Batman R.I.P.’d Off!
I’ve never been a huge fan of Grant Morrison’s work. I feel he gets way too much credit for too few great books. He has a habit of very sloppy and confusing story telling which he compounds by wrapping his story arcs too soon. I can’t knock that he can definitely come up with some great premises, but delivering on them he rarely does.
Morrison’s run on Batman just concluded and from the outset my feelings towards it was that this was another Morrison hack job. That was UNTIL Batman R.I.P. began. Finally! I thought I could see where all the confusing, poorly written and rushed issues were leading up to. And what a great build up it was… it seemed like Morrison wasdestroying the very fundamental that made Bruce Wayne become Batman. How wrong I was.
I love when comic book writers really go back into a characters vast back-story looking for any yarn that can be untangled and sewn into some new story. Morrison was doing just that with this run on Batman, and actually doing a decent job of it up until the very end of R.I.P.
With what has been his M.O. for a while now Morrison fumbles the ball at the 10 yard line. He doesn’t give the readers the payoff we deserve by never revealing who the Dr. Simon Hurt truly is and by hastily tying up his loose ends with too few pages remaining. At the very least he could have gone the predictable route and had Dr. Hurt end up being Thomas Wayne (Bruce’s dead father) or or even Alfred. While at that point an obvious culprit, the ramifications it would have created for Batman as a character would have been unbelievable!
So at the end we’re left with a very sloppily written story and no pay off. Oh wait… Morrison did leave his us with the totally unbelievably written revelation that Batman has a bastard 10 year old son named Damian! Who just so happens to be a pointless character that I bet the next long term Batman scribe is already frothing at the mouth to kill off. Bravo! What a waste of some two dozen issues!
I can only hope that the next two issues of “Whatever happened to the caped crusader?”penned by the usually fantastic Neil Gaiman do truly mark a bold new direction in the Batman mythos and clean and tie up all of Morrison’s loose ends.
- My Pal the Crook
November 29th, 2008 at 5:46 pm
I don’t think I’ve actually READ anything by Morrison since the Invisibles. Which–as I recall–was pretty seminal. But that could be my 21 year old self talking.
November 29th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
I’ve never read the Invisibles. I have the whole run sitting here on my Xternal drive and I keep meaning to read them and just never get around to it. I don’t know what it is, Morrison writes really lackluster stuff and gets hailed as a god.
Animal Man & Doom Patrol were fantastic and then i don’t know what happened. His JLA run was littered with the same problems as this Batman run good ideas, poor writing and execution and too much dependence on making characters no one really cares that much about yet as central to the story. His X-men run also suffered from these same problems.
Maybe reading through the Invisibles will redeem him in my eyes.
November 29th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
Definitely check it out. It’s more in the same category as Transmetropolitan and WildC.A.T.S. for me…but maybe that’s because I was reading all that stuff at the same time. When I think of what it was about, I really have nothing to say…it’s so…weird.
And if Morrison continues to be too much for you, maybe switch to Ellis…Authority and StormWatch are mission-critical.
Morrison and other peoples’ characters just don’t seem to mix well in my mind. He’s so bizarre that it doesn’t make a lot of sense for him to weave his ‘magic stories’ on superman or batman. They’re too public domain for him to be seancing with them. IMO.
November 29th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
I’ve also never read Transmetropolitan, like The Invisibles it’s on my “To read list”.
WildC.A.T.S. however is one of my favorite comics of all time. Vastly under read and under appreciated. But it has only itself to blame with that awful Jim Lee’s bizzaro X-men beginning to the book.
I’m actually a huge fan of the Wildstorm universe, so The Authorty, StormWatch & Planetary are all old favorites of mine.
Ellis, unlike Morrison I always felt was a great writer.
November 29th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
If anything, the wonderful inking by my homie Sandu Florea is always fun to look at.
November 30th, 2008 at 3:40 am
In my opinion superheroes were at their best when they were made by mostly untrained teenagers and marketed to five year olds. Watchmen is great but it gave birth to everybody trying to make superheroes adult in cheap ways like adding blood and tits and trying to graft explanations onto things that children just accepted.
I read every Invisibles tpb out there and at no point did I get a sense of a story or strong characters, just individual sci-fi characters, catchphrases and posing.
Transmetropolitan is entertaining but kinda stupid. I basically owned every comic book that Wizard magazine recommended at one point in my life and thought Vertigo was great when I was 14-15. Preacher holds up the best of the Vertigo comics for me, then Swamp Thing, then Sandman, then Transmetropilitan. I don’t remember the rest. Fables had good covers and the rest was stupid as hell. Books of Magic was too corny to fuck with as I recall although I wanted to like it really badly.
Basically Vertigo Comics were my teen years and much like me at the time they struggle to be hip and cool so hard that they are bound to be nerdier then all the mainstream superhero books combined.
November 30th, 2008 at 3:55 am
Mainstream comics have this problem of writers who think they’re way hipper & wittier than they are and try to inject that into their books with varied and usually bad results *cough Bendis *cough*
But that’s not to say that Indie comics have it any better.