Geoff Johns Under Consideration

I’ve been reading a lot of Geoff Johns comics over the past few months. At this point, I’ve gotten through the first six volumes of his Teen Titans run, the first two volumes of his recent Superman run and the first four volumes of his Green Lantern, with the Sinestro Corps War waiting next. The success of Blackest Night has brought John even more to the fore of comics discussion than ever before, and has also started a fairly serious backlash against him and his work.

Blackest Night, which quite literally resurrects barely living DC characters in the service of a gory, over the top nostalgic, but violent superhero epic seems to embody all the characteristics that critics of his work point to as his weakness. I haven’t read the work, I’ll check it out once I catch up to that point in his Green Lantern run, but let must just address some of the general criticisms surrounding the series.

One is the incompatibility of superheroes and the dark, violent subject matter of Blackest Night, previous Johns works like Infinite Crisis, or even Morrison’s Final Crisis. I think Morrison’s strong reputation within the critical community makes critics take a moment like Talky Tawnie battling an evil cat soldier of Darkseid of Final Crisis and embrace it as an encapsulation of the absurd joy of the DCU, as filtered through their own perception of Morrison as a cool writer who isn’t bound by nostalgia. Johns scripting the same moment would likely be criticized for dragging a ‘children’s character’ through the dirt and grime of realistic, or over the top, violence.

I think that’s a valid criticism, I love DCU stuff, but sometimes I’ll look at a serious scene consisting of a bunch of people in outré costumes standing around and it feels off. The goal of the writer should to wrap you up in the world of the story so that you accept it, but then I’ll be like why is there a woman with green fire popping out of her head here? It’s goofy, and when played poorly, superhero comics can feel like the adolescent males power fantasies of personal empowerment and scantily clad beautiful women that critics claim them to be.

And, I think the reason that Johns is so often criticized for his work is that unlike virtually all the other big names out there, he’s never done a significant creator owned work. Because Morrison does works like The Invisibles or We3, we realize that his whole world isn’t the DCU, and the superhero work is just one of his many interests. But, Morrison never denigrates the superhero work that he does, and it’s just as thematically central to his overall worldview as his creator owned stuff. But, other creators, like Warren Ellis or Garth Ennis, make a big deal of only doing superhero work as a way to promote their more serious work, to pay the bills. That means that even if Ellis uses the same characters and situations as Johns, there’s an inherent ironic distance to the work, we know he’s not being totally emotionally sincere or invested in the work, and so we’re not either and can appreciate it as “just a bit of fun.”

But, Johns is fully invested, he’s crafted a series of large scale epics in the DCU, and personally overseen the rebirth of a wide variety of characters. And, I think more notably, he’s created a very personal, auteur feeling body of work over the course of his time there. Johns has carved out of his own corner of the DCU in the same way that Morrison did, and it’s exciting to read all his titles as part of one continuum, to recognize the way that Infinite Crisis played out in Teen Titans, or seeing the way that stories from 52 led into his Superman stuff.

There’s people who like stories to be short and self contained, who view a season long box set of a TV show as a burden to be slogged through, rather than a joy to watch unfold. I love massive stories, and the DCU is one of the longest running single stories in the history of the human race at this point. I’m seeing Johns reference stuff that I read in Showcase Presents Legion of Superheroes in his Superman stuff, and that’s exciting. But, Geoff has also carved out his own corner of the universe, telling one long story over the course of his DC work. Geoff’s work all links together, and that makes it a much more rewarding experience than if he’d just written a bunch of disparate stories.

I think one of the core fallacies of art criticism in general is the idea that the most personal stories are the ones set in the real world, with characters who resemble the author, and events obviously drawn from real life. ‘Realism’ is synonymous with emotional authenticity, but I don’t think that a verite approach is necessarily the best way to represent our emotional experience of the world. If you look at someone going through a breakup or other traumatic event, it’s not the outside that’s interesting to watch, it’s what’s going on internally. And, genre, particularly over the top superhero epics, can be a great way to represent traumatic emotions in a dynamic way.

Grant Morrison talked about doing this with All Star Superman, using it as a way to process his own feelings about getting older and processing the death of his father. Is that your immediate take away from the book? No, but it’s that grounding of real emotion and experience that makes the book work and feel real in a way that most Superman stories don’t. I think that’s the best way to do genre stories, to infuse them with something real and then spin that real emotion into something wild and exciting.

I think it’s a mistake to assume that just because Johns is writing with other peoples’ characters, his stories aren’t personal. There’s a consistent set of themes, and worldview, set up throughout his work, a belief in strong, self dependent heroes who will stand up to corrupt authorities and reassert a strong morality that seems to have been lost in society. People accuse his work of being nostalgic, but I don’t think it’s necessarily nostalgic for another era of comics, it’s nostalgia for another era of heroism. For all the violence of his comics, Johns is essentially reaching back to a pre-Alan Moore era of DC, when heroes were heroes unambiguously.

This desire is represented in two characters, Superboy Prime and Hal Jordan. In Infinite Crisis, Superboy Prime is railing about exactly the stuff I was talking about earlier, that desire to return to a more pure era of heroism. Johns presents him as the voice of DC readers, but based on his work, he’s the voice of Johns himself. It’s just that Superboy Prime is a corrupted character, he doesn’t have what it takes to be a hero, and that failure corrupts him into the insane character we see at the end of Infinite Crisis. He’s not meant to be a hero, therefore he has to become a villain.

Hal Jordan, on the other hand, is meant to be a hero, that is his destiny, so Johns configures an elaborate scenario with Parallax as a way to absolve Jordan and return him to his rightful place as the force of will that drives the DCU. Jordan has done things as terrible as Superboy Prime, but that wasn’t his true self, and when he’s returned to life, he feels like a person out of time, a hero in a world that’s grown corrupted and weak. So, he shines as a beacon to the other heroes, and thanks to the way Johns writes him, is continually able to flaunt the rules and still maintain his favored status, because he’s just that good.

What separates Jordan from Superboy Prime? It seems to be the ability to overcome fear via willpower. Superboy Prime is corrupted because he doesn’t have the inner strength, Jordan has that strength and it makes him a hero. But, they’re both essentially reaching for the same thing. All of Johns’s stories take place against a backdrop of legacies, of heroes struggling to live up to the legends that came before them.

His Teen Titans depicts a new generation of heroes trying to live up to the storied reputation of their predecessors, and by extension, you could argue it’s Johns trying to live up to the legacy of Perez and Wolfman. He’s playing the same riffs, and continually referencing those old stories, seemingly as a way to show that this new generation of heroes can do their own version of Terra or Trigon just as well as the original.

Teen Titans is in some ways his most forward thinking work. His recent Superman run feels very conservative, a deliberate evocation of the iconography and setup of the Donner films. Admittedly, All Star Superman uses a similar classic setup and works, but reading “Last Son,” it felt very run of the mill, very much back to basics in a boring way. I liked that I knew what was going on, but on some level, I feel like it’s a testament against the strength of a comic if you can pick it up and find nothing at all surprising in the status quo or approach, no change.

But, Teen Titans did a good job of building a new set of characters and letting them grow and change over the course of the run. And I think it’s a perfect example of the way that a crossover should work. Crossovers have gotten such a bad reputation because they’re overused, and generally disrupt plans for a title rather than enhance them. But, seeing Teen Titans link into the overall Infinite Crisis gives the story so much more scope. The entire fifth trade has a sense of apocalypse hanging over it, an imminent doom that is hitting these characters very hard. Because the series doesn’t have to carry the primary narrative strain, it can focus on the characters, and the Connor/Cassie stuff there was fantastic, a great culmination of their relationship. It’s a story that couldn’t have been executed as well if it wasn’t part of the Infinite Crisis crossover.

And the reason that it integrated so well is that it’s all part of the Geoff Johns corner of the DCU. Morrison has his own pet characters, Rucka has his, and Johns most definitely does. And, within the world he’s carved out, there are very specific authorial tendencies. You can argue that Johns is not as strong a writer because he doesn’t do creator owned work, but you can’t argue that he doesn’t do personal stories.

Teen Titans has a lot of retro elements, but feels more progressive than Green Lantern. At that point, he probably didn’t have the authority to resurrect Barry Allen, so he’s got to work with the new Flash, and he makes him into a compelling character. But, it feels inherently conservative to bring Hal Jordan back and have him show the new guys how it’s supposed to be done. The stories are generally solid, but I take issue with the politics of the book on that level.

But, again, I think people who say that it’s evidence of Johns as a nostalgia guy might be ignoring the fact that these characters are personal to him, to resurrect Hal Jordan is not just about bringing back a character, it’s about bringing back an idea that matters to Johns. His morality and notion of personal responsibility may have been heavily influenced by Jordan and Barry Allen, so wouldn’t bringing them back be the most personal story he could tell?

I think that it’s perfectly reasonable to criticize Johns, I go back and forth between really liking Green Lantern and thinking it’s just a bunch of nonsense aliens shooting colors at each other with no emotional component. Similarly, Titans can be great in its low key moments, but get bogged down in boring fight scenes. So, you may ask why even read superhero comics in the first place if I don’t like fights? It’s not that I don’t like fights, it’s that the fights have to mean something beyond simple spectacle. The act of fighting in a superhero comic needs to be a way for the characters to express what they’re feeling and to play out the emotional conflicts that plague them at their core. That’s what the best superhero comics do, and Johns isn’t always there, but he hits enough to make his stuff worth reading. He's nowhere near a Moore or Morrison, but his work has a lot of exciting concepts and the kind of craziness you can only get from comics.

Next up for me from him is The Sinestro Corps War, the end of Teen Titans and some more Superman stuff. Then, in a little bit, I’m going to go back and tackle his JSA run. Anyone have any particular recommendations on where to go next with his work?

Batman and Robin #4: "Revenge of the Red Hood: Part One: Red Right Hand"

The new issue of Batman and Robin features the predicted drop off in art quality, as Philip Tan’s murky, sketchy pencils replace the pop dynamism of Quitely. The story generally works though, the series remains very straight ahead and accessible, without the convoluted psychological insanity of Batman RIP, which most people seem to like, but I’m finding a bit frustrating on some levels.

I’m guessing, and hoping, that this new Batman series will follow a similar arc as the first part of his run, starting with just straight forward fun stories showing Batman on the top of his game, then gradually layer in new problems and issues until it becomes a complex psychological web. I think Morrison’s first couple of arcs on Batman are among the most generic comics he’s ever written. I love Damien, so he spices things up whenever he appears, but apart from that it’s pretty light ninja manbat adventures. It’s not until the JH Williams arc, and particularly the “Space Medicine” arc that the series takes off, and pretty much everything after that is among the best work Morrison’s ever done.

The new series has gone back to the original mode, focusing more on fun and light stories, with occasional moments of character introspection and thematic development. I found the psychological stuff a lot more interesting. I know that Batman RIP got some negative response, but I think it was an ambitious, hallucinatory experience. Reading those issues was like spinning down the insane rabbit hole that was Bruce’s collapsing psyche. It’s also some of the most avant garde content in any of Morrison’s big superhero titles, going further than anything he did in JLA or New X-Men.

But, I respect the direction he’s taking the reinvention and am able to enjoy the journey. It’s just a bit frustrating that it seems like the majority of these issues is action scenes that don’t really go anywhere, and the more intense character stuff is minimized to smaller interludes, very effective interludes, but if every page of this issue was as strong as the scene with Sasha talking about taking off her face or Dick and Damien on the roof, it’d be a much more emotionally engaging experience.

