed me some kind of convoluted bullshit about Barbara Gordon not being the Commissioner's biological daughter, which made me want to take this whole weird Gordon family history and chuck it out a window from a very great height. 

Funnybook Battle: Fear Itself vs Final Crisis

Haven't done one of these in a while...

While we gazed ever more deeply into the as-yet-insubstantial navel of the DC Reboot, lots of other stuff was going on in the funnybook world, too. For instance, across the street at Marvel, Matt Fraction has very quietly turned their big event crossover series Fear Itself into something transcendent.

Not transcendent in the way Grant Morrison's Final Crisis was transcendent, understand. That book took the tropes of these big crossover event comics and raised them up, transforming them into something that was at once literary, and mythic on a grand scale. It sent many of its readers into paroxysms of impotent on-line anger in its obstinate insistence on being difficult, and is either the very apex of “event comics” storytelling... or a complete piece of unreadable crap, depending on your point of view.

What Fraction's doing in Fear Itself is neither that ambitious, nor that divisive, in spite of the two series' many surface similarities. He's playing with the same tropes as Morrison, the same end-of-the-world grandeur, and the same mix of myth and literary ambition. He's even using the same exhausting, never-stop-to-take-a-breath “super-compressed” storytelling style (and, frankly, improving upon it by exercising a bit more clarity). But he's doing all that to very different ends.

DC Reboot Round-Up, Part Three: Franchise Free-For-All!

Before we launch off into our discussion of DC’s rebooted “family” franchise titles, a quick aside: The DC brass have been making the rounds, doing their best to sell funnybook retailers on Fall initiatives that are, in part, designed to put those very people out of business. They’ve been facing understandably tough crowds, but in the process it seems a bit of the company philosophy behind the reboot has been revealed.

First and foremost, DC will be all about the action, post reboot. “No more talking heads!” is one phrase they’ve apparently been tossing around. Which, near as I can remember, isn’t something DC’s been doing anyway, but okay. That does seem to be the predominant trend out there in the world of cutting edge pop comics these days, and it’s probably a good model to attract new young readers. As long as you couple that with words like smart, funny, or cool… You’re on to something. Unfortunately, those are NOT words they’ve been tossing around, so… Hrm.

Another interesting tidbit is that they’re aiming the reboot at males between the ages of 18 and 34. Or, in other words, the same people who are buying their books now (or does the average DC Fanboy come in at 40 or above these days?). Actually, to be fair, I’m sure they’re talking about males between the ages of 18 and 34 who don’t already read comics. Which is most likely an achievable market that’s worth expanding into, albeit one in which DC will be facing an awful lot of competition. I would hope, though, that this is just the initial wave they’re talking about here. The market for women and teenaged girls is potentially even more massive, and DC already has properties and publishing lines in place that could be marketed toward them with very little effort, as well. Of course, they’ve marginalized Vertigo sufficiently at this point that maybe that’s not in the cards for them after all…

At any rate. With all that in mind, let’s get back to those solicits, starting with maybe the most important super hero of them all...

Action Comics

The Team: Grant Morrison and Rags Morales

The Premise: Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… Oh dear god in heaven! It’s a MAN!!!

The solicit for this one is kind of sparse on the details, but Morrison himself has said that this book will be telling the story of Superman’s earliest days in the cape, sort of an “angry young Superman” take that looks at how he operated initially in the new history, and how the world responded to their first super hero. It’ll apparently be a slightly more vulnerable Superman, too, one who’s still growing in power as his cells soak up solar radiation, and thus might still be hurt by, say, an exploding shell bursting on his chest.

Perhaps even more interestingly, not long after All-Star Superman wrapped up, Morrison also said that he’d like to do just such a “Year One” take, incorporating the character’s early righteous anger and Depression-era social activism. So I’m hoping we see some wife beaters and evil landlords getting tossed out of windows in this book, or maybe a corrupt politician or two being bullied into public admissions of guilt. But that’s just speculation and wishful thinking.

