Grant Morrison's Batman: Annotations and Remarks

Batman and Robin 4

2010-01-02T06:53:00.001-08:00

Spoiler Alert: I'm posting this three issues behind schedule, but just in case you're one of those "trade-waiters,"* be warned. Don't read along.

* If you made a portmanteau of “trade-waiter,” phonetically you would get the word “traitor.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Buy floppies.

Cover: Morrison makes no secret of his plans to continue the “doubling” motif from early on in the run (practically ubiquitous in the Club of Heroes arc). All of the “new” characters seem to spin off of old ones. Last issue, Morrison played Professor Pyg as a kind of Joker clone. In this one, Jason and Sasha are depicted as an aberrant outgrowth of the original Dynamic Duo concept (superheroes aren’t supposed to “grow up”). Even Dick and Damian are just stand-ins until the real Batman and Robin return.

All of these knockoffs flitting about the run, to say nothing of the exorbitant amounts of “homage” paid, one might accuse the writer of getting lazy in his old age, going back to the well a few too many times. But the God of All Comics has an answer for this also:

[Plagiarism] is democratic because everyone can plagiarize... The text takes on a whole other meaning when passed through a plagiarist. (Source, although to adhere to Morrisonian principles, I probably shouldn't be citing one)

“Plagiarism is democratic,” eh? Maybe I should spread the word around campus.

Page 1: Grim ‘n’ gritty straight away. Dig those muddy color blobs. You’d be forgiven for trying to return your copy to the LCS, thinking that the owner must've left it out in the rain.

Lightning Bug reminds us of another villain wreaking havoc in the batbooks around the time of this issue’s release: Garfield Lynns, the Firefly.

Page 2: He really can’t spare like three seconds to zip the duffel bag? All that money could have paid for the cybernetic enhancements to Quitely’s drawing hand that would have enabled him to finally get a book out on time.

Page 6: While the Hood professes to operate under higher principles of retributive justice - “let the punishment fit the crime” - it seems evident from Scarlet’s Twittering in panel 2 that there’s something disingenuous about the Dour Duo’s crime-fighting enterprise. Later, Jason's media-whoring becomes even more pronounced, when he shares with Scarlet his grand designs for the expansion of the Red Hood brand name, and explains the litany of maxims he recites as slogans he hopes the media will latch onto.

Page 7: The fact that the Lightning Bug landed on a fire truck is, I believe, meant to convey the devil-may-care attitude the Red Hood brings to his fight against crime. Unlike Batman and Robin, who will only bend the rules on occasion, Scarlet and the Hood openly break the law, in this case, “breaking” being somewhat literal.

Page 8: “Vengeance arms again his red right hand.” The line is from Milton, and while the verse from which it was drawn is much too long to reprint in this blog, here at least is the sentence:

Should intermitted vengeance / Arme again His red right hand to plague us?

The “red right hand,” as in the Bad Seeds groove of the same name, embodies the Judeo Christian God’s wrath, and the appearance of this Paradise Lost line in B&R #4 marks a resurgence of religious themes that had lately vanished from Morrison’s run.

I’ve made the point elsewhere in these annotations that Morrison interprets Bruce Wayne as a Christ figure, a representative of the New Testament God. The link from the Red Hood to the Hebrew God of the Old Testament seems to strengthen that argument, reinforcing the Biblical connection by projecting the contrast between Bruce and Jason upwards, onto an allegorical plane, where it becomes a contrast between two versions of “God.”

Since we’re being honest (and we are, aren’t we? That tie looks hideous), let me just say that I’ve come to detest theological allegory in fiction. It’s been done to death. By now, all of that Biblical thundering just seems like a halfhearted effort to supply one's work with a pretense of depth (see Troy Duffy’s The Boondock Saints). Plus, nothing blows subtlety out of the water quite like a blast of self-important religious symbolism. Morrison handles it well enough here, don’t get me wrong; it just rubs me wrong is all.

Page 10: In Batman RIP, Dr. Hurt made it his personal mission to scandalize the Wayne family name. He disseminated forged documents and doctored photographs to the press that implicated the Waynes in criminal acts ranging from drug abuse to murder. The media – in particular, the commercial media – seems to be a recurring theme (or perhaps a recurring target) in this arc, with the Hood looking to promote his brand name and later with "El Penitente" modeling his criminal machinations after certain schemes in marketing. The “message,” if we should be so gauche to believe that there is one, may be to avoid buying into the hype, although I haven’t read all three issues yet, so time will tell.

“And his odd behavior of late,” seems to be a nod to Dini’s Streets of Gotham, where Thomas Elliot is impersonating Bruce Wayne, yet the reference is sufficiently vague that Morrison could have just thrown it out there without having seen any of the other titles in the line, content in the faith that someone, somewhere was writing the alibi for Bruce Wayne's disappearance.

The ice sculpture in the background of the bottommost panel suggests that the party is a charity benefit for the Gotham City Police Department.

Page 11: Sexton’s backstory parallels that of Michael Lane, the Third Ghost of Batman, whose family, you’ll recall, was butchered by “Satanists” in the employ of Dr. Hurt. Lane is presently occupied in his own title Azrael, however it seems entirely plausible that Sexton would be yet another victim of the doctor’s experiments with “motivational trauma,” experiments he was conducting in a failed attempt to create an army of “Batmen.” Sexton's renown as a sleuth (remember that Batman is "the world’s greatest detective") and his time on the police force (more on that in a second) seem to bolster the theory.

“Mr. Graysons’s an EX-POLICEMAN himself.” The commissioner’s choice of words tells us that Sexton is also a retiree from the force. This is significant because Dr. Hurt drew his human test subjects from the police department.

Gordon’s remark also alludes to Dick’s time as an officer in the Bludhaven PD circa No Man’s Land.

Here’s David Uzumeri’s info on the “Gravedigger’s” name:

“Oberon” is the king of the faeries in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that sets in motion the series of misunderstandings that provide the comedy, while a “sexton” is a church officer in charge of a graveyard (which is appropriate, since his nom de crimefighting is Gravedigger).

Page 12: Not sure what the Hood plans to do with that Kirby tech, or what looks like Kirby tech, in the foreground of panel 1.

The frankly revolting speech the Hood has planned for the press evokes the old “tire tread on burst stomach,” Rorschach’s journal, the quintessence of grim ‘n’ gritty in comic books.

Page 15: Damian makes the third hooded figure in this issue. Just taking a shot in the dark here, “hood” relates to “pulling the wool over one’s eyes,” blindness or maybe deception to take form as a theme later on in the arc. We do have a lot of shadowy figures skulking around these pages.

The costume motif manifests in a second way as well. Notice the red lenses in Batman’s night vision scope. The Hood’s red visor would likely have the same effect on his vision, and likewise, Scarlet’s red goggles and the red shades concealing Oberon Sexton’s eyes. All of these crimson eyepieces cause the wearer to “see green,” so maybe Morrison has something to say about jealousy, although again, I’m simply guessing. It’s probably too soon to tell.

Page 17: Hooded Figure #4. “Santo’s” cowl resembles the one worn by real life penitents in Spain. I would link you to a picture, but I find these guys terrifying, so you’ll have to Google them for yourself. They look just like the mother fucking Klan!

“Flamingo” marks another entry in what is fast becoming a BatRob tradition of villains with childish gimmicks and horrifically violent MO's. We’ve seen this bird before too, in Batman 666, although in that one he’s dispatched effortlessly by Batman Junior with a single throwing star.

Page 18: “The new model of crime is grass roots, viral.” Coincidentally (or maybe not), the most expansive viral marketing campaign in recent memory was the promotion of The Dark Knight, wherein participants worldwide were challenged to partake in scavenger hunts and costumed foolery in a wide-scale effort to hype the film’s release. Given the movie’s billion dollar box office gross, I would say the campaign was pretty successful. Steering this back to Batman and Robin, if Penitente plans to use viral tactics in his criminal enterprise, then Gotham City is staring down the barrel of some serious trouble.

“In the 21st Century, crime will be the new social order,” Santo’s prophecy is realized Batman 666.

Advert on the Page Before Last: The exaggerated expressions on Atrocitus and Earth-2 Superman’s faces just give me the titters. RRRRAAAARRRR!!! See, this is the kind of goodness you turncoats miss out on when you wait for the trade.

That's it for this time. I should be able to turn out the next one within a week or two. Till then, adios, to God, as El Penitente might say.

I YET LIVE: UPDATE

2009-12-28T16:38:00.000-08:00

After months of absence, as the new year fast approaches, I've at last gotten around to updating the blog's... ENGRISH. Trudging through the archives I came across a number of foggy sentences and mysterious metaphors whose intended meanings I could only begin to guess at, and this coming from the guy who wrote them in the first place. Seeing as "morrisonbatman" is an annotation site, whose stated goal is to dispel textual difficulties, this simply would not do. So I edited the previous entries for clarity, and believe you me, it was no small feat. As anyone who's had the displeasure of revisiting his or her past writing can attest, it is an experience that can only be summed up as unmitigated agony. The process, or better yet “the ordeal,” digs up feelings of shame, guilt (since you realize someone else had to read that shit that you wrote), and inadequacy and then rolls them up into a handy cannonball to be fired at your self-worth. Not kidding, during the days of the edit, I had to swear off the blogosphere completely, since I couldn't bear to read the unbridled eloquence of site masters like Jog and Tucker Stone. Doing that would inevitably lead to self-comparisons where my writing came up woefully short. Of course, I couldn't quit the Internet entirely (it's practically 2010, who could?), so I stuck mainly to professional sites (ok, porn), whose writing I could pretend was handled exclusively by robots. Can’t expect myself to compare to robots, now, can I?

This entry is rapidly degenerating into a how-to discourse for depressives looking to revise their past writing, and that isn’t what I want. I just want for you readers out there to bear with me. I’m not a writing major, nor does my field necessitate the use of literary English in its scholastic discourse. So when I submit a barbarous sentence or ten to the site, please try to give me some latitude. Try to see through the words I’m (ab)using to the points I’m making about Morrison’s text. It’s the content of the annotations more than the style of their phrasing that comprises the heart of the site (although morrisonbatman is very much an experiment in writing for me as it is in close reading). And besides, now, after the edit, the phrasing is improved at least 0.63 units over before! (scale from 1-100)

I realize that this is not the update readers of the site were looking for. I promise you though; in front of me now sits the first Philip Tan issue, which I will get cracking on today. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll grind out the annotations for the next two issues, and that should put us right back on track, since B&R #7 (with pencils by Cam Stewart, YES!) doesn’t come out until the end of January. Till then, wish me luck.

Figure 1: Me hard at work bringing you annotations.

Batman and Robin 4_

2009-09-18T06:35:00.001-07:00

I talked your ears off last issue so let's just dive right into the annotations, shall we?

Haw, haw, fooled ya. I actually won't be getting around to this for a while - and by "a while," I mean that #5 might be out by the time I do write these up - but fortunately, FunnybookBabylon has resumed their annotative duties, so if you're reading with this face on, you're not quite shit out of luck yet.

Also, in the meantime, you should check out frequent commenter RetroWarbird's new blog, where he discusses Freud, classic cinema, ancient religions, and some retarded paper cartoon or something where a child abuser dresses up like a cave mammal and beats the shit out of other guys in fruity costumes. Seriously, it's good stuff, so give him a read.

Batman and Robin 3

2009-08-29T08:59:00.000-07:00

Well, well.

The Bat-Craft is banging on all cylinders now. Morrison distilled the fuel. Quitely lit the engine. Sinclair... painted the exterior? I can only stretch my metaphors so far before I get procrustean, you know?* Anyhow, BatRob #3. It's quite a good'n. Morrison here sort of skates the edge between hellish and hilarious, Professor Pyg giving form to the Adam West / David Lynch collision promised in interviews. Also to this end, the creative team treats the reader to a dance number from Hell, which in spite of its sheer nastiness, displays an impressive command of body language on Quitely's end. When Pyg presses his snout into Damian's face, buzzsaw in hand, you as the reader can breath a sigh of relief that in this cabaret, you're perched comfortably, or perhaps uncomfortably, in the audience.

Now what else did I like? Ah, the panels. I neglected to mention this in the last one, but the way Quitely jags the panels when the crazy ratchets up creates the effect of watching the action through a funhouse mirror, and this, of course, comports quite nicely with the circus motif. It would've been interesting to see if Quitely would continue this flourish now that the troupe has all been jailed or killed, but alas, we won't know till 2010.** The action itself too, Quitely unfolds with a characteristic flair for storytelling. One of his biggest strengths as an artist lies in the fact that he never swaps out story for fighting. To show what I mean, I've scanned in some pages from another recent Bat pamphlet, Batman Confidential #32 with pencils by Andy Clarke.

Looking at the above, it seems that there's one style of wide shots that indicates things happening and a very different style entirely which is reserved for people fighting. Compare this with the following BatRob #3 free-for-all.

In contrast to Clarke's extreme close-ups***, Quitely keeps the shot wide and apprises us of each character's movements. One listless Dollotron lumbers to deface a victim who is no longer there. Professor Pyg, rising from the ground, struggles to throw Robin off balance. More Dolls swarm in from all sides. Here we see that both "things happen" AND "people fight."

Nowhere is that formula more manifest than in the "dual punch," Professor Pyg knockout sequence. It's an iconic scene to be sure that hearkens back to the first issue, but Quitely doesn't use that as an excuse to arrest the story. If you scan to the far right of the panel, you'll see two gloved hands reaching out towards Batman and Robin, signaling another attack from the dolls. In some sense, Quitely's rendition of the scene is much more honest than a typical rendering (sans the hands) because it shows that the world outside the centered action of the panel did not, in fact, freeze for Batman and Robin to do something awesome. It simply progressed as natural, and when you think about it, in comics, that is a rare thing.

All of this highlights the reasons why Frank Quitely is an artist tailor-made for Morrison's writing. Both are concerned, preoccupied even, with expressing the greatest amount of story in the smallest amount of space. And yes, believe it or not, this comic was written as well as drawn, so I suppose I ought to make some effort to address that too, eh?

Way way back in 2008, I denounced with much vim and vigor a certain snarky little cock knocker who was out masquerading as the son of Bruce Wayne. This impostor hooligan-child accosted Alfred the Butler, raped my childhood, and roughed up MY Robin, the REAL Robin! How could DC reward this vandal with a starring role in his own comic book when they have yet to publish my Continuing Tales of AnnoMan which I submitted to their doorstep one rainy night two summers ago?! It's utter fucking brigandage, I tell you. It redefines wrong.

While I don't regret anything I've said about him in the past (Damian, not Morrison), it certainly seems that over the past few months, Morrison has come a long way in finding this character's voice. Damian has gone from a petulant, unlikable dipshit in Batman and Son to a bright and brutal wit with emerging shades of nobility. His pitch perfect characterization in this issue - "So we're agreed. It's Robin and Batman from now on." - has endeared the Damian character greatly to me, so much so, in fact, that now I'd be sad to see him go.

Another pleasant surprise in Batman and Robin #3 arrives in the form of a proper conclusion. For the first time in... God knows how many months since the Black Glove storyline began, Morrison delivers a complete arc that imparts a sense of much-needed closure on the reader, even fulfilling a long-hanging plot point introduced as early as Batman 676 over one year ago. It's comic book closure, of course, "to be continued," Morrison wouldn't be fool enough to tie all his loose ends just as Batman and Robin's big draw departs (see "jumping-off points"). Still, by the issue's final page, Damian and Dick ("Robin and Batman") have discovered a mutual respect for one another, Commissioner Gordon has eased into the new status quo, and Professor Pyg is tucked safely away in... some kind of oversized filing cabinet, I'm not so sure about that, actually.

Unfortunately, the issue just ducks under perfection in that it suffers a bit from Morrison's shorthanding techniques. While it may seem strange, my faulting Morrison on the very thing for which Quitely bagged my recognition, that is, economic storytelling, but with the artist, as I mentioned before, the efficiency is in service of the story, specifically its emotional weight. There is a certain emotional impact left when one absorbs the whole scope and spectacle of a battle in one single glance, which ceases to be left when the battle is broken into discrete packets.

However, with Morrison, his efficiency borders on impatience and seems almost tuned against the visceral resonance of his story. One really unsettling scene transition guarantees to disorient the reader, filling his mind with questions that distract from the core plot and, what's worse, may never be answered. Whose shop is this that Batman's breaking into? How did he find this Dollotron? For what purpose do the bad guys call attention to themselves? In fact, the whole disease sideplot seems shoehorned in to dial up the drama and sell Professor Pyg as something more than just the psycho of the week. By and large, it comes across as too little and too late.

That said though, these minor complaints don't ultimately add up to much against the otherwise phenomenal launch for this series. Quitely's leaving, yeah, but don't jump ship just yet. I get the feeling that we're thrusting toward even cooler shit ahead.

Notes:

* Actually, if you want to witness this phenomenon in action, refer yourself to the Cobblepot scene in the latest issue of Batman: SoG. Therein, you'll find the Penguin pairing each insignificant ongoing of his life to a unique species of bird. It's very funny in a sad sort of way.

** As I'm sure you're well aware by now, Frank Quitely will be replaced this coming month by the early Image stylings of Philip Tan (seriously, his pencils could interleave seamlessly with Jim Lee's, no one would notice), continuing DC's trend of following up an A-list artist with C-list counterparts. Now, I have nothing against Mr. Tan. I found his work adequate if a little muddy (I think that the coloring didn't help) on Final Crisis: Revelations. It's just that, could you imagine a visual approach farther removed from the aesthetic of Frank Quitely? Tits and biceps are great and all that, but this seems comparable to Frank Miller filling in for, let's say, Scott Adams on Dilbert. The transition will be fucking jarring. And a rough transition just seems so unnecessary when DC has a slew of artists available to them whose styles would be infinitely better suited to follow Quitely's visuals. Then again, Patrick Zircher used to make pictures like THIS, until he worked with Fraction and started making pictures like THIS, so... hope springs eternal for Philip Tan I guess. Actually, bump that, let's just get Patrick Zircher to pencil this book.

*** I realized after scanning that I wasn't playing entirely fair making an example of this Andy Clarke sequence, as Milligan's script most likely calls for the face of KGBeast to be obscured. Working under a constraint like this would obviously make the scene-encompassing wideshots we're discussing difficult to pull off, but nonetheless, I think it's fairly endemic of superhero comics to stage fight scenes in a close-up, one-action-per-panel format. In other words, you'd usually have something like this -- Panel 1: Spider-Man kicks the Goblin (Norman) in the face, Panel 2: Harry picks up a pumpkin bomb from the floor, Panel 3: Mary Jane yells from the doorway "Harry, no!" -- whereas in the Quitely approach, all three of these actions might be consolidated into a single, wide-screen panel.

UPDATE: HOLY CRAP CHECK THIS SHIT OUT RIGHT NOW!
UPDATE 2: Check out the comments in that link for an expounding of the Alan Moore connection in BatRob #3. Cliff Notes: Pyg = Joker, Kidnapped Damian = Kidnapped Gordon, Cabaret = "Looney, like a lighbulb battered bug!," and the Red Hood shows up! Brilliant!

Page 1: After the unveiling of the new Quad-Bat last issue, Batman, we see, has piloted the monstrosity back over to police HQ, where he has hogtied the villain Phosphorous Rex. Each member of the Circus of the Strange so far has been subject to Batman's hardcore interrogation techniques. I wonder if this is to prove that the new Batman's "still got it," or if it will become a recurring theme.

Page 2: Notice the taxi top light Rex plows into and how the Quad-Bat races into oncoming traffic. Evidently, Dick-Bat doesn't dick around.

Page 3: "They'll kill us all." It's true. They bumped off Toad last issue and he didn't say nanti. How do you think the squealers will fare?

I hope I'm not the only one whose head this shot over in the first two issues, but basically, Professor Pyg has been peddling some strange drugs to Russian people traffickers that, once ingested, erase the user's identity (making his or her mind like that of the dolls). Vials of this drug, I believe, constitute the mysterious contents of Niko's sports bag at the end of the first issue. Now, Pyg is positioning his dolls to unleash this poison on the city, and it falls to Batman and Robin to save the day (awesome). I might be grasping at straws, but I don't think it's a coincidence, Morrison phrasing the effect of the compound as "identity-destroying" and the drift of the arc being Damian and Dick's defining themselves as Batman and Robin.

Page 4: Professor Pyg's ramblings may be a nod to the "Tearoom of Despair" or the "Delirium Box" from Doom Patrol.

Mormo, at least according to Wikipedia, is not a goddess of formless chaos.

Page 5: Tiamat, on the other hand... In Babylonian cosmology, the goddess Tiamat embodies what would later be called the ether, a circumambient substance without form. She is slain by a great storm and splits into sea and firmament (the sea above) which is bolstered by a pillar of divine craftsmanship. If the story sounds familiar, its probably because the same thing happens in Genesis, except with God taking on the role of the storm.

"Tohu va bohu" translates from Hebrew to "formless and empty" (maybe). Sigh. I get discouraged when the annotations turn into me acting as a mouthpiece for Wikipedia.

As you might have guessed by Pyg's description, Medusa is a gorgon queen. The visage of a gorgon was thought by the Greeks to possess apotropaic powers and as such appeared in statues, vases, and coats of armor, safeguarding their owners against the touch of evil. Two panels down we see Professor Pyg's modern incarnation of a gorgon sculpture.

But before that, the professor makes some eerily premonitory comments which preambulate the circumstances of his undoing in 666.

Pwn'd.

Being a vulgar prole beyond the hope of rescue, I'm probably way off-base here, but would Pyg's effigy of the evil goddess be an example of Dadaist sculpture?

Page 9: Pyg has synthesized the drug into a contagion that spreads through the air in the Dollotron's immediate vicinity. (i.e. "like a flu").

Also, look closely at the detritus flying through the window and you can make out the word "crash."

Page 10: We met Sasha before in issue #1. Here in issue #3, she's undergone the exterior changes of the Dollotron procedure, though her mind remains to be wiped. The comely young lass being manhandled in the second-to-last strip is none other than Sasha's father Niko. We've met him before too, when he was rolling on spinners with Mr. Toad in the first wild ride of Batman and Robin.

Page 14: The free-for-all on this page recalls the 60s television series, what with the symmetric knockout punch and the set of matching henchmen.

"Big Top's choice of weapons led you here, right?" Oh, I see, it was Big Top's choice weapons that led him to the circus. So not the fact that they spoke in circus slang, not the fact that the bad guys pulled up to police headquarters in a clown car, not the fact that Dick calls them "Le Cirque D'etrange," not the fact that one of the group was a bearded lady who went by the name "Big Top," no, none of these things tipped him off. It was, in fact, the particular brand of cane-shaped pike that betrayed to him the true whereabouts of Professor's Pyg's super secret hideout at the circus. Well, who am I to question the all-knowing Batman? Moving on...

Page 16: In the first panel, Morrison is taking a shot at his favorite authorial punching bag, formalist, anarchist, and woman's suffragist Alan Moore (okay, not the last one). The panel satirizes the closing sequence of the Killing Joke, scanned in below for reference.

From past annotations, you'll recall that this abandoned circus is the one at which Commissioner Gordon was famously held captive in the 1988 graphic novel. This explains why he's so eager to see it burnt to the ground.

Page 18: What the hell is this bottom panel?

Pages 19-20: I've gone through the effort of arranging these in chronological order (so you better damn well be appreciative!)

Page 21: This photograph was brought from Wayne Manor during the move in BatRob #1. I think it's fairly obvious from the panel that Morrison and co are ramping up to the triumphant return of Ace the Bathound. I mean, who else could they be bringing back? Young Dick Grayson? Impossible. Young Dick Grayson's stuck in the past, and people, once stuck in the past, become irretrievable to the present! This is true science, my friend. All know it, and all abide by its rules!

Who left his boots on that gargoyle? Whoever he was, he's gonna have a tough go of getting them back. In all seriousness though, this seems to be a bit of a continuity error as BatRob #1 depicts the Wayne tower as easily the tallest building in the area.

Page 22: The Doll person that Sasha is suffocating is her own father.

Page 24: Now, I'm a bit confused. Generally, when one says he's "the scourge of the underworld," he, much like this guy, "administers punishment" to various malefactors, rogues, brigands, and societal ne'er-do-wells. While Mr. Hood here has done nothing which runs explicitly contrary to this definition, it does strike me as odd that a self-professed combater of ills would see fit to introduce himself by blowing away a pair of apparently blameless beat officers. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Batman and Robin 2

2009-06-30T13:09:00.000-07:00

Big brawl this time out, so let's get to it.

Cover: The dead man's hand clutches the mysterious double dozen domino from the teaser in Batman and Robin #1. We learned in the last issue of a colloquial linkage between domino blocks and bones. Let's how that plays out this goaround.

Page 1: The pencils for this page have been floating around the DCNation column for a while, but they look even better in color. Note the "R" patch on the ground, fulfilling one fourth of the teaser last issue, wherein Damian storms out the of the cave while stripping off his costume.

Page 2: The Dynamic Duo have been falling for a month straight! High skies in Gotham City, dontchaknow? I like the way this page is laid out, the reader allowed only a glimpse at the heroes cloaked faces and figures, the atmosphere thick with inhuman mystery.

I'm not sure whether Morrison intended this or not, but Dick's salutation to the Commissoner sounds a bit unnatural - "You called, Commissioner Gordon?" - sort of like a hangover from his Boy Wonder days where he would've addressed Jim Gordon by his full title out of respect for his elders. For a great discussion, among other things, of unnatural dialogue in the first issue, trail the link over to the SavageCritic podcast on G Mo's most recent output.

Page 3: The Caped Crusaders captured Mr. Toad in the previous issue and now his pals from the Circus of the Strange have arrived to spring him (yes pun).

Check out this second panel. Now, pardon me for a moment while I rail against my favorite writer in comics. So, how does this panel go? "Sir, it's Casey at the desk... Something's up! Trouble." These guys are communicating by RADIO. Why aren't we "hearing" it? Any other writer worth his salt (in this case, the difference isn't a good thing) would script this scene in the following fashion:

Spikey Electronic Dialogue Box: Bobbo, grab the Commish quick! We got big trouble down here! *BANG* *BANG* Agggh!"

and then Batman and Robin would come swooping to the rescue. This way comes across so much more naturally, and won't give the reader pause to recognize that he's reading such a heavily "authored" work.

I know, I know, it sounds like I'm caviling, but it's so evocative of Morrison's recent narrative impatience, the whole mantra of "This isn't the part of the story that I'm excited about, so I'll just cram it through with dialogue and voiceover," that I just can't dismiss it as a one-off fuck-up. We saw this a ton towards the end of Final Crisis too - "Hey guys, here's some animal characters! Btw, Aquaman's back!" - and reading the finished product, it just feels so awkward and mechanical, even if the story itself is rolling evenly along. It's something like watching clockwork but from INSIDE the clock.

Okay, well, rant over. Back in annotation land, Commissioner Gordon "saw that kid before" in Batman RIP, I think it was 680, when Talia and Damian rescued him from a shishkebobing on the barbed traps of El Sombrero.

Page 4: Really cool stuff, a little bit reminiscent of Batman Begins (the stairwell diving, that is), the film being a confessed favorite of Morrison's.

Page 5: The hotheaded Rex picks up his thread from last issue, blazing a trail to his captive comrade Mr. Toad. We meet another of the troupe here, Big Top, a sumo-statured bearded lady who finds the prospect of killing cops quite "kushti" or "nice." For a great reference in deciphering all this circus gibber gabber, follow the link over to goodmagic's Carny-English dictionary.

Also, I missed it last issue, but doesn't this car looks suspiciously like the Batmobile? No, not that one, this one:

The 30s Batmobile, shown above in Batman 682, drawn by Lee Garbett. We've already seen a nod to The Killing Joke in the form of the "Ghost Train" sign, might this be another reach into the past? Hmmm, maybe this run is more like the last than I first supposed.

Page 6: If you look carefully, you can make out another onomatopoeia in the gunsmoke.

Page 7: Panel 2 - SMASH

Page 9: "Flick flacking" = "Hand-Springing'"

Page 10: A "raklo" is a non-Gypsy.

Page 11: Big Top is attacking Robin with circus-tent spikes (they appear in the ground on page 20).