The Red Hood and Scarlet function on one level as another riff on the intrusion of grim and gritty supeheroics in the day-glo world of Silver Age comics. They represent the worst excesses of early 90s heroes, like The Punisher, killing villains that Batman and Robin would bring to justice, and doing so in a very modern way, publicizing their exploits on Twitter.

The Red Hood is very media conscious and sees Sasha’s mask as just another element of their image. In the same way that we wonder who’s under his hood, he claims that people will “imagine the beauty beneath that creepy mask.” That scene is the highlight of the issue, as Sasha’s inner humanity is contrasted with the Hood’s assurance that she’s doing the right thing. These two characters are clearly meant to be a mirror of Batman and Robin, and Sasha’s murders in response to her father’s death echo both Bruce and Dick’s origin. This is what Dick could have become if he was trained by the wrong man, and it’s what Dick is fighting to keep Damien from becoming.

One of the things I like about this issue is the way that Grant continues to expand the Batman universe and bring in new characters and concepts. In addition to the Red Hood and Scarlet, we get the introduction of a mysterious English author, another masked man. The Black Glove mystery in RIP was a lot of fun, and these two characters bring back the detective element to the comic, while also giving Batman some new villains.

The end of the issue builds to a flourish with Batman and Robin brought into contact with their counterparts and raising the question of who is the Red Hood. Jason Todd would definitely make sense, but I feel like Morrison wouldn’t go with such an obvious choice. Perhaps either the Hood or this English author is going to the Joker, he’s still out there, and I’m sure will return before the end of the run.

I’ve got to comment on Tan’s art, which is not a good match for the pop fun the book’s supposed to be going for. Cameron Stewart and Frazer Irving will both be a great match for the tone, but Tan stuff is murky and ugly. I think even the much maligned Tony Daniel was a better fit for the book. I actually liked Daniel, this, not so much.

As a side note, some of my waxing nostalgic for RIP was prompted by reading through Batman: The Black Casebook this week, the TPB collection of the 50s stories that inspired the early parts of Morrison’s Batman run. Why that book wasn’t out when RIP was running I have no idea, but it’s still worth a look. The thing that’s most striking about all those stories is how it’s not actually that far a leap from the strange psychological short stories in this book to what Morrison did in RIP. Many of the stories are about Batman being forced to question elements of himself and his identity, spinning into nightmarish scenarios of identity displacement and loneliness before everything is restored to the status quo on the last page.

My favorite story to date is a surreal one in which Batman wakes up in jail and is told that he’s a crazy man impersonating Batman. He goes to Wayne Manor and talks to Robin, revealing himself as Bruce Wayne. But then another Bruce comes down the stairs and our Bruce runs away. Eventually it’s revealed that Alfred was posing as Bruce, and he and Dick had set up this scheme to stop the real Bruce was dying due to a poison gas he’d been exposed to. It’s totally surreal and like a raw piece of psychological terror. He doesn’t face villains, he faces his own psychological demons. It’s a lot like the Superman stories of the era, just raw drug trip deconstructions of self in comic book form.

I’m sure there were a lot of less successful or ambitious stories from the era as well, but this book is a great compilation of ones that are fun to read and illuminate more of what Morrison was doing with RIP. Morrison has always embraced the absurdity of comics, and managed to find a way to make a story like RIP totally surreal, but still emotionally relevant in a way that more ‘realistic’ superhero comics aren’t.

And, I hope he gets back to that mode on Batman and Robin eventually. Doctor Hurt was teased to return at the end of issue one, and I can’t wait to see him back in action. After this Red Hood arc, at least we’ll have the awesome prospect of Cameron Stewart drawing a story with the Squire, one of Grant’s most entertaining pet characters in the DCU.

Batman and Robin #3: "Batman Reborn: Part Three: Mommy Made of Nails"

The first Batman and Robin arc wrapped up with another great issue, that again spotlights Frank Quitely as the best visual storyteller in comics history. The overall Morrison Batman story makes some progress, and some great groundwork is laid for future storylines, but this whole arc feels kind of like Morrison and Quitely cutting loose after the very structured, for the ages perfection of All Star Superman and just jamming on various crazy Batman ideas.

As with the other issues in the arc, the majority of the issue is a fight scene, in this case the intercut Batman and Damian fights to open things, then a triumphant reunion of “Robin and Batman” to bring Pyg to justice and firmly establish themselves as the Batman and the Robin, no matter what else happened in the interim.

As with a lot of recent Morrison work, there’s decentralization of the narrative, and an emphasis on singular moments. The threat has already escalated when we get there, and we go right to Pyg ranting at the height of his insanity and Batman mid-interrogation. This style works with Morrison for a number of reasons. One is that it allows him to give you all the pleasures you’d want from a Batman story, but still allow for Quitely to do his astonishing work on the extended fight scenes. The entire issue seems written to allow Quitely to draw something amazing on every page.

But, it also works that way because Morrison has just gotten better and better at summing up a concept or emotion in a single page, or even a single panel. There’s not that much explicit character work done with Damian over the course of these three issues, but by the end here, we can tell that he’s changed. We’re never told that he’s changed, we can see it in what he says and the way he responds to things.

The most haunting moment in the issue is after Damian promises to save Sasha, when he decides to go after Pyg instead of saving her. It’s a choice that may make sense in the moment, and is certainly where Damian’s instincts would lead him. He’s been raised by assassins, trained to kill, and he’s not going to fail in his mission. But, as he jumps on to a roller coaster car in pursuit of Pyg, he sees Sasha left behind, terribly deformed by Pyg’s process, being consumed by the Dolls, yelling “Don’t leave me! You promised!” The most haunting panel here is Damian’s hand reaching back towards her, unable to reach her as the car rolls down the tracks. That visual tells you the emotion of the moment perfectly, we know how much Damian wants to save her, but he can’t. It’s only a three panel sequence, but it’s a pivotal moment in Damian’s arc.

Sasha has lost her father in the same kind of traumatic event that Bruce Wayne or Dick Grayson lost theirs, and in the issue’s final moments, we see that she has become the Robin to Red Hood, scourge of the underworld, who seems to be a more violent version of Batman, gunning down the cops who threaten Sasha. So, because Damian failed to save her, she’s gone to work with someone on the darker side of things, and when Red Hood and Sasha invariably come into conflict with Batman and Robin, Damian’s guilt about failing to save her will come to the surface. We only hear Damian mention Sasha once after he fails to save her, but you can still tell that it phases him.

As I mentioned earlier, Quitely’s work in the fight sequence is just astonishing. I think he sometimes goes too far in drawing grotesques, but the doll people work pretty well, and the choreography is just on another level from anyone else out there. Quitely also manages to make both the Batman and Robin costumes look like the coolest outfits out there, something you wouldn’t mind being caught wearing on the street. His Damian looks like an actual ten year old, and that adds a lot of weight to the action. I love the look of his hood at the end of the issue, and the “Bang!” sound effects written in blood at the end are the capper on the issue.

The entire viral drug thing feels kind of tacked on, but I don’t really mind. That’s not what the story is about, Morrison and Quitely chose to focus on the parts they found most interesting, and then you can piece the rest together with the exposition here. The sequence with Batman and Gordon isn’t really about resolving the Pyg story, it’s about establishing the new Batman and Robin’s relationship with Gotham PD, and confirming that no matter what the earlier suspicions were, these guys are Batman and Robin.

And, with this new fresh start wrapped up, we return at last to a loose end from Batman RIP. It’s been a while since I read those issues, but I’m assuming that between the approach to Bossu’s place and Batman and Robin’s entrance through the ceiling is where the iconic “Batman and Robin will never die!” splash takes place. Either way, it’s great to see that stuff come back, and to get a really badass moment with Dick and Damian enjoying their success.

This issue wraps up Quitely’s run on the title. His art is masterful as always, but this is definitely a more low key Morrison/Quitely collaboration than most of their previous work together. I’m really excited to see what they work on next, be it the wrap up to this Batman stuff or something else, to see them incorporate the more experimental freeform style here into a new project. I can’t say I’m thrilled to have Philip Tan coming on board. I didn’t think much of his art in X-Men, and his aesthetic doesn’t seem a great match for Quitely’s or Frazer Irving’s down the line. But, we’ll see. The series has established its new status quo, now it’s time to play around in that world.

Batman and Robin #2: "Batman Reborn: Part 2: The Circus of the Strange"

Batman and Robin #2 is a lot like the first issue, in that much of the first half is spent on a fight scene seemingly designed to show off Quitely’s unparalleled storytelling abilities, and outré design sense, and then spends the second half picking apart the emotional impact of recent events in the characters’ lives. I like the way that Grant doesn’t do the story as a strictly continuous series of events, you get the sense that things happen off camera and inform the way the characters behave.

Most of the time when I talk about comics, I talk about the writer primarily, with the artist as kind of an afterthought. That’s because most writers don’t take full advantage of what the medium can do, and most artists aren’t doing anything particularly innovative. But, even working with the best writer in comics, it’s Quitely’s work that leaves the biggest impact here. I love the design sense of his Batman and Robin. The costumes are barely altered from traditional looks, but the gray pants on Damian’s outfit, and the green boots make all the difference in turning one of the lamest costumes in comics into one of the coolest. His Batman also looks great, making the classic grey suit look very fresh.

Quitely’s design sense got the most attention on New X-Men, with its emphasis on “pop sexy” characters, and his work there was great, but he always makes his superhero characters look so much cooler than anyone else. He makes their clothes look like something you’d actually want to walk around in, even more so than any of the movie Batman outfits. I still wish that someone would make a line of clothes based on his X-Men outfits, I’d love to wear those.

His storytelling is fantastic here, and the aesthetic he creates is what lingers after the issue. I think he’s just gotten better and better as time has gone on. Something like Flex Mentallo was beautifully rendered, but he’s gotten more and more formally inventive as time has gone on, and the experimental approach of We3 has given way to the almost three dimensional action feel of All Star Superman and this book. This book feels a bit grittier than the day-glo clean of Superman, fitting in light of its subject matter. The one misstep for me is the obese man in a tutu, who feels like a stock Quitely grotesque. But, everything else is great.

I don’t’ have too much to say about the fight scene, it’s fun, particularly the buildup with the roof meeting, but the real gem on a writing level is Alfred and Dick’s discussion in the cave. Here, we see the Dick/Damian relationship as a kind of adopted child thing. Dick can never live up to Bruce, who Damian now deifies, despite having little respect for him when they first met. So, Damian is rushed into both the role of Batman, and the role of adoptive parent of the world’s worst child.

Damian’s criticism only makes it even clearer to Richard what he sees from people like Gordon, he’s only impersonating Batman, it takes something deeper to be the real Batman. Alfred shortcuts that by suggesting that Richard take on the role of Batman, and channel his spirit as an actor would.

This series so far has seemed generally disconnected from the rest of the Morrison’s Batman run. The renumbering signals a clear break, but the approach is also very different. I loved the death metal heavy ambience of RIP, but I think it was smart do a break like this, to reflect the introduction of the new Batman. But, a scene like this one ties back into a lot of the key stuff from RIP. That storyline had a heavy emphasis on Alfred as an actor, raising the question of whether he was behind what the Black Glove was doing. Telling Dick to “play” Bruce calls back to the questions that were raised there.

In addition, it brings the series much closer to Morrison’s core thematic concepts than the first issue was. Much of Morrison’s experiments with magic and drugs in the 90s were about turning himself into the person he wanted to be, through the medium of the fantasy persona King Mob. He chose to abandon his previous incarnation, the low key guy we saw in Animal Man, and reinvent himself as a comics rock star. Did something just click and change in him one day? No, he chose to become the person he wanted to be, and that’s what Alfred is telling Richard here, to just play Bruce until it becomes real.

