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Grant Morrison's Batman

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17:19 / 20.11.06

Brief interview with Kubert.

18:25 / 27.11.06

So who else thinks the 'new' Joker will have blood-red psuedo-tears on his face/cheeks (since he was shot in the face in GM's first issue) as a tiny effect that will be added to show that he's sort of redefined/redesigned (but not a big enough visual change to really change the character in any dramatic way)...? The cover of the upcoming new Kubert issue shows such tears on the playing card.

22:07 / 27.11.06

hm, an emo Joker... that'd be an up-to-date design, at least.

00:47 / 02.12.06

in case anyone's considering making the same mistake, i bought #659 today, and still feel a bit dirty.

reading it gave me the strong impression that either ostrander's setting out to portray batman as schizophrenic, or no-one told him what morrison was going to be doing in his issues. i suspect that continuing to read the ostrander stuff'll lead to serious readerly whiplash when morrison comes back...

07:27 / 02.12.06

I got the strong impression that Ostrander phoned this one in, possibly years ago. What's the set-up? Batman vs another, tougher vigilante, the hideous Grotesk (dubbed such by the tabloids, found using his new name in the third person - that trick always adds colour to dialogue - a few panels later), and guess what, this guy delivers justice with claws and a flamethrower. Hmmmm, remind you of anyone we know? The other baddies are of course real criminals with real guns.

Basically it's a journey back to the halcyon days of the mid-ninties. Total shit.

12:14 / 02.12.06

it does feel a little familiar, doesn't it? down to the 'ha ha, batman, you can arrest me, or save the poor innocent from a fate worse than death !!11!111!' trick.

it's SO mid-90s, you wonder if morrison asked them to get ostrander in to provide a reminder of what he's working against. nothing makes you want grant morrison comics like people trying to be frank miller.

'there are fifteen cookies in every package of 'utterly butterys'. i break them. one by one.'

13:28 / 02.12.06

it's SO mid-90s, you wonder if morrison asked them to get ostrander in to provide a reminder of what he's working against.

Fanwank alert!

As much as it's nice to think everything that happens is a crafty five-dimensional move by George... sometimes it's just the higher-ups being shit.

Anyway is the Ostrander stuff ignorable or is it supposed to be part of the Batmorrison run?

16:58 / 02.12.06

Totally and utterly ignorable. It couldn't have less in common with Morrison's run if it tried. Christ, it's got a bloody Azbats analogue in it fer fuck's sake.

And Guns

And real criminals. From the Eastern Bloc!

18:48 / 02.12.06

Azbats analogue?? You sully the good name of Azbats, you cad! This felt like one of the really disposable single-issue stories from the early 90's, the kind of thing that even Batman comics have moved on from, but stretched. Between this and Wolfman's Nightwing, the batbooks are being assaulted by tired old hackery, it's pretty embarrassing. What year is this?

18:57 / 02.12.06

Wow, there's certainly a mad-on for Ostrander here.

I'm kinda looking forward to picking the issue up; I loved late-80's/early-90's Bat-comics, so I think I'll enjoy this one. We'll see, I guess.

19:15 / 02.12.06

And real criminals. From the Eastern Bloc!

But no KGBeast, I'm fairly certain.

20:04 / 02.12.06

For the record, it's not about having a mad-on for Ostrander - over the years I've been quite fond of some of his stuff - it's about having a mad-on for tired, hackneyed shit.

John, Azbats analogue was a bit of an over statement. Grotesk does share a love of flamethrowers, claws, and bad attitudes with the razorwinged one, however.

20:05 / 02.12.06

And, yes, no KGBeast.

00:08 / 03.12.06

Just without, y'know teh coolness!!!1!

For the record, I loved AzBats. It was one of the first stories I ever bought, and looking back at it, it was a pretty good arc moving through battered Bruce, his fall, the rise of AzBats and watching as he becomes more and more unhinged and meeting some great Bat-foes in the process. And then Bruce's return and Dick's standing in for him when he realises there are still some kinks to be worked out. It's a great arc, and even more impressive given that Chuck Dixon scripted about 75% himself (as his did on most Bat-crossovers back in the day).