Page 13: In this fifth panel, Batman is telling the siamese triplets that he understands their language and in it demands they surrender the name of their boss. They laugh that their boss is still on the loose, but offer some information, off-panel apparently, indicating that the Dollotrons are Russian slaves under the influence of mind control. Recall last issue, "Sasha" and "Niko," Russian names both, underwent the gruesome Dollifying procedure.

Page 14: "Gallopers" are carousels. I don't think I've ever seen a wooden one before, though.

Page 15: Note the double twelve domino resting in the deceased's palm. To be honest, Mr. Toad probably ran through all the mileage Morrison or anyone else was ever going to squeeze out of his thin gimmick last issue, so his "croaking" here in Issue 2 works for me.

Page 17: The Quad-Bat appears for the first time on the last page of the issue.

Page 19: Alfred "Beagle" performed and directed for the stage. His Hamlet, you'll recall from Batman 675, was panned by critics in "some of the cruellest reviews in the history of the English stage." He ponders the cowl here perhaps in tribute to "poor Yorick" of the famed

Page 20: The second panel on this page conceals the aforementioned "wooden gallopers." The weeping Dollo on the bottom most likely cries over her lost life as "Sasha," the young captive from BatRob #1.

Batman and Robin 1

2009-06-07T20:59:00.000-07:00

Na na na na na na na, Na na na na na na na, BATMAN, Na na na na na na na, Na na na na na na na, BATMAN, BATMAN, BATMAN...

Anyway.

I must admit that it was with considerable trepidation that I relapsed into this project. Summer laze aside, I feared that Morrison's latest would prove too fluid and informal for my notes to penetrate. Thumbing through this new #1, unfortunately, does little to allay this dread. We're back, it seems, at Batman and Son - Steranko with fangs, y'know - and you can check for yourself how sparse my notes were for those issues.

Of course, Batman and Robin maintains the top notch craftsmanship you'd expect from a Morrison/Quitely team-up (though with a might more exposition than the tone rightly lets), but where, for example, are the clues to suss out? Where are those grand puzzles to chart in the annotations? Sure, Morrison hasn't forgotten what came before, trotting out Professor Pyg and his Dollotrons for the devotees, but everything's bubbling right there at the surface. There's none of that angst about overlooking some remote Silver Age nod, pondering in your third read, "What am I missing?"

But if we're not missing anything, then what are we getting? Well, B&R has lots of splash pages, bright primary colors, wide screen Quitely artwork, wordless panels, and iconized sound effects - all of which sum up to a type of music like the catchy tune at the top, except much more savage, with violins screeching a Psycho-esque accompaniment, while swine men and marionettes hack away at your nerves. But honestly, I'm hardselling this more than it deserves. Morrison teases a lot here, from the offbeat Circus of the Strange to a possible coup attempt by Damian, but all in all, the final product of this first issue treads mostly on familiar territory, between its easily dispatched threat to showcase the heroes in action, character moments and exposition, its fade-out on a mysterious evil mastermind, and, wow, that's really about it.

Being a Quitely/Morrison formula crank isn't such a bad thing, of course, it's just that these types of stories don't demand much in the way of annotations. To be perfectly frank, I can see myself ditching this undertaking midway through, ala Tucker Stone, but for now, let's just keep it on (and on and on and on).

Page 1: Mr. Toad, on loan from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, is seen here boasting his characteristic ego and falling pray to Le Bossu's blunder in 681, that is, assuming that Batman could die. Aptly, we follow Mr. Toad in a "wild ride," which concludes with a "brief spell in prison," just as in the novel.

Minger (from Urban Dictionary):

Although now more commonly used to define an extremely visually challenging appearance, the word "minger" originally came from Scottish Gaelic, meaning "septic vagina," now often used by chavs all over Britain to define anything remotely disgusting.

"Septic vagina," eh? I must've missed that part of the Disney ride. And beats me what a "chav" is.

Pages 4-5: It may interest all cave dwellers to learn that Dick Grayson and Damian Wayne took up the Dynamic Duo mantle after a long drudge through a Tony Daniel mini. It was called Struggle for the Mask, I think, or Row for the Utility Belt, something insipid like that, it just escapes me right now.

Page 7: Mr. Toad mentions the name "Pyg," as in "Professor Pyg," who met his final fate at the hands of a demoniac Batman in the prophetic 666. In case you've forgotten, he was...

p a ! J ! ) n J )

Do you get it? And who says this isn't the DC Age of gauche witticisms?

Page 9: "Nanti" is European circus slang for "nothing" and "dinari," without looking it up, you may guess means "money."

Page 10: The bat cave lies in wreckage after Hush's attack in Detective 850 and possibly after its invasion by Dr. Hurt in RIP.

Beaming back at us from the photograph Dick holds, the treasured heart of the Bat mythos summons our sorrow at his recent stay of absence. Ace, oh Ace, how we miss you so! Actually, with a touch of luck, Batman and Robin might yet see the return of Ace the Bathound, the tone thusfar certainly allowing the possibility.

Page 11: I like that the top of Bruce's headstone (I'm assuming) is masoned in the shape of a bat. It fits well with the series' level of camp. I don't, however, like that Thomas and Martha Wayne's grave has yet again refigured, this time as an angel. Recall that I touched on the issue of amorphous graves in the annotations for 679, and note also that the Christ pose remains constant despite the different tomb.

Page 12: Old-school-awesome artistic conceit. Nice cutaway, Quitely. Bruce Wayne installed himself in this penthouse back in the 70s, most notably in the famed Englehart stories. The complex last surfaced in 681 as a relay tower which signaled the release of Arkham's locks. Way at the bottom, the Rail-mobile was introduced by Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan in their part, the only palatable part, of Knightquest.

I always thought "bones" were dice, but I suppose the two things (dice and dominoes) look similar enough that it could be either.

Page 13: Damian tinkers with the new Batmobile, which I posited way back in Batman 657 would parallel the Dark Knight's outlook. For example, in RIP, it was red and black, the shades then haunting Bruce's mind. Later, in a flashback to the Golden Age and the arrival of the first Robin (682), the Batmobile, little more than a sportscar, glitters a bright red, "adding color to [Bruce's] monochrome life." And now, it flies and wears an off-looking exterior, not terribly removed from the overall tenor of Batman and Robin, and well in keeping with Nightwing's Tomasi-established habit of taking to the skies (e.g. HALO jumps and, as we'll soon see, "paracaping").

Batman quickly downs the sandwiches Alfred prepared on the previous page, setting him apart from the old, fasting Batman and greatly boosting Chris Eckert's theory about the importance of food in Morrison's run. Not to diminish either of our efforts on the matter, but I can't help but wonder if Morrison, who is known to regularly peruse web speculation on his comics, was inspired by these possibly pre-emptive theories, and decided, based on them, to MAKE food important in his run. In other words, I wonder if reader brainstorming on the internet plays any part in Morrison's creative process. Thoughts?

You may recall the "International Club of Heroes" from the Williams III arc, numbers 667 to 669. Also, in three weeks, be sure to show your support for all things Williams by snagging yourself a copy of Detective Comics 854, (DC you may advance my compensation through PayPal; my account number is...)

Page 14: It shouldn't be more than a head-length from somebody's chin to his clavicle. Who will become Batman when Dick completes his transformation into a giraffe? Find out in 2010's Batman: Row for the Utility Belt!

Page 15: The Circus of the Strange emerges.

Page 18: Kickass. Please poster-ize. I must have this on my wall!

Page 20: Lev and this wiry fellow, Niko, managed at the beginning of the book to duck capture by Batman and Robin, who were naturally more concerned with their freakish driver, Mr. Toad. No idea what's in the bag here, though we're sure to find out soon.

Page 21: Here we meet the original Dollotrons, whose appearance strays far from Andy Kubert's original conception of them in 666. I imagine it has to do with a description of the Dollotrons as Raggedy Ann look-alikes, each of the two artists taking away a different subset of the doll's features when referencing it for the homage. Andy Kubert's dolls are pale-faced and rosy-cheeked while Frank Quitely's have fat faces and short hair.

Page 23: Real quick -

Panel 1: Damian appears to be quitting the Robin gig, as much squinting reveals the lighted circle on the floor to be a disembodied "R" patch from his costume.

Panel 2: A new Red Hood, possibly in connection with The Killing Joke, since we already have a circus freakshow, and Morrison has promised a Joker appearance. His sidekick is, with small doubt, a dollified Sasha, the teenage girl from the last three pages. Follow the link for a better view of this Devilish Duo.

Panel 3: One Batman, Dick I presume, battles Kate Kane while another rises from what looks like magma.

Panel 4: Dr. Hurt dangles the keys to Wayne Manor in front of his face, indicating, most importantly, that 681's helicopter crash failed to end his threat. As I've said elsewhere, given he is so paranoid and ready for every eventuality, you would imagine the ever-calculating Bruce Wayne would've thought better than to mark his address on his keys.

EDITED TO ADD:
I realize that it may seem odd, me going on in a big rigamarole lamenting Batman and Robin's annotative inaccessibility, and then launching into a 1000-word, page-by-page exegesis on the issue. I'll cop to hyperbole in the remarks, but there remains a big distinction. With stuff like RIP, I could simply jump to a page, think it over for a few minutes, and then clack out a few hundred words which would undoubtedly include references to at least two different eras of Bat lore. It would've been impossible to track onto the site everything that popped up at me while I was reading RIP, but with this, I've hardly spared any of my observations. Plus, I'm actively LOOKING for things to write. As I've said a couple of times, this is a very good comic, but just not a particularly challenging one. I guess we'll see how it goes next month. Same Bat time. Same Bat channel. Stay tuned.

Welcome

2009-03-10T04:36:00.000-07:00

Hi. Have no fear. Here is knowledge.

Mission Statement

More or less, it's like this: Morrison's Batman, I've observed, has become a huge stumbling block for readers, many flaring up in frustration at the impenetrability of the damn thing while others go on gleefully tangling up plot points into convoluted thickets of meaning when really the core of the work is as basic as the myths it seeks to emulate. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to prop up my status here or to sell myself as any kind of inside authority on the work. I freely admit to not getting it pretty much at all during my first read-through. I only want to express to you how tragic the confusion over this work really is, because Grant Morrison's Batman, once you get into it, is good and very good.

So, to parrot Mokkari, "who do we blame when it all goes wrong" and we just don't get it? It's not unreasonable to pin it on the text. For one, it's denser than a dwarf star and for two, it's strange as all get out: 5-D space imps, purple Batmen, and even Satan, the Prince of Darkness himself, makes an appearance (I'm serious). I just recently discovered a Publisher's Weekly interview in which the God of All Comics lets on his intention for readers to approach Batman collaboratively:

I had the idea to develop an approach to comic narrative that would actually benefit from becoming entangled in internet fan speculation, gossip and research. So Batman R.I.P., with its huge canvas of potential suspects, its central mystery story (“Who Is The Black Glove?"), which has driven all kinds of inventive speculation, and its references to old stories and obscure Tibetan Buddhist practices you have to look up on Wikipedia, became an attempt to do for Batman what I’d done for The Invisibles in the ‘90s but with better technology.

My hope in these annotations is that I can become that go-to collaborator for rereaders of the run (Note: REreaders), and that my notes will hold up as worthy when read concurrently with the books. In these issues, Morrison really has fanned out the full breadth of Bat history, and for every bit he hoists from Year One or The Killing Joke, there's two more that he plucked from The Dirigible of Doom and The Superman of Planet X (that is, obscure Batman stories from the 40s and 50s). So while it's very possible to enjoy this work as a standalone, it's impossible to appreciate every plot point taking the text in isolation. This plays pretty well into my next comment, which concerns...

SPOILAZ!!!!!!1113#%6 Spoilers. Spoilers. Spoilers. There are super spoilers everywhere. In the annotations for any given issue, I will spoil first that issue, I will spoil at least one issue from Bat history, I will spoil at least one issue further in the run, I will spoil with 50% probability the end of RIP, and I will spoil the end of Citizen Kane. It was the sled. That's just how we roll on this blog. Like I said, these notes are for people REreading the run or for those who don't care about spoilers and just want to breathe it all in at once. You've been warned.

On a related point, these notes also will not satisfy those who want to puzzle together the thematic pieces on their own. If you feel like you match that description, then you'd do well to skip the remarks section at the top of each post, and only skim the annotations when you feel lost, as honestly, even the term "spoon feeding" doesn't adequately describe what I do in this blog. I ladle this shit down your throat. I clobber you over the head with it and grant no reprieve. I burn it onto your flesh and then color in the scars. Too far? Yeah well I go there. Trust me though, this exercise in completeness is all for the sake of widening the aggregate knowledge. I'm paying back my debt to the internet. Hordes of info await. Shove in when you're ready.

The Hub

Prelude: 52 Week 30 and 52 Week 47
Batman 655
Batman 656
Batman 657
Batman 658
Batman 663
Batman 664
Batman 665
Batman 666
Batman 667
Batman 668
Batman 669
Batman 670
Batman 671
Batman 672
Batman 673
Batman 674
Batman 675
Interlude: DC Universe 0
Batman 676
Batman 677
Batman 678
Batman 679
Batman 680
Batman 681
Batman 681: Op Ed
Batman 682
Batman 683

Themes to Look Out For

Morrison shoots for the stars in this run and falls short, yeah, but not woefully short. The God of All Comics seeds his customary ten billion ideas, and I say about seventy to eighty percent of them bear fruit with the remainder tapering off into mere speculation fodder (e.g. the Batmobile, Gordon in Wayne Manor, Damian, etc). Well, I said "customary" but that's bullshit. These 25 issues are bursting with content well beyond the author's already-tight standard of compression. Morrison really spatters the thematic firmament in Batman, sprinkling in clues and concepts from all over, spreading his idea wide enough apart for apopheniac fans to chalk in constellations of their own. Here are some mine.

Rationalization: This extends the age old conflict of order vs. chaos. For example, Batman signs up for Dr. Hurt's isolation experiment in order to push his mind to a level where it can, to some extent, blueprint the Joker's personality (the J Man representing, duh, chaos). I'm not entirely sure that Morrison actually believes in order and chaos as absolute or even definable in any way, but he knows that Batman does, and toys with this fact, developing the rationalization theme largely through ironic self-reference "Do you get it now?"

Rebirth: Morrison's run spotlights the literal rebirth of Ra's Al Ghul in the Resurrection arc and boasts only the most feathery veil of metaphor over the revival of Bruce Wayne in Batman 681. Taking a broad sense of the word, I can argue that rebirth hooks into hypercontinuity too, Batman getting born again every time a Neal Adams comes on board or Crisis strikes the DCU. If you keep your eyes peeled, you'll find in this run that the Batmobile serves a visual aid for the different eras of Batman. Check out, for example, that kitschy 90s Batmobile in 683, a wheeling monument to poor taste in the Knightfall era. Well, to be fair, that's less a good example and more a potshot at the decade of comics history I hate most (and sadly the one from which I own most), but still, there's tons of stuff feeding this theme throughout the text. the black and red Batmobile, the Clown at Midnight, Batman of Zur En Arrh, "Dark Ranger, formerly the Scout." You really can't miss it.

Importance of Bruce Wayne as Batman: Though less than he does in ASS, Morrison in Batman taps into the mythic force of the superhero: the superhero, Bruce Wayne in this case, as god. I harp on and on about this throughout the annotations so I'm not gonna get into it here, but people who are bitching about Morrison bumping off Batman are missing a major part of the run. Alfred's speech in 683 isn't an obligatory eulogy before DC carts Bruce Wayne off to comic book limbo. It's a logical capstone for Morrison's entire run, which testifies again and again to Bruce's irreplaceability.

Acknowledgements

These are in no particular order and are not yet complete.

Dave Wallace and Thom Young: Thom's rich knowledge of Bat continuity and of literature in general pushed me to take this run a lot more seriously back in the days when I was asking "Hey, did this guy just totally rip off Bane?" Often, I would refresh the comicsbulletin front page four or five times on Sunday waiting for Thom and Dave's stellar Slugfest manuscripts on Batman. Their reviews were often laced with an annotative flavor themselves, which helped a great deal in mining 70 years of Batman lore for Morrison's often heavily obscure references. Both these guys recently paid me a kindness by reviewing a theory of mine in spite of my total n00b status. So, for all of the above, I extend 28 blog entries worth of gratitude to them.

Timothy Callahan: What to say about the man who's literally written the book on Morrison? Hopefully more than just that, since he's probably heard that one a thousand times before. Still though, the guy really does know the lay of Morrison's god-head better than anyone short of G Mozzer himself and perhaps more than even him, given all the drugs. Mr. Callahan expertly forecasts a fucking storm of key plot points in Batman well before the rest of the pull-listing population, most of whom were still rallying behind Jason Todd as the Black Glove (lol). More importantly though, the geniusboyfiremelon beefs up his annotations by pulling from works across the Morrison canon, helping the reader to shoulder the iron weight of Morrison's grand themes and big ideas in Batman. A strong man with a strong brain this Timothy Callahan.

Jog: I've lived in America all my life. I've spoken English all my life. I've never heard anyone get as much mileage out of dry colloquial English as Jog. The man can make banalities sound like birdsong. Let me pluck a diamond from the Jog mine to show you.

Interestingly, the thoroughly disappointing illustrations of John Van Fleet probably help it out a little, weighing the story down with computer-augmented chintz while the abler style of a Dave McKean may have pushed it even further out into the ether. As it is, the book mercifully launches itself into outright kitsch by the final battle, Batman and the Joker’s big clash looking like screencaps from the world’s nerdiest Tekken 2 hack...

After scanning a couple of his Batman blog entries for a suitable caption, it dawned on me how much I've unconsciously stolen Jog's style and voice for these annotations. I can only hope that this theft has richened my writing style to even near-Jog status.

David Uzumeri: Acknowledgement on its way!

Amypoodle: We might celebrate Amypoodle of the Mindless Ones for racking up godzilla word counts that encapsulate only the smallest modicums of info, but I'll be God damned if there was a single sentence in the whole lot of them that I wasn't hanging off of. In the 70s, there was a certain young mathematician by the name of Feigenbaum who in his brilliance would divine new and complex math by the droves. Colleagues would ask why he never bothered putting to paper this often cutting-edge information, to which he'd respond "Oh, I understood it," and then spark up a cigarette. That's amypoodle all over. He/she/it just doesn't give a fuck, and that blasé magic just beams outta the poodle like a rainbow streaming from a pot of gold.

Greg Burgas: Acknowledgement on its way!

Batman 683

2009-03-09T05:30:00.000-07:00

Ah, the end. The ship is pulling into port. There's not much to say that we haven't said before. Bruce Wayne is still irreplaceable. Alfred Pennyworth is still not the Black Glove. Grant Morrison still loves Batman. It's an eminently good final issue that hands over its heart to the caretaker of Gotham City and his caretaker too. Rereading 683, now months after its publication, I remember how I came to forget my frustration at the muted reveal in 681. I think of how Morrison pushed aside expectations for these final two issues and how a double tie-in run coda wound up as a starry-eyed standalone. I imagine how I must've smiled flipping the back cover over the top of the final page, and how the cooling passions of Batfans everywhere must've thawed in the warmth of Alfred's live and loving eulogy. For all of it, I say cheers Mr. Morrison. To twenty-five amazing comics.

This Alex Ross cover riffs on Dave McKean from Arkham Asylum, right? It's funny, y'know, if you think about the contents of the issue. Ross is sort of kicking the pedestal out from Morrison's ass, warning him "Hey let's not be so quick to condemn," because really Morrison's own Arkham Asylum and the wild success of that graphic novel helped usher in the last twenty or so years of dour psychoanalysis in the Bat books.

Page 1: Lee Garbett burns down the page with crackling sexual energy between his Talia - every bit the gun moll set to page by Neal Adams - and the finally-realized hairy-chested-love-god in Bruce. With hand planted firmly on hind quarters, baby-making is go go go!

Pages 2-3: There may be some Freudian commentary in this first panel, banging swords together while topless being a tad less macho than Bruce or Ra's might care to admit. Actually, scanning down the line here, and given the title, What the Butler Saw, one could argue that all of these panels have a sort of carnal undercurrent.

Image courtesy of Batman 244 by O'Neil/Adams.

Bruce straddled that toothy behemoth back in Batman 251, also by O'Neil/Adams. Garbett and/or Morrison cobble together a couple of panels from the page below.

The pouncing beast is Anthony Lupus, a Len Wein-created pal of Bruce Wayne's whom the late Dr. Milo doomed to a lycanthropic fate by dosing him with an experimental "headache medicine." In the 90s cartoon, Wein recasts Lupus as a steroid-seeker competing in the Olympic games, with Dr. Milo all too eager to accommodate his need to win at any cost.

^From Wein's Moon of the Wolf in Batman 255^

Bruce and Talia get down in Mike W. Barr's and Jerry Bingham's Son of the Demon.

Page 4: Man-Bat first swooped into the rogues gallery in Detective 400, but I couldn't say from where exactly this panel comes. Actually, just as with the ManWolf panel on the previous page and the Deadshot panel a couple of pages from here, Morrison/Garbett depict Batman as falling down, despite the fact that, as drawn, these panels have no counterparts in the comics to which they refer. Morrison or Garbett might've intended a freefall motif to underpin the larger theme of Batman's stumbles, a theme we see emphasized throughout the issue. Of course, it could just be that the high dives are meant to pump up the drama, but meh, I like my narrative device theory better.

Page 5: Alfred/Lump, like Dr. Hurt, plays the part of a superhero fan, "I like to read, sir... Mysteries, unlikely tales. Blood and thunder."

"Chemical racketeers" - Chemicals again, scratching at Bruce's subconscious.

Page 6: As we'll discover on the next page, Catwoman, at the time of her positively egregious cat mask costume, operated under the name Elva Barr.

Page 7: Mokkari and Simyan are more Kirby creations cribbed by Morrison, these two clowns bungling Darkseid's plans as early as Jimmy Olsen 135. Generally, Mokkari and Simyan carry out their experiments on human beings, finding their first success in the creation of a giant, a creature that has theo-historically stood for violence against the gods. Everyone knows the punishment of Polyphemus the Cyclops who inverted the Zeusian practice of xenia (hospitality) in The Odyssey, but what some might not realize is that titans provoked a far more cataclysmic comeuppance in, yes, the Bible. The Book of Jubilees and the 1st Book of Enoch attribute much of the ill will ushering in the Flood to the impiety of giants called the Nephilim. While both of these texts are considered apocryphal, neither contradicts canon (as far as I know) and the latter is quoted directly in the New Testament.

What's more, given his predilection for human lab rats and the cool nestling of that cigarette between his fore and middle fingers, this version of Mokkari pretty well allegorizes Josef Mengele. Here Morrison is deliberately following through on Kirby's Fourth World treatment, in which Anti-Life bears an unmistakable resemblance to Nazi doctrine. The point of all this being that Mokkari and Simyan are really, really bad dudes.

Notice also Alfred's dialogue, in which he attempts to redirect culpability for his actions: "Your mother appears utterly convinced the dog found his way into the old well... I allowed you to talk me into this misadventure." This becomes important on the next page.

Page 8: Ace shows up outside the well. I suspect Alfred's personality, or Bruce's memory of Alfred's personality, has shone through the Lump's rouse. The butler's excuses on page 7 cover up his efforts to snap Bruce out of this unending sequence of false memories by leading him into the place where Batman was born and giving him a motivational trauma in the discovery of Dick Grayson's "never found" body (see Page 5).

Page 10: Cut to Floyd Lawton crashing through a skylight in Detective 474.

Cut to Jason Todd boosting wheels from the Batmobile.

Page 12: Morrison reimagines Robin II's death-by-democracy with black humor very much in the vein of The Killing Joke. Compare with Alan Moore's version of the joke below.

Needless to say, Alfred's watch stopping suggests that Jason's death is a moment frozen in time for Batman.

Page 13: Batman cradles the corpse of Jason Todd, as he glowers at the Reader - "Why hast Thou forsaken me?" (compare with eyes downcast in the Aparo original). Well, since you asked, it's like Mokkari says, "This is what we want! Raw emotional energy! More pain! Motivation!" Everyone knows that nobody can do anything that's great or noble unless somebody dies to make them do it.

For this last panel, Garbett apes the style used by Brian Bolland in The Killing Joke, but if you didn't know that already, then... wtf? Get on that shit.

Page 15: The first panel paraphrases the final chapter of A Lonely Place of Dying (Batman 442). It's Tim Drake in the Robin duds, just in case that's unclear.

I love the line "So who do we blame if all of this goes wrong?" It's a question one imagines being murmured through Nazi Germany in the days leading up to Nuremberg.

For Batman and Robin's vow of silence over the "death" of Alfred, see last issue's Page 21 annotations.

"Why do I feel like a book that's being read?" Uhhhh, well...

The Mad Hatter and the other rogues were sprung from Arkham during Bane's gambit in Knightfall.

Page 16: Now what in the hell is going on in this top panel? What dusty volume of Bat arcana did Morrison pluck this relic from? Well whatever, I can't be arsed to look this shit up. Good luck finding it on your own.

Bruce Lee did indeed recover fully from a spinal injury, which doctors insisted would keep him out of the martial arts for the remainder of his natural life.

Bruce fights to reclaim the cowl from Azbat in Batman 510.

Page 17: The first panel alludes to the gargantuan No Man's Land crossover consuming the Bat books at the turn of the millennium. The mummy man is, of course, Hush, and this particular panel is inspired by his "climactic" battle with the Caped Crusader in Batman 619.

Alfred's Lumpy narration stands in contrast to Batman's dialogue in the panel above, as well as to that issue's title. Maybe Morrison is placing himself at odds with the Loeb story, but who knows? He's alluded to Hush a couple of times in the past, maybe he actually digs it?

Oh my, is that a boomerang in your chest or are you just happy to see me?

The Garbett panel obviously homages the one above from Identity Crisis 6.

Page 18: Morrison appeals to recent continuity for support of his gun-toting Batman in Final Crisis 6 with this pointer to 2005's Infinite Crisis 7.

"How does Batman process this degree of stress?" For detailed discussion on the superhuman aspects of Bruce Wayne, see the annotations for 669 and 681.

Page 19: Mokkari's pistol escapes the laboratory with Batman and ultimately finds its way to Darkseid, though we don't know that just yet.

A little cloying after so much metacommentary already and over in Final Crisis too, but interesting nevertheless, the dialogue of the polymorphous Lump strongly suggests that he's a living embodiment of stories. From the previous page, "In the kingdom of pure thought, the Lump reigns supreme! In your mind, the Lump can be anything!" and more dramatically, on Page 19 he threatens "I feel nothing. I should kill you now. Your purpose is served," the purpose of stories being, of course, to strike an emotional resonance. When the feeling's all faded away, the story ought to be "killed" or ended.

Finally, consider the Lump's withering protest "Why? I did as I was told... My body dying..." which lays out the great tragedy of the story, that eventually it must be put down, even if it always does what it's told. Sometimes, however, which I think is something that Morrison is getting at throughout the comic, the tellers, like Mokkari and Simyan, lose their handle over the narrative and the "story becomes toxic... out of control," and they "must end it" for the good of the reader and the beneficence of stories on the whole, to crib some wise words from the Monitor Tahoteh.

I'm being a little terse, as I could probably go on about this for a few hundred words, but I've trumpeted the metatext in this run for pages and pages in these annotations, and to be honest I'm getting a little tired of it. I hope Morrison's recently-announced return to the Bat books sees an easing-off of the stories-about-stories and a narrowing of focus to quirky and candid tales along the lines of We3 and ASS. It's rumored (confirmed now?) that Frank Quitely will collaborate with Morrison once he resumes his Bat chores. Hopefully, Quitely can squeeze that style of him once more.

Page 20: "Leave his belt! Leave everything," ensconced somewhere in that belt is Orion's fatal bullet, as we'll see in a couple of pages.

Page 21: "These lies, these sick lies." Recall the dossier dropped in the lap of Gotham Gazette editor Mr. Sheldrake in part 2 of RIP, the file containing a lurid account of Mom and Pop Wayne's ventures into drug abuse, swinging, and murder. I hope they wrap up that plot point before Morrison's return, because otherwise that would be a terribly long time to leave the Wayne family name lying in the mud.