It ties in to a lot of stuff from previous Morrison comics, the characters in Division X for one, and Magneto’s performance as Xorn in particular. In that case, Magneto played the role so well, he created a character that people liked more than his actual personality. So, the inspirational message here is don’t worry about your “true self,” just be the person you want to be, and the world will catch up. It’s a magical act of transformation.

Things close out with Damian getting overwhelmed by the creepy doll henchmen from last issue. It’s a great visual moment, colored in neon day-glo shades. It also sets up a nice redemptive moment for Dick in the next issue. While those closing images are great, my favorite drawing in the book is Damian speeding along on the bike, a spectrum of color streaming out behind him.

So, I really liked this issue. I think it deepens the world we saw last time, and raises some deeper character stuff, keeping the arcs from the previous Batman stories in mind. It’s a totally enjoyable book, and I’m eager to see where Morrison goes with it next.

Batman and Robin #1

Morrison and Quitely’s Batman and Robin isn’t anywhere near as profound or majestic a work as their recent collaboration, but it is a really fun comic, that sets out an interesting new status quo for the characters, a shift in approach for the next chapter in Morrison’s great Batman novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed the issue, I think there’s a lot of great stuff in there, but I’ll admit that it didn’t move like the over the top insanity of Batman RIP. What the issue does best is set up a really strong world and a new outré threat for the characters. A lot of that change in feel is due to Quitely’s art, which feels so much cooler and futuristic than the Tony Daniel art on RIP. It’s a new pop world, which needs a different Batman and Robin.

Morrison’s economic characterization is a large part of what makes him so great as a writer in comics specifically. He tells everything we need to know about the Dick Grayson/Damien dynamic from their brief interactions with each other. Damien sees himself as the real heir to the Batman identity, and is supremely self confident, while Dick expresses uncertainty about taking on the identity of his legendary mentor. But, it’s not done in a really emo way because they’ve both got a job to do, and that takes priority.

I admire the artistry of the opening action sequence, or the cool cut away view of their Gotham apartment building, but it wasn’t until the ending that the issue really took off for me. The introduction of The Pyg is really creepy, bringing a horror movie vibe to this otherwise rollicking adventure. Morrison described the series as David Lynch directs the 60s Batman TV show, and that’s the sequence where I really felt that coming to life. This is the same doofy theme villain with a gang of identical henchmen you’d see in the series, but with a creepy twist to it that makes it really disturbing.

The first part of Morrison’s Batman was largely about confronting the horrors within. Everything that Doctor Hurt did to Bruce was designed to send him down a self created spiral of insanity, to destroy Batman’s ability to be Batman. In the series, every criminal that Batman fights is really a prismatic reflection of his own confrontation with death, his own thogal. Hurt is designed to be a deliberately ambiguous worst nightmare ultimate enemy for Bruce. So, he may be Thomas Wayne pretending to be the Devil, he may be the Devil posing as Thomas Wayne, either way, he’s the worst threat that Bruce could imagine.

Morrison played with the idea that Bruce was really the one behind the Black Glove, creating an enemy so strong he could never defeat it as a way of preserving his own purpose. The whole thing was that kind of bizarre psychological journey, and I loved it, but I still respect the change in approach he’s going for here. It’s almost like the change in the identity of Batman necessitates a kind of back to basics fighting crime approach. I’m sure things will become more twisted and psychological as it goes on, but for now, I enjoyed this issue as a fun romp.

Though, I’ll admit the most joy I got from the whole thing was seeing Doctor Hurt holding the keys to Wayne Manor on the teaser page. For whatever reason, that character totally resonated with me. I love his outfit, I love his over the top lust for destruction, and I’m eager to see him come in contact with this new Batman and Robin.

The Kingdom

I read Kingdom Come, the Mark Waid/Alex Ross superhero opus, a few years back and enjoyed it, primarily because of Ross’s art. Say what you will about his storytelling skills, he makes spectacle and pages that are just gorgeous to look at. Doing a Kingdom Come sequel without Ross seems like an odd choice, but I decided to check out The Kingdom for a couple of reasons. One is it’s got an issue drawn by Frank Quitely, one of the few things he’s drawn that I haven’t read. I also wanted to check it out because it was the only in story appearance of hypertime, the Waid/Morrison DCU concept that’s a source of continual fascination to me. So, how did The Kingdom read? Surprisingly well, it’s not an all time classic by any means, but there’s a lot of good pieces in here, and it plays as an interesting precursor to what happens in Final Crisis.

One of the most interesting things about the book is its structure. The central conflict is set up in an introductory issue, then we divide off into a series of semi-related stories about various b-list side characters and their role in the crisis, before bringing it all back together for the finale. The obvious parallel is to Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers, which used a similar structure. This series doesn’t feature the in depth character work or scope of Seven Soldiers, but the structure still works really well, to the point that the main story is largely beside the point, what lingers is Rose’s troubles in “Planet Krypton” or Iris’s struggle to get equal treatment by her father in “Kid Flash.”

The central story is convoluted, and predicated on a central idea that doesn’t quite hang together. It’s odd that William would so abruptly switch from total devotion to the notion of Superman as God to a mad fury to destroy him across time and space. I suppose someone who had such fiery religious fervor in the first place would be particularly disappointed when it turned out that his faith was built on a lie, but it falls prey to a common problem in these kinds of stories, which is a not clearly defined slippery slope of villainy. It’s one thing to want revenge on Superman, it’s another to go from a normal guy to a cosmic force of destruction. You can justify it, and the narrative reasoning is there in the story, but emotionally it didn’t quite work for me.

But, using his rage as a multi-versal threat gave the opportunity for a bunch of interesting stories about characters hovering on the edge of universal destruction. The core idea is the notion that Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman’s mission back in time will destroy their universe, whether it succeeds or fails. They are the products of a universe built on pain and suffering. Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman may be trying to do a good thing, but why should people be punished for the sins of those in control of their world. So, the story becomes largely about these peoples’ struggles to justify their own existence, and show that their universe is worth saving.

The reveal of hypertime at the end of the story is a way to solve the central conflict of the work, which is what happens to the people left behind when the world is changed. In the context of the DCU, the clear parallel is to the characters from the multiversal Earths who were wiped out of existence in the crisis. In “Planet Krypton,” Rose sees the ghosts of characters from those other Earths, and is comforted to know that they’re out there, that she isn’t alone, and also, to find out at the end, that she shouldn’t regret the choices she made, she’s in the place she’s supposed to be. That story was the high point of The Kingdom for me because it managed to make the DCU emotionally relatable and explore the role of the civilian in this universe in a way I’ve rarely seen. The odd structure of the piece meant that there was room for a digression like that.

The thing I really like about hypertime is the way that it reconciles all the different eras and tones of the DCU into a single cohesive whole. The goofy adventures of early Superman can co-exist with the apocalyptic world of Kingdom Come, and comment on each other without rendering each other invalid. I think it does run into a bit of a self indulgent loop of commentary, when you have a story like this, where multiple versions of Superman converge on each other and are used to comment on the nature of the DC Universe itself, but when a character is as mythic as Superman, it makes sense that he’d function as a significant symbol in a work like this. Hypertime is about recognizing the mythic essence of these characters as a core from which everything else flows.

Hypertime is described here as a river built of events, or stories. In Final Crisis, Morrison picks up this idea, I’d argue that the archetypal Platonic Superman seen in Superman Beyond is the “source” of the hypertime river, he is the hero from which every other hero flows, and is defined against. You could argue that each of the “trinity” of heroes are the source, an idea that’s reinforced by the appearance of Jonathan, a hybrid of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, who has power over hypertime. He is the end of the river, the coalescence of the disparate pieces built up by many stories over the years.

I see a lot of echoes of The Kingdom in Final Crisis, which adapts the hypercrisis idea in its tale of a universe built out of stories. Both works end with an attempt to liberate the characters from the notion of a single linear narrative and plunge them into a larger universe without rules or restrictions. On some level, I have problems with this because it plays largely as a way to bring back old stories that Waid or Morrison liked, and seems to spiral further and further away from any real world relevance.

But, stepping back, I think hypertime has a lot to say about the nature of mythology and human identity. People complained that I’m Not There was too insular, something that was only of interest to Bob Dylan fanboys, but I feel like it only uses Dylan as the jumping off point for an exploration of how we all construct our own identities. Similarly, hypertime functions simultaneously as an exploration of DCU continuity and a representation of the way that we construct our own personal narratives. Everything that happened to us exists and is true on some level, but we banish certain experiences to our own continuity limbo, and even build up pieces of ourselves using “imaginary stories” that didn’t really happen, but become a piece of personal mythology.

But, our perception of our own identity is largely based around where we are at the moment. I’ve gone from student to worker, child to adult, all the previous incarnations of my own identity are true, but they aren’t necessarily relevant to where I am now. Similarly, Batman has changed from day-glo 60s Batman to gritty 80s Batman, hypertime is a way to reconcile the growth and change that a character goes through by acknowledging the evolution of fictional personalities rather than trying to create a construct single narrative.

The Kingdom is the precursor to a lot of Infinite Crisis and Final Crisis, and certainly the hypertime stuff is really interesting. But, for me, the most significant thing is the great character work on some of the individual stories. The overall story is fairly typical JLA material, but some of those character pieces were really nice.

Batman #686: "Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" (Part 1)

Picking up where Grant Morrison left off, Neil Gaiman’s Batman #686 presents yet another spin on the death of Batman. This one also appears to be taking the “It’s all true” approach to Batman, mixing elements of pre-Crisis Catwoman with post-crisis Barbara Gordon and a reincarnated Joe Chill for a pretty mysterious opening. Is this a dream like trip through hypertime that Batman takes on his journey between worlds? Are the various deaths he experiences a piece of his journey through Darkseid’s Omega Sanction? Or is it just an excuse for Gaiman to get a bunch of characters he likes together and tell some fun stories about Batman.

I haven’t written that much about Gaiman on this blog, but I do love his work. Sandman was the first long form comics series I read, and I still think it’s one of the high points of the medium. I was debating at the New York Comicon who the fourth best writer in comics is, with everyone having the foregone conclusion that Moore, Gaiman and Morrison are the top three. I can’t argue with that, Gaiman doesn’t write that many comics, but what he writes is usually really strong. 1602 didn’t work so well, but I’ve liked pretty much everything else I read by him in comics.

I’d still love to see Gaiman get to conclude his Miracleman run. I’ve only read “The Golden Age,” and there he did the near impossible of following up on Alan Moore’s legendary run in a way that didn’t step on what Moore had created, and only served to deepen and expand the universe. It’s a shame the series has been trapped in legal limbo for so long, one day, hopefully Gaiman will be able to finish the story.

When reading a Grant Morrison comic, the thing that overwhelms you is the amount of ideas. In Final Crisis, there’s a dozen cool concepts littered on every page and you can’t believe that he has this vast store in his mind to draw from. With Gaiman’s work, what has always amazed me is the huge amount of stories. Sandman knitted together its larger story with countless standalone stories. Where do they all come from? This issue is similar to a lot of Sandman arcs in that it uses a gathering of a bunch of people as a framing device for various smaller tales, each from a notable member of Batman’s supporting cast.

I’m not sure what the end result of all this will be. How can all these different incarnations of the characters be there together? I think it’s the perfect thing to tie in with the Omega Sanction, that this is Bruce’s hallucinatory journey through a series of different lives and deaths, watching all his friends betray him and leaving him utterly alone. Selina, particularly this Earth 2 version, and Alfred have always been allies of Bruce, why would they kill him?