The Appeal: As a huge Grant Morrison fan, I’m a little biased here, but I’d imagine it would be pretty broad. Morrison’s already shown that he has a rock-solid understanding of the Man of Steel that’s proven popular with Fanboys, intellectuals, and mainstream readers alike. His one weakness in terms of the mass audience is his penchant for complex narratives that require actual thought on the part of the reader. His Final Crisis series, for instance, was so demanding that it drove many Fanboys into a rage. But his recent work has shown him incorporating that sort of thing into stories that still work for people who are only looking at the surface and just like to be wowed by cool ideas.

On the artistic side, meanwhile, Rags Morales is a solid draftsman of the type traditionally assigned to the Superman books. His clean lines and clear storytelling make his work easy for inexperienced funnybook readers to follow, and he has just enough flair that his stuff’s not boring to look at, either. I’ll be most curious to see how well he works with Morrison. Artists with more traditional styles don’t always deal well with the more bizarre ideas he throws at them. I like Rags’ stuff, though, so we’ll see.

At Last! A Long, Rambling Discussion of Batman!

So the nerd wranglers have been givin’ me funny, kinda worried, looks lately. Askin’ me if I was feelin’ okay. They were obviously hintin‘ at somethin‘, but I couldn‘t figure out what. But then, just last night, I found an autographed photo of Adam West on the door to the bunkhouse, and it all fell into place. Nerd wranglers are a superstitious lot, afraid of angerin’ the Funnybook Gods. None of ’em wanna work for a man who forgets what’s really important. And well… I guess it HAS been awhile since our last serious discussion of Batman.

There’s lots of reasons for that, and you could probably track them if you went back and ferreted out all the reviews I’ve done on the run of Grant Morrison’s Batman Inc. to date. But even I can’t see taking the time to do that, and lord knows I love the sound of my own voice. So just let me boil it down for you now: the book’s seemed a little too… obvious thus far for me to really feel the need to dig in and write about whatever deeper meanings and complexities are folded into it. Now, I’ve been trusting that this obviousness is surface only, and that eventually some keystone issue will drop, shedding new light on all these preliminaries and making them much more than the sum of their parts. And, hey presto, it seems that issue dropped just recently, with…

Batman Inc #6
Written by Grant Morrison
Art by Chris Burnham

(And it’s all SPOILER, all the time, from here on out, so… you know… You have been warned.)

Entitled “Niktomorph,” this story really is the capstone for the series’ first arc, the issue that defines the whole Batman Incorporated concept, and what it’s supposed to accomplish. Niktomorph translates roughly as “nightshape,” which is ultimately what Bruce Wayne is building here: an ever-shifting and difficult-to-trace global bat-presence, multiple agents acting as one to fight evil wherever it rears its head. In becoming ubiquitous, he’s also becoming more legendary, spreading the new world-wide Bat-Myth amongst the underworld, using his various agents to generate even more confusion as to who and what the Batman is.

Or, as Bruce himself puts it in the story: “Wayne arrived in Paris, Batmen sprung up … Batman’s in Hong Kong. Batman’s a girl. Batman‘s in Australia … Batman is everything you fear.” He even goes so far as to fabricate (I think?) extreme actions, spreading a story that he tattooed ‘child molester’ onto the forehead of a slave-purchasing celebrity pedophile in Australia. The terror campaign against crime has gone global. Welcome to Planet Gotham.

Something New, Something Different: BATREVIEWSAREGO!!

So I think it’s high time we got back to what’s really important here on the Dork Forty. Our core values. The things we hold most dear, and which really define us as we make our way through this complicated funnybook world. By which of course I mean… Batman.

Batman Inc. #3&4
by Grant Morrison, Yanick Paquette, and Chris Burnham

I must admit, I was a trifle worried after the first two issues of this new series. They seemed so… straightforward, after all. I mean, they pretty much made sense on first reading, and barely rewarded a second with new insights at all. They were fun, certainly, and packed to bursting with cool concepts and rapid-fire action, ala the Mark Millar formula. That would be enough for me on most books. But honestly? For a Morrison comic? Written in his new hyper-condensed super hero style? I felt a little let down.

