Batman 664

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.