The Selina story covers a piece of the Batman mythology that I love, but hasn’t really been touched on in either of my two favorite comics Batman stories, Morrison’s Batman RIP or Miller’s The Dark Knight Strikes Again. The uncertain flirtatious relationship between Selina and Bruce, Batman and Catwoman, can be great because it explores the thin line between Batman and the criminals he hunts. If Catwoman can so easily switch sides from good to bad, why can’t Bruce do the same thing, and, could he find himself on the other side without even meaning to be there?

The relationship is most brilliantly explored in what is still the finest Batman film, Batman Returns. There, we see Bruce go one step further than he does in this comic and offer to throw away the Batman persona and settle down with Selina, only to have his image of an idyllic homelife rejected. The two of them need that fire to be together, they aren’t normal, and can only really be together as Batman and Catwoman. One of the things I love about the film is Selina’s defiant rejection of his offer of a classic heteronormative dream life, marriage to the most eligible bachelor in Gotham, a good looking guy who’s also incredibly rich. She has moved beyond that world now, and doesn’t play by their rules.

Wonder Woman is so messed up in a history of bondage and power/subservience, I’d argue that Catwoman is DC’s real feminist hero. Sure, she may be a villain some of the time, but the character argues for a rejection of traditional feminine roles, and the embrace of a new kind of independent lifestyle. I’d really like to see Morrison’s take on the character in his next batch of issues.

Catwoman’s story here is largely about the impossibility of being together with Batman, primarily because he has his way of doing things, and doesn’t see much room for someone with her own approach. He is attracted to her when she’s a criminal, but when she tries to fight crime, he just chastises her for doing it “wrong.”

Here, Selina does achieve the kind of domestic dream that she rejected in Batman Returns, but she gradually loses the fire that drove her as time goes on. In letting Batman die on the couch, she is making it possible for her to kill herself. As long as he was out there, there was always the hope he’d come back to her, and things could be like they were. When he comes back and she finds out that he knew she was there all the time, but never chose to see her, she decides that it would be best to let them both die together. Only, she’s too scared to do herself, and instead she just watches the man she loved, a piece of herself, die.

The Alfred story is also extremely interesting. It works fine as a straight up elseworlds type story, but I’d argue it functions more as Alfred exercising his guilt for enabling Bruce’s delusions over the years. In letting Bruce become Batman, Alfred indirectly upped the ante in the crime stakes, and paved the way for supercriminals like The Joker. We see that dramatized here with the story of Alfred literally creating supervillains as a way to make Bruce feel better.

The whole story feels a bit like the portions of Watchmen that discussed how much better it felt to go out in costume when the villains were wearing costumes too. If Alfred hadn’t created ‘The Riddler,’ Bruce might have gotten over his depression naturally and given up the illusion of being Batman. But, Alfred kept raising the stakes to keep him happy, and eventually the illusion he’d constructed spun out of control.

And, as time went on, the illusion became real, which is discussed in the scene with Bruce and Alfred at the window. The fight against evil is real, therefore the evil itself must be real as well. The whole story is interesting in light of the rampant speculation that Alfred was the force behind the Black Glove, and also in light of the idea that Bruce was his own worst enemy, another possible candidate for Black Glove status. Batman RIP was largely concerned with the idea that only Batman himself could come up with a villain powerful enough to defeat him. This story would take place early in Batman’s career and play off the idea of Batman and The Joker as symbiotic entities, each becoming more violent and powerful in response to each other, riding together on an inextricable path towards destruction.

I’m still not sure what the overall setup for the story is, but this was a great, really dense issue that brought back memories of just how good a comics writer Gaiman can be. This is stronger than 1602 or Eternals, and it made me wish that he’d jump back on an ongoing, or just do some more work in the DCU or anything. I want more Gaiman comics. But, for now, this two parter will do.

Final Crisis #7: 'New Heaven, New Earth'

After a tumultuous seven issue run, Final Crisis wraps up with its best issue yet, an issue that manages to resolve all the threads in a satisfying way, and perhaps achieves Morrison’s long discussed goal of making the DCU a sentient entity. The parents of the universe are gone, the gods are fallen and it’s up to the characters to invent their own world. A large part of the issue is about the characters gaining the agency to control their own story and build this fifth world of their own design. It’s at once a return to the pre-Crisis DCU, and a celebration of everything that has come since. It’s a complex issue, and not everything about it works, but the overall impact is huge, I think this is easily the best issue of the entire series, and a great way for Morrison to wrap up his current time in the DCU.

The issue begins with a trip to an alternate world where there’s a black president and a black Superman. I was already talking about the resonance of Obama and this comic, and this opening fuses the iconography of Obama and Superman to foreshadow the emergence of a new, better world at the end of the series. It’s also a pretty badass moment to have the president rip off his suit and have a Superman costume underneath. The discussion afterwards about using the “wonder horn,” and the music they hear makes a lot more sense after seeing what Superman does later in the issue.

The issue is odd because it violates so many seemingly basic rules of writing, and in the process proves that rules are good, but what really lingers about a story is the energy and experience of it. The early parts of the issue are told in flashback, or perhaps narration in the present, it’s unclear. Images flow from the narration in a seemingly stream of conscious way, drifting from fight to fight in a haze of action. What this means is that we don’t get to see some important story points. I’m frustrated that we don’t get a closer view of Shilo activating his boom tube, after all the buildup of his story, he either doesn’t appear or is barely visible in this issue. I also find it frustrating that we never really see Wonder Woman liberated from her Justifier enslavement, we can infer it, and we get an emotional beat when she crumbles the mask, but we don’t get the seemingly critical moment when her mind comes back to the surface.

So, there’s some sloppy story construction on those beats. I’m not sure how much is a product of the art and how much is conscious choice. I will say that Doug Mahnke kills it on this book. I’ve heard a bunch of people say they wish he had drawn the whole thing, and I can’t disagree. JG Jones did a good job when he was on time, but he wasn’t good enough to justify the delays or art mess. He’s not Frank Quitely. If Mahnke could have drawn the whole story in a timely fashion, it would have been great to have him on board. At least in terms of art, the series goes out on a high note.

The other major issue is the amount of deus ex machina in the story. On some level, a story about gods is going to always involve this sort of ending, but the stuff about the monitors doesn’t feel as developed as other elements of the story, and that makes it feel kind of out of place here at the end. Darkseid was the villain of this whole thing, and to end on a different, somewhat related, but not really connected story thread feels a bit off. But, I think Darkseid gets a good finale too, so it works okay. It’s partially an issue of pacing, it might have been better to have Batman do the final strike on Darkseid in this issue, while Superman was off with Mandrakk and the Monitors so they could be intercut instead of happen in succession.

One of the things I love about the issue is the sheer epic quality of the story. I think that all three Crises, for their flaws and merits, manage to feel truly epic and important for the universe. They stand as testaments to the insane over the top storytelling capabilities of the DCU. On a meta level, the tour of all of the aspects of the DCU in this series is a way of showing its strength, the power of its lifeblood, a way to combat the vampiric death that Mandrakk represents.

This issue’s use of narration in particular makes it feel huge. I’d be hard pressed to say exactly what sequence certain events happen in, but I felt the importance of them, and was emotionally engaged throughout the entire thing, Lois’s narration serving as a way to heighten our emotional engagement with what’s going on. Yesterday, I said that Superman Beyond worked on an intellectual level and a pure spectacle level, but it didn’t have the emotional component. This issue has all three firing at full cylinder, reading the pages, I was really excited to see what came next because it really felt like anything could happen. There were a ton of panels in here that just made me smile, and that’s one of the greatest things about Morrison’s work, and superhero comics in general. They can be so huge, so archetypal that it transcends the traditional demands of a story and just hits you in that part of the brain that loves spectacle and excitement.

In Superman Beyond, we saw Zillo Valla claim that Superman’s origin story was the most powerful story in the multiverse, the story that could pull Dax Novu back from the darkness. Here, we see that story invoked again, and replayed as part of the battle against Darkseid. It starts with the rocket full of Batman’s iconography. Batman is just as powerful an archetype as Superman, the core things that make him who he is will survive any threat against the world, he’ll always find a way. I love the idea that in a world made of story, symbols and images are the life essence, if those can be preserved on another world, Batman will find a way back to life.

That’s perhaps the boldest innovation in this miniseries, the idea that the DCU is literally built on stories. It will live on because it’s always “To Be Continued,” and the characters will perpetually deal with the same archetypal story elements. Something like the Joker/Batman conflict is a founding principle of the universe and it will always cycle itself through again and again.

Superman’s confrontation with Darkseid is really well done. At this point, Darkseid has infected virtually the entire populace, the world itself is evil, so what can Superman do? As Darkseid says, “Kill me and you kill everything!” So, Darkseid does precisely that, he fires the bullet at Orion, which he knows will eventually come back to kill him, and in the process, he intends to take the whole world down with him. At least that’s the way I see it, the whole bullet backwards in time thing is pretty hard to fathom, but this view of it makes sense.

I love the payoff on the Flash’s long run through the entire series. They bring death to Darkseid and zip off in a haze of trippy visuals and the sort of crazy science dialogue that Morrison does so well. Lois describes it as “the story of the flashes outrun Death, the Black Racer.” In some ways, this caption is used simply to facilitate the dissemination of narrative information, but I’d argue that the goal is also to transform this story into instant mythology. This is a story so huge they’re already telling it to kids within the DCU, it’s the creation myth of the fifth world, the way that the world was saved and changed and rebuilt. And, the crazy brilliance of the Flashes outracing Death and bringing him to Darkseid lives up to that kind of mythos.

From there, we see the dissolution of the world, conveyed in a series of perfectly chosen scenes that convey what I view as the dissolution of the entire multiverse. We see all the scientists working together to buil this Miracle Machine, even our old friend the Chief from Doom Patrol, whose head is no longer in a jar. This builds to the dizzying assault on Checkmate and the Atoms doing something. These panels are drawn from the pure reservoir of superhero stories. This is what every comic should feel like, filled to the brim with insane images and concepts. Morrison has talked about how comics have to up their game now that films can do superheroes. This is what he means, this is a comic that spans universes and does something you’ve never seen before in every panel.

It’s also a marvel of economy. The Arrow and Canary resolution is touching and funny in just three small panels. I love their hands barely touching as they drift through space, staring down at the Metron symbol. A panel down we can another fuck yeah moment with the appearance of Most Excellent Superbat and his team in action. I don’t know who these characters are on an individual level, but Morrison makes me care about them through the sheer pop joy inherent. Who doesn’t want to save Lolita Canary? Who doesn’t love Lighting Flash dashing between panels, all in a massive buildup of light and fire.

I’m honestly not totally sure on exactly what happens at this point in the comic. I know that the Checkmate satellite explodes, apparently killing Mister Terrific and Hawkman and Hawkgirl, while the Super Young Team and the others evacuate via Mister Miracle’s Boom Tube. Then, there’s a separate JLA satellite where the survivors of all the destroyed multiverse worlds stick around. So, are those worlds entirely destroyed, and then rebuilt later on, or are the only survivors the ones who were stuck in the freezer? I guess it might be that everyone’s possessed by Darkseid, and it takes Superman’s wish to make them better again. It doesn’t really matter, perhaps a couple more reads will make it clear.

The sort of free association storytelling is present in the panels where Renee tells her story. Speaking to Overman about his cousin’s death, we jump to a scene that may or may not have ever happened where he screams in the rain while holding her body. On one level, this is likely an allusion to the original Crisis’ famous dead Supergirl cover, but it also works as a visual way to express the emotion he’s feeling. The walls of reality are breaking down at this point, emotion and logic are converging into a psychogenic reality where idea and feeling are indistinguishable from physical reality.