But as it turns out, I needn’t have worried. Because issues three and four renewed that just-slightly-queasy “Wait, what?!” feeling I’ve come to love so much. This has been a story packed with mythological references, excavated and reclaimed Bat-History, and the opening feint of the first major threat to the Bat-Buddha: Dr. Dedalus, Oroboro, and Leviathan.

Bat-Buddha? Well, yeah. The spiritual journey Bruce Wayne went on through the first two acts of Morrison’s Batman run (the Thogal ritual) mirrors the Buddha’s journey to enlightenment. It mirrors it pretty closely, in fact, and he’s come out the other side with a similar synthesis of identity and purpose. At least I think so. There are also indications that the Thogal may still be going on (“Thogal never ends,” as the monk told him). Issue three’s “Tango of Death” certainly has echoes of it, though I haven’t taken the time yet to go back and see if it corresponds to anything in the actual Thogal ritual. But Bruce is certainly taking actions similar to the ones the Buddha did upon his enlightenment: expounding his personal belief system, gathering supporters, and spreading the good word about the Bat. So until I figure out otherwise, I’m thinking of Bruce as the Bat-Buddha for now. Which amuses me to no end.

SPOILERiffic SPOILERS that SPOIL things... after the jump!

Grant Morrison @ Steve Cook's Alternity

Back in 2002, funnybook scribe extraordinaire and Dork Forty patron saint Grant Morrison performed a dramatic reading, with musical accompaniment by Ysanne Spevack, for the opening of an exhibition of artwork by sometime-funnybook-design-wizard Steve Cook. It's an odd thing, as you'd expect, based on one of Cook's paintings. I'm going to have to listen to it again to fully appreciate it, but on first run-through Morrison seems to be riffing on Britishness by way of American icons and the cosmological preoccupations underlying most of his work. Bizarre and funny and not the least bit afraid of slipping over into pretentiousness (though I think it avoids that for the most part), this really brightened my morning, and so I thought I'd share it along to you, my faithful readers...


Alternity Performance from Temporal An0maly on Vimeo.


Many thanks to Bleeding Cool for posting.

Byrne Victims and Other Dorks of Note: Funnybooksinreviewarego!!

So the funnybook reviews have also fallen prey to my December work and holiday schedule, to the point that the nerd wranglers here on the Dork 40 are starting to give me crap about it. Which means that it must be time once again for some Quickies. But first, a slightly more in-depth look at a book I almost didn't buy...

Next Men #1
by John Byrne

I tried this book in spite of the fact that I've liked exactly nothing John Byrne's written in the last decade. But I remember the series fondly from its 90s heyday, and thought (after debating for a week) that I'd give it a try. Much to my surprise, it's actually pretty good. This first issue is mostly recap, but in this case that might be a good thing. I haven't read Next Men in 15 years, and so the refresher was most welcome.

Getting the series' entire story laid out all at once like this reveals some serious creative missteps along the way, but it also reminds me of something far more important: John Byrne's penchant for applying serious science fiction concepts to his super hero fiction. This was what I liked most about the man's work in the 80s: it often felt like a true updating of the Lee/Kirby/Ditko creative aesthetic, applying a touch of logic and a slightly more adult sensibility to things while still delivering on the high imagination of the originals. It was work that refreshed some already-great characters and polished them up for a new generation of readers. You could see it in his contributions to X-Men, his back-to-basics approach to Fantastic Four, and even his often-forgotten work on Namor. The same aesthetic powers his revamp of Superman, though that is in some ways his weakest work of the period, feeling almost hamstrung by a slightly more kid-friendly approach to the writing.

Batman's Back And There's Gonna Be Trouble

Batman: The Return
Batman Inc. #1
by Grant Morrison, David Finch, and Yanick Paquette

Attention all crime-fighting bad-asses! Batman franchise opportunities are now available!

No, seriously. I mean… Batman just foiled the master plan of the God of Evil and his thematic reflections throughout the history of time itself. What’s he gonna do now that he’s back to his drab work-a-day existence? Go back to protecting Gotham City? Pssh! Hell, no! Gotham’s small potatoes to the Bat now! He thinkin’ bigger! He’s thinkin’ better! He’s gonna found an international brotherhood of crime-hatin’ motherfuckers! A real “Batmen of Many Nations” to protect his new turf: Earth! Or, as Bats himself likes to think of it: PLANET GOTHAM!