"Burn in hell." Yes, Dr. Hurt is the Devil. Oh and there's also Hurt's prophecy, which we'll see fulfilled (sort of) in Final Crisis 6. Given Bruce's lack of a cowl, we should assume that these four panels take place immediately after the helicopter crash in 681, and that Batman swam to safety and is now being reined into Justice League headquarters for briefing on his final mission in the corresponding Crisis.

"It began with the murder of a god," Green Lanterns discover the corpse of New God Orion in the first issue of Final Crisis.

Page 22: I'm trying to make a joke that joins in language Batman's utility belt, the New God-killing bullet, and the stellar body "Orion's belt," but I got nothing.

Though somewhat opaque in the artwork, what you're seeing on this page is the Lump in his death throes toggling off Batman's restraints.

"I shall become a bat," like most great novels, Morrison's Batman ends at the beginning.

Batman 682

2009-01-25T05:34:00.000-08:00

Picture extravaganza! 681 examines the Silver Age of Batman with eyebrows a touch raised and tongue firmly in cheek, but the annotations deliver the original scenes to you in their full pokerfaced mania. No remarks/essays this time. Just enjoy the ride!

Pages 1-3: Bruce has just dragged himself home from an ass-beating in Frank Miller's Year One (Batman 404). David Uzumeri points out that Bruce cannot effectively fight crime in this form. He needs to get born again as a symbol, which of course is the bread and butter of Morrison's run. Achieving mythology, coalescing with the collective unconscious, this two-issue beat scales toward that five-word utterance first spoken in Tec 33 and later countless rehashes in which Bruce consigns his entire life to an ideal.

Page 4: Bruce was engaged to actress Julie Madison as early as Detective Comics 31. For the most part, she would get trotted out as arm candy or thrust artificially into distress only to be saved by Batman a few pages later (it was the 40s) but she did in her final appearance pitch in to beat Clayface, donning a Robin costume in her team-up with the Caped Crusader(again, the 40s).

Page 5: Alfred told a number of imaginary stories beginning in Batman 131 all speculating on the future exploits of "Bruce Wayne Jr." AKA Robin II and Dick Grayson who became the second Batman. Some believe that Alfred was the teller of the "imaginary story" in Batman 666, and connected this idea to theories implicating Alfred as the Black Glove. The title of this issue is a bit of fun at the expense of those theorists. Moreover, as I mention in the remarks for 676, Morrison penned a chapter in JLA entitled Imaginary Stories which followed Tim Drake and Bruce Jr. as the next generation's Batman and Robin.

Incidentally, "They're all imaginary stories!" is the standard pseudo-intellectual's sophistic defense for failure to adhere to internal story logic.

Page 6: Comic book writers in the 30s were known for their penchant to blur the line between good and evil. Comics were so mired in subtlety and understatement, you could scarcely tell who the bad guys were. From Tec 29:

Is it me, or do a lot of writers use the Batman comic book to couch their medical phobias? Dr. Hugo Strange, Dr. Hurt, Dr. Death, Dr. Phosphorous. Maybe it's an oedipal thing, Doctor Thomas Wayne and all that.

All off Alfred's dialogue in the second to last panel carries a double meaning.

Page 7: The first panel belongs to the little-known Detective Comics 27.

This vat, which I can't place anywhere in the Madison era, makes the second reference to chemicals, the first being Dr. Death's laboratory. You'd figure Batman hanging over an acid vat would have happened somewhere in that period, acid vats being a staple of the genre at the time, but no. The chronology's a little off though. For example, Robin should be established in the continuity before Julie leaves, so I'll chalk up the vat to generic Batman imagery.

Interestingly, Julie's reason for leaving in Detective 49 diametrically opposes the one she gives here. In that story, Bruce was too much of a shiftless popinjay for her tastes; she wished he was more busy, not less. Oh Morrison, you and your wanton retconning, don't you care one lick for history?!

Page 8: For this first panel, no one really drew those types of angles back in the Golden Age, so I have no idea to what this panel alludes. Although if you want to look into the matter yourself, I can name for you all the issues in which people have aimed guns at Batman. They are Detective 27, 28, 29, 30-850, Batman 1-683, The Brave and the Bold...

Oh and Bat-Christ is not touching that sandwich.

Page 9: One of the best and most heartily Morrison pages in the entire run. Also, more drugs!

Page 10: The fourth panel was ripped from Detective 33: Against the Dirigible of Doom.

In that story, Bruce suits up in a clansman uniform (not kidding) before filling the crew of that zeppelin with lead! Remember what I said about the moral ambiguity of the 30s? I guess anyone short of Hitler those days could be considered "the good guy"!

The letters are addressed in different handwritings. This and the meaning Julie Madison ascribed to personal letters earlier in the book lead me to conclude that the basket is overflowing with goodbye letters from all the ones that got away. A tragic unavoidability of Batman's lifestyle really and a punchy bit of compression on Morrison's end.

Page 11: Batman wallops Hugo Strange's Monster Men in Batman 1. Actually, that story picks up right after the Batman's first cross with the Joker! Unfortunately, not all foes can weather the test of time, and guys like this "Joker" become lost to all but the most devout Bat-archivists.

Pages 11-13: Scanned from Detective Comics 38 and The Untold Legend of the Batman 2 (the exact same panel appears earlier in Batman 213, but I figure Len Wein's work in that mini is more pertinent to the Morrisonverse), we have:

Note the slick red anachronism hugging the curves of the road in the first panel on page 13. That's a proto Batmobile, and its presence on-panel adds weight to Alfred's grieving over the lost "color" in their "monochrome lives."

The red-lit cockpit and wide-grinned Batman homage Jim Lee's All-Star Batman and Robin.

Page 14: Perhaps Alfred is conflating in memory his production of Hamlet (mentioned in 675) and a Joker fight he witnessed, maybe this one from Batman 2.

Or, I thought it would be cool if this actually was Alfred Beagle's Hamlet, which would explain why it was panned by critics.

This Joker-Copter, last seen in 655, appears to be an amalgam of the Joker-Mobile and the Joker's helicopter from Batman 186 or maybe a modernization of the Joker-Plane from Batman 37. I can only guess that it's Matt Murdock piloting this whirly bird because the view out of its front visor is completely obscured by that giant Joker face. Fuck function, the Joker rolls in style!

It would be far easier for Bruce to consider this panel a dream. But how can he?! For in his hand, he holds the Bat-Radia!

I'm fairly sure now, after much combing of the archives, that all the panels on this page (and the "laughing contest") are originals. I bet Morrison had quite the chuckle imagining all the diligent annotators like myself scouring their longboxes and persisting on Google with searches of "giant crown + Batman," "laughing contest + Joker," and the like, suffering to find the derelict corners of Bat lore from which these panels were pulled. Prick. :-P

Page 15: Could it be?! It is! Ace the motherfuckin Bat-Hound! Ace descended from the heavens into Batman 92 and comics would never be the same again. Amid a stretch of complete suck in Superman, James Robinson blessed readers with a Krypto issue that instantly elevated his run to Watchmen stature (okay, that's a lie). Here's a typical example of the kind of asskickery that a superdog can impress upon an issue:

So awesome.

The closest match I could find to this first Kathy Kane panel is from her introduction in Detective 233.

Morrison superheroes always notify reader in advance of their team-ups.

The typewriter Robin's sitting on was lifted from Batman 115.

Notice Batman can't take chemicals off his mind. This is a great feint, a mystery threaded through the Batman ages and the answer turns out to be the clues themselves (that is, chemicals). Batman fought his first battle ("first" in real world time) at Apex Chemicals in Detective 27 and I think Alan Moore named the plant at which the Joker was possibly born "Ace Chemicals" in The Killing Joke though that may have been established earlier.

Page 16: A dream Robin had in Batman 122 shook his nerves and (I assume) drove him to pursue this line of worrying.

I think Robin means the hyphenated "Bat-Girl" AKA Betty Kane who debuted in Batman 139.

Seems like the Tim Drake character could've been partly inspired by Betty Kane.

The bottom of the page, which Morrison has retconned into a drug trip gone awry, recounts some of the events and dialogue of Batman 153, which receives a bit of the recap treatment here.

Page 17: "I was a circus kid." Dick and Kathy were both circus folk.

Page 18: Morrison took the Lump from the pages of Jack Kirby's Mister Miracle 8, but not without first administering a vital sprucing-up. In Kirby's original story, the Lump could only influence thought realms. However, unlike in Morrison's revamp of the character, once one's mind was plugged into the Lump, the Lump would engage him in an ordinary fistfight, the mental winner emerging triumphant also in reality. Do you see why this is lame? So Lump, who can do anything, squares off against Mr. Miracle, who can do anything, and they both start doing anything at one another until Mr. Miracle finally beats him in a ham handed way that makes no sense given what we know about him.

You can find all the details surrounding Alfred's death and rebirth (there's rebirth again) here.

We find Bruce in reality where Final Crisis 2 left him. I will not be annotating that book as there is no deficit of Final Crisis annotations on the web and honestly my knowledge of general DC lore isn't at all up to the task.

Page 19: And "sea" for Catwoman.

The leftmost villain, the Eraser, tried to "rub out" Bruce Wayne in Batman 188, but was met with, shall I say, pointed resistance from the Dynamic Duo. Sorry, it's irrelevant but I just can't shy away from recapping this issue, in which Robin shoots off one of the most astoundingly hypocritical lines in 70 years of Batman comics.

Actually, the first printing looked like this:

Anyway, the Eraser, an old college acquaintance of Bruce's named Lenny Fiasco, soured toward crime after living his university days under a constant stream of taunts from his classmates. Over what, you ask? His foul habit of erasing mistakes, of course.

See, how could I make this shit up?

CHIP: Hey Len, misspell anything today?!
LEN: No, I --
CHIP: Boy do I got just the thing for you!
*Chip pulls out an eraser*
CHIP: Haw haw haw!!
LEN: Oh the humiliation! Mark my words, Bruce Wayne will pay!

So, in keeping with his MO as the Eraser, Len encases Bruce in solid ice (again, how could I make this up), but the Dynamic Duo manage to save the day anyway. This issue was penned, not surprisingly, in the wake of the TV show's runaway success and obviously apes the show's characteristic camp style. Morrison was undoubtedly seething over missing the Eraser boat, but included him anyway, perhaps to preface the Eraser's many metatextual usages in upcoming Morrison comics.

The Joker hired the feisty dwarf Gaggy in Batman 186 to, believe it or not, make him laugh. Laughter would gear the J-man up to plan the campy capers he would pull in the 50s and 60s. You can read a slightly modified version of the "Gaggy" comic here.

The Poison Ivy knockoff mounting that stripper pole is actually Catwoman in a costume she wore, I believe, exactly one time, in Batman 197. What, you're surprised Morrison went with the obscure one?

If I had to guess based on his physique and color scheme, I would say the last guy is Blockbuster. The colorist might've mistaken his bushy eyebrows for a domino mask. Time period fits perfectly for Blockbuster too.

Page 20: Creepy, no?

The Nightwing stuff didn't quite play out like this in the 80s' comics. Dick walked out on Bruce well before adopting the Nightwing persona, and when he finally came to face him eighteen months later (comic book time) in Batman 416, they weren't on such casual terms as this panel suggests. Not a complaint really, just staking out the differences.

Page 21: The Lump manages to gurgle out a couple of words through his paralysis: "hurt" and "dream." I'm not sure exactly what these mean, but I would guess that Lump is pronouncing clues to Batman's current state; he's in a "hurt dream" or a "dream of hurt," a long nightmare.

"I made up a story once... as a way of putting things in perspective." - Could this be Neil Gaiman's "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" The extent to which Morrison and Gaiman collaborated before the scripting of that issue, I don't know. Got answers, Newsarama buffs?

How exactly did the Lump give himself away? See the panel below:

Bruce trusts Dick to the point where not even Alfred can convince him that Robin broke his promise.

"I'm coming to get you." Bruce said exactly these words to Jezebel in 680 before her villainy was revealed.

Page 22: I'm surprised Morrison/Garbett didn't go with a strong resemblance between Dr. Hurt and Thomas Wayne. Anyway, Papa Wayne emphasizes the words "mental patient" and "poisoned," layering some subtext into his discourse which is superficially about the Joker attack at the end of Year One, explored more fully in Ed Brubaker and Doug Mahnke's The Man Who Laughs.

Page 23: We're running a bit long at 2000 words already, so I'll save Mokkari and Simyan for next time.

Batman 681: Op Ed

2009-01-24T00:19:00.000-08:00

Well, on the one hand, Batman 681 floats to the surface most of the major themes from Morrison's run. So that's good. It also treats the reader to a couple of "Fuck yeah!" fistpump scenes, and those are good too. On the other hand, from a plot standpoint, Batman 681 might be the biggest blue balls moment in 70 years of Batman comics. I can't help wondering if before RIP, Grant Morrison intended to employ Alfred in some capacity as a villain, and then for whatever reason changed his mind.

In a mystery, the protagonist typically suspects each red herring at some point in the story. Bruce Wayne never once suspected his butler, even though clues did point to him. Furthermore, mystery authors don't exculpate major red herrings during a crisis stage a few chapters before the climax. Yet the Black Glove lays the smack down on Alfred just three issues before the big reveal, seemingly exonerating him. I believe that this beating caused Timothy Callahan, for one, to ease his suspicion off Alfred, as reflected in his third-place ranking here. Easing their suspicions cannot be something Morrison wants readers to do if Alfred actually is a mislead, and so, from a mystery structure POV, this "exoneration" actually inculpates Alfred.

But, since it's not Alfred, what honestly does Batman 681 disclose in its 70-year galaxy-destorying reveal? That Dr. Hurt was the Devil and not the red horns and the tail Devil, but the subtle, "Is he really?" Devil? If so, we already knew this back in 666 and 674; the Third Man told us as much: "Doctor Hurt was the Devil. Sometimes he visits this world to destroy the good and make slaves of men like me." Granted, we didn't know he was speaking of the literal Devil, but we still don't know that for sure.

Let me just say that I have no problem with Satan filling the role of Batman's mastermind enemy. On the contrary, the Devil naturally fits the bill of such a mastermind, and more importantly, the idea of Batman fighting this Enemy harmonizes beautifully with themes sounding throughout not only this Batman run, but all of Morrison's writing on the Dark Knight. What I do have a problem with, however, is the reveal being hyped as an ultra twist, when it's not even a twist at all. It's an insinuation. A mystery twist, a "shocker", cannot be ambiguous; the defintions of these words run contrary to one another.

And no, it's not just DC ad copy and solicitations that generated expectation for an epic twist. And no, it's not just that Morrison himself attested in several different interviews that this would be the most astounding reveal in 70 years of Batman comics. All of these things can be argued away as irrelevant because they are apart from the text (though I personally don't take this view). What can't be dismissed, however, is that 672-680 read like a mystery in that they fuel anticipation for the big money shot at the conclusion. Peel open 680, for example. In it we have:

Who is the Black Glove?" reminding the reader what he's looking out for
"You gave it all away, but that's not it, is it? That's not it at all!" hinting that the whole story has yet to unfold, but the protagonist is closing in on the truth
"Now do you get it?" teasing the reader, since he obviously does not
A false reveal of Jezebel Jet

All the drapings of a standard mystery, right? This story practically demands a shock unveiling at its climax.

Part of the problem is Morrison's subtle portrayal of the Devil. His "Devil" doesn't exhibit supernatural abilities, not even low key ones like Mr. Whisper's missing shadow. Hurt directs all his evil against Batman and his family, so it's easy to mistake him for someone with a grudge or an infatuation. His actions on their own are not really convincing, and as a result, Morrison is forced to explain a number of times through exposition that the good doctor is really Our Father in Hell just to get the point across. Morrison wants to pit the Dark Kngiht against a subtle, symbolic Devil, an intensely cruel and influential nonpowered human being. This is a perfectly sensible thing, as I argued before. However, he also wants to showcase this revelation as a twist. In other words, he wants the reader to be shocked that "an intensely cruel and influential nonpowered human being" is scheming Batman's downfall. Well that's not very surprising now, is it?

Though I suspected earlier in this editorial that Morrison originally planned to uncover a different hand beneath the Glove, whether he did or he didn't, there were better ways to handle the conclusion, even without sacrificing anything. For example, he could have easily played Alfred in a villainous role, which would have provided the shock value craved by the mystery's final chapter. And it would not have been gratuitous either, because that ending would cohere with clues given throughout the run (Alfred's love of "blood spattered prose", Bruce Wayne's mention of "outsider work" in Batman 656), as well as resuscitate a long dead Silver Age story, which of course, fits nicely with Morrison's superhero modus operandi. Moreover, Alfred's lapse into his Outsider persona would mirror Batman's fallback on his Zur En Arrh persona. The transformation into the Outsider could be explained, subtly of course, by Satanic possession. This version of the finale consolidates three main currents from the run: (1) Batman vs. The Devil (2) Self-Reinvention (3) Silver Age with a Dark Twist. As well as maintaining (enhancing even) the thematic unity of the currrent ending, this alternate ending resolves the plot in a much more viscerally satisfying way that would even appeal to casual readers or newcomers.

Batman 681

2009-01-23T03:26:00.000-08:00

Imagine being able to disappear and reappear at will... You would never be stuck in traffic at rush hour, your car would simply vanish and rematerialize at your destination... Imagine having X-ray eyes. You could see accidents happening from a distance [and spot] exactly where the victims were, even if they were buried under debris. Imagine being able to reach into an object without opening it. You could extract the sections from an orange without peeling or cutting it... No secrets could be kept from [you]. No treasures could be hidden from [you]. No obstructions could stop [you],

This magical proposition, pulled from physicist Michio Kaku's charming lay science text Hyperspace, isn't just idle fantasizing; when put into context, it illuminates a dark and neglected corner of the mind, a concept we take for granted with every glance and every movement we put forward, the concept of dimension.

What being could possess such God-like power? The answer: a being from a higher dimensional world.

First, know that one can't possibly fathom an entity composed of four spatial dimensions. Our eyes operate only in three dimensions, and we can't visualize something we can't see at any distance from any angle even if it was there, so don't even bother trying. Instead, consider an ordinary human being, yourself, standing above a two dimensional plane. For simplicity, imagine the two dimensional plane as a piece of paper (though a piece of paper has some small amount of depth). Imagine within the paper lives a 2-D man, call him J.

To imprison J for life, you need only draw a box around him. To free him, you need only peel him off the page and then plant him back somewhere outside the box. As you are freeing J, he will suffer the worst acid trip of his life, his two dimensional eyes absorbing only the rapidly shifting cross sections of the room, which appear to him as bands of color. For example, if you scaled J alongside an upright Dixon Ticonderoga pencil, he would perceive first bands of pink (the eraser), then bands of green (the metal brace), bands of yellow for a while, then brown, and then finally black for the point. Upon his return to the page, he will feel as though he performed teleportation, for how else could he have escaped the confines of the box?

To demonstrate the ease with which a 3-D person could execute feats impossible for J, consider the same situation with yourself enclosed in a two dimensional box. While J could never hope to penetrate this box, it would be trivial for you to step over it (or sneak under it if it's above ground). The concept of "over" does not exist to J nor could he even begin to puzzle together the implications of such a transcendent direction. To J, we gods move in mysterious ways.

Now wait. Did I just post on the wrong blog? Nope, not at all. Throughout Morrison's run, the Batman bleeds his powers out of the plane of the paper and in to higher dimensions to wage battle against his God-like foes. I hope that Morrison's run and my annotations have thoroughly evinced Dr. Hurt's Satanic qualities, that Hurt is a god of evil out to disgrace a paragon of good in the Batman. From that and the above discussion about dimensions (a concept dead center in the scope of Morrison's interests), it's not silly to extrapolate that the Black Glove's transcendence is rooted in dimensions higher than the comic world.

A lot of the art in the Club of Heroes storyline feeds this idea. For example, the Black Glove first alerts Batman to its presence by exploding his plane. Williams conveys that scene within the confines of a giant shadow hand.

The shadow hand appears as a cross sectional slice of a 3-D hand passing through the 2-D plane of the paper.

Later on in the arc, Batman ascends too, such that the very page cannot contain the cataclysm of his battle with the Black Glove.

Again, this could be thought of as a 2-D cross section of a 3-D battle, albeit a highly iconic and representative cross section.

Both of these scenes might be interpreted as Williams soaking his characteristic inventiveness into the page, but it's also a fact that Morrison instructs Mr. Williams to draw these kinds of sublime moments, playing to his strengths as an artist. Here's an extract from Morrison's Seven Soldiers #1 and its corresponding script fragment.

"Guardian seeming to become less man and more myth," in particular, echoes Morrison's sentiments about Bruce Wayne's Batman. In that panel, Morrison highlights the Guardian's mythological qualities by running him through hypercubist dimensions. Since Morrison obviously hopes to accentuate those same qualities in Batman, it seems natural that he'd go about doing that in a similar way.

Joe Chill in Hell continues this process of acquainting Batman with the world outside his comic. A young, apprehensive Bruce Wayne insists that he "can feel eyes watching. Eyes with human intelligence watching. Always watching." Of course, he's absolutely dead-on about that; his life is under constant surveillance by the comic book readers out in Spaceland.

Following that, Bruce says "I must be around five years old when I first sense the presence of a gaping, toppling void in the center of existence," just before bats swarm him from the Wayne Manor well. This scene, with Bruce at five, is likely the first in his life on panel, the earliest Bruce Wayne scene to which readers were exposed. In the annotations for 674, I connect this to Dr. Hurt who alleges to be "the hole in things." It's possible that Morrison intends Hurt to represent the ultimate Bat-fan reader. This view coalesces many of Hurt's statements under one banner, for example, "I'm something of a Batman specialist. I've studied his psychology under pressure," in 674, and, "No one knows him better than I do," in 677. Moreover, his "research" on Batman, incinerated by the Third Ghost in 674, could easily double for a Batman comic book.

Also in that issue, Batman assigns his then unknown enemy skills material to an overworld deity:

What if there existed an invisible, implacable foe who calculated my every weakness? Who had access to allies, weapons, and tactics I couldn't imagine. An adversary whose plots and grand designs were so vast, so elaborate that they went unnoticed.

Notice that Batman's foe not only accesses weapons and tactics that Batman didn't think of but those he "couldn't imagine." And all of this is happening invisibly too, or in other words, off-panel, outside of the comic realm.

The Third Ghost arc also oversees the introduction of Bat-Might, whom Morrison ties most explicitly to higher dimensions with Might's claim to come from "Space B at the fivefold expansion of Zrfff." In an obviously Morrison scene of 52, Animal Man teleports home from the far recesses of the cosmos via Space B travel. This should remind you of the first sentences I quoted from Kaku: "Imagine being able to disappear and reappear at will... You would never be stuck in traffic at rush hour, your car would simply vanish and rematerialize at your destination." Like Batman, Animal Man questions whether Space B might actually be a dream brought on by isolation trauma.

And according to this link, Might's second home of "Zrfff" lies somewhere in the fifth dimension and lodges beings whose true forms cannot be comprehended by lower dimensional people, in agreement with my earlier description.

As the run moves along, we start to see Might break out some tricks befitting of a 5-D pixie. For one, he's constantly teleporting on and off panel. What's more, he exhibits a complete knowledge of Batman's life including a nugget of info about Space B that Batman really shouldn't possess. This sort of positions Might as an attentive comic reader, like we said about Doctor Hurt a few paragraphs earlier. His omniscience extends even beyond this though as Might locates a tiny hidden tracking device in Batman's teeth in Batman 679, which recalls Kaku's nod to "x-ray eyes" (and later in the text, he notes that high dimensional beings could be master surgeons to their dimensional subordinates).

Pushing ahead to 680, Charlie Caligula develops the ability to see the prevailingly invisible Bat-Might, but then seems disoriented when he finally does, panicking "What's that thing behind you! WHERE AM I?". Perhaps this is because he's gotten a hold of some of Batman's "slow vision" from earlier in the issue or perhaps his senses are being bombarded by the flickering, amorphous color forms one perceives as he's being dragged through higher dimensions (remember J and the Ticonderoga pencil).

When Might eventually drops his infamous line in 680, he's not dispelling any of these big ideas. His smug declaration "Imagination is the fifth dimension" doesn't throw out the latter of those two notions, but rather unites it with the realm from which all comic book stories hail. The players of the DCU believe they live in four dimensions (three space and one time). We obviously live in a higher world than them, so from their vantage point, we hail from a fifth dimension. With our higher dimensionality, we can exert influence on their lives, and the way we've done this is through storytelling, through imagination. Bat-Might extends Batman in strength and in potential (both Might and Might). This hooks into issue 683 in which Batman projects his "might" outside of himself to fry his clones. Mokkari wonders, "What kind of man can turn even his life memories into a weapon?" For characters in a story, a writer can do this.

And back in 679, Batman begins to witness story blossoming all around him. He starts seeing the city for what it really is, a checkerboard grid, panels in a comic book that "lives grow around like vines on a trellis." No one within the comic book plane has any imagination (see Animal Man 26) because his story is already carved out ahead of time; It is Written. Bruce describes the grids of Gotham City as "blueprints, a machine designed to make Batman." But these machine-made Batmen consistently break down, from Bat-Bane to the Anti-Life clones. Bruce has broken free of the lockstep vine growth through which the others developed; he flies somewhere above story, in myth, as though it's his actions that dictate plot and not the other way around.

By the time 681 rolls around, we've reimagined Bruce in full Christ mode, plowing through the grave with a Bat-Crucifix slumping to the sheer force of his will. Bruce is the thematic spitting image of Dali's Corpus Hypercubus, except Morrison has already folded Bats in the elusive seventh fundamental direction.

As a consequence, the Joker can never escape his all-seeing eyes. Whatever new level the Joker scrambles onto, he's still just a comic book man living in a comic book page, and so Batman, glowering at him from on high, can simply "build a new box" around him.

Bless your soul for trying, Joker. Keep on truckin.

Page 1: Like those in 678, these notebook excerpts are pulled from the Black Casebook

Page 3: "The superior man thinks of evil that will come and guards against it." I-Ching quoted this passage at the beginning of Batman 670.

Page 4: The three-eyed Gene Simmons demon at the zenith of the page evokes the Joker's new fashion, all teeth and a bullet dent in his brow like a splintering red Hindu dot. Riffing off of that, the wikipedia entry for "The Third Eye" chats a chunk about the spiritual significance of the thing, the wisdom it embodies, and now we're seeing the eye as Batman finally begins to "get it."

Oh and you don't need three eyes to notice with no great difficulty that these scenes are awash in the Joker's prized black and red.

Page 5: "I found a hole in my mind" sounds a lot like the "toppling void" he sensed at five years old in 674 or "the hole in things" Dr. Hurt refers to later in the issue.

Also, Morrison sort of pisses on subtlety in this scene, but still zealously refuses to spell out the answer for us. "Fuck, I don't want to just tell them what I mean by 'cover personalities', that would be too obvious. Hmmmmm... Oh okay, I got it. Tony, this time I need you to draw it backwards. Subtlety lives!"

Page 6: I think that billboard is an album cover, but I don't know whose so don't quote me on that. The "Knights" are Gotham City's MLB hitters and were, I believe, killed in a bomb blast in Rucka and Brubaker's Gotham Central. Anyway, the splayed body of Pierrot Lunaire will crumple the paper so that it reads "I give up" on the next page.

Pierrot Lunaire and the jolly old Swagman have been breathing down Robin's neck since 678. Isn't it neat how the air alone just seems to magically support Pierrot's weight?

Page 7: "Dark fuckin Ranger? You're dead" --> "You're wrong! Dark Ranger and the Scout will never die!" Well not quite, but this episode screams its parallels to the much prognosticated succession of the Bat by...

Page 8: Tim! The reflection in the Ranger's helmet clearly marks Tim as heir to the cowl. The remarks for 676 exhaust all the evidence I could find that Tim will slip into the old crow's combat boots during Batman's absence.

Page 10: "Buried alive in his best cape!" explaining where Batman's purple Hefty bag blew off to. Let it be known that the Black Glove sends its guests off in style.

