Agent Bat: Just wondering, have you read the two part "Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?" I only have issue one of the two, but I found it to be rather interesting. Especially the bit about Alfred.

As for the Crow series from '99, I actually have a copy saved to my computer. However, it's been hard to find good comic time recently. D:

Batman was supposed to be dark and gritty, and until Final Crisis, he was.

Final Crisis (I'll believe that name when I see a legal guarantee from DC that it is the "final Crisis") is one of those big, stupid crossover events that DC Comics does from time to time when their writers have contradicted too many old stories writing new histories for their characters and they need some massive cosmic-scale event to "clean up" the mess (though it usually winds up making an even larger mess of things). This time around, the story - written by none other than chaos magician and Batman scribe Grant Fucking Morrison - behind the madness is that the omnicidal nihilist alien "New God" known as Darkseid has finally found the Anti-Life Equation - a formula that gives whoever uses it total control over the thoughts and minds of all affected living beings, thereby granting them the power to undo Creation itself - that he has been searching for all his life and the DC super-heroes have assembled to stop him from destroying everything with it. Morrison was playing around with themes of Armageddon and the end of civilization/the world as we know it, an extremely relevant topic since 9-11 and all the saber-rattling going on with Iran and North Korea. Essentially, Morrison was asking, "Are we really prepared to live our entire lives waiting for the world to explode, or are we going to deal with it and move on with life?", only with super-heroes.

That's all well and good... until you factor in his work on the Bat-books. Somehow - I don't know whether it was Morrison's decision, his Final Crisis cohorts' call or the DC Comics editor-in-chief's idea, but somebody is to blame for this nonsense - it was decided that Batman would "die" during the latter issues - specifically Issue #6 - of Final Crisis. Morrison was already playing with this idea in his awesome story Batman R.I.P. (which preceded Final Crisis, so the DC editors decided to make R.I.P. a direct tie-in to Final Crisis, essentially making Final Crisis #6 the unofficial "final chapter" to Batman R.I.P..

I can see the reasoning for this. By keeping Bats' involvement in the huge, cataclysmic Final Crisis to a minimum, they could claim that the Bat-books were still as grimdark and "realistic" (can you really have realism in a comic series featuring such fantastically surreal characters as Poison Ivy?) as they ever were. That might've worked... had they not stuck all the damned "Bruce isn't dead! He's just lost in time!" references into issues of Red Robin and made it the ultimate focus of The Return of Bruce Wayne mini-series.

See, when Darkseid blasted Batman with his Omega Beams in Final Crisis #6, he didn't really kill Batman, he just sent him careening back to the beginning of human civilization with no memories of who he was, super-charged with so-called "Omega Energy". The Omega energy would hurtle Batman forward through time at random intervals, and all the while Bruce would learn more about the history of the Wayne family, Gotham City and a mysterious villain Morrison had introduced into the Batman books named "Dr. Hurt" (who played a major role in Batman R.I.P.), recovering his memories as he went along. Once Batman reached a point called "Vanishing Point" (the moment just before the heat-death of the universe), he was to recover all his memories. By then, his body would have built up enough Omega Energy that he would be a living bomb that would destroy all of Creation. (Don't see the logic in that, since Darkseid would only be destroying all of Creation right before entropy will undo it all, anyway, but I'm not a super-villain, so what do I know?) Recovering his memories would be the "trigger" that would set the living Bat-bomb off, and Darkseid had his servant - some uber-powerful, silly-named fool called the "Hyper-Adapter" (sounds like something you'd use to plug a SATA hard drive into an IDE port on a motherboard) - follow Batman through time to spur him on in his time-jumps. Somehow, Batman knew what Darkseid was planning (???) and left himself clues throughout history, which he quickly pieced together to regain his memories before he was supposed to so he could say one step ahead of the Hyper-Adapter (who we never actually saw following Batman) and reach Vanishing Point with enough time to use the advanced technology there against the Hyper-Adapter. (How both Darkseid and Batman planned for all of that nonsense in the one second it took Darkseid to blast Bats with his Omega Beams in Final Crisis #6, I'll never know.) Patently ridiculous story, isn't it? That's what you get when your big story event is nothing more than a marketing tool that has to be planned out on-the-fly by an overworked writer.