That’s the title of the story in the “Batman: The Return” one-shot, and it would have been a far better title for the comic itself. In fact, I think I’ll call it that from here on out. Planet Gotham. It’s a title that sums up Batman’s new crime-fighting philosophy in a succinct and stupid-awesome manner. He’s going global, and he’s not doing it alone. This comes as a direct result of his Thogal-inspired epiphany, his enlightenment to the Truth of the Batman: much as he once liked to think otherwise, he’s never waged his war on crime alone. He’s always had help. So why not reach out? Why not train and fund others to protect their hometowns the way Batman’s always protected his own? Sounds like a natural extension to me. And a great excuse to do a Batman team-up comic, too…

Bat-Finale II: The Next Day

So apparently, I’m a moron. I mis-read something pretty horribly in the finale to Grant Morrison’s Batman saga, something that alters my reading of the story quite a bit. My original reading still works, I think, but not in a way that makes me feel like I can claim any longer to have “nailed it” at all. Ah, hubris! Thy name is Dork!

And I mean it this time. This isn’t something as minor as mistakenly guessing that Alfred was dressing up as Batman, it’s a pretty fundamental breakdown of basic funnybook reading skills. I’m actually kind of embarrassed. But in the interest of honesty (and getting to write about Batman some more), I figured I should probably ‘fess up.

Here’s the crux of it: at the end of Return of Bruce Wayne 6, Bruce rips the Hyper-Adapter-infected future bat-suit off himself, it’s swiftly taken down by the JLA and tossed into a booby-trapped Time Sphere, which then activates and self-destructs. So far, so good. But I read the panels that followed as images of fractured time like the ones we get before and after, caused by the time-shattering effects of the Omega energy built up around Bruce in his trip through time. I thought we were getting some key images of the Hyper-Adapter’s past as it died in the destruction of the Time Sphere.

But then I made a trip to read the discussion of the issue at Rikdad’s Comic Thoughts (always a source of more sober insights than the Circus of the Glib approach we often practice here on the Dork Forty). And following a quick re-read in light of that discussion, it became apparent that those panels weren’t some crazy Morrisonian time fracture, but something much simpler: actual, linear funnybook storytelling. The Time Sphere activates, sending the Hyper-Adapter back in time, but self-destructing as it goes. The next panel shows Dick Grayson’s encounter with Barbatos in the Secret Batcave, with the added detail of the shattering “glass” of the Time Sphere as it breaks up. Then we get a page set back in caveman days, as a flash of light comes out of a cave mouth, followed by Barbatos (and, again, shards of Time Sphere “glass”) as it flies off to meet its death at the hands of Vandal Savage, as we saw back in the first issue of Return of Bruce Wayne.

And that sets up a whole different story than the one I’d been imagining.

Bat-Finale!

Batman & Robin #16
Return of Bruce Wayne #6 (of 6)
by Grant Morrison, Cameron Stewart, Chris Burnham, Frazer Irving, Lee Garbett, and Pere Perez

So I have to admit: I over-thought things on this book. Seriously, I blew it. Morrison’s plot and theme have been so labyrinthine that I got lost in the maze, just another victim of the lit-crit minotaur lurking at its heart. So it is with hat in hand that I come to you this fine evening to admit my critical failure: it wasn’t Alfred in the Bat-Suit after all.

Click to Embiggen

Otherwise, though… I think I pretty much nailed it.

(Oh, and I suppose that now’s as good a time as any to let you know that this post will be ALL-SPOILER, ALL THE DAMN TIME. So stop reading now if you don’t wanna know…)

What was I saying? Ah. Yeah, I think I nailed it. Not in every detail, certainly, but on the whole. Hurt really was trying to take Batman’s place through communion with Barbatos, and didn’t realize that all he was actually doing was taking the place of the Joker as Batman‘s number one arch-foe. Or trying to, anyway. Because, let’s face it: in the field of iconic arch-enemies, Joker has had Hurt badly out-classed from the outset. Sure, Hurt’s a classic “opposite number” villain, and he’s got the weight of history behind him, drawing on all sorts of hurtful minutiae from Batman’s past. But that’s the sort of thing that only matters to comics historians and massive dorks like myself. Joker’s the real deal, the actual antithesis of everything Batman stands for. Plus, his gimmick’s all his own, no previous knowledge of Batman necessary. And he’s way-cool to boot, something Hurt just can’t lay claim to.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?

