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well, I think grant might be annoyed by the double standard that gets applied to his writing at times. some people are agressively committed to the non-linear, highly indeterminant, tension of ambiguities element of his work, and get pissed when things are too literal, while others insist that everything must be utterly clear at first glance and that grant must be losing his faculties if they don't get it right off the bat.
That isn't a double standard, though. It's two separate standards being applied to the same thing by disparate sets of people. It is not a double standard, but simply two incidences of standards. Even if people want both at the same time, that isn't a double standard. It's just a bit confused. If people expect it of him but not of Geoff Johns (GEOFF! JOHNS!), that's a double standard. Or possibly just realism.
However, I'm not sure how much of the commentary, certainly the comments here, relate to demanding either obscurity or complexity - again, there is a danger of seeking to defend the boy Morrison's unsullied skin from cruel javelins and slingshots that do not actually exist. I think, near as I can tell, that the problem here is that readers have understood the whole thing pretty well. They generally thought that the Batman of Zur-Enn-Ah was pretty awesome, but then that the closing episodes of Batman R.I.P failed to deliver the happy finish one might have hoped. Most obviously, two things that one might reasonably have expected - not least because the marketing solemnly claimed that they would happen - did not. Dr. Hurt's identity was not shockingly revealed (it's a tulpa), and Batman was not changèd forever. He did not R, in P or otherwise. He got buried alive, but that's cheap. He was on a helicopter when it blew up, but we already know that he is fine not only because of the demands of the medium but because we are, good personal friends of Grant as we are, reading Final Crisis. The finish is, not to put too fine a point on it, flubbed.
And then, next up, we have "Last Rites", which is a lot of fun, but involves Batman in a cellar being mindwronged. Which we've already done in the previous story. Which is why the reference to the two Darkseids as emergency author-generated fanwank to explain the disparity between the end of Countdown (which was, let's remember, specifically meant to lead in to Final Crisis) and Final Crisis is relevant, although with the proviso that Morrison is writing both Batman R.I.P and Final Crisis, and so this strange stutter makes rather less sense, compositionally speaking. And, you know, it's great that true dedication can find virtue in all this - alba ligustra cadunt, vaccinia nigra leguntur and all that - but I don't think that the issue is unfair expectations of comprehensibility or otherwise. |
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