Then again, that's indicative of what I feel is the major problem with Batman: the fact that he exists in the DC Universe. Any other day of the week, Batman lives in a realistic decayed urban sprawl fighting (relatively) realistic criminals and total nutjobs (not to mention the occasional sci fi villain, such as Poison Ivy, Clayface, Mr. Freeze or Rah's al Ghul) using (relatively) realistic methods (martial arts, grappling hooks, a tank-car that only Bruce Wayne's money could afford, kevlar body armor, etc.). He faces realistic, though horrific, problems (major spinal injury, massive earthquake hits Gotham City, criminal underworld goes nuts and turns Gotham City into a 1920s Chicago-style warzone) and tries to deal with them in reasonably realistic manners (respectively: undergoing radical new physical therapy while a hand-picked successor takes his place, heading to Washington, D.C. and lobbying unsuccessfully for congressional aid to rebuild Gotham City and playing the top crime lords in Gotham City against each other to set himself up as the secret Gotham City underworld boss [until the new Robin screws it all up]). Suddenly, a major galaxy-threatening event occurs and the Justice League calls in Batman...

See what I mean? How can you have a guy who's supposed to be "gritty" and "realistic" also be this galaxy-hopping, alien-punching bad-ass at the same time and somehow keep these aspects separate? Somehow, DC Comics managed to do this for over a decade. Batman would do his "darn an' gritty" in Gotham City, the Justice League would call him in to help them deal with some sun-devouring whatzit or a Green Lantern reject or somesuch, then he'd hop back to Gotham City and all the galaxy-hopping adventures wouldn't even rate a mention. It was like they never happened, at least not in the context of his stories. I thought that was a nice line of separation.

Then Grant Bloody Morrison came into the picture... *sigh*

Don't get me wrong, I'm a major fan of Morrison's work on Batman, as I've mentioned before in this very thread. Am I a fan of any of Morrison's other work? Fuck no. I hated his big finale to the "Planet X" story in New X-Men (sorry, but I still think having a Holocaust survivor like Magneto shoving humans into gas chambers is really uncalled for), I was never really interested in Animal Man, I wasn't fond of The Filth at all, and I found his work on JLA to be fun yet uninspiring. In short, I have no love for the man's work, aside from what he has done on the Batman books. For me, Morrison's work on Batman and the other associated Bat-titles has been the pinnacle of his career in comics.

The issue at hand is his willingness to bring Batman more into the established DC Universe and erase the unofficial "line of separation" between Bats and the rest of DC. More than that, Morrison loves some of the old Golden Age/Silver Age Batman stuff (like the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh, who he brought in for Batman R.I.P. [proof], and the Batmen of All Nations, which he re-introduced in Batman #667-669 and in Batman Incorporated) and has no problem finding creative ways to introduce some of it into the modern "dark an' gritty" Batman universe. I just wish he wouldn't try to use so damn much of it!

The last vaguely "realistic" Batman story was probably Morrison's debut in Batman & Son. Sure, it was a slightly campy idea - "Let's give Batman a kid! What could possibly go wrong with that?" - but Morrison kept it grounded in already-established Batman storylines (for those who haven't read the story yet, Damien Wayne is essentially a vat-grown, genetically perfect child of Bruce Wayne and Rah's al Ghul's daughter Talia, trained as an assassin from "birth" by his mother). He managed to do that with the rest of his stories as well, to some extent, but he kept introducing Silver Age stuff without giving any of it a proper history in the Post-Crisis context (lots of it was explained away by Morrison and other DC writers as "Superboy punch", which really gets on my nerves).