Again With the Batman!

So I’m gonna do it to you again: here’s a slight divergence from the Halloween festivities because… dude, new Batman comic! But there’s a nice Halloweenie touch to it, as you’ll see below…
Batman and Robin #15
by Grant Morrison and Frazer Irving

With all the heavy extra-textual stuff going on in Morrison’s Batman run, it was refreshing this issue to get more of a straightforward adventure story. Don’t get me wrong; there are still mysteries within mysteries, and super-condensed writing, and yet more pieces to the Dr. Hurt puzzle. But it’s hard for me not to focus on the pure fun aspects of a comic that starts with this image:

(click to embiggen)

See? Halloweenie Goodness!

…and ends with this one:

(Which you can see in all its SPOILERY GLORY… after the jump.)

But Getting Back to Batman...

So all this Halloween talk has been lots of fun, but it’s time today to turn the spotlight back onto what’s really important: Batman. Well, okay… The Batman story I’m going to talk about does have a sect of devil worshippers performing hideous sacrificial rites to summon a demon who’ll give them the secret of eternal life. Plus, it’s got this picture in it:

And that’s pretty creepy, right? So there’s still a strong horror component for Day 18 of the Countdown to Halloween. It’s just wrapped in spandex this time around…

The Return of Bruce Wayne #5 (of 6)
by Grant Morrison, Ryan Sook, and Pere Perez

Morrison takes his “super-condensed” writing style to new peaks this issue, with reams of fascinating backstory packed into a few tantalizingly brief lines of dialogue. He’s also expecting the reader to do an awful lot of heavy lifting on those background plotlines this time out. Which is fine with me; I love doing that kind of work as a reader. Of course, as always with the Moz, it may not be to everyone’s taste. But I get ahead of myself…

And from here on out, we drive directly into the busy heart of Spoiler-Town, so you might not want to hit the jump link unless you’ve read the issue at hand…

Revisiting RIP

So here I am, writing about Batman again. Sorry. I’ll get off this kick eventually, I’m sure. But for now, it’s the best-written funnybook on the stands today, so much so that I’ve been doing research and re-reading to really, firmly unpack all its hidden meanings. And to that end, I’ve just completed a re-read of the “first act” of Grant Morrison’s Batman run, culminating in the “Batman RIP” arc, and including the recently-published “Missing Chapter.” Those two issues add a lot more to the story (and to Morrison’s run as a whole) than I’d given them credit for on first blush, so I thought I‘d come back to them for a few minutes.

In some ways they’re spackle, something to make the final collected edition of all these comics read better. They attach “RIP” to “Return of Bruce Wayne,” and they seem intended give you just enough of the Final Crisis part of the story that you don’t have to read Final Crisis itself to understand the Batman run. In that, I suspect they fail rather badly: if I hadn’t read Final Crisis, I don’t know that “The Missing Chapter” would entirely make sense. But it’s a noble effort anyway, and if you read things in the right order, they illuminate Morrison’s larger plots and themes quite well.

FUNNYBOOKSINREVIEWAREGO!!

So it's been awhile, I notice, since I last discussed my weekly funnybook haulings. Which can only mean that, once again...

FUNNYBOOKSINREVIEWAREGO!!!!

Joe the Barbarian #7 (of 8)
by Grant Morrison and Sean Murphy

As many have noted in the past, Grant Morrison tends to deal with similar (or, okay, identical) themes across several works, often at the same time. Thus, ten years ago, Invisibles and JLA both wound up being about humanity transcending into a higher state of being. Now, having gotten his millennial jones out of the way, Morrison's dealing with the death of his father. We got a preview of it in All-Star Superman, where humanity had to cope with the imminent demise of everybody's dad, Superman. But now, in both Joe and Morrison's Batman work, we're dealing with the aftermath. Not the mourning so much, but the effort of the sons to honor their fathers while still moving forward in their own way. And in that, they're both stories about finding yourself, discovering your own personal mythology and using it to shape yourself into something better: an adult in your own right.