This brings us to Superman realizing that Darkseid intended to kill himself to bring the whole world down into the black hole with him. If he possesses all their minds, his death will destroy everyone. But, Luthor won’t have that. As I mentioned in earlier reviews, Luthor always exists in reverse moral polarity to the world he’s in. Now that he’s in an evil world, he’s going to fight for good.

Luthor claims that “Libra was the anti-life equation and now he’s not.” So, was Libra a physical incarnation of the concept of anti-life? I’m not sure about that, maybe it’s more that Libra was some kind of vessel used to channel the anti-life into our reality. I’ll have to reread to see what exactly was up with Libra throughout, but the point here seems to be that Luthor and Sivana have created a machine that co-opts the anti-life equation and overrides it. So, using this machine, they’re able to rescue the people under the control of Darkseid and restore their individual will.

This leads to the fantastic moment where Frankenstein rides a giant dog and hacks the head off of someone. It’s great to see Frankenstein back in action, I’ll always have great affection for all the Seven Soldiers characters, and particularly with Mahnke drawing, Frank is as good as he’s ever been.

The Morticoccus virus comes seemingly out of nowhere here. Apparently, it was mentioned in Countdown, and is a call back to Kamandi. The way it reads here, it sounds like the “god-bacterium” could easily be Darkseid himself.

So, this all leads up to Superman’s final confrontation with Darkseid. This is another huge fuck yeah moment. The world is seemingly collapsing, but Superman knows the nature of this world, it’s made of “vibrations,” of stories. If you put a better story against this bad one, the good one can win out. Darkseid is the bad virus designed to destroy the world, Superman is an agent of good, rebuilding the world from within. He sings like only he can and Darkseid explodes, unable to withstand the onslaught of pure universal essence.

I love these sorts of moments because deep down I do believe that good and hope will always overcome darkness. As in this series, things can go bad for a long time, but progress will always win out in the end. I don’t think a moment like this is hokey or unearned, it kills it on an emotional level. Love will win out in the end, you can have a whole world of darkness, but all it takes is one little light to make things bright again.

This leads up to the confrontation with Mandrakk, and our intersection with the stuff from Superman Beyond. Mandrakk is the anti-story, the desire to end the universe and prevent the characters from developing any further. He invokes Superman’s origin story, but positions Superman as his father, a man who failed to save his universe. The origin is the powerful keystone of the entire reality, and Mandrakk is trying to twist it to serve his own ends.

Superman igniting the Miracle Machine with his solar battery is a literal representation of the light concept I was talking about before. I love the panel where he reaches his hand out and seems to have a tiny galaxy spinning below him, electricity arcing to create the Metron symbol around his head. There, he truly is a god, the benevolent architect of a new reality.

This leads to another fuck yeah moment when we see a legion of Supermen descending on Mandrakk, shouting “Let the sun shine in!” You can’t help but play the euphoric Fifth Dimension song in your mind, the music that tore Darkseid apart now echoing in your own mind, a truly bizarre bunch of characters stand and tear down Mandrakk.

The choice of such wacky characters as a bunch of Earth-35 animals and Captain Carrot can easily be read as a meta assertion on the health of the DCU. Mandrakk is the kind of reductive writer who seeks to tear down the magic of these characters, while Morrison wants the universe to be strong in all its bizarre contradictions.

The assembly of Supermen also reinforces Superman’s status as the ur-hero of the DCU, the source of everything that has followed. He has inspired all these others, he is the true god and architect of this world, and next to that power, Mandrakk is decidedly insignificant. He is staked, and the cancer eating at this world is gone, the “symmetry of the orrery” is re-established, Darkseid’s hold is slackened and the world can go on again.

Part of this is Nix Uotan’s emergence as a fully realized 5-D aware being. His story is kind of a reverse John a Dreams. He starts out beyond reality a piece of the core universal essence that is chipped away into an individual form to become a monitor. Then he falls in to our reality and gets lost in a human life, forgetting that he was ever anything more than that. But, now he’s fully realized, he has his monitor powers, but also human emotion to anchor them. There is a power in our lives and loves on this world, and that’s what Mandrakk doesn’t understand.

In his power, Nix summons the “Forever People of the 5th World” and the Super Young Team shows up. This reinforces the idea that new characters will be inheriting the roles of the old archetypes in the new world. The Super Young Team are the new Forever People, Shilo the new Mister Miracle, and I’m sure we’ll see a new Orion and others in the future. But, where does that leave the original New Gods? They are seen here watching over the birth of a new Earth, Earth-51, rehabilitating the graveyard world into a flourishing New Genesis. The war is over and a new world can be born.

At this point, the Fourth World gods seem to have passed beyond physical form, and serve more as touchstones for the next generation. They are the archetypal essence of good, and will reign supreme in a world where the archetypal essence of evil has been defeated and fallen deep down in to a black hole. And, they will guide Earth 51 to better things. It’s a classic Morrison trope, the worst, most corrupted thing drawn back to goodness through positive influence. Earth 51 is Quimper, plunged through the worst shit and reborn as a glorious flower.

This all leads up to the Monitors abandoning their post and descending down into reality to live as humans. The Monitors were old order gods, trying to maintain order in the universe, to keep the parallel worlds separated and limit humanity. They are the evolutionary shackles that helped us grow, but have to be thrown out as we advance into a new world. They are in some ways like Barbelith, and the dissolution into white here echoes Jack’s entrance in to the supercontext at the end of The Invisibles.

Superman Beyond equated the Monitors with the DCU’s writers. So, does this ending imply that the DCU is now beyond writers, it’s a self sufficient entity guiding its own way. One could argue that if this is meant to be Morrison’s farewell to the universe, he’s sending it off to a place where malevolent gods no longer control it and the characters are free to live out stories without his outside influence. Throughout Morrison’s DC work, we’ve seen negative portrayals of god-like controlling figures, from Morrison himself in Animal Man to the Time Tailors in Seven Soldiers. Both the Monitors and Time Tailors are mixed influences, but the point of this ending seems to be that it’s time to stop trying to control everything and to let the universe direct itself.

Superman is such a strong idea, he can guide things forward in a fine way. There’s no longer needs for an intermediary, people have shown that they can control their own destiny. Our heroes are now like the gods of old, and the fifth world has begun. We get very little glimpse of what that fifth world will entail, but I guess that’s ultimately up to you. We’re all Nix Uotan, waking up anew, ready to write our own story.

In a lot of ways, the story is comprable to The Invisibles’ liberation from the needs of a structured universe at the end of the series and the journey out to the supercontext. The DCU has been engineered to specific ends by these monitors, they thought that they needed to rule like that to ensure the safe progress of the universe. They sought to keep the universes apart and organized because it was too dangerous to let them mix. But, the people here have shown that they can manage their own reality. The child universe has become an adult and we don’t need the gods to guide us anymore. We can be our own gods. As King Mob said on his way to the supercontext, “I’m ready to play with the grown-ups, babe.”

This leads up to one final big moment, the return of Batman, who’s stranded way back at the Dawn of Man, drawing his sigil on a cave wall. Will the bat symbol become as enduring a symbol as Metron’s sigil? How will he make it back to the present day? Has he become a god? Who knows, but the ending feels right, and I’m eager to see Morrison pick up his story again when he returns to the title in the summer.

So, after all that, what is the major takeaway? The DCU is built on stories, and as such, the Miracle Machine can control it by rewriting the story. When Superman wishes for a happy ending, he’s essentially rewriting his own reality. He’s the ur-hero, the source of all good in the universe, and he’s always going to do just the right thing. This version of Superman seems very influenced by Morrison’s vision of the character in All Star Superman. I think he works even better than Morrison’s JLA Superman, outside of All Star itself, this is one of the best Superman stories of all time.

At this point, he seems to have become meta aware of the nature of the universe. He knows it’s built on stories, and will always continue on, but he’s got to make sure this story goes out on a happy ending.

And it does. After all the messy darkness of the previous six issues, this single issue manages to resolve pretty much all the narrative threads and give us a glorious rush of hope to overwhelm all the darkness. It’s a lot to fit in a single issue, but Morrison pulls it off, and makes it emotionally relevant. I had mixed feelings on Final Crisis throughout, I really liked most of it, but it didn’t hit me in the way that the best Morrison does. But, this issue, he’s at his best, and it’s a great farewell to the DCU for now. I want to read some creator owned work soon, but in a year or so, I wouldn’t mind a trip back to the DCU to check on the Fifth World’s progress.

Final Crisis: Superman Beyond #2

Final Crisis ends tomorrow, and I’ll be reviewing it tomorrow afternoon. But, before that drops, I’ve got a few things to say about last week’s Superman Beyond #2. This is an issue that’s frustrating on some levels, but really exciting on others.

My major trouble with the issue is the fact that it’s both a retreading of themes that Morrison has handled better elsewhere, and an essentially insular work. What does this book have to say about our world as a whole? What relevance does it have to your life or mine? There’s certainly some, but it’s more about the DCU itself, and the process of reading superhero comics. Some of Morrison’s best work, particularly pieces of Seven Soldiers and Flex Mentallo, were largely meta narratives about the nature of superhero comics, but they managed to tell those stories in a way that retained emotional relevance to the real world. They were about real people in a crazy world, this story, with its myriad of Supermen and convoluted Monitor mythology, loses that connection to reality and becomes, much like the original Crisis, a spiral into the mythology of the DCU itself.

My other major problem with the work is that all the major stuff has been covered elsewhere in Morrison’s canon. Final Crisis is by its nature a kind of greatest hits journey through his years of DCU writing, but at its best, the main series has managed to touch on new aspects of the universe and feel fresh. Here, the old sucking out the joy of superhero comics meta theme has been covered before. People have read Mandrakk’s fall into corruption as another riff on Alan Moore’s influence on superhero comics, a theme that Morrison handled much better in Zatanna #4’s Zor battle.

Both Seven Soldiers and Flex flourished because they used superhero comics as a way to riff on parental abandonment issues and emotionally arrested development. The Zatanna Zor battle is a riff on Alan Moore, but it’s also a confrontation with her own unresolved father issues, and consequently it has a strong emotional impact. Superman Beyond hits the popcorn spectacle and intellectual sides of things, but only occasionally hits me on an emotional level. Flex Mentallo, the greatest superhero story ever written, deals with superheroes from an aspirational point of view, spinning through the adolescent power fantasy and ultimate parent fantasy as a way of exploring our hero’s psychological condition.

I think ultimately a large part of it comes down to the fact that I generally enjoy the struggles of loser heroes rather than the super confident adventures of Superman. In All Star Superman, the entire series is about exploring Superman as a god totem, an inspiration to humanity who will show us the way then move on. The series often uses Superman in the way that Gaiman uses Morpheus in Sandman, or Miracleman in his run on that title, as an idea rather than a character. The All Star stories work because they deal with the idea of Superman and use him as an entrée to emotional engagement. The two greatest moments in the run are both in issue #10, the page where we see Superman comfort a girl who’s about to commit suicide, and the audacious finale where we find out that Superman actually created our world, and the idea of him was so powerful he infected our minds and emerged in our fiction.

This issue riffs on that idea, placing the Platonic ideal of Superman in conflict with a villain who feeds on the essence of the DC Universe itself, the Bleed. The life blood of the DCU is quite literally stories, it’s in the continuing narrative of these characters that the universe maintains its life. Stay out of the stories too long and your life will wane. That’s what happened to the characters in limbo, in the DCU, death is ephemeral, the only real way to die is for people to forget you. In that sense, the characters have more in common with gods than traditional literary characters. It is our belief and interest that sustains them. We know Batman will never die because he’s too powerful a thoughtform. Our desire for narratives about the character feed him, and out of that lifeblood, he’ll always emerge. So, who is the ultimate threat to these characters? It would be a character who could quite literally drain the stories out of them, and prevent them from continuing on.