Then he introduced Simon Hurt in The Black Glove and Batman R.I.P., where Hurt engages in an obscene character assassination campaign against Bruce's late father, Dr. Thomas Wayne. While Hurt's identity has been left open - intentionally (though Morrison dropped several hints that Hurt could be either Bruce's father, a Wayne family ancestor with the same name as Bruce's father or a former actor-turned-evil psychiatrist named Mangrove Pierce) - the basic notion is that Simon Hurt is really the Devil, and that Batman R.I.P. is a case from Batman's "Black Casebook", a book Batman uses to journal all of his paranormal, supernatural or otherwise unexplainable cases. (The only problem with this is - as several other stories have shown - Batman only uses black spiral notebooks to chronicle his thoughts and case files, so all of his casebooks are "black casebooks".) While that may be a cool notion, "paranormal" and "supernatural" are not the first things I usually think of when I think of "Batman". It just doesn't fit with the character.

Nonetheless, you can ignore all of the paranormal ramblings and just enjoy Batman R.I.P. as a relatively realistic, intense, gripping, "what the hell is going to happen next?" kind of story. Even with Batman becoming the "Zur-En-Arrh Batman" and Bat-Mite wandering around Bruce's head for no good reason (though Morrison does give some interesting explanations), the story is still very well-paced and well thought out. It's easily one of the best modern Batman stories out there, and it ends on a mystery with the helicopter Batman is fighting Dr. Hurt on crashing, so you could conceivably ignore Final Crisis altogether and pretend Bruce has been holed up somewhere recovering while everybody thought he was dead.

Just don't read the next issue. It introduces a Darkseid minion and about a half-dozen or so Batman clones made by Darkseid and leads directly into Final Crisis #6.

Then we have Final Crisis and the damned Omega Beams. Then Battle for the Cowl (which was good and had a fair level of realism). Then the year of Batman, Batman & Robin and Detective Comics issues set in between Bruce's "death" and "resurrection" (which were okay, except for the occasional reference to the damn aforementioned Darkseid-created Batman clone or the fact that Bruce has been shunted back in time with Doc Brown and Marty nowhere in sight).

Then you had The Return of Bruce Wayne, which... Fuck, man, just... Fuck. If you're trying to ignore the whole "time-travelling Bruce Wayne" idea altogether for the sake of your own sanity, this issue just pulls it out and slaps you in the face with the idea, whether you want it or not. I'm normally a pretty sharp cookie, and I can usually read the ending of any comic story without reading any of the rest of it and immediately pick up on what's been happening before that final issue. Tried that with the last issue of this series. I couldn't make heads or tails of it because I never gave half a shit about the New Gods or the Linear Men to begin with. If I had, then I would've read those comics all these years instead of fucking Batman comics, now wouldn't I have? As it is, The Return of Bruce Wayne doesn't feel so much like a "Who's Who" of the DC Universe's history as it does a "Who Gives a Fuck?" crossover between the Batman books and a bunch of other non-Superman/Wonder Woman/Flash/Green Lantern heroes nobody in the mainstream non-comic reading world gives half a flying fuck about. Reading this story does not make me more interested in the Linear Men and Vanishing Point, and it damn sure doesn't get me more interested in the New Gods or anything else about the "Fourth World" Jack Kirby did for DC Comics that didn't have to do with Superman (and I can barely stomach that shit at all, primarily because of its long, involved space opera backstory that you really should've been reading since the 1960s to get into, a story totally retreated repeatedly and ruined by later writers who weren't Jack Kirby). I'm sure all the Fourth World stuff is awesome on its own, but when it crosses over into the rest of the DC Universe, it makes things a frightful mess. Again, if I wanted to read space opera comics, I'd have read New Gods and all the rest of the "Fourth World" stuff (or go for the much more accessible Green Lantern). I don't, though. I want to read Batman, a story about a human being from Planet Earth with human problems - parents murdered, crime-infested hellhole he lives in, being an absolute nutcase who can't get a hot date (aside from a sexy former prostitute/dominatrix-turned-thief who dresses up in a skintight leather number right out of a furry's wet dreams) because he dresses up in a bat-like kevlar suit and beats up men who are trying to kill him (yes, that was sarcasm) - and human emotions (like brooding, being emo about his dead parents and... uh... more brooding...). That's why I read Batman!