Just, you know. With a lot of kicking.

Grade: A

This Isn't About Batman! (Oh, It Totally Is!)

It's last week's comics today! FUNNYBOOKSINREVIEWAREGO!!!

Batman and Robin #14
by Grant Morrison and Frazer Irving

In this issue, at long last, the real battle of the Batman and Robin series is finally defined. And it's not Joker vs Batman, or Batman vs Dr. Hurt, oh no. Batman, really, is only peripherally connected to things here in his own book. Because, from day one, this series has been all about Joker vs Hurt. Oh, sure. There were Batman-centric stories along the way. And, granted, the series has also been about Dick Grayson learning Batman, and Damian Wayne learning Robin. But the contest that's tied it all together, the competition going on in the background of all that, has been Dr. Hurt and the Joker preparing to fight over Gotham City's soul.

Bat-Myth 101

Still under siege from my real job, but I thought I'd slip in a quick Batman review. Because, hey. It's probably the best comic on the shelves today. How can I NOT talk about it?


Batman #702
by Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel

In the second and concluding part of “RIP: The Missing Chapter,” we get Batman’s own impressions of the events of Final Crisis. Which makes this a sort of “Final Crisis for Dummies,” something that, considering some of the reactions I read to that book, would probably ease the bitter souls of the angry fan-men who didn’t understand it. Except, of course, that they’d then take offense at being called dummies, and get pissed off all over again. So god forbid.

That being the case, this would seem to be a story without an audience. It’s mostly re-cap, after all. Re-cap with artwork that’s mostly not as good as the artwork in the story being re-capped. But I really shouldn’t crap on Tony Daniels’ efforts here; his work has improved a lot, and this is nice-looking stuff in places. If he ever gets better at poses, he’ll be one hell of a mainstream funnybook artist. And that’s not something I ever thought I’d say back when he was Morrison’s primary Batman artist.

But what was I saying? Oh, yes! Story without an audience. Except it’s not. Morrison works a little bit of magic here, using some finely-tuned prose to give us new insights into events we read about almost two years ago. Mostly, the issue is concerned with how Batman deals with facing aliens and gods. They’re hard to prepare for, he says, and he doesn’t like fighting things he can’t prepare for. But he improvises beautifully. Because of course he does. He’s Batman.

There’s also a huge revelation about Dr. Hurt lurking at the end of the issue that ties RIP and Final Crisis together: Dr. Hurt is an echo of Darkseid in the same way that Darkseid was an echo of Mandrakk. They’re three different faces for the same thing, pure evil rippling back and forth across the surface of reality. That’s my reading, at least; I’ve seen others that are pretty convincing. But I like my version best. It allows Hurt to be The Devil (as was revealed at the end of RIP), but ties him to the larger mythic world Morrison‘s writing about. And still makes the story an intensely personal one about Bruce Wayne’s quest for inner truth.

Which probably sounds insane to anyone who hasn’t been reading this stuff, if it makes any sense at all. That’s the problem with writing about Morrison’s Batman work at this late date: it’s maddeningly complex, and the themes and plotlines dovetail into each other at every possible opportunity. My understanding of it is as much instinctual as intellectual at this point, and trying to explain the various layers of meaning is impossible without unpacking the entire four-year run of comics for you. Which is a project I’m working on, but which goes a bit beyond the scope of this review. For now, suffice it to say that I was blown away by this issue. Batman goes cosmic, but remains Batman.

Grade: A

Brokebat Mountain

So my long-time, pre-Dork-40, readers already know this, but for the rest of you... My day job gets pretty crazy three or four times a year, and my funnybook writing slows to a crawl. Late summer/early fall is one of those times, and it's now upon me with a vengeance. So while I won't be abandoning the blog completely over the next month, the entries will probably be a lot shorter. Which brings me to today's post about Cowboy Batman...