Cardinal Maggi and Jezebel fling some more misery Batman's way, the whole commandeering of the batcave, bludgeoning of the butler, disgracing of the parents, pumping of the meth, breaking of the heart, and burying alive proving woefully short to the task of breaking him.

"We can disfigure him to look like his worst enemy... speak of the Devil..." Oh Morrison, how your masterful double entendre does entender my heart, doubly so in fact. Signs point to "worst Enemy" meaning Hurt after that "Devil" nod. [1]

Page 11: "Reiki to the rescue!" I wonder how the Joker acquires all these little pop culture references. Just somehow I doubt he's been exposed to much Reiki and Wikipedia in between the asylum and the mass murder.

Page 12: All that build up for the Bat-Radia to shut out the lights and close the door? Watch out Satan, Bat-Mom's putting you to bed with no story tonight! Still, the Radia apparently tunes into the station that raises the dead and wraps up the plot. I'm gonna call it W-DEM and leave the meaning up to guesswork.

Page 13: The Joker butchered Bossu's face last issue. Again, I think "furruh joke" implies that he sculpted Dr. Dax's face in the image of his hunchback mask.

Page 16: Some nice symmetry in the fact that Batman is born on page 16 and also on page 32.

Page 17: Everybody and his sister started dropping this term like breadcrumbs in the forest after Morrison posted it up in 681, but here you go anyway, just in case you were method reading RIP's conclusion in an isolation chamber. Apophenia.

A double clue to Dr. Hurt's true identity, "devil is double is deuce" and "pleased to meet you, admire your work," the latter being an obvious tip of the hat to the Stones' Sympathy for the Devil. [2]

Page 18: Again, "this high" with the hands. I love her faux-cutesy dialogue about it too.

Page 19: Jezebel said "I want you to know I understand" way back in Batman 664 to get Bruce to open up about his parent's death.

Page 20: There's no defending this sequence of expository dialogue without a complete rejection of statutes for criticism or a special exemption for Morrison from scrutiny under those statutes (which really is the same thing as rejecting them). Thinking along similar lines, Thom Young slaps this scene around a bit in his Comics Bulletin review of the issue. I've reproduced my favorite part below:

The type of expository revelation that Morrison used here--in which pertinent information is suddenly revealed to the reader after the fact in a novel’s final chapter--is generally considered an example of bad writing. This poor craftsmanship usually occurs when a writer has a clever premise that wasn’t carefully considered--and so he writes himself into a corner and has to produce a resolution out of thin air that supposedly satisfies all of the earlier plot threads.

All this info really does just breeze in from nowhere.

Page 21: There's Bossu again, stitching his face up.

Page 22: "Le Gant Noir. The actors, the director -- all murdered, gone mad or vanished. The story is the Devil himself put a curse on the whole thing." The stars of The Black Glove (why did El Gaucho watch the French version?) were Mangrove Pierce and Marsha Lamar. The latter was wife to the director John Mayhew who loosed his psychosis on the Club of Heroes in 667 to 669. [3]

Page 23: Thumbs down:

Poor art. - The layout makes it appear as though the ambulance is dropping onto the Batmobile.
Two inhumanly cold responses - The humor Morrison is shooting for falls flat and I'm tempted to dig up my Damian Wayne FAIL pic.
Ultimately pointless - No one believes the Joker died here, and the Joker remaining at large renders this page highly skippable

Page 24: "We stemmed the tide of crime in Gotham City, undermining your reason to be." In Morrison's first Batman issue, Bruce jets off to London on vacation after supercrime in Gotham had apparently vanished overnight. Before he leaves though, he spots a mysterious trenchcoated figure on the Bat-Computer that he mistakes for Killer Croc. Perhaps he suspected the presence of his Enemy as far back as that very first issue.

"We daubed the walls with a trigger phrase..." Well, there goes all that sanctimonious theory espousing I did about graffiti and ghosts and aerosolized drugs back in 665. Oh wellz.

"I must put away my Batman costume and retire from crime-fighting." From Robin Dies at Dawn:

Page 25: Dr. Hurt delivers his Darth Vader revelation, but our two-handed Bruce doesn't roar back "Nooooo!!!" Instead, he just shrugs off Hurt's claim like he knows it's Grant Morrison and not Kevin Smith on the script.

"I skinned Mangrove Pierce alive and wore him to Mayhew's party," I've hammered you guys with this one a thousand times before, but for those just stopping in on 681, wearing skin is like a physical analogue to spiritual possession.

"I am the hole in things, Bruce, the Enemy..." Christians often refer to Satan as the Enemy.

[4]

"Unless Batman agrees to serve the Black Glove. And willingly dedicate his life to the corruption of virtue. Ready to deal?" a Faustian trade. No thanks. Who do you think he is - Spider-Man?! (Couldn't resist)

"Then I curse the cape and cowl, as you will soon! The next time you wear it will be the LAST!" Silly Devil, everyone knows you can't curse in superhero comics. Seriously though, we need more jinxing in Batman comics, because it really is just a radiantly cool concept. On the other hand, I do think it would've been hilarious if some moron Final Crisis tie-in writer unwittingly scripted Bruce as changing clothes before FC 6, ruining the whole fulfilled prophecy vibe and baiting the ire of Morrison apologists everywhere.

Page 27: That's the Third Man from 672-674 piloting the helicopter.

"Pure source evil... find the Devil waiting" [5] Do you believe yet?

Page 28: "I am the daughter of the world's greatest criminal mastermind and the mother of Batman's son. We'll take care of retribution." I always announce my lineage before vowing revenge. Turn the next page over and watch Talia mete out the promised comeuppance.

Page 29: In case you forgot...

Pages 30-31: The Ninja Man-Bats return triumphant. Even old Cardinal Maggi can't escape Talia's bodacious justice.

Page 31: "Even Batman and Robin are dead!" Bossu's line sets the stage for the pronouncement that kicked off RIP "You're wrong! Batman and Robin will never die!"

Page 32: "Zorro in Arkham" Blech. Thomas Wayne must've been slurring like a four o'clock drunk for Bruce to miss that hard "k" sound, unless only his three penultimate syllables got tattooed onto Bruce's subconscious with memory blotting out the last in procrustean compliance with Morrison's favorite Silver Age invocation ("Zur En Arrh"). It's exactly the sort of non sequitur explanation that Morrison pokes fun at in the very next issue. It's apophenia at its finest, which maybe Morrison intends but even so, it's a whole page mostly devoted to explaining something nobody was wondering about, while still hanging were a number of plot points readers were legitimately hoping Morrison would flesh out a little more. Sorry guys. You get "Lubri chupa" instead.

Batman 680

2009-01-17T20:12:00.001-08:00

We know Morrison really buys into all the tropes of mythology and this issue is no exception. When Batman crosses a threshold his spirit guide Bat-Might can no longer follow. Might follows the model of Honor Jackson who also abandons Bruce at a key instant before transformation, supporting my claim two issues ago about the mirror structure framing RIP. Red and black, in addition to all its other significances, color the lion's share of Batman's two costumes, Zur En Arrh and Regular respectively.

What really set the internet abuzz though was, of course, the ending. Now do you get it? Morrison is toying with the readers, preying on our shakiness, our nervous uncertainty about where the roads are leading. He's trying to convince us that the patterns in his run which we have some vague inklings about - well vague until we do comprehensive annotations like these - don't really exist. Again, the character and the reader experience the story in tandem. Batman wonders whether all the correlations he's made are illusory, a product of his delirium, and we wonder whether we're going delirious trying to make correlations ourselves. This surreal narrative, can it really be resolved? Will it make sense? Will we "get it"? It's the ultimate cliff hanger, not whether the story will end well for Batman, but can it end well for us?

Page 1: David Uzumeri and David Wallace tell me this title alludes to David Bowie. I'll have to take their word for it - David's a trustworthy name right? - because I can't stomach the amount of mind altering substances required to 'get' that music.

Page 2: The Black Glove are shepherded into Arkham Aslyum's new sportsbook. Morrison names Cardinal Maggi later in the issue and Al-Khidr next issue. Also next issue, the Joker breaks the general's neck and, I guess, succeeds him in Black Glove fingerhood.

Notice one of the member's has dragged his daughter (who could pass for a young Gwen Stacy) to the festivities, which hints that perhaps President Nkele did the same with a young Jezebel Jet, emotionally scarring her into the conniving witch of a woman she is today.

Page 4: Interestingly, Le Bossu actually is a neurosurgeon. I thought he only posed as one, but I guess you really need credentials to work in a place that confuses an undisguised Nightwing with a killer mime and sets the Joker free every other week. Note the duffle bag full of razors at Le Bossu's feet.

Page 5: The Joker stands there like a bored movie star listening to a drooling fan drone off all his favorite scenes. As amypoodle puts it: "Isn’t it just great that the Joker could not give a fuck?"

Page 6: Ah, the much maligned spread, which clearly draws the eye to the right when it's supposed to go up-down. I don't know what Bat-Might means when he says "a glowing bat-signal on your chest too!" as the insignia on Batman's chest is the only down-tuned part of his gaudy geddup (which I absolutely adore, by the adore).

Page 9: "Good call to puncture the gas tank on that limo." Bleh. I hate it when exposition is used to explain something that can easily be depicted on-panel. SHOW, don't tell.

Bat-Might claims to be from imagination, about which people lie in two camps. The first camp, generally ignorant to Morrison's style of storytelling (i.e. meaning beyond just the plot), will accept Bat-Might's statement at face value; he is a figment. The second camp, generally well-versed in Morrison's style of storytelling (e.g. David Uzumeri and Amypoodle), believe this revelation is intended to be ambiguous; Might is actually something more. In my view, the first camp is right and the second camp is wrong. I don't see any ambiguity in the statement "Imagination is the 5th dimension." The only ambiguity that this statement could possibly entail is whether Bat-Might is lying or not, but anyone who adopts the "he's lying" stance, by implication, accuses Morrison of the somewhat lazy mystery-writing practice of having characters provide false information to the reader without any textual reason for the reader to suspect foulplay.

However (yay), we can extract interpretive meaning from Might's assumed true claim of imagination land citizenship without snaking our minds into Orwellian doublethink, if we take "Imagination is the 5th dimension" as literal. How exactly we go about doing that I'll (try to) explain next issue.

Anyway, after disappointing legion fans with that revelation, Bat-Might parts on a suitably ghostly note, "Batman Beware!" that only Morrison would ever really think to write.

Page 10: I wonder how many times I can invoke this panel in the annotations before I get tired of it.

David Uzumeri covers the parallels between the Black Glove and the asshats from 120 Days of Sod All in Invisibles 7, so I won't retread that ground. But I will add that in the following issue, the Joker ousts the general from "The Duke" position, which makes sense given that he's referred to as the Thin White Duke of Death.

What the fuck is going on in that bottom panel? Where did the Joker get the rope? How did he find that disembodied glass floorway/doorway in the blackest cosmos where clearly it resides? By what method of travel does he return to earth on the next page?

Page 11: "[H]ow extraordinarily... inevitable you are." It's "unbearably inevitable", "unbearably" ya hear?! Hurt channels the "Unbearable Inevitability of Batman and the Joker," the unbearably overbearing chapter 8 heading in the barely-a-comic Batman 663

Dr. Hurt seems to be outfitting the Joker's suspenders with a black corsage, but the Joker ditches that shit fast because the clown at midnight means...

Page 12: I guess we are to assume Commissioner Gordon's has passed through a motion sensor that triggered a recording, since Dr. Hurt is currently occupied entertaining guests and El Sombrero is currently occupied being dead.

Page 13: Man this subplot is so pointless and that's not even my disdain for Damian talking. As David Uzumeri says, there can be no doubt now that Commissioner Gordon knows Batman's true identity.

Page 14: "We didn't get the shipment! We're out of ammo!" Batman crashed the Martius Freight weapons shipment last issue, much to the chagrin of Charlie Caligula. And (if I'm lucky maybe one reader will get this reference) the top panel of this page reminds of me Metal Gear Solid 3 where the player could blow up the enemy's weapons storehouse, enabling terrorists to expend their once infinite ammo. Yeah, that's right, I just alluded to an obscure Easter egg from a five year old video game in the annotations for a completely unrelated comic book... bitch.

Page 14: "And you turn up dressed like clown," There's a certain, very Morrisonian irony in the fact that the new Batman is fruiting around Arkham Asylum in his new duds, tasting the rainbow, while a highly subdued Joker looks on, murmuring dry psychoanalysis at him strictly in lowercase.

Page 15: "Jezebel, I'm coming to get you." Brian Cronin from CSBG points out that this scene could be interpreted as Batman suspecting Jezebel of guilt and "coming to get her" the same way he'd come to get the Joker. Mr. Cronin thinks it's very cool, I'm not sure if it's anything at all, but you should check out the link anyway because the comments section features one of the finest bits of sarcasm (commenter named karl and not me, sad to say) ever to be visited upon the internets.

Page 16: A Batman impostor working for Dr. Hurt shot the Joker in Morrison's first issue, 655.

Page 17: "Jet-black irony with our morning coffee" isn't just a bad line of dialogue. It's also a hint to the issue's conclusion.

The Joker forks his tongue in an effort to look more snakish. Snake imagery is generally associated with Satan in the Judeo Christian tradition, so that obviously furthers the whole Bat-Christ idea, since I once overheard someone talking about Batman as if he was the PB to Joker's J, like some kind of duality between them I guess, idk.

Anyway, although I doubt Morrison was shooting for this alternate interpretation, serpents in classical Greece were often said to be apotropaic, as the medusa snakes in Athena's aegis. This falls in line with the Joker's antagonizing of the Black Glove, since all of its members may be thought of as evil spirits that he's helping Batman to ward off.

Page 18: "no, batman, that's just wikipedia." At the wikipedia website, you can learn about things.

Based on his reappearance "six months later" in Batman 681 and his statement that the Joker did it "for a joke," I assume the Joker carved Dr. Dax's face into a likeness of his Le Bossu mask, not that they were ever drawn so different to begin with.

Page 19: "and i hold the winning card" reprises the Joker's dialogue from Batman 1 and Batman 663.

Page 21: "It's only when they come together that the deadly neurotoxin is activated." Harley Quinn dispersed this neurotoxin among the Joker's henchmen in Batman 663.

Page 22: Note the clock wheeling towards midnight, fulfilling Harley's prophecy from 663: "Batman dead at midnight on the steps of Arkham Asylum, right?" When the neurotoxin hits Bruce's brain, he contorts his face into a Joker-like grin which, working in conjunction with his preposterous ensemble and his humiliating circumstance, makes Bruce the Clown at Midnight.

Actually, the details surrounding Bruce's transformation here and in the next issue, imitate those of another legendary figure... Cinderella! First, Bruce receives an invite to the ball (the Danse Macabre). Then, he arranges a transformation with his Fairy Godmother (Honor Jackson) that renovates his attire to match the lively garbs of his hosts (the Joker, Club of Villains, Dr. Hurt). At midnight, the spell begins to unravel and Bruce reverts to his original appearance (regular Batman). Finally, he is fitted for a glass slipper (punches Satan's helicopter into the Gotham river). Alright fine, but the resemblance is still a strong one.

"My good and faithful servant." Dr. Hurt isn't condescending to the Joker. The Joker really is a good and faithful servant to the Devil.

Page 23: I like Bruce hopelessly clutching the Bat-Radia. At this point, nobody knows it's anything more than just a piece of junk.

Batman 679

2009-01-14T19:58:00.000-08:00

While perusing Miracle on Crime Alley, which debuts the new BAT-man, I caught a drift of something, something hard to place, but something I could feel, something, some theme like symbolic selves. Maybe I imagined this theme (hallucinated it even) because I was looking for it after the first couple of nods, but the instances just seem to pile up in this issue. Visual cues, of course, arise naturally in the panels medium, but there's something a little extra in this one. I know I usually concretize my theories better than this, or I hope I do, but for 679 you'll have to make due with a more pointillistic approach which hopefully reading Grant Morrison comics has habituated you to.

First page, for example, Batman decked out in his garish new duds smashes through a door with a baseball bat. Now the bat, in addition to being a dusty old pun that should've died with the 50s, also embodies the brutality of the new Batman, who no longer functions as a human being but entirely as a weapon. "I'm what you get when you take Bruce out of the equation," Bat-Bum gravely intones. But the tacky hobo's-uniform undercuts this latest incarnation of the Batman, trivializing his newfound bloodlust.

Now the next pages really set the cogs off spinning in my head. Because honestly, without some thematic significance, this scene means absolutely nothing: the tailor never returns to these pages and his revelation about Le Bossu neither advances the plot nor connects the reader to any info he didn't already possess. Notice though that Morrison, like a fashion model with an abusive boyfriend, comes back again and again to the tailor motif, and there I think indwells the significance of these two pages. Clothes, especially in comic books, externalize the self of the wearer, often as if the character's very identity was sewn into the fabric of his or her outfit. Historically, it had to be this way, as comic book faces were (and often still are) sufficiently nondescript that distinguishing one person from the next necessitated characteristic fashion senses (e.g. Gordon's moustache and glasses).

Perfect example: think about the flurry of confusion storming the internet last issue over the identity of Arkham's latest captive. Even though Bossu was clearly fingering Nightwing's domino mask, since Nightwing wasn't actually wearing it in the final panel, examining that panel in isolation, the only things the reader had to work with were short dark hair, medium build, somewhere between adolescent and geriatric. That caricature doubles for Bruce. Hell, it doubles for Tim too. And though I hate to found two unrelated theories on the same ideas, consider 680's famous line, "Batman is cool! Batman wears black!" Right, so even with the same musculature, the same jaw line, the same costume even, only a different color scheme, but still operating in much the same way as always, the general can't believe that the real Batman could attire himself in these fruity fatigues.

And with Morrison spinning the threads, the clothes often don't make the man, and we've seen a lot of Batman knock-offs screw up just to prove that point. The clothes sometimes lie, broadcasting only desired associations rather than real ones. For example, to punish the depowered god-wizard Zachary Zor in Seven Soldiers, the Time Tailors knit him into a patchwork jacket that causes a lynch mob to confuse Zor with suspected killer/pedophile Cyrus Gold. "Not much of a disguise, you'd think. But watch it fool the locals," one of the tailors remarks, the implication being that comic book characters, like the audiences reading about them, have difficulty differentiating one another and frequently rely on characteristic adornments, in this case, a patchwork jacket, but other examples include Gwen Stacy's bow and Mr. Fantastic's gray streak, to tell one person from another.

Even earlier than that, Morrison's Orlando was fooling dumb kids with some of the most unconvincing skin grafts ever witnessed!

But let's not get off track. In this issue alone, we have numerous instances of characters pulling the wool over our eyes with the wool over their skins. First, Batman drapes himself in the flashy threads of a 1950's costumed do-gooder (Tlano Batman), yet doesn't follow his model in the least. In fact, the Batman of Zur En Arrh is far more brutal than even the hard-bitten original, provoking Jog's comparison to the awful Jean Paul Valley.

Moreover, this issue sees Dr. Hurt fruiting around the Batcave, defiling the costume of the first Bat-Man, trying desperately to sell the idea that he's Thomas Wayne still alive. Charlie Caligula likewise advertises a fake self in this issue, belting out his best karaoke of the Joker, eliciting Batman's comments on "the make-up, the vanity, the desperation." In a somewhat weaker way than Jezebel Jet, Wingman, and even Le Bossu / Dr. Dax in this issue, these characters anchor the theme of misrepresentation that has been floating around this run.

So yeah, I think the tailor bit matters.

Moving on, threads are but one of several ways Morrison projects personality onto physical form. For example, this issue offers a couple of insights into Bat-Might's true identity, which 680 reveals to be the personified subconscious of Bruce Wayne. Might accesses in this issue certain memories he could not possibly possess without tapping Bruce's mind or actually working out of a higher dimension as he claims he can (this is actually the stance I take, in spite of Bat-Might's apparent status as a hallucination). And not to dredge up a hoary old Frank Miller cliche, but Batman's roots do extend pretty deeply into his city, enough so to justify his naming of certain streets as "a machine designed to make Batman."

Page 9, in particular, gets much of its point across through symbolism. The second panel on that page reprises the Wayne murders but with the Waynes off-panel. That's okay though because those pearls provide a perfect pictorial summary of Thomas and Martha Wayne: rich, pure, loved, so that it would have been superfluous to depict them on-panel. Two panels later (after a suitup panel that we already got into), Zorro - or is that El Gaucho - declares "This will remind you that I have been here once and can return," presumably after signing the "Z" of his name. This obviously riffs on the whole Crime Alley rebirth current of the issue, but it also reminds us of something more relevant to this essay, namely, leaving one's mark. When you see a bandito wearing that "Z" on his hide, you know exactly what's happened to him. A writer can truck a whole mess of meaning to the reader (sometimes with the intention of misleading him) with a very simple picture, a cornerstone concept of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which I sampled in an earlier link.

It feels kind of weird to discuss iconography as a theme, as opposed to discussing what the icons actually point to, but I hope the above illustrated (Heh) the prevalence of symbolism, especially symbolism of identity, in this particular issue. God, it'd be nice if I had to picture to say all that.

Page 4: "The hunchback. Hmmm." "Heh! You said it!" Everyone in that panel is hunching over.

Page 5: The grids are almost certainly miscolored on this page. Checkerboard grids - nothing could more perfectly facilitate the use of red and black.

"A machine designed to make Batman." Batmen are born, not made.

Page 7: Batman has tied his tooth to the pigeon's leg, presumably the same pigeon that was perched atop the gargoyle's head on page 4.

Page 8: Explicitly informing the reader that the Caped Crusader hallucinated Zur En Arrh seems to swim against the current of Morrison's run, wherein we have consistently bobbed around Batman's zany past with innuendo and insinuation. What happened to "It would be far easier to consider this a dream"? Lame.

Morrison sure likes to flex that Dr. Milo muscle. He's used him in both Arkham Asylum, where he was a sane inmate in the house of crazies, and in 52, where Ralph Dibny flings Milo from his wheelchair in order to get at the black magic artifact concealed in one of its tires. Morrison divulged a while back plans for one to two issue arcs following BftC. It looks like DC's booting him off the title, but I wonder if Dr. Milo played any part in those plans.

"Paging Doctor Freud!" Bat-Might jokes, channeling my mother's awful sense of humor.

Also, I believe Morrison is the first writer to entomb the Waynes under crucifixes. Even Bruce's angry stance evokes Christ on the cross, a favorite image of Morrison's. If Grant Morrison wrote a comic book about Donald Duck, he would petrify his wingspan in a Christ pose and probably confront the suffering duck with the frozen corpse of Walt Disney, and barring that, some other incarnation of the man.

Page 9: After some fairly mundane exposition, we discover that Bruce created the Zur En Arrh identity as insurance against a psychic attack. Solidifying a main theme of the run, Bat-Might confirms that "Batman thinks of everything," an idea Batman 681 will come to beat us over the head with.

Page 10: As I explained in the annotations for 676, the Swagman gets his name from the Australian anthem Waltzing Matilda.

Page 12: "Senator Fishy" According to legend, Emperor Caligula tried to inaugurate his favorite horse into the Roman Senate. Charlie's line here obviously plays off that legend, substituting a fish for the horse in order to link himself more closely to the Joker (don't tell me you haven't read Laughing Fish), whose manner he seems to be aping.

Page 15: Morrison waxes sympathetic for Officer Nobody before shish kebobing his frontal lobe on arrow stems. Jog seems to think that Morrison is satirizing the shit writing practices inherent to this kind of event comic, but I'm not so sure, since he pulls the same pity-me fishing in Final Crisis 3 and Batman: Gothic. So I mean, how many times can you satirize the same thing before you start to satirize yourself, you know?

Pages 16-17: Dr. Hurt vastly oversells his case. Everyone knows he's not blowing the load this early in RIP, and so, Alfred dismisses his claim with a prim, butler's version of "stfu."

Page 18: "We know who you are Bruce Wayne! Everything about you!" Charlie Caligula raises a very good point. Dr. Hurt seems intent on fairplay with the Batman, always affording him an out to the Glove's death traps, but what of the other Club members? What's to keep them from blabbing Batman's alter ego around Gotham City or auctioning it off as Professor Hugo Strange once did? Six free agent nobodies in Gotham City after RIP, all coveting a ten million dollar tidbit - maybe that's what drives Bruce into retirement. We'll see tomorrow (as of posting this).

Just as the Ranger apended "Dark" to his name in order to keep pace with his increasingly sinister foes, Charlie now commits gimmick crimes in a Halloween costume to compete with the growing legions of psychopaths in a post-Joker DCU. It's the prevailing notion of The Long Halloween and, more famously, The Dark Knight of "freaks" commandeering the criminal scene, and old "Little Boots" didn't want to be left behind.

Page 19: "What's that thing behind you! Where am I?" As seen on the previous page, Bat-Might is skulking somewhere behind Bruce. Charlie's awareness of the imp's presence seemingly contradicts Bat-Might's claim to be a figment of Bruce's imagination.

Page 22: On Batman's belt dangles the leafy coronet of Charlie Caligula, who Batman... killed??? I don't think so but we never see him again, so I wonder. Remember, Batman's not himself here, so anything's possible.

Batman 678

2009-01-13T03:46:00.000-08:00

Morrison certainly has a lot of fun this issue. Fortunately this time - and it's not always the case - fun for him equates to fun for us. First, Bruce Wayne raises the bar on high fashion, shaming Ashton Kutcher and his trucker cap by becoming the world's first billionaire bum (Be honest, you thought I was shooting for the red and purple with that "fashion" comment). Second, a pithy magical negro opens Batman's eyes to new facets of life during their tour through the seedier side of the big city. In this sense, Honor Jackson seems directly inspired by Seven Soldiers' subway pirate No-Beard who accompanies the unmagical negro Guardian (here comes my racist ban from blogspot) as a spirit guide to the literal underworld of New York. Morrison even tags the bums of this issue with little pirate monikers like "Lone Eye Lincoln," which, unintentionally I think, mashes together pirate culture and urban poor culture, both of them violently preoccupied with turf - "Hey! This is my personal stuff! Fucking junkie!" - and concentrated in small clumps of kindred spirits.

Some of this issue also riffs on the Dickens Christmas Carol beat, first tapped on by the three ghosts of Batman way back in 665. But this time we have old Ebenezer Wayne slumming how the other half lives and then warming into a kinder, gentler Batman. Well, okay maybe not those things, but he certainly slips into a kinder, gentler color scheme. Morrison must've smirked through the entire script writing process for this issue, bubbling into full-blown giggle for the last couple of pages where he spoofs all the self-serious "I am Batman!" sequences and even slates a thunderbolt to strike at just the correct narrative moment. Bat-Might admonishes from overhead - "uh-oh" - to plant our feet back on the ground after the warp jump to Schizo Central on Zur En Arrh. Might reminds us that Bruce is a guy who dresses up as a bat. This shit was almost as silly back when he wore black.

Now Batman 678 calls for a rather protracted history lesson, which I interleave with my customary speculations on the material. First, that opera costume Dr. Hurt is cavorting around the Bat-Cave in belongs to Thomas Wayne. Choosing that costume out of all the others does seem to bolster his claim about secretly being dear old Dad in 679. Interestingly, and probably not coincidentally, the origin story of that costume draws extensively from The Origin of the Batman in which Joe Chill is killed (this was discussed heavily in the annotations for Joe Chill in Hell).

In Tec 235, which occurs chronologically after Origin of the Batman, Thomas Wayne, in flashback, attends a masquerade costumed as a "Bat-Man."

Some low-level enforcers kidnap Doc Wayne from the party and demand he remove a slug from their boss Lew Moxon's stomach, which seems to cast Moxon in a similar mold as the later Carmine Falcone. Wayne Sr. manages to escape the mobsters and testify in court against their boss, putting him away for 10 years.

A resentful Moxon hires Chill from prison to whack the Waynes, and the rest... well, you know. Back in the present, Bruce, donning his father's costume for story reasons (amnesia's involved, I'm not gonna get into it), pursues the paroled Moxon who, in fearful recognition of his attacker, flees out into the street where he and a speeding big rig have an intimate conversation. For the second time, Batman marks the murder of his parents as a case closed.