The next stories - Bruce Wayne: The Road Home and Batman Incorporated - are really damn good. Morrison has really returned from the zany time-travelling nonsense and brought the material back to its real world feel. As long as you pretend Bruce has, oh, I dunno, been stuck down a well or something for the year that people thought he was dead, then Morrison's stuff has been pretty good. If you take it as a whole - including all the damn Final Crisis and Return of Bruce Wayne tie-ins - then you have a dreadful time-hopping mess that only feels like half a Batman story tacked onto half a horrible sci fi flick.




No, but I've been dying to read it! I've heard it was really interesting.



It's a really interesting look at the Crow mythos. I highly recommend it, whenever you have the time to read through it. You'll probably be a little disappointed in the rushed ending, though. I think the book was canned before the writers really had time to bring their ideas to fruition, which is a damn shame.

I heard the '99 Image comics version was a retelling. Was it supposed to be if The Crow was wrong? I think that's what I recall the blurb saying.

They have the original 'Crow' comic and they have a later version that looks like it's based on the movies.

I don't read any new comics. You can date my comics from the time Steven Hughes died and backward a few years.

All of these 'ex machinas' they're putting in shit these days makes me glad that I haven't picked up a new comic in over a decade!

Except for The Walking Dead.

Christ, that original post was long.

Your problem, Agent Bat (Coming soon from DC, written by Grant Morrison with art by Frank Quitely!), is that you're viewing the sum output of the industry's two largest companies, DC and Marvel, as the industry's ONLY output. Understandable given they are the largest, but short-sighted. It's like saying nobody's making any good movies in the world because the major Hollywood studios are churning out shit, while ignoring foreign and independent cinema. Comics as a whole are as good or better than they were in ye dim and distant past, and a million miles better than the grimdark-and-gritty days of Image and co in the 90s, where every comic book had to be X-TREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEM!

The only comic I'm really keeping up with at the moment is "The Boys" by Grant Ennis (art by Darick "Transmetropolitan" Robertson), published by Dynamite comics. It's a superhero comic written by a man who absolutely despises superheroes, and while nowhere near as clever as Watchmen was for its time (though Ennis likes to think so), it's still a breath of fresh air compared to Infinite Secret Crisis War Night #531.

That would be the '99 version, aye. The artistic style is based on the movies. The story is a hybrid of O'Barr's original work and the film, though with the "what if the Crow was wrong" twist. Essentially, Eric doesn't get to go back to Shelly after defeating Top Dollar and his goons, and he has to discover what his purpose here on Earth is. Sort of like the television show The Crow: Stairway To Heaven, though nowhere near as over-dramatized. Great artwork. Had nice, tight writing with some very interesting ideas. Unfortunately, it came out when The Crow: Wicked Prayer did, and the film hurt the comic's readership. Book was cancelled before it's time, if you ask me.




The Walking Dead is definitely worth it. Never read any of the Chaos! Comics books. Good stuff, I assume?




Aye, that's how I roll. I don't write posts. I write brief novellas.




You speak of the Rob Liefeld "Dark Ages" when every "hero" had to look like Cable and act like a violent psychopath. I'm still trying to blot that era out of my memory.

And it's not that I ignore the foreign or indie comics. It's just that they don't make as much of a splash in the industry as we'd like them to. The only comic store that services my area - Midland/Odessa, but we call it "Midessa" for short - only carries the mainstream comics (when he even bothers to carry those anymore; his cell phone business has been overtaking comics lately, so you can guess which items have started taking up more shelf space). Hastings or Barnes & Noble is as good as it gets, and the indie/foreign stuff usually only shows up at Barnes & Noble (unless it's from Japan; then it ends up at Hastings). If it isn't DC or Marvel, it's likely to be Image (though they're slowly going the way of the dinosaur), Dark Horse, IDW or it's not on the shelves. :-/ The indie stuff is great, but it doesn't get noticed - or carried in shops outside of the major metropolitan centers (or even torrented to pirating sites, for cryin' out loud!) - until somebody makes the comic into a film.