The series presents a cosmology that’s similar to The Invisibles. In the lower world of the DCU itself, there is a division between good and evil. Characters align on either side and exist in “dualities.” But, on a higher level, there is no duality, only symmetry. That’s what Captain Atom says, and it takes a ritualistic fusing of matter and anti-matter to send Superman to the source of reality, the world of the monitors. When he reaches that world, it’s similar to the cosmology of the Outer Church and the Archons. The Monitors are the creators of the world, they guide the world forward, while Mandrakk struggles to destroy it. But, Mandrakk is the creator of the world as well, there are no sides, only circles.

In the higher realm, Superman exists in the form that was built by Dax Novu, a form that I’d argue represents the ur-superhero from which all other superheroes, and the DCU in general flows. Superman is an ideal that inspired every other superhero that followed, so you could easily argue that the source of the DCU is that platonic ideal of Superman. The story is powerful enough to fuel the entire universe, that’s why Zillo Valla tries to use the story to save Dax. Perhaps the story that inspired the universe can pull Dax Novu back from evil.

It doesn’t, but Superman still overcomes Dax. The battle is essentially the life force of the DCU, Superman, the ur-superhero, versus the destructive impulses that try to tear down heroes. It could easily be read on a meta level, Mandrakk is the kind of writer that seeks to tear down the mythology and take the magic away from the DCU, but no matter what’s thrown at him, the myth of Superman remains strong. I do think that’s a really interesting point, and ties in nicely to the themes of both Final Crisis and Morrison’s Batman run. All these books came out of the post 9/11, Iraq War depressed mindset, and I think Morrison’s essential point is that hope is so strong, it’ll always overcome the people who try to tear us down. Obama has been associated with the iconography of Superman, and it’s easy to read this as a story about the rebirth of the best of America, and the world in general, overcoming an era of vampiric destruction.

But, the story doesn’t end, and it’s in the final couple of pages that we get my favorite beats of the story. For one, I love the throwback to the winking Superman of the 50s, as Lois struggles to recall this crazy story she imagined. But, it’s the final page that had me just saying “Yes!” out loud. For Superman, and the DCU in general, stories are their life blood, so “To Be Continued” means that they’ll survive another day.

That final page also echoes the end of Mister Miracle, where Shilo burst triumphantly out of the grave. There, Morrison presented Achilles as the ur-superhero, who inspired future heroes. Much like in The Invisibles, Morrison is presenting similar concepts through different lenses, here Superman is the inspiration, there it’s Achilles, but it’s the same idea. This essential force of good will always overcome the forces that prey on life. Hope will overcome fear and repression will crumble. Sure, it’s still out there, but it’s in that struggle that we get better. The very idea of a grave in superhero comics is somewhat ridiculous, as we saw in Batman RIP, it’s just one more obstacle. The hero will always find a way out.

In a recent interview, Morrison talked about his recent comics as experiments in audience participation. With Batman RIP and Final Crisis, he’s been leaving room for the audience to discuss and reinterpret old stories through the lens of his current material. I love that concept, and I think in general, it works well. So much of the furor around Batman RIP was the speculation about who the Black Glove was and what Batman’s final fate would be. I don’t think the finale, either in Batman proper or in Final Crisis quite lived up to it, but the experience of speculating was a lot of fun. And, I think after the story’s over, you can read it as simply a great story.

An issue like this can be read on a straightforward level, as just a wacky Superman story, and I think it works there, more or less. But, it’s more interesting to analyze in light of Morrison’s other work and on that meta level that I’ve been talking about here. I think it is a great issue, and the more I write about it, the more layers I uncover. I think that’s largely Morrison’s point with the issue. But, I don’t think that excuses that lack of immediate emotional impact on the initial read.

The question that lingers now is what will happen in the last issue of Final Crisis. We’ll presumably see a universe wide rebirth and explosion into a glorious new age. But, how much time will there be to cover all this. Things looked pretty dire at the end of #6, how much can be resolved? Word has it that the issue will be along the lines of Seven Soldiers #1, a supercompressed narrative. I love Seven Soldiers #1, but that issue had the emotional attachment of all the previous character minis. I’m not as attached to the characters in Final Crisis. But, if it can match the intellectual density and moments of ecstatic emotion that Seven Soldiers #1 had, it’ll be a great conclusion. We’ll find out tomorrow.

Final Crisis #6:'How to Murder the Earth'

I’ve been re-reading The Invisibles over the past few weeks, as part of getting the book ready, and I’m in the heart of Volume III right now. That makes it unfortunate timing for the release of Final Crisis #6, an issue that’s solid Morrison, but pales next to the brilliance and progressive feel of late period Invisibles. I love almost all of Morrison’s work, but I do think he’s been trapped in this kind of turned to 11 insane superhero storytelling for a while now, and it could be time to go back to something more introspective, along the lines of “Karmageddon.”

FC #6 is as strong an issue as most of Final Crisis to date, and I’m sure read under normal circumstances I would have been more into it. There are some absolutely fantastic moments, most of them involving the use of the Metron symbol to tie the resistance together and cut holes in Darkseid’s power. I love the moment where the Tatooed Man ignites his symbol and throws chaos into the onslaught of justifiers. Also awesome is the two page spread at the end where Metron tells Nix Uotan about the oncoming fifth world.

The issue is also notable for the ‘death’ of Batman. Again, people say that he’s dead, but even Morrison is making it clear that this is just part of Bruce Wayne’s ongoing evolution. The Omega Sanction is just another version of Thogal, a series of deaths and rebirths that will culminate in Batman eventually being reborn again. Morrison just wrote a lengthy story that made it clear that Batman is always prepared for anything, surely he can overcome the worst that Darkseid has to offer. What I hope is that we’ll get the rumored Bruce Wayne as god of the fifth world story, at least for a little bit before everything eventually resets to the status quo.

But, I’m hoping that after Final Crisis is over, Morrison takes some time off from big superhero comics and does some more restrained comics. I love the intensity and scope of this book, but when I read the incredibly precise ‘Karmageddon,’ or even look at the very specific emotional moments of “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” I want to see more stories like that. During The Invisibles, he balanced the heights of JLA with the more grounded Invisibles, we need that counter now. I’d love to see him do another long form creator owned project, or at least a couple of minis. I’m sure there’s a lot of stories still to tell in the DCU, and I do want to see those, but I want to see something closer to Seven Soldiers or The Invisibles as well.

Batman #683: "What the Butler Saw"

I don’t have that much to say about Grant’s last Batman issue for the foreseeable future. It’s a nice conclusion to his run so far, summing up the major themes in an easily accessible way, and bridging the gap to Final Crisis nicely. However, I found myself more eager to read that Final Crisis issue than this issue. The ending was never that in question, but at least if Final Crisis #5 hadn’t spoiled the ending of this one, there’d be a bit more tension.

A lot of the criticism of Morrison’s Batman run has centered on the idea that it’s incomprehensible without knowledge of the classic Batman stories Morrison’s referring to, or the philosophy he’s presenting in interviews. These issues tell a condensed version of the “it’s all true” Batman history that Morrison discussed in interviews. It is the first time we see this concept rendered so explicitly in the text itself, and I think that’s the major merit of the issue. But, having already heard the concept in Morrison’s interviews, it’s not that much of a shock. This is basically confirming what we’d already suspect from the run to date.

There’s some fun moments here, but the major significance is found in the events with the Lump, and in Alfred’s final speech. During Batman RIP, Batman puts forth the idea that Gotham is a machine designed to make Batmen, that’s debatably true, but what we see in these flashbacks is the process that led to the creation of Batman, the way he turns the memory of his parents’ death into an engine that drives him past human limits of endurance. The Bruce Wayne we see in the alternate reality scenes is the kind of person that maybe he was meant to be, a spoiled rich kid, but the tragedy fuels him to be an undefeatable superhuman fury of justice.

The Lump tells Batman that he’s useless and immobile, he needs something to power him, and after his emergence in Batman’s mind, he has Bruce’s own trauma to drive him. The concept of Thogal is a brilliant addition to the Batman mythos, rather than just referring to the Nanda Parbat experience, it refers to the entirety of his life as Batman. Each awful thing that happens pushes him deeper into the darkness, but he continually climbs out. He faces death, he experiences the ultimate evil and is able to come back stronger and more able to fight it. That’s what Alfred’s speech that closes the issue is all about, his ability to face death and triumph over it.

The entire saga of Morrison’s Batman will apparently wrap up in Final Crisis #6. It’s a rush reading this in single issues, and seeing the two thematically similar stories literally cross over. Morrison is tying up all his loose ends in the DCU, there’s a lot to cover in the last two FC issues, hopefully they’ll hit that same manic insane hypercondensed style as Seven Soldiers #1 had. I don’t think anyone could manage a totally satisfying traditional narrative wrapup in that short a time, he’ll need something that unwraps in your mind as time passes. It’s only a couple of weeks until we’ll find out.

Final Crisis #5: 'Into Oblivion'

Final Crisis as a whole is a really curious event. Taken in the context of the DCU as a whole, it feels rather disconnected. I don’t even really read any DCU books other than Morrison’s, but just from the online chatter, you can tell that it isn’t as huge a deal as Secret Invasion was over at Marvel or previous Crises were, simply because it isn’t really a crossover. The story doesn’t sprawl out over the whole line, it’s very concise and focused to a specific set of books, and I think that set of books has been remarkably successful because most of them are a piece of Grant Morrison’s DCU. This book is his little corner of the world, full of heavy violence and Silver Age insanity living back to back, all infused with a glorious over the top energy. I still think the series lacks the emotional resonance of Grant’s best works, but it’s full of crackling energy and an epic good/evil quality that will hopefully make it a fitting capper to the many years of Grant’s work in the DCU.

I think the best way to enjoy the book is to look at it as very much a companion piece to Batman RIP, a cleansing ritual in which the DCU will reach its low ebb, then burst forth again in a new, better way, in the Fifth World. And, just as Batman RIP was about uniting the many different corners of the Batman mythos, this series is about exploring the DCU in all its strange and contradictory elements, focusing particularly on those which Grant has rehabilitated during his time there. We get appearances by three of the Seven Soldiers here, and in his treatment of characters like the Marvel Family, you can see what Grant’s been writing down in those fabled notebooks of possible character revamps.

This entire work feels a lot like the missing piece of Seven Soldiers, the actual invasion of the Sheeda. Seven Soldiers was notable because it let you see this awful threat obliquely, through what we picked up in the various miniseries, never connecting them all for the full on ‘war.’ Batman RIP/Last Rites, Superman Beyond and FC: Submit all function like the Seven Soldiers miniseries did, filling in the gaps of what happened around the big threat. I think Final Crisis is the only crossover that I wish had a lot more tie ins. I think it would have worked better if it was structured as a two month weekly series, where every book in the DCU told a story set in the world of the series, all overseen by Grant. There’s so many stories to be told in this world, and I’d love to see even more of what Grant had in mind with the story.

Anyway, on to the issue itself. This issue is largely about plunging everyone even deeper into darkness, even as the cracks in the plan begin to shine through. This is the battle to create a new and better world, even as Darkseid creates a populace with one mind to serve him in braindead oblivion.

I don’t love the opening bit of the issue. I never particularly liked the Green Lanterns, their powers are so vast, it seems hard to tell stories with the characters. Admittedly, I haven’t read Geoff Johns’ recent run, but even in JLA, Green Lantern often served as an all purpose deus ex machina. What the scene does set up is the way that Darkseid’s lieutenants have infiltrated all areas of the DCU. I like this concept, and I think it works well to pave the way for the fifth world. The Gods of old now wear mortals, if evil gods can do this, good gods could do this too. Way back when the series was first announced, there was speculation that Batman and other current heroes would replace the New Gods, and I think it would be incredible to see Batman channel the spirit of Orion and just tear apart Darkseid’s world.

This is the final battle of the Fourth World and it’s being played out on the DCU. When this war is over, there will be a new set of new gods, and the DCU will be a healthier, shinier place. But, for now it seems that the gods of New Genesis are dead, and the gods of Apokolips reign. It plays a lot like the fiction suit concept from The Invisibles. The gods are wearing the identities of people within ‘the game,’ and manipulating them to their own ends, only these aren’t the benevolent 4-D beings of The Invisibles, they’re using this possession to destroy the DCU.

The creepiest of these is Mary Marvel, who’s being worn by DeSaad. The crotch rub on Captain Marvel Jr. is already an infamous moment, and she seems like the pure embodiment of this wild youthful embrace of total evil. DeSaad is definitely getting a lot of joy out of being able to wear this girl, and use her body. Grant has talked a lot recently about the fact that the DCU is always going to revert to the status quo, so he might as well push it to extremes on the journey. That’s what this comic is about, taking the DCU to its nastiest, darkest place before soaring back into the light.

The thing that separates it from something like Identity Crisis or even Miracleman is that it’s not trying to bring the horrors of the real world into the superhero universe, it’s taking the evils within the DCU to their extreme. That’s why we’ve got a gang of tiger soldiers going out to hunt people, the concept is ridiculous, but Morrison makes it look badass. And, it’s answered by that fantastic two page spread of our heroes going into action.

I heard somebody call this issue the Silver Age taken to its darkest extreme, and I’d agree with that. It’s got the frantic storytelling pace of a Silver Age comic, and the total embrace of the craziness of a superhero world. Like Batman RIP, it’s about finding the psychological resonance inherent in these comic book characters.

I’ve been reading The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test recently, and it’s interesting to see all the acid heads of that era constantly referencing comic books. They saw themselves as superheroes, they saw that as the evolutionary path to move humanity forward. That’s the inherent power in the concept, the draw of reading about people who are better than us, people we can hope to be one day. This comic is about that evolution, the war that we all fight against oppression and single mindedness in our society.

We are fighting that war everyday, we’re fighting an army of corporate influences out to enslave our minds, out to make us forget that our lives can be more than just this. Wonder Woman and her furies are the people who’ve given up their dreams, given up on ever being happy and decided that it’s easier to just surrender to the routine and go along with what society wants them to be. But, we can be Hawkman too, fighting in the sky to save ourselves from Anti-Life. It’s easier to go through life without thinking. That’s what Hawkman reacts against when he proudly declares that “Life…is all struggle!”

I wish that more of the critical commentary on this work was about the way that it relates to our world and the political place we’re at right now. I hate when writers on entertainment blogs say that politics is off limits. The best works of fiction, even if they’re as seemingly removed from our world as this one, are all about the world in which they’re created. Grant’s an astute social critic, and his works always capture the zeitgeist of the moment in which they’re created. To read The Invisibles is to trip back to the mind space of the 90s, and you can tell a lot about the change in times by comparing his JLA to Final Crisis. This is a heavier time, but we’ve still got people fighting on the edge of perception to make the world better.

One of my favorite scenes in the issue is Mister Miracle’s call for action. Of course he’s not dead, we’ve already seen him rise up and miss death at the end of Seven Soldiers. If he can come out of the ground, surely he can survive a bullet. That does raise the question of Batman as the fifth world’s incarnation of Mister Miracle? Is he the host for Scott Free?

Anyway, the critical thing here is the Metron pattern. This is sigil, designed to channel the god Metron into the reality of the DCU. It’s the same kind of thing we saw in The Invisibles with King Mob channeling Lennon, only in this case, the gods of the Fifth World are able to literally visit them and influence the world. I really hope that the last issue involves an army of people united by the positive god, wearing the Metron symbol, and going out to battle the army of Apokolips.

Also notable in the scene is Shilo’s description of Darkseid’s fall, “A devil-god is dragging us down with him into a deep, dark hole in time.” This is exactly what happened to Shilo in his own Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle series, a mini that should be essential reading for understanding Final Crisis because it contains the entire series in micro. The DCU is now experiencing the plunge through awful permutations of reality that Shilo went through, and it will need to die before punching out the grave infused with a new fifth-world energy.

Along those lines we get the great scene where wheelchair bound Metron from the Mister Miracle series runs into Nix Uotan. Nix is at his lowest ebb, he’s lost faith that there’s anything more than this world. He remembers a life he used to have, a life of wonder and magic, but now it only comes out in dreams and drawings. He has lost his faith and seems on the verge of succumbing to Darkseid. The entire series is contained in his arc, the loss of the wonder, and in this scene, its glorious rebirth. I love the way the Rubik’s Cube becomes a motherbox and wipes out the guards so quickly. The hypercondensed storytelling works in this issue because it’s centered around this one struggle. Each side makes salvos at each other, and this time, good has won one.

But, things go bad again very quickly during the chilling Darkseid speech. We’ve all seen these sort of evil speeches before, but here, I was just overwhelmed by the amount of evil on display. This is the superhero comic taken to 11, an entire universe in peril to the point that even Lex Luthor is worried. Darkseid has command of the world, they are united and one behind him, a hivemind extension of the ultimate evil, and only a few heroes remain to do combat with it.

One of them is Nix Uotan, who has realized himself into some kind of fifth world superhero. Parituclarly notable here is the transition page where the heroes he drew from many worlds float in the air. His side of the story ties back to what was going on over in Superman Beyond. The core of it seems to be that it is our belief in the heroes that matters, the apperance of Metron reaffirms Nix’s faith in himself and lets him actualize as a hero again. In All Star Superman, Morrison posited the idea that Superman was actually the creator of our world, and his good qualities are an archetypal well from which humanity will always pull. Superman will always be there because we need him to save us, and if we believe in him enough, he’ll be there. Because that’s what heroes are, and the bigger the threat, the bigger the heroes.

I’m still loving this series, I wish it came out in a more timely fashion, but I think it’s going to be looked back on a lot more kindly than it’s being received now. It really is drawing on all Morrison’s DC work in a way that is virtually unprecedented. I love the fact that Batman RIP continues here because it ties everything together in a fascinating way. It feels a lot like Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, an acknowledgement of the fact that all these stories hail from the same mind, and an attempt to reconcile the contradictions and ideas within.

Batman: RIP: Part II (#678-680)

When we last left Batman, he was sprawled over in pain, contemplating the idea that the Black Glove may in fact be nothing more than a figure of his childhood-trauma fueled imagination And now, things get weird. The last few issues of RIP have all been amazing in their own way, pushing the character to a place I’ve never seen him, doing things you’d never expect Batman to do. Batman doing weapons grade heroin while homeless on the street? Yup, this is not your everyday Batman story.

Issue #678 begins with Batman’s Black Casebook account of Doctor Hurt’s isolation experiment. As I mentioned earlier, interpreting the bizarre excesses of Silver Age stories as mental dillusions brought on by psychological experimentation has a lot in common with what Alan Moore was doing in Miracleman. I think the central difference is Alan Moore’s story is about trying to find a way to incorporate these stories into a rational universe. The absurdity of those stories is evidence that they could not be ‘real,’ and his interest in that run is exploring what a character like Miracleman would do when confronted with reality.

Morrison’s interest with this run is basically to explore what it means that Batman experienced all these things, and what that does to his mind. He’s lived a schizophrenic life, jumping from strange experience to strange experience, and that’s gradually broken down his sense of self and reality. The only constant has been his childhood trauma, the death of his parents. That’s the reason he became Batman, and no matter what changes, that trauma lingers. Morrison then uses the Silver Age stuff as a way to spin a stranger story, taking elements of Batman’s insane Silver Age hallucinations and translating them into reality. If he lived through those stories, he believes they are real, and consequently, the lines all blur and we wind up with the insane purple suit Batman from the end of this issue.

In the casebook, Batman says that “I don’t want to know what goes on in the Joker’s head. I have to know.” His mission to eradicate crime, and The Joker is his greatest foe because he’s so utterly unknowable. He can be a goofy Silver Age prankster criminal one day, and a Killing Joke style murderer the next. The Joker is able to seamlessly move between selves, as we saw in the “Clown at Midnight” story. Batman is not able to integrate his many different selves as easily, and I’m guessing the end result of RIP will be the synthesis of crazy Silver Age Batman and gritty Batman into a new stronger Batman at the end.

Notably, Morrison places a major emphasis on Robin in Bruce’s narration. The central trauma at the heart of this arc is the “Robin Dies at Dawn” story, in which Bruce drives himself insane over guilt he feels for letting Robin die. Robin is the counterbalance to Batman, drawing him closer to humanity and not letting him indulge in his greater excesses. This is the same story that Frank Miller’s telling over in the Goddamn Batman, Robin humanizes Batman. It’s notable that as RIP goes on, Batman disconnects from everyone, living in his own head, he goes gradually more and more insane.

The majority of this issue chronicles Bruce’s time living as a homeless man on the street, along with his spirit guide, Honor Jackson. As I mentioned earlier, I see a lot of similarities between this arc and what’s going on with Don Draper over in Mad Men. In both cases, we’re watching someone strip their personalities to the bare essence, taking all the societal trappings that have made them who they are and getting to the core underneath. In this case, the wealthy Bruce Wayne self is totally destroyed by Doctor Hurt, and consequently, the wealthy, well equipped Batman is also destroyed, to be replaced by the homeless insanity of Zurr-en-Arrh Batman.

I love the alien quality of Doctor Hurt in these first few panels. Surrounded by demon henchmen, lit only in grey and red, he’s the most menacing Batman villain since the Joker. I particularly like the fact that somehow DC allowed Batman to be injected with “weapons grade crystal meth” in an issue that came out the same month as The Dark Knight movie. Could you imagine a kid who just saw The Dark Knight going in to buy a Batman comic and coming out with this? You’d either have someone who’s totally put off, or a comics fan for life. Normally, there’s a moral code that’s used for superheroes, mainstream characters like Batman. They don’t indulge in crystal meth, thankfully DC fell asleep on this story or something and is just letting Grant run wild with it.

At the end of the story, we find out that Honor died a while ago, from the $100 bag of heroin he bought with the money Batman gave him, another great twist that just messes with the Batman character. Anyway, I’d argue that Honor is the same essentially entity that we later see incarnated as Batmite. Both of them are either figments of Bruce’s subconscious, the piece of him that becomes Zurr-en-Arrh, an autopilot that keeps him going even when his conscious mind is destroyed, or they’re fifth dimensional entities, like John a Dreams in The Invisibles, inserted into the game to fulfill a specific role and help Bruce defeat the Black Glove. And, as Batmite says in #680, “Imagination is the fifth dimension,” so I guess they’re both.

Either way, Honor helps Bruce “get into character” as a homeless man, the first step towards rebuilding him into the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh. It’s interesting that Honor talks about making “a declaration,” then puts on a sign declaring himself a Gulf War Veteran. Batman is a soldier in his own war on crime, and now he’s come back mentally damaged, unable to fit in with mainstream society. The heroin addiction ties in with that, so many Vietnam vets became addicted in the course of the war, and found no support system to help them when they came home.

At the end of the ‘odyssey,’ Bruce finds out that all Honor wanted to do was buy some booze. But, in the process Bruce rediscovered something about himself. He still doesn’t know who he is, but he’s getting his fighting skills back, and he’s seeing the clues again. He’s thinking like Batman. He soon finds out that Honor was dead, and is offered a bag of heroin, “the keys to heaven.” Batman has reached the bottom, he’s alone the streets, doing heroin and left with nothing except a bunch of scraps of cloth.

He now shuts off his conscious mind and reverts to his backup persona, the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh. Stitching himself a new costume, he emerges sublime and ridiculous on the final splash page. On the one hand, this story is full of darkness and grim and gritty tropes, but the costume here totally undercuts it, as does the great Batmite “uh-oh” line. Bruce has gone fully insane at this point, he thinks it’s all a dream, he couldn’t be Batman. This leads to the classic line “For in my hand…I hold the Bat-Radia. And I…I am the Batman.” Of course, the Bat-radia is a beat up transistor radio, at this point, he’s so insane that his skewed perception of the world makes him believe that he actually is sane. Well, whatever works.

The next issue opens up with the classic scene where Batman is on a roof talking to some gargoyles. In another so insane he’s sane moment, Batman asks Batmite if the Gargoyles were really talking and is reassured, that yes they were. I love Batmite, the absurdity of the character and the juxtaposition of this crazy looking hallucinating Batman and Batmite with the gritty world of Gotham. Another instant classic line is Batman telling Batmite to be quiet, “Shh! The city’s talking.” This bit ties in with the city magic from The Invisibles, Grant’s first pop magic column, the idea that if we shut off our conscious minds, the forces underlying the universe will speak to us and answer our questions. Batman sees the city now as “a machine designed to make Batman,” he sees no coincidence, everything has a purpose and tells him something. He has transcended to a magician’s consciousness. Perhaps it’s delustory, perhaps there was no tracking chip in his teeth, but either way, he’s doing his thing and it’s working.

Next up, we get an explanation of the whole Zurr-En-Arrh thing. Morrison has equated Batman’s 50s and 60s adventures to one decade long acid trip, all finally catching up with him. He built this Zurr-en-Arrh world in his mind during one those trips, a fantasy world where he’s like Superman, lacking the mental anguish he has in the regular world. During the isolation experiment, Batman reached his low ebb, and as a result, built a backup personality so that would never happen to him again. That’s who the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh is, his spare self who will take over when the original breaks down.

I continually see people cracking on Tony Daniel’s art, but I think he’s a perfect fit for this arc. The dirty Image 90s style grounds everything in a ‘reality’ that’s totally broken by the crazy things that he’s got to draw. I love the panel here of Batman pulling on the purple mask, his eyes clearly exposed, as well as the weird looking shot down at the bottom of the page where Batman stands in front of the mirror shirtless, and we see Batmite with some weird tentacles coming out of his back.

Even as Batman stumbles deeper and deeper into isolation, we see the seeds of his rescue and salvation brewing all around. In this issue, there’s the great scene with Cyril and Beryl, setting the stage for the eventual return of the Club of Heroes to help Batman battle the Club of Villains. I love those characters, and Cyril kills it in the last line “Club of villains? Can’t have that, Beryl. Better put in a call to the lads.” The run is tightening up, that seemingly disconnected “Club of Heroes” arc is playing a larger and larger role in what’s going on now.

From there, we jump to a red herring scene playing with the idea that Doctor Hurt is in fact Thomas Wayne. I love the crazy 1920s style pulp villain look Hurt is rocking at this point. Despite the fact that the whole Club of Villains ostensibly tracks back only 10 years, Morrison plays it more like the whole of Batman history happened in real time along with history. John Mayhew’s films look like they’re from the 1930s, and Batman’s isolation experiment, despite taking place “ten years ago,” feels more like it took place when those comics were published, in the 50s. I like that strange treatment of time, it fits more with what we know as readers, even if it doesn’t make sense within the diegetic world. Hurt promises that “We’re breaking the Batman at midnight,” and at this point in the story, he’s done a pretty good job. They may have committed that classic villain mistake of letting the hero go after you’ve got him, but in this case, the goal is to utterly destroy him, and it doesn’t look like Bruce can really get it together to get back at them.

Batman has a fantastic scene where he roughs up Charlie Caligula, promising to see through him with the Bat-radia, prompting Charlie Caligula to exclaim “You’re nuts! You’re crazier than all of us!” Except for one of course, the club of villains are all imitators, trying to live up to The Joker, just like the Club of Heroes tries to live up to Batman. Batman breaks down Caligula’s tics, and proceeds to assault him with a bat. This is what it’s come to for Batman, beating this guy up in the theater where he went to his last movie with his parents.

This brings us to issue #680, and the inevitable confrontation between Batman and the Joker. I love this entire arc, but this issue has been the high point to date. It’s got all the intensity and edge of your seat stakes that are so often absent from big character corporate superhero comics. While I have issues with both this book and Final Crisis, I think Morrison has done a fantastic job of creating stories where every page feels like it could hold a massive revelation, or an incredible, unforeseen moment.

That’s hard to do in the DCU, where everything tends to normalcy. I think a large part of it is the fact that Morrison has essentially disconnected from the DCU as a whole and opened up his own little corner of the universe. I don’t see how this book can mix with something like Trinity, that’s supposed to be a back to basics Batman story, or even the Paul Dini stuff, which has a similar modus operendi. In those books, obviously Batman isn’t going to die, but in this Morrison book, it’s possible, and I think Grant has essentially stopped caring about what the people who come after him do. Final Crisis may be getting essentially ignored by the rest of the DCU, but reading his books, it’s an epic, crazy story full of really meaningful events. Few moments in big superhero comics can match the sudden return of Miracleman last issue, or the descent of Turpin to Darkseid. Will it be the new status quo for the universe after Morrison is done? Probably not, but much like with New X-Men, you can usually just stop where he does. His last Batman story can be the last Batman story, All Star Superman can be the last Superman story and “Here Comes Tomorrow” is the end of X-Men. So, who knows what else Batman is doing, but in this corner of the universe, he’s totally losing his shit.

There’s a very dirty, creepy vibe to this issue, starting off with the images of the people coming to the event. We’ve got an old man with a little girl, an oil sheik, a cowboy, a military dictator. These are the people who run the world, and they’re all here to watch the utter destruction of the Batman. I’ve heard the issue compared to “120 Days of Sod All” from The Invisibles, and I can definitely see the parallels. These are wealthy people who live beyond the limits of the law, and can do whatever they want.

The scene where Bossu discusses his transformation with The Joker is another disturbing highlight. He lives a normal life, but longs for the total insanity of The Joker. This whole thread reminds me a lot of Seven Soldiers, of The Whip wondering at which point she stops feeling like an imitator and stops feeling like a superhero. Bossu works so hard to be evil, but society just doesn’t see him that way. They’re in awe of The Joker, and he has to put on a mask to capture what The Joker has naturally. Particularly disturbing is the idea that Bossu wants to do awful things to his daughter that “polite society” will not permit. In this moment, this danse macabre, they all seek to transcend polite society and legitimize their evil. Too all of this, The Joker simply yawns.

Batman and Batmite part in a scene I mentioned earlier, where Mite says that imagination is the fifth dimension. Batmite claims that he is the “last fading echo of the voice of reason.” I think it says something about Bruce’s insanity that a floating elf dressed as Batman represents his voice of reason.

Over at Wayne Manor, we get the return of the well written Damian, not the bratty teenager of Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul, but a brutal assassian in the body of a twelve year old. The action sequence here is well done, setting up a lot of tension, then paying it all of with the badass return of Damian. This issue has a ton of momentum, from the cross cutting buildups, so the tension of the rest of the book makes the scene with Gordon seem tenser and more apocalyptic than it would in isolation. The cross cutting also works really well during the Batman/Joker confrontation, where our glimpses of the Club of Villains only enhances the epic nature of the confrontation. This is the ultimate battle, such that all these people have traveled miles to see it, to watch The Joker finally destroy Batman.

Next up is the final stage of Batman’s descent into insanity. For Doctor Hurt and his crew, fighting Batman is an elaborate intellectual exercise, an attempt to outdo the master detective at his own game. For The Joker, it’s pure instinct, he just walks into the room and is able to finish the job better than they ever could.

Batman and The Joker are fighting in what looks like the black lodge from the last episode of Twin Peaks, all black curtains and checkerboard patterns. There, The Joker expresses his anger at Batman breaking their ‘pact’ by shooting him in the face. The Joker doesn’t care about the fact that the guy who shot him wasn’t the ‘real’ Batman, his mind doesn’t see the world that way. Batman shot him, nobody can dispute that. This leads to that particularly nasty panel where he cuts his tongue in two, evoking a serpent.

This leads to the brilliant exchange where The Joker says that Batman’s attempt to understand him, to find meaning in the dead man’s hand and the search for the Black Glove is not life, “that’s just wikipedia.” Batman clings to the idea that there is a rational explanation for everything that happened to him, that there’s an elaborate conspiracy out there, and if he can just knit together all the different threads, he’ll be able to find the meaning of it all. Batman has descended into this strange Zurr-En-Arrh state, but if he can discover the meaning behind the Black Glove, it’ll all be worth it. But, what if there’s no meaning? What if his attempt to find out what it’s like to be the Joker was all futile?

The Joker pulls back the curtain and behind the glass is Jezebel, crying. Batman pulls back his hood, and the relentless backup personality recedes. He no longer speaks in those purple word balloons, he’s left with the uncertain speech of the human Bruce. Jezebel was a reminder of what he was clinging to, the human attachment that kept Batman from being like the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh all the time. Jezebel is his only hope, his chance to be a better person, to grow up and stop being Batman. In #677, it’s Jezebel who equates his being Batman with being trapped in a prolonged state of adolescent trauma. She wanted to help him grow out of it, but he only fell deeper in.

And then, Doctor Hurt and The Joker toast their ultimate victory. Bruce is tripping out behind the glass, trying to use the bat-radia to save her, only to find out that she has turned, she’s been in on it the whole time. Or, so it appears. I’m still not sure whether Jezebel was actually evil the whole time, or whether they’ve done something to turn her. There’s a lot of gas and weird stuff floating around, so it would make sense for her to be mentally altered in some way. But, at the same time, her being evil would fit. Doctor Hurt’s plan hinges on totally destroying both Bruce Wayne and Batman. Having Jezebel find her way into his heart, then tear it up would be the perfect way to cap off Bruce’s insanity, to utterly break him.

At this point, Bruce has totally exhausted the Batman of Zurr-En-Arrh persona, he’s broken and collapsing on the floor. Evil has won, and it looks like we’ll soon see exactly what the fate worse than death that awaits Batman is. Unfortunately, we’ve got to wait until November 19th for that.

But, I’ve really got to give huge props to both Grant and Tony Daniel for this issue. Reading Final Crisis, there was an underlying disturbing darkness to everything that was going on. This issue amps that up to the extreme, every single panel is full of tension and evil. Those final moments are utterly devoid of hope, they represent Batman literally brought to his knees, with absolutely nothing left. I didn’t think I could be this concerned about Batman, or this anxious to find out what happens to him next. This story is a masterpiece, and though I still have issues with much of the early run, this last ten issues or so is as strong as anything Grant’s done recently.

Certain stories just hit me on a deep level. I think All Star Superman is an objectively better book than this one, but nothing in that book excited me as much as the insanity of these last three RIP issues. It’s messy and frantic, and alive in a way that very few corporate superhero comics are.