The story of Tec 235 is driven by a familiar formula: "You thought you had closure when Mr. Y died but oh ho! Really Mr. X masterminded the scheme!!" It's a fairly common retcon, which you've undoubtedly seen before if you read superheroes with any regularity. Perhaps Morrison is lampooning that tradition of retcon by carrying it absurdly far:

Well it's not just Joe Chill who killed your parents, he was only acting under orders from Lew Moxon! But Lew Moxon belonged to a crime syndicate which operated under the banner of the Red Hood! But the Red Hood only turned to crime because of the evil in his heart, and we all know who made up evil -- the Devil!

I cooked up the Red Hood part myself, but still, the idea fits with the Black Glove's claim to be "operators at the highest level!" I think Morrison is playing up the proto-Villain aspect of Dr. Hurt / Devil, the Mastermind behind all masterminds.

Finally, I shouldn't have to point out that this story supplies yet another instance of father-to-son occupational inheritance in Grant Morrison's Batman. More fodder for my Tim = New Batman theory which I put forward two issues ago.

The second story, Batman - The Superman of Planet X from Batman 113, links into 678 in much more obvious ways, not the least of which being some direct dialogue swipes from the 1950s issue.

The story begins with Batman possessed by some unknown entity who compels him to pilot his Bat-Plane into outerspace where he's teleported to the mysterious world of Zur En Arrh (presumably, "Planet X" is only the "Earthian" name for that world).

I'm not entirely sure why he needed to fly into outer space to be teleported, but the date on the first page reads "1958" so we'll let it go. On this new planet, Bruce meets Tlano, a Batman-inspired crusader (what a novel concept!) who brought the original to his planet to help ward off the green, generic bug-like invaders from the cover.

Tlano has also constructed an elaborate Bat-Cave, complete with Batmobile and Bat-Plane. A psychedelic version of the latter adorns the cover to 678.

Then, the garish double breaks out a new toy for Batman, the Bat-Radia, which "issues electronic molecules that cause controlled disturbances in the atmosphere!" Sweet. Suddenly, Tlano pulls out a gun and starts blasting at Batman who, caught by surprise (this is a pre-Morrison Batman, remember, so it was possible to catch him by surprise), collides with its "ray-bullets." Fortunately, the bullets bounce off his chest causing a smug Tlano to explain how, due to the immense gravity difference between their planets, Batman now possesses god-like abilities on Zur En Arrh, and in fact, Batman fills an entire page demonstrating these Superman skills, including the now-classic coiling-of-long-metal-bar.

I'm very surprised Morrison didn't attempt to adapt "I can twist it like taffy candy!" into his run. Batman wiles away the next couple of pages testing his new powers on the invaders when Tlano finally broadcasts the full power of the Bat-Radia on them, which robs the aliens of their biggest edge against Batman.

The actual plot of the comic isn't terribly important. The dialogue and the Silver Age accoutrements are really what's pertinent to Morrison's run. After successfully warding off the invaders and their robots, Tlano returns Batman to his home, but not without a keepsake to commemorate their victory -- the Bat-Radia!

That parting line pretty well sloganizes Morrison's run on Batman, and he steals it perhaps in recognition of this. "It would be far easier to consider this a dream." Tacitly, this is what DC has asked us to do for the past 30 years, but how can we?!

Page 1: "The Bat-Radia is turned on. The electronic molecules are streaming forth. It would be far easier to consider this a dream, but how can I??" quoted from Batman 113.

The second panel riffs on the cover of Batman 134.

That cover has a kind of metatextual irony, don't you think? Batman and Robin are already two-dimensional people! What's more, the Dynamic Duo actually defeat the monster by stripping him of his color and then ramming him with what looks like a giant pencil.

I wonder if Bill Finger was intentionally layering his story with metatext or if he's just streaming it subconsciously onto the page.

The third panel pays the reader a kindness and tells its place of origin, Batman 156: Robin Dies at Dawn. The details of that issue, I've recapitulated here.

The fourth panel cobbles together several different panels from Batman 153 with the closest resemblance reprinted below.

Though he's not in this panel, an alien really does pilot a red jet ski elsewhere in the comic.

Page 2: "I don't want to know what goes on in the Joker's head. I have to know." Bruce agreed to participate in the isolation experiment to better understand the Joker.

"But when I imagine how it must feel to be him, I think of a snake with a broken back, flipping and tracing intricate, agonized arabesques in the dust." Recall from Joe Chill in Hell that for his black casebooks, Bruce practices that “self-conscious, hard-boiled style that Alfred loves to read.”

Pages 3-5: Notice that Robin's entire battle with the mime Pierrot Lunaire is silent.

Page 7: "I do know you from somewhere. Alright! Honor Jackson never forgets a good turn!" Honor Jackson knows Bruce from Batman 676, where Batman, in one "good turn," threw a couple hundred dollars his way. "Honor" honors his obligation to furnish "another" even after his death, perhaps an invocation of ghosts with "unfinished business," as Honor does vanish once he's set Bruce on course to become Batman again.

Page 10: These gladiators belong to Charlie Caligula.

Page 12: God, I just can't get bums these days to shut up about "horticulture!" Actually, Morrison could've pulled the line off if he had Honor repeat the word later in the issue, as it's been my experience that the under-educated will often exhaust the novelty of their ten-dollar words. Anyway, we can pin it on Bruce's imagination, devising that unconvincing bum dialogue, so Morrison slips away on this one.

Oh also, somebody drops some change into Honor's beggar cup on this page, which is kind of odd considering that he's dead and not really there. Maybe this person is just in the habit of throwing change. Oh be a dear won't you Two-Face and jot down for me that lovely shade of nail-polish you're wearing.

Page 13: We see Batman resurfacing, not only in the severe ass beating Bruce administers to the "Psycho Riderz" but also in his trademark scoff "Hh."

Page 14: "You have a kind face," Honor thought this even when Bruce was wearing the cowl in 676.

Bruce retains his detective prowess despite his amnesia.

Note the red and purple rolls of cloth at the bottom of the shopping cart.

Page 15: Honor Jackson hands down to Bruce the sacred Bat-Radia, which Thom Young compares to Kirby's Mother Box. Like Kirby's device, the Bat-Radia also comes equipped with a "Resolve Plot" button, which we see Batman press in the concluding chapter of RIP (where else?).

"You can fall... or you can rise." Falling was the motif around which the last issue revolved. Now Batman rises. Last time, I noted with some disaproval that Morrison was using the same visual hook in two contiguous issues: 677 and 680, but now that I think about it the repetition makes good storytelling sense. In 677, Batman falls. In 678, Batman of Zur En Arrh rises. In 680, Batman of Zur En Arrh falls. In 681, the circle joins on itself and Batman rises again. Cool huh?

Page 17: Thomas and Martha Wayne met their fates at Park Row / Crime Alley, which is like the Brooklyn Bridge of Batman comics. The building in the fourth panel could be the theater the Waynes were departing just before their run-in with Joe Chill.

Page 18: Le Bossu, posing as a doctor in Arkham, has convinced the Arkham staff (man these guys are dumb) that Nightwing, who's spewing foam from his mouth after getting stung by Scorpiana, is actually Pierrot Lunaire, the mad mime who ambushed Tim at the beginning of the issue. I guess Le Bossu assumed the other doctor wouldn't recognize that mask as belonging to Nightwing, a fair assumption, since greater than 70% of the Bat-fan/Internet overlap found the frothing patient's identity to be terribly unclear (many thought he was Tim).

Page 19: The Club of Villains drink a toast to the Black Glove, including King Kraken, who I imagine will just pour the champagne onto his face plate and wait for it to dry.

Page 20: Batman pricks his finger in... well, I'll let Jog explain it:

Oddly, Batman also pricks his finger while sewing his new duds, a possible reference to the 'snapping out of a trance' bloodletting bit from Arkham Asylum. Well, more accurately, something that was supposed to happen in Arkham Asylum, before Dave McKean transformed it into a multi-page cataclysm of self-mutilation, "which would surely have rendered Batman's hand entirely useless for the rest of the book, and possibly the remainder of his useless life," as Morrison remarked in his annotations to the 15th Anniversary Edition. There is a ritual element to it all, but what the ritual does remains to be seen.

Page 22: Apparently, Bruce ingested a lot of roids along with that weapons grade crystal meth, as his body appears grossly disproportionate. Actually, the clunky Batman enhances the silliness of the scene, so it's not really so bad of fuck-up on Daniel's part.

Batman 677

2009-01-10T21:14:00.001-08:00

On the first page of Batman in the Underworld, Batman falls down. He falls down as a demon pursues him into a subterranean Hell, a motif in which our hero remains trapped for the remainder of the issue. Note that from cover to cover, we never once see Batman emerge from the underground. He only spirals further down, further into the depths of his own swelling insanity, so that by page 14, he's drowning in it, with all his Bat-copters circling like sharks overhead in his underwater cove. His corkscrew path to Hell summons up powerful, archetypal imagery going back to Dante's Inferno and even earlier to Norse cosmology in the sort of Jungian unconscious appeal that Morrison loves. Loves so much, in fact, that he replays this motif in Batman 680 where the Dark Knight once again winds his way downward to an unpleasant fate.

Even more interesting than the visual framework though is the big exchange going on within it. I think fans justifiably mistrusted Jezebel Jet even before the big reveal at the end of Batman 680, so most of them/us probably interpreted her coaxing, armchair psychiatry - "This is a disturbed little boy's response to his parents' death," - as subversion, or prodding at best. "Don't let that bitch hustle you, Bruce! Batman never quits no matter how crazy shit gets!" or at least I thought. And I think Morrison anticipated this response from a good chunk of the fanbase.

But the funny thing is, if you find someone who never heard of Batman and show him this sequence, he'll say "This guy's nuts! He should listen to his wife," because Jezebel argues completely sound points and only our fondness for the Batman character averts our sympathies from them. Bruce reacts to her much as his most zealous fans would: "But this is how the Black Glove would work, isn't it? Wouldn't he even use you as a weapon?"

Excessively paranoid, no doubt, but Bruce is actually right! Following Jezebel's logical arguments would have played right into the grubby hands of the Black Glove. Only through unreasoning faith in the Batman persona can Bruce Wayne prevail over the forces of evil. Morrison is dabbling in absurdism again, rewarding Bruce's illogical choice to remain Batman in the face of a hundred better ways for someone of his stature to promote the good. Their whole argument takes on a religious flavor, the rational atheist Jezebel and the devout cultist Batman proselytizing to one another in the sacred temple of the Batcave. It all culminates when Bruce, hoping to convert Jezebel, brings her to his Holy Book, the Bat-Computer, in which all answers are contained: "If it's me, the Bat-Computer will know." But Batman can't read the Word. It's shrouded from him by static in a way that recalls another absurdist tale penned by Morrison, Animal Man's Coyote Gospel.

(Note: I skipped two pages after the first to avoid any sort of trouble)

In that story, the coyote is the prophet (obviously) and Animal Man is just an onlooker. In Batman though, Morrison flips the scene, so the scripture is lost on the prophet but clear to the onlooker. There's good reason for the reversal. In The Coyote Gospel, Animal Man can't decipher the document because it details a decree by God Himself for an endless cycle of torment. While the coyote has come to terms with the violent way of the world, living that violence endlessly everyday, the pacifistic Animal Man cannot face it. In Batman in the Underworld, Batman can't decipher the display because it depicts a part of his insane history that he's willfully surpressed. While Jezebel freely acknowledges the absurdity of Batman's adventures, emblematized by "Zur En Arrh," Bruce cannot face that symbol of his contradictory past. Both "Man"s can't swallow those truths that defy their respective systems of belief.

Notice that for all the talk of black casebooks, Bruce never actually reads them. Alfred "left them in his desk" or borrowed them to "transfer their lurid contents to memory stick." Alfred is right to keep them from Bruce. As we see in this issue, his mind can't take the strain.

Page 1: The gargoyle "henches" (it should be a word) for Le Bossu. His blade, as we learn on page 7, is coated with a latently-acting drug which makes Batman susceptible to the trigger phrase later in the issue. I like that the gargoyle wears sneakers; he refuses to sacrifice practicality for flamboyancy.

Page 3: The "old movie" alludes to The Black Glove film, whose poster we first spotted in the Club of Heroes arc.

Page 4: "I believe I committed most of your handwritten notes to bat-computer files." He began this undertaking in 664

"Innocent lovers corrupted and destroyed." John Mayhew and the Black Glove framed (it's implied) his wife's lover, Mangrove Pierce, for her murder.

Page 5: I believe this is the first time Batman mentions a connection between his parents and the cast of The Black Glove, which seems sloppy on Morrison's part considering we met John Mayhew and the Glove way back in 667. Also, Mangrove Pierce changed his name from the previous page to "Mongrove" Pierce, which he thought sounded less gay.

The monitors display (probably) the faces of Marsha Lamarr, Mayhew's murdered wife and co-star of The Black Glove, "Mongrove" Pierce, and Mayhew himself.

Page 6: "Nothing less than the utter ruination of a noble human spirit." The Devil wouldn't settle for less.

Page 9: "It was like I'd known you all my life. It felt like meeting you was always meant to happen." Batman doesn't spout romantic drivel like this. The Black Glove has cued his mind to attach to Jezebel.

Page 10: "Ed Sheldrake" is possibly related to Cyril Sheldrake the Knight? Maybe the Black Glove is trying to advance the illusion that all of Bruce Wayne's friends have turned on him. Seems tenuous though.

"Schizophrenic?" On this page, Morrison lines his red herrings in a row - Thomas Wayne, Bruce Wayne himself, Alfred - before shooting them down over the course of RIP.

Page 16: "You know like the dead man's hand the Joker dealt me when I went to Arkham Asylum." DC Universe 0, as if you forgot! -- Crustaceous Cass

Page 19: The monitors display the leering golem from Robin Dies at Dawn, the one Bruce hallucinated in Batman 672.

Batman 676

2009-01-08T21:08:00.000-08:00

Unbelievably, I've managed to chug through 2/3 of this run to arrive at RIP. Though I set up connectivity to later issues in the early annotations, I always giggled to myself whenever I did this because I imagined that I would surrender at some point or simply sputter out with no further ideas to fuel the posts. Yet, here we are, 20 posts strong and this one's the longest yet. Please, hold your groans until I leave the room.

Before I launch into mad, only-tangentially-related conjecture - well not conjecture, my theory will culminate in fact! - let's dip our toes into 676. Morrison submits an oddly decompressed comic (think Geoff Johns, not Brian Bendis) this month, like he's breathing a long sigh before he takes the big plunge into RIP. Only about two thirds of the comic is actually broken into panels, with two bookend splash pages and two two-page spreads filling out the remaining third. The latter of the two-page spreads is insanely indulgent to the point that even in my first reading, before I knew squat about Morrison, I still had to put the book down and wonder why anyone would squander two pages like that. I suppose now that Morrison was trying to spotlight the neglected "Batmobile as a metaphor for Bruce Wayne" theme established in the first issue, but even with this in mind, the spread reeks of a desperation play.

Tony Daniel pencils some pretty pictures for us this month, including very believable facial expressions for a family kidnapped by an idiot and a suitably horrific rendering of a newscaster tearing apart his own mouth. When given substantial lead time (Ryan Benjamin penciled the previous issue) Daniel can really strut his artistic stuff and exhibit a real talent that gets buried in his rush work (see Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul). It's almost a shame I have to ream the art in the annotations for bungling the story at one point, as this could've been a real banner issue for Daniel without the gaffs on the last couple of pages.

Anyway, here's the mad, only-tangentially-related conjecturing I mentioned before:

During the course of reading this issue, I formulated a theory which, after scanning the run, I'm now 99% certain will pan out. I predict (with 99% certainty) that Tim Drake will succeed Batman following Battle for the Cowl, provided Morrison dictates the final outcome of that project. "But it's so obviously Nightwing! Didn't you see him clutching the cowl in 681 and staring at it contemplatively? Didn't you see him standing in the shadow of the bat in that Detective cover? IT'S ALL SYMBOLLIC!" Yeah well, I have trouble believing that DC would bother hyping up the mystery aspect of Battle for the Cowl with its conclusion already carved in stone. Before I begin detailing my theory, the reader should know that I'm taking a weakest to strongest approach. So if you don't find my initial points particularly persuasive, read on. They get better.

To start, I'm going to assume that Morrison writes well enough that no character other than Nightwing or Robin will replace Batman, since his run spotlights none of the other candidates. Yes, I understand Morrison isn't writing Battle for the Cowl, but I presume his run exerts major influence on its story because Batman has been the flagship since Morrison came aboard. So for all of those out there crying, "It's Jason Todd because he wears black and red!" or "It's Harvey Dent because in a story Morrison never read Harvey Dent protected Gotham City!" you're wrong and you've mistaken Morrison with a Bendis-level hack.

With that in mind, note that Tim receives a lot more facetime than Dick in Morrison's run. Tim deals with Damian. Tim battles Bane-Bats. Tim endures the trials on Mayhew's Island. Tim "saves the city" from the Club of Villains in 681, while Dick froths at the mouth waiting for his lobotomy. Overall, Morrison has established a stronger presence for Tim and, in my view, writes him as a better superhero, one more deserving of the Bat mantle.

What's more, the theme of father and son umbrellas Morrison's Batman run. Note, for example, the arrival of Damian or Dr. Hurt's many allusions to Thomas Wayne or Cyril Sheldrake inheriting his father's calling as the Knight. While one might argue that both Dick and Tim serve as surrogate sons to Bruce Wayne, in reality, the age gap between Dick and Bruce isn't all that wide and Dick doesn't interact with Bruce the way a son does with his father. On the other hand, Bruce possesses legal guardianship of Tim, who is an appropriate age to be his son and pretty much considers himself as such. Note that he calls Damian his brother in this very comic.

In addition, Tim Drake's Robin pulls some very distinct Batman-isms over the course of these issues. For instance, Robin admits to a complete dearth of personal life in 667: "My choices? A weekend nursing my should and dodging Alfred... or a trip to a private island to hang out with a bunch of C-list crime fighters... I'm totally sad either way, Bruce." Interestingly, he says this as Bruce ventures away from that lifestyle, visiting old friends (The Club) and building a serious relationship with Jezebel. Later in that arc, Tim spots an out-of-place light source which leads him to a secret passage, a very subtle clue similar to the chicken grease clue Batman sussed out earlier in the issue.

I admit, the previous two examples only illustrate Tim's growth into a more dedicated crime fighter, more like Batman, but the next two examples speak volumes to how much Tim is actually becoming Batman. In Batman 655, Bruce Wayne keeps forgetting to drop the Batman growl in his voice when chatting with his socialite friends. In tandem with this, we see Robin forget to remove his domino mask before cycling out to town in his civies. Fortunately, Alfred stops him before he leaves, but it's a very Batman-esque blunder that betrays a difficulty in separating himself from his superhero persona. Morrison also seeds a strong clue in a seemingly throwaway scene in 675. In that scene, Tim out-Batmans Dick by predicting the precise amount of time it will take for "Ray-Gun Rider" to fly overhead; he calls it at exactly 2.75 seconds (Dick guesses 3 seconds). This sort of obsession with exact detail, to have the timing down to the correct hundredth of a second, echoes Batman speech to the treacherous monk in Nanda Parbat as well as his Black Casebook captions before he rises from the grave in 681. Note also that 675 is the ONLY time we see Robin and Nightwing together in all of Morrison's run so Dick never evens the score with him.

Let's journey outside the text for a second now. The strength of the Dick Grayson/Nightwing character carries two books: Nightwing and Titans. The strength of the Tim Drake/Robin character also carries two books: Robin and Teen Titans. Currently, the Dick Grayson books outsell their analogous Tim Drake books with Nightwing leading Robin by a substantial margin. People will read Batman no matter what, especially with a new creative direction. Just like the wild success of Brand New Day, intrigue always beats outrage, as does collectors' completionism. So it makes a lot more sense from a sales standpoint to resume Dick Grayson as Nightwing, relaunch with a new #1 to thrust its already-high sales further out into the stratosphere, and just ditch the Robin book altogether or perhaps restart it with Damian in the title role *shudder*.

This brings me to another point. It's fairly obvious from Tony Daniel's drawing of "Batman and Robin will never die!" that Damian takes on the Robin mantle. If Nightwing replaces Batman, why would he recruit Damian, someone he's never met, as his Robin when he could just as easily have, well, ROBIN as his Robin? It would make no sense. Also, I really doubt DC will go with two Robins, so the writers must adopt one of three alternatives.

Bump off Tim Drake - No.
Retire Tim Drake - Hasn't been set up at all, plus Tim is awfully young to retire.
Transform Tim Drake into a new Nightwing - Feasible, however it leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, which I hope DC would recognize before proceeding in this direction. Having Robin become Nightwing again not only rehashes an old storyline, it also contrives a very mechanical shifting, everyone pushed up one slot in the hierarchy, an RPG style level-up for the whole party, not exactly germane to organic storytelling.

Diving back into the text and the very thing that inspired me to write this piece, look at the first page, generally an important part in any literary work, of RIP: "You're wrong! Batman and Robin will never die!" and ask yourself "Who believes this?" Not Dick Grayson. Nightwing does not take stock in the idea of Batman and Robin's iconic power; he quit, afterall. In fact, Dick Grayson's character development for the last 25 years has been a concentrated effort to propel him out of the aforementioned shadow of the bat.

But Tim became Robin exactly because he believed in the Dynamic Duo. In Tim Drake's eyes, Batman needs Robin and Batman and Robin must "never die."

As these excerpts from Tim Drake's introduction in A Lonely of Dying imply, Tim views the myth of Batman and Robin as a force for good that must continue to be upheld.

Now if the above didn't sell you on my theory, then how about this? In a future scenario penned by the God of All Comics himself in JLA #8, Tim Drake takes over for Batman with Bruce Wayne's son as his sidekick! Enlarge the picture to read that lower left caption box.

Still not convinced yet? Of course not. That story's 10 years old. Let's go a little more contemporary, like Batman 681. This one is the smoking gun that case-closes this mystery as far as I'm concerned. On page 7 of that issue, the late Dark Ranger's sidekick the Scout dons the costume of his fallen mentor and zaps the Swagman. Obviously, this foreshadows a whole student-becoming-the-master type deal to occur with Batman. Fine, this could implicate either Robin or Nightwing. But notice, on the very next page, Robin's face appears reflected in the glass of the new Dark Ranger's helmet, symbolically linking the two, singling out Tim as the cowl's inheritor. Sure, later on in the issue we get a pinup of Nightwing brooding over the cowl, but this is Morrison we're talking about. With him, the safe money's on subtlety.

Page 1: This page fills in the missing second-to-last page of 681. Coolest picture eva until you realize that's Damian in the Robin gear. The PMS sky indicates that the DCU has entered full Crisis mode.

Pages 2-3: "Six months earlier" informs us that Final Crisis follows RIP. Morrison unchains his inner Victor Hugo with the stagecoach and the whole gothic France look for the introduction of Le Bossu (literally: "The Hunchback").

Pages 4-5: Dr. Hurt we know from before. The Club of Villains from left to right:

King Kraken, after the sea monster of Norwegian legend, hides his disfigured face in the helmet he once wore as a deep sea diver. Presumably, whatever disfigured his face also warped his mind, turning him into a pirate and arch foe of Wingman's. Batman reports in 669 that Kraken kills with a high powered electric rifle, though he never carries one in RIP.

Charlie Caligula, after the psychotic Roman emperor, suffers from some form of dementia and patterns his crimes around a Roman Empire theme. In 679, Batman calls him out as a poser, a wannabe psycho-savant gimmick villain, essentially an impostor Joker to his impostor Batman nemesis the Legionary. Other than exercising some control over the powerful King Kraken, Charlie seems to have no special abilities.

El Sombrero, after the Spanish for "the hat," an item he paradoxically does not wear, hires himself out to build elaborate death traps (which he claims border on art) for less creative villains. Note that this is the first time we see the real El Sombrero. In the Club of Heroes arc, Sombrero's nemesis El Gaucho ("the cowboy") mistakes John Mayhew's mockup of Sombrero's costume for the real deal.

Pierrot Lunaire, after the French for "moonstruck mime" and perhaps the melodrama of the same name, has mastered some mime form of martial arts which appears to enable him to leverage his body on thin air. The painted tear dotting his eye continues the French tradition of "Pierrots" as sad clowns pining for love, not to mention the Morrisonian tradition of nice touches over the heads of fans. The Musketeer claims Pierrot as one of his rogues in 668.

Scorpiana, after nothing (the Spanish for "scorpion" is "escoprión"), deploys blue scorpions to assist in the assassinations which are her trade. Morrison fleshes her out the least of the Club members (he even gives her a shitty name and costume) making her a token female in the group, which is unfortunate. In the past, Scorpiana, like El Sombrero, has clashed with El Gaucho.

The Swagman, after the protagonist of the Australian folk song Waltzing Matilda, pilots a badass looking motorcycle and totes a big 'ol six-shooter that he brandishes while singing the song of his namesake. The Club of Villains' Swagman battled the late Dark Ranger in their native Australia.

EDIT 1: This is wrong, but I leave it as a testament to the kind of tenuous theorizing Grant Morrison comics inspire.

His helmet, I believe, is modeled after the billycan pot with which Waltzing Matilda's swagman boils his tea water.

EDIT 2: This is right. Commenter Eddie points out that the Swagman's look is based off the armor of Australian bushranger (outlaw) Ned Kelly, whom you can read about here.

EDIT 3: Omar Karindu, the smartest writer in comics not to have his own comics blog (which, by the way, makes him REALLY the smartest) observes that each member of the Club of Villains synthesizes different gimmick elements from other Batman villains ("cosplay mashups," as he puts it). Charlie Caligula combines the Greco/Roman theme of Maxie Zeus with the clown theme of the Joker. Pierrot Lunaire has the appearance of the Joker, but his personality gimmick comes from literature, like the Mad Hatter. Scorpiana, I thought, could be a mashup of Catwoman's animal theme and fighting ability with Poison Ivy's penchant for poisoning her foes.

Page 6: The Green Vulture belts out his best karaoke of an Arkham regular. With so many Bat-clones running amok in these issues, it shouldn't surprise anyone that a few Joker clones would get loose. Like Charlie Caligula, the Green Vulture comes across more as an attention whore than a mad genius.

Pages 8-10: The tints of Bruce's obsession color the new Batmobile. It suggests that the fingers of the Black Glove are swirling around in Bruce's mind, creeping through his thoughts. As he says, "It's not how I saw it when I first had the idea." Right, last time we saw the Batmobile (I mistakenly wrote it off as a coloring gaff), it was under construction and the fender was blue. Now that the Black Glove is getting to Bruce, the Batmobile has a new coat of paint more to the tastes of Dr. Hurt and his evil organization.

Page 11: Batman rescues Honor Jackson who repays the favor by becoming Bruce's magical negro spirit guide to heroin and the hood in Batman 678.

Page 13: Cleanly-shaven-love-god! "Miss St. Cloud" refers to Silver St. Cloud who figured out Batman's identity in the Englehart/Rogers run, mostly because Batman sucked at hiding it from her. "Miss Bordeaux" refers to Sasha Bordeaux, a court-imposed bodyguard for Bruce Wayne, who grew increasingly frustrated by Wayne's constant disappearances. After a while, Bruce realized the jig was up and led Sasha into the cave for some Bat training, which I imagine went over well on her job application for Checkmate. She appears to have kamekaze'd in the pages of Final Crisis: Resist in a last ditch effort to activate the OMACs against the zombies of Darkseid.

Page 16: Jezebel's is angling here with her question here which, keeping her true motives in mind, essentially asks "What would get you to quit being Batman?" Naturally, Bruce won't grace the question with an answer.

Page 20: These Rorschach ink blot tests that recur in comics - going back to Watchmen and maybe (?) earlier - always remind me why I like the comic book format better than plain old prose (blasphemy!). You simply cannot convey this scene well with words, it's impossible. You'd get bogged down describing the blot, its resemblance to the pool of blood in the Joker's fantasy, its resemblance to a bat, and even in the deftest hands the scene would come across clumsily.