I've a tough time getting into Ennis' work because of his hatred for superheroes. Don't get me wrong, his stuff can be brilliant, but when his distaste for the capes starts creepin' in...

I reckon there are some super Top Secret CIA documents that don't have as many black-bars as your post did.
The last thing you will see before you die is a grotesque monstrosity with deformed legs, muscles on top of muscles on top of muscles, a gun bigger than a four-bedroom house, and a thousand empty pouches strapped to every available surface of his body.

You will never be free of the memory of this terrible period in comics.


"The Boys" proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that Ennis fucking despises the entire superhero genre: his hate doesn't creep in as much as blow the door off with C4 and spray napalm into the room. Funnily enough, it works in the context of "The Boys" because nearly all of the so-called superheroes in it are complete and utter shits. It basically takes the old adage "power corrupts" and cranks it up to eleven. If you can stomach Ennis's hate for heroes and don't mind lots of swearing, gore, violence, sex and the usual staples of his writing then you might enjoy it in an ironic sort of way.

The art is brilliant too. One of my favourite scenes is from one of the first few issues where The Homelander, a so-obvious-it's-hilarious carbon copy of Superman, is absolutely livid with one of his team mates for something. Imagine if Superman was a raging psychotic who just manages to keep enough of a hold on what little sanity he has to maintain a facade of sanity. Now imagine him glaring right at you, eyes glowing from his barely-restrained heat vision, because you've pissed him off. Darick Robertson conveys the terror of this image so perfectly it still sends a shudder up my spine whenever I see it.

- trag

Gotta be some love for MarshalLaw? That seems to have been forgotten in all the Watchmen and Batman mania.

Never read Marshal Law, but I loved Nemesis the Warlock.

Just picked up volume 3 of Preacher! Has anyone else read the series? It stands as one of my favorites, hands down.

I hear you. My cousin started collecting Marvel back in the early '70s. I was more into DC's Weird War Tales, Weird Western Tales, SGT Rock, etc. But I did like some of the Marvel stuff in the '70s/80s like Deathlok. As the Young Adult Librarian, I maintain our graphic novel section. The endless myriad of Xmen, Superman, etc. spinoffs bore me to tears. It's all the same.
I'd rather read "Oh My Goddess".

You are talking to a kid that read 2000AD from issue #1

Be pure!
Be vigilant!
Behave!

PROG #1, PROG! Not "issue"! Did The Mighty Tharg teach you NOTHING?!

I didn't get into 2000AD related stuff until I was about 11 or 12, having been a fully paid-up member of the Beano fan club. One of the first "proper" comics I bought from a shop was Judge Dredd Megazine when it was running the "America" storyline, in which a group of dissidents try to restore democracy to Megacity 1, and a Conan the Barbarian comic where Conan fights a giant spider in a cave: being Conan the comic also featured breasts. Alas, my mother, being far more uptight in those days then she is now, discovered my collection of mind-warping filth and got rid of it all.

Ok, ok prog.

Quite funny looking back, having my mum read them out to me as I sat on her knee.

*sigh* I know... Makes me wish we really had neuralizers.




...That gave me a geek hard-on. I must read this series.




I've yet to read that one, though it's on my Must Read list.




I'm definitely with you there. I wouldn't mind the spin-offs as much if they bothered to put more originality into it, maybe kill a character off and then leave them dead for longer than a few years (maybe a decade or two, or just never bring them back at all).

The X-books are the worst at this. The first time Jean Gray died it was gut-wrenching. Now, she's been dead, what, three times already? Aren't we taking the "Phoenix" theme a tad too literally now? Already, the Marvel execs are talking about her eventual resurrection. (Dammit, Marvel, just kill her and be done with her!) Even worse are the new crop of mutants they toss in to liven up a tired, elderly franchise. Doesn't really liven much up if the stories are all the same, does it?




Same story here; my mom was the one who first introduced me to comics. Any time I took ill, she'd come home with a stack of Archie, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman.