Batman #680

Posted by Adam on October 7, 2008

(DC)

All the while Grant Morrison’s been dazzling us with his run on All-Star Superman, he’s also been doing something rather more challenging and bent in his run on Batman. In the process he’s attempted to synthesize and redefine the history of DC’s two most well-known superheroes, and he’s done so by specifically referencing the Silver Age. This is perhaps an easier task with Supes, whose goofy but imaginative adventures from the late 40s through to the 60s provided a lot of fodder for the character’s mythology even when re-imagined in the 1978 movie or the post-Crisis relaunch. As silly as some of that stuff is, it does seem to cohere to a consistent theme of optimism and imagination that fits the character of Superman, and besides, even the stuff DC tried to strip away from his history has slowly been creeping back in. As long as it’s all handled with a certain degree of intelligence, the way-out aspects of Superman’s mythology—multi-coloured Kryptonite, Bizarro, Krypto the Super-dog, and so on—all seem natural. They work, and they’re inextricably linked with the character.

Batman’s trickier. Much more so. That’s probably because, ever since the late 60s, the character’s been slowly redefined through a more natural process that culminated with stuff like The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke: Batman as noir on speed, a grim avenger facing off against twisted, monstrous villains whose candy-coloured silliness has become the very thing that makes them creepy rather than juvenile, with the Joker as the apotheosis of this concept.

All well and good, but as we all know, there are aspects of Batman’s history that cause the average fanboy to cringe. If they see Bats as “dark” and “serious” and “gritty”, a supposedly realistic, intense, and badass superhero, then it surely doesn’t help that image to bring up the Adam West TV show. The 50s and early 60s comics are even goofier, often sending Batman off to outer space, saddling him with a weird array of costumes and identity changes, and tormenting him with an imp from another dimension. Yet, here’s Morrison, bringing up these aspects of the Bat-mythology in the same year that gave us The Dark Knight, and introducing (or reintroducing) them into the current, ultra-dark continuity of the books. He’s even doing so in a storyline that features one of the most freakishly skeezy incarnations of the Joker we’ve ever seen. Morrison’s goal is apparently to somehow reconcile these two sensibilities…and while it’s too early to say for sure if he’s succeeded, he’s certainly created something unique here.

It helps that, in this issue, everything seems to be finally falling into place. Morrison’s Batman run has been a lot more jarring and dense than his take on Superman, or even (and this may be a controversial opinion) his scripts for Final Crisis. Morrison’s tossing out a whole bunch of interesting ideas that tie into Batman’s history, but in his usual style, he often doesn’t bother to develop them in a coherent fashion–or so it’s seemed for much of this run. An issue away from the climax, however, things are suddenly snapping into place. Much of Batman’s 50-era adventures, we’ve learned, took place in his mind during a bout of psychological reprogramming involving sensory deprivation. The current storyline has been centered on “The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh”, a Batman doppelganger from outer space who Batman encountered in the 50s; we’ve now learned that this story was a hallucination meant to create another, emergency backup persona for Batman in the event of a psychological attack. Zur is a sort of positive version of the Manchurian Candidate, a “Batman without Bruce Wayne” who can keep fighting even when everything he cares about has seemingly been destroyed. Likewise, the Bat-Mite, who’s been dogging his footsteps for the last two issues, is revealed as a personification of “the fading voice of reason”, one who’s forced to abandon him completely as Batman enters the inner sanctum of the Black Glove.

We also finally get a better idea of who the Glove and his attendant Club of Villains may be—they’re basically a bunch of rich socialites gambling on Batman and his ability to survive this psychological attack. Almost every plot thread Morrison let loose is suddenly coming together in an extremely dramatic way, and the climax of this issue really packs a punch. Batman goes symbolically deeper into madness than he’s ever gone, entering a David Lynch-style arena to do battle with the Joker and learn a twist that you probably saw coming, yet works pretty effectively anyway.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comic storyline take this long to really pay off, and then to do so all at once, so near the end…it’s both impressive and a little frustrating. As I said, this has been a far more jarring, disconcerting run than Morrison’s other DC contributions, but that fits the character, after all. If All-Star Superman transforms the Silver Age trappings of his book into something noble and stirring, it’s only logical that Batman’s should wind up in a darker, more psychologically charged place. Whatever you think of the results, the simple fact that Morrison’s actually done something new and interesting with Batman after all these years warrants a thumbs-up. That the book is suddenly firing on all cylinders dramatically is just the icing on the cake.

Batman #680

Filed Under: Rack Raids

Tags: 4/5, batman, batman rip, dc, grant morrison, superhero

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