Unfortunately, I now have to embarrass myself by pointing out that although a visual medium is necessary to execute this scene well, it is apparently not sufficient, as some pretty significant mistranslations from Morrison to Daniel to Guy Major confuse this episode's intent. For example, why is Commissioner Gordon so young in the Joker's fantasy? I understand that it's a fantasy and the Joker can imagine Gordon however he wants, but why hallucinate Nightwing and Robin from the present and Commissioner Gordon from the past? Also, in the third panel from the bottom left, which appears to occur in normal reality given the blood-free walls and the ink card, the Joker is still brandishing his razor blade. Now I know the bulbs of the Arkham staff don't shine brightest, but do they really allow their mental patients, their murderous mental patients, to walk around sporting lethal weapons? Finally, on the last page, the blood spattered all over the Joker's person does not belong there. Morrison admits as much here, where he apologizes to the fans who spent time speculating on a coloring gaff that should never have seen print.

Page 22: The Joker isn't necessarily patronizing Doctor Bossu when he says "Another pretty flower." Remember that some pretty flowers were responsible for a lot of carnage in the Joker's last appearance, the same type of carnage tormenting millions in his fantasy.

Interlude: DC Universe 0

2009-01-07T20:19:00.000-08:00

Morrison capitalizes on the sampler book format by flooding these teaser pages with info and even themes that a n00b might find edifying before he tears into RIP. Unfortunately, it doesn't exactly work as no one who hasn't read the run could really grasp what the fuck is going on here - Morrison's work is generally unforgiving to newcomers - but it does serve as a handy recap for those who actually have been keeping up with the past 20 or so issues.

Page 1: The page itself is split red and black. This looks nothing like Tony Daniel's other work, but I'm sure the red and black motif was dictated by Morrison, so that might have masked his style.

Page 3: Morrison/Daniel lays out the page as a red and black checkerboard.

The Dead Man's Hand earned its name when Crooked Nose Jack McCall put a bullet in the back of Wild Bill Hickcok's head, while his attention was focused on a poker game, in particular his two-pair Aces and Eights. Maybe this means that the only purpose of black and red is to distract Batman from what's really going on.

In the second panel, the word "Hurt" is emphasized and repeated. At this point, Bruce does not know about Dr. Hurt's connection to the Black Glove.

"The Dead Man's Hand is missing a finger. The last fatal card." In 681, the Joker replaces a "finger" in the Black Glove organization.

The Joker pantomimes a bullet to the brain, like the one delivered to Wild Bill Hickok. Actually, this tenth panel might alternately be interpreted as the Joker looping his finger in a "cuckoo" motion to imply that Batman will lose his sanity before dying. Morrison is playing up the near-prescient, Hannibal Lecter quality of the Joker.

Although creepy, the blood on the Joker card actually bodes well for Batman. Without the blood, black dominates the hand, portending victory for the Black Glove. With blood, "life," represented by red, may have a shot.

Batman 675

2009-01-07T18:34:00.000-08:00

Note that while Jezebel nurses a wine glass on page 5, Bruce drinks only water and suggests they "cancel the tempura." In Batman: Gothic, the Dark Knight, off on mission to Austria, instructs Alfred to "cancel the Peking Duck." In Morrison's handling of the character, Bruce cancels food far more often than he actually eats it. Over at Funnybook Babylon, columnist Chris Eckert frenziedly hunts for food in Morrison's run, scribbling down each instance of it (and there are many) in a brilliant, maniacal effort to inform the starving of the Bat. He showcases the treasure of his pursuit here.

Mr. Eckert makes one point particularly relevant to a different theory of mine; he says "Food represents emotion and humanity." When I read his article, and specifically that sentence, I thought of a story in the Gospels about the temptation of Christ. In that story, Christ fasts for 40 days and 40 nights, after which time the Devil comes to him and, in phase 1 of a scheme, presses Christ to turn stones into bread, presumably for Christ to consume them and stave off starvation. Christ responds "It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." (Mathew 4:4). In Phase 3 of his scheme, which might ring more familiar to Bat-Fans, the Devil leads Christ up a very high mountain (hmm, kinda like a tall, helicopter-accessible tower) and offers him a Faustian bargain. To this Christ replies "Get thee hence, Satan" which I believe translates into modern English as "Burn in Hell."

Christ, like Bruce, transcends emotion and humanity. Bruce, like Christ, bitch slaps the Devil with self-denial. He starves and drinks only water. He spends all his riches in the furtherance of good. He channels the great tragedies of his life into strength like a man confident that everything plays into a higher plan. Bruce is the camel that can pass through the eye of a needle. His faith in himself, in his friends, and in Gotham City eclipses the sin, decadence, and wanton malice assailing him from all sides.

Why, aside from comic sales, has Batman never killed the Joker, or even let him die when his own bad karma catches up with him? Batman must know by now that nothing can heal the Joker. But he spares him time and again because Batman stands for self-denial to such an extent that he's actually mocking sin. For this reason, he'll keep on cancelling his tempura.

Page 2: "Alfred Beagle" was Alfred's stage name. "Proceeding from there naturally to the English stage... his library is a shrine to blood spattered prose." Another nod to Alfred directing this dark stage drama starring Bruce Wayne. Especially poignant when Jezebel asks "Where is he now?" alerting everyone that Alfred conveniently disappears before the shit hits the fan. He pulled the same vanishing act before the ninja Man-Bats crashed the pop art museum party.

Here's a taste of Alfred Beagle's Hamlet from Len Wein's Untold Legend of the Batman

You can't blame the critics, look how stiff he is!

Page 4: Jezebel's face contorts through the wine glass (although Ryan Benjamin turns in such sloppy pencils this issue that you can't really be sure), signaling that she might be more than she appears. Also - and this is really tenuous - the purple color of the wine blends the colors red and black, the Black Glove's top two faves.

Page 6: Ten-eyed men cut the demons from Bruce's soul in 52 Week 30

Page 8: Merlyn was one of the Sensei's Men of Death in the Ra's Al Ghul arc

Page 9: Zomg Damian is so cool!!!!!!!!1111 Automatic FAIL for this issue.

Page 12-13: Robin and Nightwing are kind enough to dump some info on the undoubtedly clueless newcomer.

Page 16: I have no idea how Merlyn knows what he does or where exactly he's returning from. According to wikipedia, he possesses no teleportation powers nor any other metahuman powers at all. Since Talia's base is nestled between snow covered mountains, I would guess that Gotham City is a good ways off from there. The comic indicates that the attack by the Fiend with Nine Eyes is stopped by Batman within five or so minutes of him crashing the dinner, much too short a time for the media to procure and release word of it. So... wtf? How does he know? The League's obviously not spying on Bruce, otherwise Talia would be more familiar with Jezebel Jet than she is on page 8.

Batman 674

2009-01-05T14:11:00.000-08:00

After the travail of last issue's annotations, I'm taking a load off and skipping the remarks this time. The last three issues flew by for me, very enjoyable, like the Club of Heroes arc without Williams :-( but with a much more viscerally satisfying resolution :-) even with plot threads still dangling.

Page 1: There's Officer Farelli, who won't cut the mustard in this selection process, and the big dude is probably Branca/Bat-Bane. Also on this page, Morrison christens the previously unnamed army doctor "Dr. Hurt," a very subtle name in the tradition of "Ebeneezer Badde," from Morrison's Seven Soldiers (hint: He turned out to be bad). Still, the name sings of a fun kind of irony, DOCTOR Hurt.

"Everything he says. Every move he makes. Everything is a clue." Examining this issue in isolation, Batman's dialogue seems to apply to the Third Man. However, notice that two of those captions intersect with Dr. Hurt's panel, perhaps pointing to him instead or in addition.

Page 3: I don't know whose idea it was, Morrison's or Daniel's, but having battle damage completely tear off the bat insignia was a nice touch.

Page 5: The dialogue in the first two panels, even the layout, is duplicated from Robin Dies at Dawn (to which this issue's title pays tribute). See last issue's annotations for those panels.

It upsets me that Morrison never explains the super creepy spider latched onto Bat-Might's back.

"I must put away my Batman costume and retire from crimefighting" a post hypnotic suggestion that Hurt tries to retrigger in Batman 681.

Page 7: "These are the secrets of death we teach." I'm sure this shows up somewhere else in the run but I can't place it.

Without digressing too much, Buddy Baker in 52 transports himself home from the deep recesses of outer cosmos by making use of the higher dimensional Space B. The impish Mr. Mxyzptlk, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried in Superman: The Animated Series believe it or not, comes from Zrfff. His higher dimensionality allows him to perform feats that appear as magic in our reality. We'll talk more about higher dimensions in the annotations for 681 (seriously).

Page 7: "The post hypnotic keywords..." for example, the above and "Zur En Arrh"

Page 9: "This all happened back when I got demoted to patrolman..." in Detective 121: Gordon Walks a Beat (see last issue's annotations). This is really pedantic and comic book nerdy, but DC released Tec 121 a good ten or so years before Batman participated in the isolation experiment.

Page 11: In case you've forgotten:

"Venom" is the stuff that gives Bane his super strength, and Hugo Strange dosed people with "monster serum" back in the 40's to create some of Batman's first super foes.

Two nice little touches on this page too. The first being "kept him supplied with girls, TV, pizza, and drugs" all of which Batman found at the site of the prostitute massacre in 664, and the second being "I am the Batman. And this is how I came to be" which perverts the title of the first story in Batman #1: The Legend of the Batman, Who He Is and How He Came to Be.

Page 12: Hurt tries to create Batmen with trauma, just like Mokkari and Simyan in Batman 682-683. Both fail because, as I've beaten you to death with, the cowl is nontransferable. Bruce Wayne cannot be replaced as Batman.

Page 12: The pentagram carved in blood resembles the one on which Lane situated his murders in 666.

Page 13: "Dr. Hurt was the Devil." Lane has trouble with tenses. Dr. Hurt is the Devil, Lane, is!

Page 15: Batman reports on his absurd and fantastic commitment to preparation.

Page 16: Lane casts off the bat-crest portion of his costume. I'm gonna say its symbolic.

Page 17: "If you kill me now, you can stop what's going to happen," in 666, the Third Ghost says that Batman failed to kill him, "If he had... perhaps things might have been... different for all of us." Batman's mercy here threatens to set off a course of events that ultimately leads to doom for Gotham City and the world at large.

Page 20: "If my hypothetical ultimate enemy can be imagined, I can't help considering the possibility that he actually exists." Batman's thoughts echo the ontological argument for the existence of God which basically follows like

Define God to be the greatest entity that could ever exist.
It is greater to exist in reality than not to exist in reality.

Therefore, God, in order to agree with His defintion as the greatest, must exist in reality. It's not difficult to imagine a mirror image of this argument which guarantees the existence of the Devil, the "ultimate enemy" Batman ponders here.

Page 21: "Is he telling me his name?" I'd say no because that glove is dark blue, but yeah, I guess the meaning is clear.

Page 22: Maybe I'm reaching but does anyone else think that last panel foreshadows Bruce's time as a vagrant in 679?

Batman 673

2009-01-04T18:47:00.000-08:00

Being a little psychotic himself (it's the hallucinogens, the real space medicine), Morrison writes crazy better than any other person in the biz. Partly because Morrison knows that crazies cling to their skewed vision of sanity much more fervently than any sane person ever would. In Arkham Asylum, Jeremiah Arkham, draped in his mother's wedding gown, staring at his dismembered family, insists that it "all seems perfectly, perfectly rational." In Joe Chill in Hell, Batman resounds that conviction:

Hearing voices is normal. Hallucinations from the past and the present are normal. Flashing lights and intimations of mortality are normal. All of this is normal.

Only a lunatic would feel the need to justify himself like this. Bruce Wayne's rejection of the abnormal overarches Grant Morrison's treatment of the Batman character.

For example, in JLA Classified #1, when Bruce busts out his Jack Kirby deus ex machina technology, he instructs Alfred "Don't tell my friends in the GCPD about this." Batman is ashamed of these sci-fi devices. He and his writers work hard to perpetuate the notion that "Batman is cool! Batman wears black!" and throws smoke bombs and fires grappling hooks. He doesn't fool around with gay shit like motherboxes and boom tubes.

More recently, we've seen Bruce write off his inexplicable encounters from the 40's, 50's, and 60's - vampires and flying saucers - in the Black Casebook. And now he's swearing up and down that his hallucinations of Zur En Arrh, Bat-Might, and purple golem heads are all blandly normal. They're not, of course, but Batman needs to be in control. If he can reason out every eventuality, he can prepare for each one. But what if the eventuality is unreasonable? Batman must reconcile this by making it reasonable, by "building a new box" around it. And it starts to make sense to us too because we're looking for things to neatly tie together, we're looking for coherent continuity and No-Prize moments. Apophenia is like original sin for superhero fans. We were all guilty of it well before Morrison's run began, but no one ever pointed it out to us quite like this before.

To better explain this comic, I'm giving a run through the important bits of Batman 47: The Origin of the Batman and Batman 156: Robin Dies at Dawn.

After stopping a mob related crime, Batman discovers that Joe Chill, the man who murdered Thomas and Martha Wayne, is smuggling criminals in and out of Gotham City.

LOL. Totally nailed the mood they were going for. Anyway, the police can't pin anything on Chill, and Bruce Wayne, posing as Matches Malone, fails to penetrate his inner circle (ho ho, that's what she said). Frustrated, Bruce decides to confront Chill in costume, threatening as Batman to haunt his every step for the rest of his life. When Chill asks why Batman is singling him out, he unmasks, revealing himself as the son of Chill's victims.

Shaken, Chill solicits protection from his mob cronies, recounting Batman's confession to them. However, before Chill can disclose Batman's true identity, his pals shoot him for creating the vigilante responsible for so many of their woes. The story ends with Batman marking the murder of his parents as a case closed.

Now the second, and arguably more important story:

Batman and Robin, apparently stranded on an alien world, are being chased by a monstrous four armed statue, the purple creature whose face Batman envisions in 672. During the course of fleeing, at exactly dawn on the alien world, the golem flings a boulder which crushes Robin.

The tragedy of Dick Grayson's death dispirits Batman, and in guilt he surrenders himself to be eaten by an alien monster. Just as we're getting to the real juicy part, the scene suddenly shifts to a scientific-looking room where Batman is sprawled out on the floor, hooked to an electronic device. Batman hallucinated the foreign planet, it turns out, after being isolated from society for an extended period of time (though in this era, Batman often visited alien worlds). The purpose of the sequestration, a nameless doctor explains, was to gauge the effects of long-term isolation on the minds of astronauts.

Leaving the laboratory with Robin, who watched the experiment from outside the chamber, the Dynamic Duo resume their normal crime fighting routine.

Unfortunately though, Batman can't seem to shake the monster hallucinations or the guilt over his imagined failure to save Robin, and as a result, he fails to stop some retarded looking criminals known as The Gorilla Gang. Depressed, he feels compelled to retire.

After sopping up his tears, Robin (it's implied) allows himself to be kidnapped. Batman, rejuvenated by his friend in need (and friend indeed!), rescues him unhampered by his hallucinations, and the sun rises in celebration of their triumph.

Both of these stories are quite good and ought to be read if possible. Timothy Callahan even hails Robin Dies at Dawn as a pre-Morrison Morrison story, meaty praise coming from him. Okay well that's it for this time, see yo -- oh shit, that's right. I still have to do annotations for this issue. Fuck. Kinda makes me feel like this guy ↓↓↓

Page 1: The story picks up after the point in Batman 47 where Batman threatens to stalk Chill. Morrison exercises some artistic license here, as Chill's mob buddies actually do agree to protect him and a disguised Batman actually has infiltrated their group.

Page 4: "With thanks to Bill Finger," Bill Finger wrote both Batman 47 and Batman 156

Page 6: I love this. Morrison has unearthed a textual reason for the pulpy writing style smothering every choked back, self-conscious syllable framed in those blue-grey squares boxing Batman's thoughts like chalk outlines drawn around some poor sap's spilled brains. What? I thought Alfred might be reading.

Anyway, this clues us into the identity of the unknown narrator in Batman 663: The Clown at Midnight. It might be Bruce Wayne, since he confesses to practicing that style. However, since Batman's captions during Morrison's run have been in the first-person while the prose story was narrated from the third-person, I suspect Alfred is our lurid story teller.

Page 7: The sword wielders, as well as the Thogal ritual, hail from 52

Page 9: In Batman 47, the Land Sea Air Transport Company was a front for Chill's smuggling racket

Page 10: "The son I lost," this might be Morrison humanizing Joe Chill or this might be another red herring. Or maybe this ties into the line after next, "How can anybody know the compromises I had to make, the regrets I have to live with?" Chill wonders while fiddling with a deck of cards. Could Joe Chill have bargained with the Satanic Black Glove? Did he sell his son for a ticket to the top? Or perhaps, Joe Chill, grief-stricken from his son's unrelated passing, agrees to murder the Waynes in service of the Devil?

Also, immediately following this, Chill unwittingly addresses a disguised Batman, "You're just a kid, Frosty. What do kids like you know?" Even without the thug mask he's wearing, that statement still holds water, Batman really is just a kid. By design, the public Bruce Wayne is a fainéant playboy (emphasis on "boy") whose inefficacy is trumped only by his superficiality, a "reckless mask of a man who never grew up." (from 675) The private Bruce Wayne obsesses over absurd gadgets (read: "toys"), martial arts, and strategy games, squashing relationships before they can become too meaningful a distraction. The childishness of the Batman persona almost explains itself: he dresses up in a Halloween costume and beats the shit out of people. Chill's lines here, which almost look like throwaways, can spark a ton of interesting speculation if you stare hard enough at them. Incidentally, that segues quite well into...

Page 13: "I can feel eyes watching me. Eyes with human intelligence watching. Always watching." a direct quote from Robin Dies at Dawn. I would guess Morrison is using the line to establish a metatextual mislead for the architect behind Bruce's suffering. We are watching Bruce, in case that was unclear. No, I'm not putting it past Morrison to use himself or the reader as a red herring, since any one who has read his work knows he's very capable of revealing the Black Glove to secretly be Bill Finger or Dan DiDio or some other real-world person.

"I must be around five years old when I first sense the presence of a gaping, toppling void in the center of existence." That void is probably Dr. Hurt who in 681 refers to himself as the "hole in things, the piece that can never fit, there since the beginning."

Page 14: Bat-Might is trying to tempt Bruce to the ~~DarkSeid~~ dark side, not unlike Dr. Hurt in 681. And what the fuck is going on with his nose piece on this page?

Pages 14-16: The doctor and general's dialogue are all direct quotes from the above Bill Finger stories. Thank you Batman for your "remarkable contribution to space medicine." God I cannot get over how great that is.

Page 15: Morrison is juxtaposing Batman's guilt over Dick Grayson's imagined death in Robin Dies at Dawn with his guilt over Jason Todd's real death in Batman 428. Interestingly, Morrison makes a point in Batman 683 that Bruce positively channels his guilt better than anyone in the world, but in Robin Dies at Dawn, Batman takes Robin's death so poorly that he practically throws himself into the gnashing jaws of a hungry monster.

Page 16: Morrison introduces a new rationale motivating Bruce's participation in the army experiments.

Page 18: "But her heart was weak and she died of blood loss." As he articulates in his Arkham Asylum notes, Morrison believes a wife dying of a broken heart speaks more to our subconscious than a wife being murdered, as the former is more archetypal and rooted in myth. He touches up Batman's origin story in accordance with this belief.

Page 18: "They'll all kill me if they find out." They do find out and kill him in the original story, but in this version, it looks like Batman has driven Joe Chill to suicide. Remember though, we're dipping into Bruce's mind now, so this might not be a memory at all but rather a playing-out of some deep rooted revenge fantasy.

Page 22: Batman wakes in Dr. Hurt's isolation chamber.

Batman 672

2009-01-04T12:37:00.001-08:00

I wish Morrison's other villains could be as interesting as the Third Ghost. It's almost hypnotic watching him sleepwalk through the issue, chatting casually with his hostages about the bat signal lighting his brain. Yeah, the Third Ghost chews scenery down to subatomics, but what's cool is that he tempers his delusional ravings with plainer, expository dialogue that lulls the reader into a false sense of comfort before he snaps and starts threatening to fill skulls with Napalm. The Third Ghost crackles with a certain energy the other "color form" villains we've seen in this run simply don't; he brings personality to the table. Yes, this run revolves around the greatness of Batman the person, but a huge part of what makes Batman the comic so great, is Batman's imaginative rogues gallery, often hailed as the best in comics but still an aspect of the mythos Morrison seems resolved to downplay.

Normally, that wouldn't matter at all, especially for someone as creative as Morrison, someone more than capable of inventing punchy villains to fill Two-Face's shoes. But in an unexpected move, Morrison marches out a troop of mute and/or brainless baddies: Officer Muller who speaks exactly ~~one line~~ one word of dialogue, ninja Man-Bats, the Hulkish BatBane, some silent foes in 666, and the mostly off-panel John Mayhew. By this point in the run, Morrison needed to inject the series with some of the spirit that had dissipated along with the rogues gallery. The Third Man and equally the resurfacing Bat-Might (as he's now called) hold strong promise for fulfilling that need.

SPACE MEDICINE

Page 2: A million years ago, Commissioner Vane replaced Jim Gordon in Commisioner Gordon Walks a Beat.

In that story, Vane declares that Gotham no longer needs the help of Batman and Robin and even smashes the bat signal with an axe, perhaps the first appearance of this recurring image.

Anyway, there's obviously more to it than just that. It turns out the incompetent mayor and his son were blackmailed by mobsters Smiley and Gomer into giving Gordon's chair to the stooge Vane and severing all ties with the Batman. Interestingly, Smiley and Gomer both love gambling (hmmm, like who else?), and foolishly bet their leverage on the mayor against Batman performing some silly 1950's stunt. Of course Batman pulls it off and Gordon is reinstated as commissioner before the 11-page tale concludes. Suddenly humble, Vane walks away spotless from the whole ordeal, regaining his old position as chief inspector, and now probably spends his days forgetting himself somewhere in Morrison's Limbo.

Page 2: The demonic Third Man, escaped from Batman's nightmares and apocalyptic visions in 665 and 666 respectively

Page 4: The title Space Medicine is borrowed from a line in Batman 156, Robin Dies at Dawn (more on this in next issue's annotations)

Page 6: Third mention of Gotham Noir, the first in 655 and the second in 663. Ed Brubaker wrote an Elseworlds GN called Gotham Noir, but since it's not three hundred years old and not written by Morrison, I doubt he's referencing it.

Page 8: Farelli hassled Batman and some hookers in 664 and 665. He apparently leashes the Three Ghosts, but obviously it's not working out too well since all three of them managed to snap free. Also, in case you're wondering, Farelli does NOT appear in Detective 121.

Page 10: Jezebel "wants to do everything." Mayhew expressed similar sentiments in Batman 669. He had to commit murder because he had already done everything else.

Page 13: Like Farelli, officers Muller, Branca, and Lane the Third Man do not appear in Gordon Walks a Beat.

Page 16: The bat signal shatters and its image becomes distorted, just as in the image above. Symbolic?

Page 17: Gomer and Smiley may have been early members of the Black Glove who grabbed control of the police department during the Vane administration, allowing Dr. Hurt to conduct his perverse experiments unhindered.

Page 18: Batman imagines the Third Man as a monster he previously hallucinated in Batman 156.

Page 20: Recreation of Frank Miller's bat-smashing-window scene from Year One, but this time with a different color scheme. Red and black. Like a bat. In a dream. In a window.

Batman 671

2009-01-04T07:31:00.001-08:00

Man, maybe it's because I'm not reading the other titles in the crossover, but this issue wasn't very good at all. If someone whited out the credits, I would never guess that Morrison wrote this. It's so... pedestrian. Also, Daniel, whose art is supposed to carry this action-heavy issue, turns in the muddiest, scratchiest pencils of his entire Batman run. Even ignoring the fact that people in the foreground are drawn with the same level of detail one expects of people in the background, Daniel also treats us to razor elbow on page 9, mysterious flying garlic cloves on page 14, levitating depthless boot soles on page 16, and several panels of unintentional shadow moustache throughout the ish.

Page 1: "They say all things of this world are impermanent," the Sensei possibly predicts Batman's departure from his own title, but at the very least forecasts his own demise at the end of the issue

Page 2: As far as I know, the Sensei's Men of Death are a new entry to the Bat mythos. Like Damian's foes in 666, I'd swear Morrison slapped these guys together from super villain color forms

Page 2: Rama Kushna, patron goddess of Nanda Parbat, transformed Boston Brand into the superhero Deadman. In 52 (in what I'm positive is a Morrison scene), Diana Prince expiated her murder of Maxwell Lord before Rama Kushna, who absolved her of the crime.

Page 4: Hmmm, tough choice Ra's. I know you really need a new body, and I feel just awful about it - breaks my heart - but you should take Damian. What? There's a third option so that nobody needs to be sacrificed? No Ra's, you can't take any chances, it's too dangerous. Go the safe route and take Damian's body, although I will surely be sorrowed by losing him.

Page 12: "My son," another instance of occupational inheritance, which we saw with Damian in 666 and Cyril the Knight. Who will inherit the mantle of the Bat? Find out in Battle for the Cowl, coming this March!

Page 12: "You and your witless daughters" - The 's' belongs, believe it or not. Ra's Al Ghul sired a daughter before Talia, the now 250 year old Nyssa Raatko, who obviously enjoys a good dip in the Lazarus Pits every now and again (unlike Talia). The by-all-accounts excellent Death and the Maidens by Greg Rucka expands Nyssa's backstory.

Page 21: Ra's now wears a monk's skin, yet another instance of possession.

Batman 670

2009-01-03T14:44:00.000-08:00

Morrison casts these Ra's Al Ghul issues out into the deep fathoms of fandom to be feasted upon by all us fishies on the net, and no one even so much as nibbles. Really. Timothy Callahan skips it. David Uzumeri skips it. Thom Young skips it. The usually insightful Jog effectively skips it. Seriously, could no one conceive that an arc about the RESSURECTION of the DEMON'S Head, grandfather to Damian Wayne, might possibly relate to some of the other stuff in the run? It actually works to my benefit though because now my commentary won't look shitty by comparison.

Man that's a provocative cover. This cover inspired Thom Young's prediction that Tony Daniel would attain Neal Adams-like excellence on this title. Of course he didn't or rather, has yet to do so, but still, this cover packs a wallop.

Page 1: I-Ching trained Diana Prince in the martial arts during Denny O'Neil's tenure on her book.

Page 1: "You can hear it everywhere-- the voice of the whole world talking to itself, working out what to do next long before it actually does it! People rarely listen when the world talks." Morrison may be ribbing the fans here for overlooking all his little clues and intimations, but really the joke's at least partially on him. Morrison is grossly infatuated with foreshadowing. If he could, he'd have long nights of sloppy sex with foreshadowing and then cuddle with it well into the morning hours. When at its worst, this fetish can manifest in awkward, cryptic dialogue prefacing trivial events to occur long months down the line, causing this annotator to shake and shout at the pieces of paper making up his comic book, "What the hell does that even mean?!"

Page 3: "The superior man thinks of evil that will come and guards against it." More preparation mottos, this one to be repeated in Batman 681.

Page 3: "... one man's disembodied consciousness can possess another man's body..." an allusion to the devil power Dr. Hurt professes to employ

Page 4: The Sensei, originally a foe of Boston Brand the Deadman, matched wits with Batman in Detective Comics 485, 487, 489, and 490. In 485, for basically no reason, the Sensei sends a team of assassins, including the Bronze Tiger, to kill Kathy Kane, the original Batwoman who we see tripping balls with Bruce in 682. Kathy dies, and this sets Batman crusading after the Sensei, who also beefs with Ra's Al Ghul because he drafted a League of Assassins splinter cell for his own. During a capricious attack on some religious leaders in 490, a bomb the Sensei himself planted opens a fissure in the earth that swallows him alive, mercifully terminating his boring run on Detective. If you read the issue, you'll see the Sensei even dies in anticlimax (and NOT "engaged in a fight to the death with Ra's" as wikipedia for some reason lies). Anyway, Morrison mostly preserves the Sensei's personality from those early books.

Page 6: Jesus. Dragon Fly, Silken Spider, and Tiger Moth: These gals had to be carted up from the sub-subbasement of the Morrisonian Institute of Arcana. Introduced in Batman 181, which also features the first appearance of some character called "Poison Ivy," these models compete for the title of World Public Enemy #1 in a series of kitschy pop art posters.

Why in God's name one of them is leaning on a trash can while another handles what appears to be a satchel of dog shit (or a caveman club), I don't know. Anyway, Poison Ivy hopes to bump off these three, as she too is vying for the prestigious World Public Enemy #1 slot.

Now Dragon Fly and co have been revived due to the shortage of scantily clad women in superhero comics. And check out this sweet ad that appears at the end of the issue.

Fuckin. Awesome. I wonder if it would take whole issues for Wonder Woman One to flatten Egg Fu? Really, with promotional material like this, do you think they knew they were satirizing themselves? I mean, can anyone straight-facedly write the words "Birthday Cake for a Cannibal Robot!" or draw a neckerchiefed, mustachioed Chinese egg man? I couldn't.

Page 12: "The Demon's Head just returned from the grave." Ra's Al Ghul is a great villain here because he encapsulates two core ideas from Morrison's run:

The Demon/Devil, the undying enemy who possesses and manipulates others to accomplish his goals
Rebirth/Reinvention, which so many characters in this run undergo

It's cool that Morrison underscores the figurative rebirths of characters like the Joker, the Ranger, and Batman (into the Batman of Zur En Arrh) with literal rebirths of Ra's Al Ghul and of Batman himself when he ascends from the grave in 681. Well, the second one wasn't literal literal, but it's about as thinly veiled as symbolism gets.

Page 13: Pwned!

Page 17: I might be guilty of apophenia here, but I don't think it's a coincidence that Ra's Al Ghul chooses an actor's body to inhabit, nor do I think it's a coincidence that the body is deteriorating. We know Morrison is toying with the idea of pretenders, particularly ones who can't measure up. We saw this a lot in the Club of Heroes arc. For example, Wingman, a trainee of Batman's, confesses that he only broke into the superhero business for fame. Batman hands him his ass. Even earlier, in Morrison's brief stint on JLA Classified, Batman looses a robot Justice League with identical power sets on a possessed (hey, there's possession again) Ultramarine Corps. The Corps dispatches them easily. The moral of the story is that it takes more than just training (Wingman), powers (robot JLA), and motivational trauma (Lane/Third Man) to become a major player in the DCU. Big shots like Batman and Ra's possess something more, something that makes them greater than the sum of their parts. And yes, I realize I'm hammering you over the head with this, but blame the text, it's there.

Batman 669

2009-01-03T07:52:00.000-08:00

I thought I'd use the remarks this time to clarify something that might easily be missed in a reading, as well as sermonize on the greatness of Batman. Actually, many things might easily be missed in a reading because Morrison crams what was in all likelihood a Tolstoyesque initial draft for this final chapter into a scant 23 page allowance. Not unexpectedly, some of the details got lost in translation. For most of them, the annotations suffice, but for Wingman's resentment and why it makes sense, I think a full work up is needed. Wingman blames the Knight and Batman for ruining his shot at fame because:

The Knight's tussle with the Legionary and the scandalous accusation he flings at Mayhew become publicized after (just filling in the blanks) Rachel, the disgruntled secretary, or possibly the Knight himself spills the beans to the media. Mayhew likely cuts funding from the Club of Heroes.
Batman's presence at the meeting would have given the public reason to place their faith in the Club of Heroes, as well as possibly inspiring the heroes to handle the accusation and their personal differences in a more civilized way. With Batman absent, however, everything is shot to hell. "Something that might have led to global media exposure, maybe even Justice League status, led nowhere."

In his work with the character, Morrison has always tried to establish the necessity of Batman in the DCU. I've not read his JLA run yet, but from what I've heard about it, Batman exercises almost superhuman brilliance, defeats enemies that the rest of the JLA can't match, and otherwise demonstrates a surplus of talent unfeasible for any nonpowered being. That Bat-God interpretation has fallen under criticism as untrue to the character. Again, I haven't read the run, but such a portrayal of Batman seems especially reasonable in a JLA book where it's so easy to question the need for Batman at all. In terms of power, Superman, Wonder Woman, Aqua Man, Green Lantern, etc could easily pound Batman into a meaty paste. As well, most members of the JLA, while not quite as clever as Batman, can still connect the dots on the majority of their cases, especially since JLA threats are generally epic in scale, and therefore not exceptionally mysterious. In short, why not have Batman occasionally consult for the Justice League, only on the real head-scratchers?

Morrison attempts to answer the question in this run; without Batman, things go to shit. In 52, while Batman trots the globe, Manheim's monsters seize control of Gotham City. In Batman 666, Armageddon strikes at Gotham, its only "protector" a doped up, ice cold killer who beats his enemies by rigging up half his jurisdiction with bombs and booby traps. Here, in the Club of Heroes arc, Batman's absence results in strife and the dissolution of the team. Superheroes, Batmen even, preside over all of these scenarios, except they're not the real deal, they're not Bruce Wayne, and so they struggle, cheat, or fail altogether.

It must be Batman that wields some supernatural quality that makes him better than his impersonators, the same quality that allowed him to transcend the comic panels last issue. His mere presence promotes order. He's risen above manhood and become an apotropaic, quasi-religious symbol (perhaps what Morrison enjoys so much about Batman Begins). People behave around Batman as they behave in Church. So in some sense, Wingman is maybe not right, but at least justified in pointing his finger at the Dark Knight. Like the Third Ghost hinted in 666, Batman's choices can alter the destiny of the whole world.

At this point, we know that DC plans to replace Bruce Wayne. In light of the above, I can't imagine things going anything but poorly for the replacement if Morrison continues on the title.

Page 2: The Knight is pinning the murder of Mayhew's wife on Mayhew himself. Later, Batman informs us that Mangrove Pierce was jailed (probably unjustly) for that crime.

Page 7: "He seemed like a smart bloke." Wingman, disguised as the Dark Ranger, validates himself here, and Batman might be testing him when he says "Wingman was too good to let this happen"

Page 8: King Kraken is yet another member of the Club of Villains, leaving just Swagman and Le Bossu unmentioned.

Page 10: Maybe I'm grasping at straws, but Harley Quinn famously dangled the Caped Crusader upside down over a piranha tank in Paul Dini's Mad Love. Regardless, a lot of Morrison Batman foes suffer from the same affliction as El Sombrero, what one might call docevilphrenia: never the bullet through the skull, always the slowly descending platform into the tank with the sharks with the laser beams on their foreheads. The Black Glove has Batman at its mercy a number of times in this run (as far back as Bane-Bats stomping his spine), but they refuse to just cap him and be done with it. In Batman Gothic, Mr. Whisper takes it even further, launching into full-on self-parody when he rigs up an actual Rube Goldberg death trap for a Caped Crusader who's already prostrate unconscious on the ground before him.

Page 10: Williams lays this page out brilliantly. He actually seems obsessed with iconography, inserting it, like a 17 year old boy, everywhere he can (KPLOW), but here he uses it to such excellent effect. With the top and bottom strips, he compresses the whole story of that page: what good guys are fighting what bad guys, and of Morrison's run: red vs. black and good vs. evil, filing everything down to its essence. Look he even fucking draws black gloved fingers pinching the insignia, letting the reader know who's really pulling the strings in this show. Williams experimented with something similar last issue, a two page spread evincing the cataclysm of Batman vs. The Black Glove, but here he nuances it much more. Williams has a knack for really exploiting the avenues opened up by storytelling in a visual medium. These are the type of narrative decisions that place artists like Williams and Darwyn Cooke far ahead of the pack and well into Will Eisner territory.

Page 11: "Success was all in the preparation," echoing Batman's advice to Damian

Page 13: "He's going nowhere!" One of the "all-purpose, semi-hypnotic phrases" with which Batman "draws criminals into familiar patterns," as explained in 663

Page 16: I've never heard an American call Beryl's weapon a "catapult" before, only a "slingshot"

Page 18: Dr. Hurt claims to be Mangrove Pierce, costar of The Black Glove film, in Batman 681, but he claims and is suspected to be several different people, and since Mangrove Pierce represents by far the lamest of those, I wouldn't lend any weight to it.

Page 18: "... But you turned me into a villain!" Wingman exerts some serious bad faith here.

Page 20: Mayhew sums up the attitudes of the Black Glove organization "[Rich] people like me live lives beyond the law, beyond morality"

Page 22-23: Lacking a textual explanation, I think it's safe to assume that the John Mayhew pelt worn in the first issue was a synthetic mock up

Batman 668

2009-01-02T09:48:00.001-08:00

Not too much new in Batman 668. It's more stellar Williams III art. More R-Rated Scooby Doo intrigue. More savory Silver Age reminiscence. It's the type of story Morrison does best, with a big cast of flawed characters and a deadpan deconstruction of juvenilia. Like The Coyote Gospel from Animal Man or Sex Secrets of the Newsboy Army from Seven Soldiers or We3 (all fantastic comics by the way), the Club of Heroes arc casts the heroes of our youth in a cynical light, asking "What would happen if these characters grew up through the comic ages?" What if Wile E. Coyote was convinced that God sent him as a martyr and a prophet? What if a Jack Kirby character committed statutory rape? What if a talking rabbit blew a soldier's brains out? That's certainly how some of these characters would be written if they were created in the stormy climate of today's comics.

It would be easy, soothing even, to resume The Club of Heroes' lives where they left off, dust them off as swashbucklers whose only goal is to break bread with the world famous Batman. But it's fake. Batman has changed so much from his 50's personality, why wouldn't they? Just because they're off-panel, they should completely stagnate? Morrison writes these characters as alive, which helps communicate them as people. Like Man-Of-Bats warns next issue "Only a little kid would ever think we were heroes." He means this in a somewhat circular way. Only a child would think of them as heroes in a childish sense of the word, as flawless bastions of good. To be sure, they do good, but they're only human.

Morrison's big hang up as a writer, the thing he's most fixated on is transformation. He almost never writes rocks. Either the character changes, or our understanding of the character changes. For heroes from the past, he doesn't just let them live in their own personal Silver Age bubble. No, he drags them screaming through the comic book ages and then drops the tattered remains into his story. For heroes of the present, he propels them backwards through time to the era where they first gained standing as myth.

Page 2: The "two new members" are Man-Of-Bats and Wingman, as the Knight mentioned last issue. This makes the photograph on the cover of 667 an anachronism, as it clearly depicts Batman and Robin, who never arrived at the last meeting, standing next to both inaugurees, Wingman and Man-Of-Bats.

Page 4: Morrison really digs into hypercontinuity here, really pressing Batman to deal with story inconsistencies... by creating a new one in actual history! Caesar on the steps of the forum, and correspondingly the Legionary, was now stabbed 23 times, whereas, one month ago in the present, Caesar was stabbed 17 times. Got it?

Pages 4-5: There's that black and red again. It strikes me that both Robin and Raven Red deck themselves out in black and red. Many people have speculated that his black and red costume points to Robin as a betrayer (and before 681, the true identity of The Black Glove). I don't think Morrison has set this up, but we have seen Tim a lot more than Dick in Morrison's run, so maybe black and red is singling out sidekicks as important (replacements maybe?). Black and red compose much of Beryl's costume too. Just a thought.

Page 7: "I'm trapped on an island on the middle of a tropical storm, by a madman who has killed and skinned our host." We know now that the madman actually is their host. Morrison only bothers with recapitulative exposition when it reinforces his lie.

Page 7: "Controlled by a gorilla!" refers to JLA Classified: #1-#3, the gorilla was Grodd

Page 9: Charlie Caligula is a member of the Club of Villains. Also, the Legionary's clue, an absurd, Velma-level clue, slots Batman in the Sherlock Holmes super detective mode of his early years.

Page 12: "That's how his Dad was killed! Spring-Heeled Jack put a bomb inside him!" Just as it designed the Three Ghosts to trigger Batman's worst fears, the Black Glove designs this scheme to reawaken in Cyril thoughts of the trauma that spiraled him into a clinical depression, and in so doing, debilitates him for the remainder of the mystery. The Black Glove always knows its enemy inside and out.

Spring-Heeled Jack, often misidentified with the Swagman, was an English urban legend commonly bandied about in Victorian times: so commonly in fact that at one point the mayor of London convened a city meeting to discuss the mythical demon. The monstrous Jack was said to have the ability to leap exceptionally far and high and breathe blue flames from his mouth. His ears pointed up like pitch fork prongs and he would claw at young women with metal talons. The locals called him the Devil, although certain illustrations - like the first one in that link - place him closer to a Bat-Man in appearance.

Could the Third Man have killed Cyril's father? The shoe certainly fits. He's a Batman who spits flames (he carries a flame thrower) and sheathes his hands in gauntlets, possibly metallic. Though he never leaps "exceptionally far and high," he does pull off a fence hop that even Batman misses in 674. The motives add up too; Mayhew wants to silence the original Knight's accusations, so he sics the Third Man on him, and in the absence of a better name for this demonic figure, the Knight settles on "Spring Heeled Jack," after the creature of lore whom he most resembles.

Page 13: "You might even be forgiven for thinking he's committing suicide and trying to take us all with him." You could especially be forgiven if you read And Then There Were None because this is exactly what the killer in that novel does. The murderous suits of armor look like they're taken directly from old Scooby Doo VHS tapes.

Pages 14-15: The avatars of good and evil, Batman and the Black Glove, do battle in a duel that transcends the normal plane of comic action. These icons fight as gods in the comic book world. More on this next issue and pretty much everywhere else, especially the 681 post.

Page 15: Beryl hears the screams of the Dark Ranger as he's lynched/burned.

Page 18: Morrison's superheroes love to announce their team-ups (see, for example, Seven Soldiers: Bulleteer)

Page 19-20: Pierrot Lunaire, Scorpiana, and El Sombrero are all members of the Club of Villains

Page 21: His face needed to be scorched beyond recognition before he was hanged? Cmon! If you didn't think that something was up when you saw this, you need to head to your local library and pick up some mysteries.

Batman 667

2009-01-01T13:04:00.000-08:00

DC blesses us with three comics showcasing the sublime art of J.H. Williams III. The selection of the supernal Williams III ties to Morrison's use of Christ symbolism and the notion of second coming presented in 666. I'm kidding of course, but only half, as really the art rises that high and above the call of duty. For a fantastic discussion of Williams' character design in this arc, check out Timothy Callahan's review.

Unfortunately for me, Batman 667 follows the template of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and features primarily characters taken from World's Finest 89, neither of which have I read. So I won't speak to any parallels among these. Still, Morrison, with nods to Christie, crafts an enjoyable first chapter for this mystery, with the Club of Heroes so endearingly pathetic that it's hard to imagine any of them mustering up the cojones to commit murder, although one of them will most certainly be fingered as the killer.

Page 1: Aside from any higher, more abstract meaning, red and black are the colors of gambling (we see the Joker playing cards later too), something opposed to Batman, for whom risk is eliminated by intense preparation

Page 4: The Knight is a pet character of Morrison's. In addition to their first encounter in Detective 215, Cyril Sheldrake appeared with Batman in both Morrison's JLA and JLA: Classified. In Batman 655, he failed to return Bruce Wayne's phonecall, a call ostensibly to discuss this meeting of the club.

Page 5: Batman gestures "this high" with his hand, just as Damian did in 658 and as Jezebel will do 681. Not sure about the meaning of this, but it seems to appear too frequently to be a coincidence.

Page 6: The Musketeer basically foretells the whole story of RIP, "locked in an asylum with two of my greatest enemies alongside an army of gibbering homicidal freaks." and later "I never have to fight crime again." Amusingly, the Musketeer hauls in millions from this story, perhaps channeling some of Morrison's wishful thoughts about RIP.

Page 8: Legionary apologizes to Man-Of-Bats for "last time", which we see in 668 and 669.

Page 10: The Dark Ranger summarizes his self renovations, more on this later.

Page 12: Batman, grim as a gravestone, dwarfs the other members of the club, who are awe struck by his presence.

Page 15: The mystery man costumes himself in Mayhew's skin, like Orlando from The Invisibles and like Dr. Hurt brags to have done to Mangrove Pierce in 681. The grotesque act of wearing another person's flesh stands as a physical counterpart to possession of the mind, wherein one temporarily wears a body to suit their generally evil ends, a major hang up of the Devil's. Actual mental possession shows up in the largely overlooked Ra's Al Ghul arc.

Page 15: Note the painting on the wall. From Thom Young's review on comicsbulletin:

Fortunately, Timothy Callahan, the author of Grant Morrison: The Early Years was able to identify it for me. It’s The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder—a painting that shows people of various social classes, from peasants and soldiers to aristocrats and clergy, all dying indiscriminately.

Page 18: "And don't eat any more food," Batman eschews all food in Morrison's run, whereas secondary characters like Robin, Legionary, Musketeer, and Man-Of-Bats can all be seen noshing on one thing or another at different points in the run. Funnybook Babylon's Chris Eckert theorizes about this apparently annorexic Batman, and I'll spit out my own theory in the post for 675.

Page 20: Strangely, Morrison blows his best red herring, the Legionary, right at the beginning of the arc. Why was the Legionary his best red herring? Because an evil impostor Legionary infiltrated the Batmen of All Nations in their first appearance in Detective 215

Last Page: "Advantage evil, place your bets with the Black Glove." An anonymous friend of David Uzumeri's likens gambling on good and evil to God and the Devil's wager over the loyalties of Job. I believe it. The complete devastation of Job's life in the Job arc of the Bible (kidding) definitely resonates with what happens to Batman later in Morrison's run.

Batman 666

2009-01-01T08:54:00.000-08:00

While I considered condemning this issue passive-agressively in the annotations, I think I'll serve it the pan pizza up here in the remarks. I didn't like this one very much at all. Timothy Callahan tells me I'm wrong in his review, and seemingly the entire internet has reached a consensus that this issue kicked ass, but I'm not buying it. Am I saying this comic is completely bereft of good ideas? No, there are some very good ideas in this comic, and they, as well as the ever-talented Andy Kubert, save it from being truly bad. Is the appreciation of those ideas overshadowed by the uninteresting plot, clichéd setting, and the "Who's Who" of bad Grant Morrison writing fetishes packaged along with them? I'm gonna say "Yes."

In honor of the 666th installment of Batman, Morrison trots out for us the same anime future we've seen a thousand times before, complete with riot gear police force and religious end times mumbo jumbo. He even furnishes the obligatory Frank Miller news broadcast to clue us into how fucked everything is.

On its own, this isn't so bad; most of us have come to accept these banalities as natural components of a "doomed future" depiction (though they needn't be). However, Morrison aggravates things by subjecting the reader to all his worst idiosyncrasies as a writer. For example, and I'm starting small, it really irks me that both Barbara Gordon and Damian Wayne have memorized verbatim the same hundred year old poem. To be fair, this isn't only Morrison, many writers in comics have their characters rattle off fat blocks of text from old literature (Captain American comes to mind), but why? Do people really do this? In a somewhat similar scene later, ~~Grant Morrison~~ Damian explains didactically to his cat that "The two upright horns," which are nowhere to be found in the art by the way, "represent the triumph of matter and duality over spirit and unity." Neat!

Morrison also tends to misplace his humility, treating his excellent conceits as throwaways and placing his undeveloped character creations at the top of the character totem pole. For example, Damian's booby trapping of "every single prominent building in Gotham," an awesome and fitting twist on Batman's preparation fetish, merits at least a couple of pages of face time, but Morrison shuffles it off in half a page to pave way for more OMG BADASS moments and tired religious symbolism. The perpetrator of this badassery, the trenchcoated Damian Wayne, easily dispatches six super villains in a 22 page span, one of whom may have been the Antichrist. Oh and its also implied that he killed Dick Grayson. Yeah, just like that.

Morrison transmits the tireless excellence of Damian in another way as well, through Damian's supercool dialogue, by far the worst part of this book. Just look at the last three pages where Morrison runs a train of supercool dialogue, just cheesy line dry humping cheesy line, ad nauseum.

Tell your big, bad daddy to bring it on anytime. If he wants what I owe him, Batman's waiting. I promised my father I wouldn't kill. Looks like I let him down again. You're all free. Go and make the world a better place or I'll hunt you down one by one. The apocalypse is cancelled until I say so.

Especially that last fucking one.

Just for fun, contrast the last line of this issue with the parting line of Clown at Midnight, where Harley Quinn asks the Joker "Dontcha love me no more?" Here's this broken, messed up woman who basically gave everything for a man who can't be bothered with her any more - you know, one a dem - whatchacallit - oh yeah, compelling characters. Harley Quinn, of course, unpityingly poisoned the Joker's henchmen earlier in the issue, but the line so perfectly captures the pathos of her life that we can't help feeling some sympathy for the little devil. On the other hand, "Until I say so" captures only Damian's arrogance, which I think the four prior masturbatory remarks had more than sufficiently demonstrated.

To be fair, some redeeming elements do elevate this book out of the muck. As mentioned, the booby trap bit was too brief but still a very nice touch. The opening poem too, Yeats's The Second Coming, poses an interesting point of contention: Is the second coming that of the Devil/Antichrist, the Third Man returning for Dr. Hurt, or does The Second Coming refer to Batman, who I argue is really Christ? Morrison's depiction of Damian Wayne bolsters the latter interpretation, as he reminds us of the more brutal Christ of Revelation, the birthplace of the whole 666 thing. So yeah, despite appearances, this comic is not dumb. Morrison sprinkles a bunch of really smart bits throughout the issue. It's just a shame he makes us slog through a blood-soaked, Chuck Norris Fact foisting of Damian Wayne to find them.

Pages 2-3: The Legend of the Batman: Who He Is and How He Came to Be, a succinct run through of Damian Wayne's life, in the vein of Batman #1. Can anyone explain what the rat and the syringe signify?

Page 5: Several accounts in the Bible cite Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus Christ.

Page 6: Damian and Commissioner Batgirl are quoting William Butler Yeats's thunderous Second Coming, which I've reprinted below:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Page 7: I don't recognize Lexmart from anything, though I know next to nothing about Superman lore. But if it really doesn't exist in the DCU, then I think Morrison is implying that in an apocalyptic future, Lex Luthor reigns over the international retail industry.

Page 11: "That monster was responsible for the death of... of a good friend." Barbara Gordon veers away from what she was going to say, probably something along the lines of "old flame." I can't imagine this meaning anyone but Dick Grayson, as no one else fits both descriptions. Plus, nobody cares about any of her other boyfriends.

Page 12: The Third Man makes his entrance, pontificating a demonic version of John Lennon's Imagine.

Page 15: The name "Max Roboto" cracks me up.

Page 16: The Devil, in some sense, gave birth to the Third Man when Satanists murdered Officer Lane's family (recounted in 674).

Page 20: "... In return for my soul!" A Batman who "sold his soul to the Devil" embodies one third of Bruce Wayne's three nightmarish visions from the previous issue.

Batman 665

2009-01-01T06:14:00.001-08:00

We continue our trudge through the 90's with another dour, sanguinary cover that let's us know

Batman is serious.

Anyway, I like this issue. Like last issue, Morrison relies largely on Andy Kubert's art to carry across this honest tale. I wonder if, maybe not the presence, but the placement of these issues in the overall scheme of his run was dictated by Morrison's fatigue after the travail of writing 663. That is, I wonder if this fatigue caused him to bump the presumably easy-to-script Bat-Bane issues up the time scale.

The titular Black Casebook, introduced this issue, raises some serious concerns about the havoc a thing like this could wreak on Batman's brain. Jog theorizes that by forcing Batman to write these things down, he must cope with them and recognize them as real. Given that the history of any long-running comic character must teem with logical inconsistencies and tonal leaps, recording such a history runs the risk of launching the Caped Crusader's sanity out the window. I differ slightly from Jog in that I believe the actual copying of the history serves as a cathartic release for Batman, a means by which he's historically expunged these tales from his memory, literally closing the book on them. Only now that he's forced to reopen the Casebook for clues does his sanity fall into peril. Batman's journey into yesteryear mirrors the reader's, who, for pretty much the first time ever, must now reconcile Batman's impossible past with his present as he or she combs the backlogs of Bat arcana to determine the identity of the Black Glove.

Batman 665 does, at some point, digress into some irrelevant silliness with the whole testosterone business, but it's more distracting than annoying. As is often the case with Morrison's work, the most interesting thing about 665 lies outside the work itself, in the fevered speculations and hypotheses about the concepts only teased inside. I throw out a couple of these in the annotations below.

Page 1: The Zur En Arrh graffiti has vanished. David Uzumeri, in a wonderful thought, asks, "Could it somehow magically follow the Three Ghosts?" The text doesn't buttress this view 100%, as the Zur En Arrh graffiti was actually absent on the last page of the previous issue, with BatBane standing no more than two or three feet away. However, Batman is unconscious in that panel. Therefore, I suspect the "magical aura" is actually a pathogen that the Three Ghosts transmit, one keyed to alter Batman's mind state. A part of the previous issue, in which Batman claims he is able to feel the air around BatBane, supports this theory.

Page 5: Batman heads straight for the drugs. The effect of such drugs threatens to transform Batman into a numb, pitiless creature like the smack addled BatBane or the pill popping Damian of next issue. More on this in a few.

Page 7: "High dose of painkiller," more chemicals

Page 7: "Venom" is the stuff that gives Bane his super strength, and Hugo Strange dosed people with "monster serum" back in the 30's to create some of Batman's first super foes.

Page 8: First panel, Bruce snaps to wakefulness, seemingly just seconds after passing out on the previous page. Might this be one of his "Problem-Solving Microsleeps" ala 682?

Page 8: "I recently began transferring its rather lurid contents to memory stick." Interestingly, even the Black Casebook, a spiral bound monument to the Batmen of eras past, cannot remain static in time. Like Batman, it must evolve.

Page 8: "One too many exposures to Scarecrow Gas or Joker Toxin," Writing off disagreeable continuity as hallucination or subterfuge reeks of modern practices. I remember a Ditko/Lee Spider-Man story in which the Terrible Tinkerer reveals himself to be an alien out to steal military secrets. The story has since been retconned (by the great Roger Stern actually) with Mysterio and henchmen disguising themselves as aliens (though how alien costumes would help spies, I don't know). I would guess the purpose of the retcon was that a green alien rogue didn't "fit" with Spider-Man. Yet, much as Batman participates in sci-fi adventures all the time with the JLA, Spider-Man travels off-world to the Beyonder's planet just a couple of years after the Tinkerer retcon and even today battles armies of green men from outer space in the pages of Secret Invasion. Plots involving these two heavy-hitters adhere to an arbitrary set of rules depending on the title in which they occur.

In addition, Alfred's comments fix a Chestertonian, unraveling nightmare as a scapegoat for the increasingly bizarre happenings in Batman.

Page 8: "Cautionary tales, visions of what I might have become in other lives" In the next issue, Batman becomes someone who "sold his sold his soul to the Devil." We see later a Batman who uses a gun to kill his parent's murderer (he doesn't pull the trigger, but still). Finally, the climax of this issue sees the Dark Knight, high on tranquilizer and testosterone, out-brute even the bestial Bane-Bat.

Page 17: Batman sacrifices his old-fashioned looking Batmobile, clearing away the old to make way for the new. Again, Morrison is using the Batmobile as a symbol.

Page 18: "Why did you have to choose an enemy that's as old as time and bigger than all of us, Batman?" When I first read this, I thought Gordon was talking about crime. After reading 681, it becomes fairly clear that he's alluding to the Devil. Everything is so obvious once you already know the answer :-)

Page 22: "Oh Bruce, you hairy chested love god, take me in your arms and kiss me!" The spy cloaks his hands in... Black Gloves, DUM DUM DUM!

Batman 664

2008-12-30T03:52:00.001-08:00

After the veritable tommy-gun of ideas fired at readers in the prose issue last time, Morrison is content to pinprick us this go around. Timothy Callahan finds himself equally flummoxed by the transparency of this issue, which sees us probing the depths of 90s comics (oh shit son, irony!). The annotations this time are correspondingly scant, because really, what does one say about a work that deliberately bereaves itself of content? We'll try to find something.

Page 4: Blue flower in snowy mountains, probably a nod to Batman Begins, a favorite of Morrison's

Page 5: Jabari and Diallo stay on as Jezebel's body guards until their walloping at the hands of Batman in 681

Page 9: "My own father was assassinated," the details of this assassination to be exposed in Batman 681.

Page 11: The fatter, freckled cop is Officer Farelli, who we'll see a lot more of as the run goes on. Also, more "Zur En Arrh" graffiti

Page 15: De Shawn believes Batman beheaded The Spook and shot the Joker. These suspicions, so long as the cops don't share them, typically service Batman's cause, as cowardly and superstitious criminals like DeShawn cooperate better with the threat of death looming.

Page 17: "Regular patrol. My nightly workout..." parrots the bullet point monologues that have become common in current age Batman comics

Page 19: I like Bat-Bane's look a lot better than regular Bane's. The little cape endows him with sort of a vampiric quality

Page 20: We hear first mention of the Black Casebook on this page, but it's just a tease. We get some insight into what exactly it contains next issue.

Page 22: Although foot-stomp-on-the-floor differs radically from knee-drive-in-the-air, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that this page commemorates Bane's breaking of the bat in Knightfall.

Batman 663

2008-12-29T10:39:00.000-08:00

In an effort to extinguish any hope I ever had of completing this project, Morrison pens Batman 663 almost entirely in prose. Be warned, a 1500 word tome (and no pictures!) awaits beneath the gap. Most of it is just garbage. I even fly off on a wild tangent about cheeseburgers for 250 words. Seriously.

What will we say about The Clown at Midnight, the texty behemoth that set the entire internet afire? A lot. In this issue, Morrison basically pisses his drug crazed mind onto the page, and Jesus did it have to go. The soupy prose swamps about triple the page count this plot calls for, but if you can navigate the peano curve of the first paragraph, you'll probably find most of its lurid pulp charmingly ironic. How can you not love and admire a sentence like

He wants to tell the other clowns how cruddy and broken and uncomfortable he feels inside, but their garish faces are stretching, leering, and opening up like colorful envelopes all around him, in a way that's so awful and funny to look at that he decides to face the dirt and deal with that instead.

He's expressing the least with the most, obviously, but would you really trade that fevered, bombastic energy for "He felt sick," or even "A sick feeling overcame him"?

These are superhero comics! Comics of which sensationalism abides at the very core! Picture that iconic image of Batman swooping down on an enemy, his tattered cape, four or five times his person, thrashing in the wind. What a bag of bullshit that image is. A cape like that would prove impossibly cumbersome, perpetually snagging and tripping Batman up to the point where he'd just burn the fucking thing and become The Cowled Crusader.

But the image still kicks ass.

In The Clown at Midnight, Morrison translates that picture into words, booming words that resound the operatic melodrama an artist would normally impress upon the image when drawing it.

If that's true, why did so many people dislike this comic so much? Well, some people disliked it because it's not a comic, a stance much ridiculed by interweb savants. The savants argument is basically that no one is entitled to be disappointed or dismayed by the substitution of panels for prose, ostensibly, although they don't say this, because prose is higher art. I disagree, but even if it is higher art, the savants are still wrong.

Suppose you develop a craving for cheeseburgers. You've been dieting for five months, eating mostly grotesk vegetables, and in that whole time, abstainining from red meat. Because of this you no longer stock ketchup in your cabinets. No problem. You drive to the local store and grab a bottle. Upon returning, you're ready to chow down. You throw the chop meat in a bowl, mix in the secret blend of herbs and spices only you know from your fat days, roll up your patties, fry them, and top them off with those budget brand American cheese singles that taste like family barbeques from when you were a kid. You pop the rolls out of the toaster, and just for a second, you hover, ketchup bottle in hand, over your sumptuous feast, thinking about how fucking great it's gonna be when you sink your teeth into that juicy, tender slab of dead cow. The meal is so very nearly complete now, just a squeeze of the ketchup bottle and, and - wait, what the fuck? You squeeze the ketchup bottle and out comes... caviar, FUCKING CAVIAR. And no surprise, you're pissed. You're pissed because the store misled you and sold you something you never intended to buy. Now maybe you like caviar, maybe it's your favorite food, but you were lusting after this burger for so long and now your whole experience is fucked. So yeah, even though you think caviar is great, sometimes you just don't want caviar. Sometimes you just want ketchup.

If you're still awake after that intensely subtle, Aesopic parable, we should talk some more about why people didn't like this comic. The assiduous Thom Young can't get over the many rhetorical duds in the text, and there are a lot. Unlike Thom, I can cope with them, as many of the lines in Clown that don't impress me do amuse me. Also unlike Thom, I have the luxury of reviewing this issue after the great propounding of the "Alfred = Black Glove" theory, which was largely rooted in the notion that Alfred narrates this comic, weakly aping the style of his favorite novelists. In the sense that the saturated prose of The Clown at Midnight would eventually spark half the internet swearing that "The Butler Did It" when, in fact, he did not, Batman 663 is a raging success (though I don't really buy Alfred as a red herring).

In one of the funniest reviews I've read, Jog completely dismembers the work, paying special emphasis to Morrison's recycling of hoary themes, ideas so craggily and battle worn that it hurts to look at them. And in case you can't already tell, Jog's point resonates pretty strongly with me. How many times do we need to be told about the bond between Batman and the Joker? It's not a rhetorical question, the answer is zero. Zero times, it can be inferred from the text. Hell, a single panel might be enough to communicate that this shadowy gargoyle and the dapper clown he's beating on share a special relationship. And yet, for the last 20 years, everyone who writes the Joker spins "The Unbearable Inevitably of Batman and the Joker" in his own words. Is the "You can't kill me and I can't kill you" speech a rite of passage? Seriously, compare the rendition of that speech in this issue with the one in The Dark Knight. Fucking identical. In a run so dense and so heady, it's hard to believe that we're still hit with this type of pandering.

In conjunction with this, Jog goes on to ream Morrison for using characters as mouthpieces to announce events that transpired rather than having those characters actually experiencing said events, to the effect that some parts read like extended recap pages rather than organic continuations of story. It's the classic case of telling and not showing that I highlight in the talks about 681. As it pertains to this issue, the Joker (and Morrison) professes to a profound conversion of his character, but does his change really have substance? Certainly not in this comic, in which the Joker's cell is replenished just four pages after his "transformation." Even in RIP, the Joker operates in much the same way as before, except now he whispers and wears more boring clothes. I don't think Morrison ever really intended to change the Joker in any meaningful way, but rather, he needed a forum in which to expound the changes the Joker has already undergone. It's also possible that Morrison is just marking his territory, distinguishing his run so that the next writer to try something like this will pay homage to the "Morrison era" stories.

One criticism that even the unremitting Jog can't tack onto this issue is irrelevance. Most of the important toys Morrison is playing with get wheeled out in this issue. Red and black pokes its head up for the first time in these pages. We also have hypercontinuity and rebirth commingling, as well as religious allegory and, duh, some metatext.

Do I like this issue? Yes, but only because I'm a stickler for the kind of convoluted bombast Morrison gushes here. Could've been much better though.

Page 2: "Rain goes clickety-clack-tack..." The issue begins and ends in rain, like Alan Moore's seminal The Killing Joke

Page 3: Morrison is boiling all the famous Joker stories together in The Clown at Midnight. The whole knocking-off the henchmen bit salutes The Joker's Five Way Revenge in Batman 251 where the Joker's murderous, "original persona resurfaces." A snippet from this issue appears on the splash page of Batman 683.

Page 4: The astute David Uzumeri snags this one, "Deep in the dense architectural reefs of midtown, primary reds and yellows and the hot purples of gigantic moving advertising hoardings..." Red, yellow, and purple are the colors worn by Tlano, Batman of Zur En Arrh. Well done, David.

Page 4: Jim Aparo was a popular Batman penciler and Bill Finger scripted the very first Batman stories. Did someone named "Crescent" work on Batman?

Page 5: "They called themselves the Boys of St. Genesius." Why? From Batman 251: "You'll recall that Saint Genesius is the patron saint of actors and comedians... jokers!"

Page 9: The Rose Bruford School is a school for the performing arts, a strange place for a speech therapist to receive accreditation. Also, "Rose" likely alludes to the flower with which Harley Quinn poisons her old cronies.

Page 10: "Ringmaster-from-Hell phase," nods to The Killing Joke

Page 10: Solomon and The Queen of Sheba are figures from the Old Testament

Page 11: Lots of red and black on this page; the lethal flowers return in Batman 680. Morrison links the colors to rebirth, a theme we'll visit briefly in the annotations for 670. Also of note,in Morrison's Batman Gothic, the undying Mr. Whisper, in service of the Devil, attempts to unleash the bubonic plague on Gotham City via infected rose petals (red roses, black death). Even moreso than other issues, The Clown at Midnight suggests that Morrison's Batman run is a spiritual successor to his other work with the character. Master of all matters Morrison, Timothy Callahan gives a good talk about this in his review of the issue. YES! Now I've officially referenced every single person ever to utter the words "Morrison" or "Batman" in this post.

Page 11: "If it's him, there has to be more. He always leaves a clue. A pattern." Morrison's characters, like Morrison himself, love to drop hints and clues. In Batman 667, the Legionary, in his death throes, smears his fingerprints on a security monitor to guide Batman to his killer. In 674, the Third Man intentionally ditches his glove, leaving Batman to wonder "Is he telling me his name?" The reader must act the part of the detective, trying to solve two mysteries at once, Batman's mystery "Who is the Black Glove?" and the thematic mystery "Where do the ideas of these seemingly unrelated threads meet?"

Page 12: Nothing really, I just love "fish being gutted" and "Eager to be born, he counts backwards to midnight." Actually, there might be something to "fish being gutted." I found in his annotations for Arkham Asylum that Morrison associates fish with Christ. "Think of the classic Christian Fish symbol," he incites the reader, "also known as the Vesica Piscis." In this light, "fish being gutted" easily transforms to "Christ being gutted," and the sentence falls perfectly in line with the Devil/Anti-Christ innuendo that abounds in this serialized Batman novel. However, I think its unfair to expect the reader to produce this very tenuous connection on his own.

Page 13: Harley Quinn as "the Joker's quiet Bostonian speech therapist" has got to be a joke at the expense of both Harley Quinn and Boston, neither of which are known for articulate or refined speech ("Hiya puddin!" and "Get the ceat [cat] outta tha cah [car].") Also, while a speech therapist probably shouldn't be quiet when treating a patient, Harley's silence as "Miss Wisakedjak" does not alert the suspicion of Arkham's dunderheaded staff. So perhaps Morrison is sniping at the Arkham employees as well. This summer, Batman and the Joker star in Morrison's Five Way Revenge! (on Boston and fictional characters).

Page 13: Gotham Noir, first mentioned in Batman 655

Page 15: The name of this chapter likely derives from the play Prometheus Unbound about the god-man Prometheus' release from captivity. The writer of that play was Percy Shelley, whom Morrison depicted in the Invisibles as an agent in the eponymous super team.

Page 16: Artist Joker's personality pallet: "Satire Years before Camp, and New Homicidal, and all the other Jokers he's been." Morrison exhumes this notion of the Joker's "super sanity," which originated in the now 20 year old Arkham Asylum GN.

Page 16: For the Joker's psychotic fit, Morrison copies a couple of lines directly from other comics:

They can't keep me here I know a way out. - last page of first Joker story in Batman #1
You see I hold the winning card. - page 8 of that same Joker story
You're in my power Batman Ho Ho! I could pull off your mask now - and end your reign! I could even kill you but I won't! HAHAHAHA Let him live!" - page 10 of the Joker story in Batman 67
He's so amusing when he tries to match wits with me... hehehehehe - page 8 of the Joker story in Batman 11
Take a look! We resemble each other! - page 16 of the ubiquitous Batman 251
And I'm loony, like a light-bulb battered bug. - page 24 of The Killing Joke
Aren't I just good enough to EAT! - page 20 of Arkham Asylum
Stop... stop... stop me... if you've heard this one... - the opening sequence of Batman 614

I admit defeat at locating the Batman 11 and Batman 67 references, which, to be fair, are obscure (nobody remembers the camp stuff). However, with the power of Google and poster rikdad's excellent work on the DC Comics message board, I can achieve!

Page 21: "Red and Black. Like a bat. In a dream. In a window." this image repeats (in actual panels) in Batman 672 and Batman 682. Someone, I can't remember who, suggested that Batman fabricated the story of the bat crashing through his window to inflate the drama of his transformation, to cement it as a matter of destiny. I like this view, as the whole thing does seem a little ridiculous.

Page 22: Harley Quinn closes the book with the best line of the issue. When Morrison shuts off that "super cool" shit, he can really write some moving dialogue.

Batman 658

2008-12-28T23:48:00.000-08:00

We know from interviews that Morrison is trying to incorporate into the Batman mythos his notion of hypercontinuity, the idea that every comic ever written about a particular character happened canonically in that character's life. So we expect to see forgotten rogues like the Spook and nods to Aunt Agatha, stuff like that populating these pages. But Morrison doesn't stop at that. He exercises hypercontinuity even tonally.

As I said in the annotations last issue, Batman & Son is really a Golden Age story dressed as a modern comic. In Batman 655, Batman, in a symbolic gesture, hurls the Joker into a dumpster, intimating both the end of that version of the Joker and the end to the sadistic story telling we saw in the first five pages of this run and the past 20 years of Batman. After those first five pages, Batman & Son just starts flinging shit against the wall and hoping it sticks: ninja Man-Bats with machine guns, henchmen in matching clothing, battle atop a T-Rex, and my favorite, Batman skull thumping an earthbound baddie with an expertly-timed jump kick from fucking outer space.

If that doesn't sell it, just look at the way the Damian revelation was handled. Morrison plays it casually and for laughs, with Alfred and Damian jeering at one another and even Batman getting a joke in "It's actually pretty good when you don't mix it with the wall paper." No other modern superhero writer would cast Damian's reappearance in this light. They would have Batman brood, "How could this be?" and spend maybe an issue investigating or warming to his boy with some father son activities, blah blah blah, it would just be a shit serious affair. Not so in the Golden Age, where previously unheard-of relatives would emerge from out of the woodwork all the time to shake things up and rope in readers on the fence. And then, once those characters grew tiresome, they'd ebb back into the woodwork again. Aunt Agatha is a good example of this. Selina Kyle's brother (!) fucking exemplifies it.

Also, think about Talia's schemes. Why does she kidnap the prime minister's wife and attack Gibraltar? Why does she release the Man-Bats at the art exhibit? When you really consider them, Talia's motivations are paper thin: some ill-defined power play, largely an attempt to get Batman's attention? I mean, she has his son for Chrissakes! I'm sure even a phone call relaying that info would've captured his attention. But no, that's not the point, is it? Talia is being evil to provide Morrison with a narrative silo in which to dump his many insane ideas. Again, given what Morrison is trying to achieve here, Talia shouldn't necessarily have any compelling motives.

What I'm saying is that this goes beyond Grant Morrison's quirks or defects as a writer. With this arc he is consciously implementing Silver and Golden Age tropes and mimicking the creative processes responsible for the comics of those generations. He's not just doing this with the camp periods either. Morrison's Batman run traverses all the major eras in Batman history and experiments with the styles and tones prevalent in those eras. The next arc, for example, treads through a very post-Crisis style story, with Bat-Bane and those satirically graphic caption boxes. He even tops that three issue beat from 664 to 666 with a Spawn style, early Image era Elseworlds tale of blood and brimstone (kinda like this one). Following that, the Third Man subarc revisits the surreal ghost stories of Englehart's stint on Detective and its neighboring runs, as well as briefly recalling the callous, vindictive Batman created by Finger and Kane. Paying attention, you'll find that Grant Morrison's Batman is very much experimental comics. The fact that most readers don't even notice it testifies to the success of the experiment.

Page 2: Tim is sprawled out over Dick Grayson's original Robin outfit, the one with the tighty greenies

Page 4: I explained Alfred's complaint in the 657 annotations

Page 5: The Great Kubertini will now transform this red, Robin-style shirt into...

Page 6: a plain white sweater! Tadah!

Page 11: Morrison makes his characters gesture "this high" with their hands several times in his run. Like the whole beheading thing, I'm not entirely sure why.

Page 18: "Kirk Langstrom is consulting with the British army on anti-Man-Bat tactics as we speak," a Silver Age gem if I ever read one.

Page 20: "For people like us, the world is the game board, and nations are pawns," an example of the exploitative thinking characteristic of the Black Glove organization.

Page 23: For those rereading the run, does this image remind you of anything? Another, better-remembered image from later on in the run inverts this one, with the son overlooking the father's apparent fiery death. What? You want me to spell it out for you?

Batman 657

2008-12-28T23:05:00.000-08:00

I'm reserving my remarks on the Batman & Son arc for next issue's annotations where I really cut loose on it. The annotations this time are pretty rich in speculation to compensate for the lack of content up here at the top. So let's get to them.

Page 4: Perhaps a gaff by Dave Stewart, I think the Batmobile's fender should be black, its color upon completion in 676. David Uzumeri, in his annotations for the issue, proposes that the Batmobile is symbolic, which he's probably right about, and he even ties it to a theme of nature vs. nurture, which I hadn't considered.

I think actually the whole Batman/Batmobile connection is something Morrison, in his boundless ambition, really wanted to illuminate upon, but with all the ideas he juggles in this run, his reach simply exceeded his grasp on that point. Notice that Morrison titles the first chapter of his serialized novel "Building a Better Batmobile," which isn't a far cry from "Building a Better Batman," something Alfred set out to do in 655 after Batman's rogues were all jailed in the Missing Year and OYL. Here the Batmobile is incomplete, like the run which aspires to change Bruce Wayne's life. Next time we see it, it's red and black, the colors of Bruce's obsession. As it stands, the parallel doesn't stand out enough to be particularly noteworthy, but we'll forgive Morrison not developing it, because he really does have 10 trillion other things on his plate.

Page 11: I just love "You dishonor your sensei with the loss of composure!" It's the perfect way to coerce obedience from a martial artist.

Page 12: Morrison disinters another relic from Batman's past here with the Spook. The Spook once smuggled convicts out of Blackgate through a series of underground tunnels, as explained in Detective Comics 435. Like I said in the annotations for Batman 655, Morrison was lying when he said he would resurrect the O'Neil/Adams hairy-chested love god Batman. What he did instead, which was a better move anyway, was return Bruce Wayne to the Batman: Paranormal Investigator type comics from the Englehart/Rogers Len Wein era which showcased these sort of surreal stories where everything was always smothered in smoke and fog and rain and people were never really who they appeared to be. This story, Batman 657, only pays a superficial homage to that era with the Spook's brief appearance. On the whole, Batman & Son is a Golden Age story. But Morrison really does dig his hands into those Engleheart/Rogers stories with his creepy Third Man arc in 672-674 and much of RIP.

Page 13: "Suction cup and smoke bombs and electronic gimmicks..." The Spook really uses all these gimmicks in his crimes

Page 14: The second instance of beheading, the first was in the newspaper Gordon was reading in 655. Maybe Morrison is implying that Batman will "lose his head," as in going insane? Pretty thin though.

Page 16: The whole bloody key bit is unnecessarily opaque. Combining this scene with another in the next issue, I gather that Damian did not, in fact, read Alfred's fingerprints off the keypad, but instead, keeping with his prickish M.O., just jacked the key from him.

Page 20: Wow. Pointless really, but wow.

Batman 656

2008-12-28T05:47:00.000-08:00

Well, Andy Kubert lasted exactly one issue inking his own work, which is exactly one issue more than anybody expected given his track record at DC. Still, Batman throwing down with ninja Man-Bats in a pop art exhibit with the art pantomiming the action is a fucking brilliant conceit, and Kubert handles it very well. I would award this comic 10 points out of 10, because really it's a great comic, but unfortunately I have to knock the rating down to 0 points because this issue inflicts Damian on the world. Damian - the worst character in 70 years of Batman comics. Yes, he even beat out this guy. Here's how I imagine the pitch went down:

RRRINGGG, RRRINGGG
Dan: Hello?
Grant: Hey Dan, I've got a great idea for a character in Batman. Now, imagine if Batman had a son, right?
Dan: Yeah, I mean, I suppose. So who is this kid?
Grant: Well Damian, he's a ruddy little bastard, a rotten lad just spoiled to the core. Skelps the piss out of poor Robin in his second book.
Dan: Um, I don't know if the fans are gonna go for...
Grant: No no, of course not, they'll fuckin 'ate 'im. Now after the first story, we're gonna give him an issue on his own.
Dan: Alright, so what does he, he redeems -
Grant: So he takes a lot of pills yeah? And then he dresses up as Batman but also a trench coat. Just a completely mental badass, he is. Then he snaps the Devil's neck, the bloody Devil, Dan!
Dan: But -
Grant: And after that, he runs an ambulance clear off Gotham Bridge with the Batmobile! And after RIP...

Dan: Sigh. Yeah. Yeah, okay Grant. Go ahead with it.

Page 1: The name "Jezebel" translates from Hebrew as "not exalted" and is today used euphemistically by old ladies to refer to their slutty granddaughters. In the book of Kings in the Old Testament, Queen Jezebel, through subversion of her husband the king, "leads the Hebrews into idolatry and sexual immorality." You can read the rest of what I read here, but the point is, if we believe her name to be allegorical, which we should since it's Grant Morrison, then we should not trust Jezebel Jet; she will be exposed as an evil seductress and an agent of the Devil.

Page 2: I love Bruce Wayne's dialogue here:

All this comic book stuff is way too highbrow for me. I collect tribal art, schizophrenic painters, 'outsider work' I believe they call it. There's a message here. I know if I just stare hard enough...

Interestingly, in the comic world of Batman, the artistic hierarchy is inverted, with comic books at the top and tribal art at the bottom. I actually have no idea whether aesthetes regard tribal art favorably, it just seemed like something one would find ornamenting the apartment of a New York bohemian.

Bruce is goading the reader when he says "There's a message here," but he's not lying. "Outsider work" points us to Detective Comics 356.

That boil-covered albino is actually Alfred who, after being crushed by a boulder in Detective 328 - boulders were much more abundant in those days, posing the greatest threat to secondary characters -, was secretly revived by a quack scientist following what might be the longest editor's note in 70 years of Batman comics.

For whatever reason, the Silver Age contraption that jolted Alfred back to life also disfigured him and twisted his desire to help the Dynamic Duo into a desire to kill them.

Behind the scenes as the Outsider, Alfred conscripts Z-list supervillains like Blockbuster and the Grasshopper to perpetrate schemes against Batman and Robin. This begins in Detective 334 and continues until 356 where Batman and Robin finally uncover the Outsider's true identity. During their battle, Batman knocks the Outsider into a "regeneration machine," restoring him to his natural form. The rejuvenated Alfred does not remember his crimes, and Batman and Robin vow never to discuss them because "the news of his treachery might kill him." This promise is at the center of Batman 682's plot. Obviously, since the Outsider was a behind-the-scenes evil mastermind, this line of dialogue strongly suggests Alfred as the identity of the Black Glove, although outsider art is a real thing, which makes this line easy to dismiss even if you did read and remember those stories from 45 years ago.

There's a lot on the Outsider and other stuff in Thom Young and David Wallace's review of 677, which isn't so much of a review as it is a frantic unloading of theories.

Page 3: See the diorama in the first panel? "Population explosion," might portend the death of the Joker's henchmen in 663. We do see it destroyed later in the issue.

Page 8: "If there's one thing I hate...it's art with no content." If he hadn't read the later issues to see the connection, one might describe the beginning of Morrison's run in this way.

Pages 14-15: "More noise. Lots of it." Bruce motions for the fire alarm. "Sounds great on paper." The noise of the alarm and the screeching Man-Bats does sound good on paper because paper is mute. Very subtle and very cool, Mr. Morrison.

Page 18: The many plans Batman's prepared, even ones for fighting Ninja Man-Bats. From 674: "I've worked out ways to defeat villains with M.O.'s and pathologies that haven't even been thought of yet."

Pages 20-21: I don't actually have the comic from which the events in this discussion originate, but Wikipedia synopsizes it well. Also, in the Richard Donner film The Omen, a boy named Damian is revealed to be the offspring of Satan, making him a literal "Son of the Demon."

Batman 655

2008-12-27T23:01:00.000-08:00

A couple of comments on this issue: First, Andy Kubert and Dave Stewart slug this one wayyy out of the park, such a bang up job from them, very clean, very colorful. This issue absolutely dazzles with the coolest, most popping art in Morrison's whole tenure on the book (well aside from Club of Heroes with J.H. Williams III, but I don't count that because it's not fair to compare mortal artists with Williams).

If you're rereading the Batman & Son arc after poring over RIP and Last Rites, you'll be immediately startled by the disparity in styles and pacing. This first issue strolls casually along the straight line of its plot, pausing occasionally in its course for some character moments that don't bear at all on the bigger picture. Compare with the last Morrison issue (683), an ultra relevant double tie-in that tears through 20 years of Batman history in 15 pages, somersaulting from memory, to dream, to reality at random intervals, with spacetime left over for Batman to dismantle a clone army with his mind and for Alfred the Butler to sound a touching, if premature, final note for his oldest charge. Yeah.

Page 2-3: The Joker copter, a zany Silver Age concept that Morrison consigns into the belligerent world of modern comics. "In front of a bunch of vulnerable, disabled kids!!!!" He's likely satirizing the propensity toward "darkness" in contemporary comic book writing, the idea that sadism is an essential component of drama, expressed most notably by scribes like J.M. Stracynski and Brad Meltzer, who oversaw, respectively, the rapes of Gwen Stacy and Sue Dibney a year prior.

Page 5: That Morrison guy sure knows how to kick things off with a bang! You see what I did there? You see, he fired the gun and... wait, it's "Blam" you say? Stop killing my moment man! Alright, with that out of my system, The Joker's shooter is the first of Three Ghosts of Batman who gain importance later in the run.

Page 6: The first scrawling of "Zur En Arrh", a phrase that drove both Batman and the interwebs to the brink of insanity

Page 8: The second panel here struck me. The nurse's silhouette outlines the shape of a headsman on the wall while she and Gordon banter about a live beheading! I can't imagine how this connects with anything though, as Gordon escapes Morrison's run relatively unscathed. At the bottom of the page, a glib Commissioner dismisses his nurse, "Everybody needs to lighten up," he says, echoing Grant Morrison's promise to deliver a more a squeezably soft Dark Knight and co - a promise he ultimately won't keep.

Page 16: Talia Al Ghul is threatening to lobotomize Francine Langstrom, unless her husband, Dr. Kirk Langstrom hands over the drug that induces his Man-Bat transformations.

Page 17: "The Earl of Wordenshire," alter ego "The Knight," is a Morrison creation whom we encounter in the Club of Heroes arc down the line in Batman 667.

Page 18: First of many mentions of Gotham Noir

Page 23: "There's a chapter in the latest Artemis Fowl I'm keen to catch up on." The Artemis Fowl series of youth novels follow the fantastic adventures of a cutthroat, twelve year old crime boss. The book seems tame for Alfred though, whose library Bruce calls "a shrine to blood spattered prose" in Batman 675, but perhaps Morrison is only citing the work as an inspiration for the Damian character.

Prelude - 52 Week 30 and 52 Week 47

2008-12-26T09:54:00.000-08:00

Not too much to say about these issues, although they do introduce a lot of the important concepts that overarch Morrison's run on Batman.

52 Week 30:

Page 2: "The Joker gave up being a murderer," a reference to the Joker's changing personality, of which there will be many

Page 4: Batman sets up Dick and Tim as replacements, which may or may not happen in issues of Batman following 683

Page 12: If you're gonna have surgery, ten eyes beats two any day. Another ten eyed man is featured in 675.

52 Week 47:

Bruce endures the Thogal ritual (which gains importance later in the run) over the course of this issue.

Second to Last Page: The Goose represents Batman, and the bottle represents the form to which previous writers have fit him, in particular, the morose Dark Knight we've seen for the last 20 years. As Robin says, "There's only a goose (Batman) in a bottle because you (the writers and readers) said so." Robin's (Morrison's) realization frees Bruce from the grim mode he's been locked in for years and...

Last Page: Bruce emerges with an "uncharacteristic" smile on his face.