But yeah, this Ostrander issue is a piece of shit. This whole issues should have been 5 pages in a single, throwaway issue penciled by Jim Aparo.

01:26 / 03.12.06

obviously, i was advancing the theory that ostrander writing a tossy issue proves that morrison's manipulating time-space as a 9-dimensional super-solid, and in no way suggesting that it's a nice coincidence that this lump of stodge turned up like the ghost of shitmas past in the middle of his run.

i can't see how this is meant to tie in with the morrison archs on either side. doesn't someone mention the joker in connection with the chap-torchings the first few pages? since he's just been shot in the face in front of half of gotham city whilst hanging out the bottom of a rather conspicuous jokercopter, you'd think they might cut the poor bastard a bit of slack for a few weeks. equally, gordon got better pretty quickly...

i got onto batman through knightfall, too; zsasz cutting up girls in a boarding school had a fair impact on my squishy little brain. nothing wrong with grimness, as long as it’s good grimness. ostrander’s not destroying western civilisation, his work just seems incongruous in the middle of the promised jolly poppy run by nice old uncle grant; wierd choice of filler.

11:21 / 03.12.06

The problem with a lot of that early to mid-ninties stuff is that when you go back and reread it it just isn't that good. Sure it does what it says on the tin, but it really doesn't stand up well when compared to the output of one of today's middling writers, let alone the big guns. Sure, alot of these modern johnny-come-latelys don't have Dixon's work-ethic, and granted his output has been impressively vast over the years, and there is a ceratin grimy appeal to some of it, but that's not enough to make me miss it when there's so much better on offer these days. I think it's also worth pointing out that Batman comics really haven't moved on that much from the world of the Dixons and Ostranders, so I'd quite like to wait before their particularly aesthetic has a revival (although, come to think of it, I'd quite like to see what Morrison could do with that stuff).

Also, John, you must've been pretty young when you read Knightfall. I don't imagine you're being entirely objective about it's worth - much of it is unarguably appallingly bad.

"I am the dark heart of the Knight. THE KNIGHT!"

That kind of arse.

14:00 / 03.12.06

You're gonna make me feel like a tit now, Boboss, but... I own the entire (I am the) Knight(!)fall run.

In trade paperback.

I think part of the appeal was that this guy, previously a nobody second-stringer, could get to be Batman and, more than that, Azrael was a normal lad by day but - as an ex-super-assassin - he had all these badass murder skills under the surface. That's pretty appealing to a nerdy 15-19yr old boy. And probably, uncomfortably, ties in with The Woman Is Occasionally A Superheroine. Pandering to maladjusted adolescent fightsex.

"I could crush your head like an egg! Maybe that's what it takes!"

But, is that fair to the Knightfall arc? He loses, doesn't he? Robin states for the whole of Book 2 that he's gone off the loony end. Bruce - off being crippled and human - comes back and kicks his ass. Azbats is intentionally the Grrritty Knight taken to the extreme for a specific purpose.

He's Qlippoth Batman. He's Batman without the Bruce, without the humanity. The whole story exposes the "YOU ARE SCUM!" sledgehammer-wielding Batman for the tonto nutter that he is. That he'd have to be to act like that. And that's so relevant to the learning-to-be-human-again Hairy Chested Lovemachine of Morrison's run.

What I'm saying is, if you feel like "fuck! Azbats! What a tit!" Then Knightfall's done it's job. Hasn't it?

(Rumours that DC were using Azbats as a plausibly deniable way to phase in an EXTREME NINETIES Batman is completely relevant but for another thread)

Fuck, that was longer than expected. Think I need to re-read this with a 22 year old brain. I had a whole paragraph there about Bruce beating Azrael by making him strip off his armour. Thread coming if anyone's interested.

14:19 / 03.12.06

This discussion has become a little sidetracked in that I never intended us to go down a is Nightfall good/bad route - my point was intended to be broader, that dark, gritty, grim, grrr, REAL CRIMINALS, REAL GUNS Batman has been done to death and that it's nice to have escaped that for the time being, or at least it was until Ostrander's arc turned up and threw us right back into the shitheap.

Nightfall, isn't without virtues. The purging of the Qlippoth Batman was probably needed at the time, and I actually always had a soft spot for Azrael - a super-assassin trained and sublimated by subliminal messaging pulls my bell every time - but make no mistake (as far as I can remember) quality writing Nightfall is not. The dialogue is functional and dull; the prose isn't so much purple as black and blue; the art, well, it served a purpose and I like some of it, but on the whole it's workmanlike; the characterisation is basic and lacks anything like real insight; the plot is perhaps it's greatest strength - it's seedy, grimy, nasty fun - but I think it would pay to imagine what a writer with real talent could do with a story like that.

All that said. I think part of the appeal of stuff like Nightfall is that it isn't polished or indeed authored in the way that modern comics tend to be.

14:22 / 03.12.06

Oh, and as an ontopic aside, upon even further reflection I inclined to think that that last Morrison ish did have a certain phoned in quality.

What was all that shit about Gibraltar?

14:30 / 03.12.06

off topic, but...

obvious comment, but knightfall resonates nicely with this 'one year later' stuff, and the curren 52; batman learning to be batman again and so on.

i only read the trades quite recently, having read a few bits here and there in the british news-stand reprints that came out at the time whilst laid up after a particualry nasty school PE accident, all put in context by the novelisation. can't remember who that was by, but as these things go, it was quite cool; reread it last year when i got the trades, and thought that the comics came of quite badly by comparison, possibly because the trades seem to have a few bits missing. i remember BBC radio doing a hilariously bad version, with bane's venom injections accompanied by the kind of sound effects you'd expect on an episode of dr. who from 1974...

see you in that thar thread.

14:41 / 03.12.06

as for gibraltar, given the submarines in this and the GM authority, think his research might be doing double service?

i think there're submarine pens on the rock, and remember a disagreement between the british and the spanish about the repair of a damaged nuclear sub off gibraltar a few years back. if he's got buggered submersibles on the brain, seems likely that he'll've been doing a spot of gibraltar-centric reading. or he may just be being weird.

15:23 / 03.12.06

I know that Gibraltar might be of military value - in fact let's assume that it definitely is - but quite why the League of Assassins would want something of conventional military value is completely beyond me. It's just utterly nonsensical and crowbarred in because ol' Grant couldn't be bothered to think of something a little more solid.

Phex: Dorset Doom

15:28 / 03.12.06

Incidentally, did anybody pick up John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's fill-in story 'Grotesk'? Good God that was painful - everything a Batman story shouldn't be after several months of seeing all the wonderful things that can happen in a Batman comic if you lose the grim nineties 'realism' and deformed guys with flamethrowers on their hands talking about TRUE JUSTICE and burning Russian gangsters.

15:35 / 03.12.06

Phex, have you read this page? apparently not.

I thought the last ish was one of the weakest GM comics in a very long time. Very very, which is a shame bekoz parts 2 & 3 had me believing.

Aside from Gibraltar, and the insistence it's an island, there is no African Ocean so far as I'm aware.

16:30 / 03.12.06

This discussion has become a little sidetracked in that I never intended us to go down a is Nightfall good/bad route - my point was intended to be broader, that dark, gritty, grim, grrr, REAL CRIMINALS, REAL GUNS Batman has been done to death

Sorry about that but I found a seam and started mining. Anyway, yes, outlandish popfights are what Batman should be about.

Coincidentally I flicked over to that new The Baaaattmaaaan cartoon on Toonami. It's well super-pop pulp. People may say it's shit and "not Bruce Timm" but fuck 'em, it's ace (Batman has a jetpack!).

18:17 / 03.12.06

wasn't this supposed to come after the Joker comeback?

=/

20:08 / 03.12.06

Yes, but they changed it. What was #659 is now #663 - I also think the John van Fleet fill-in, which I was quite looking forward to, may be replaced by more Andy K.

20:09 / 03.12.06

Triplers, you are wrong about the Batman cartoon.

20:16 / 03.12.06

Well, as said it's ignorable pap. Put it this way, it gives George time to make sure the next 8 issues shine. It's his broken back, leave Gotham, come back and kick arse! moment. Or something. Soon as he finishes training in that silly ninja mask.

20:19 / 03.12.06

Triplers, you are wrong about the Batman cartoon.

Nah, the cartoon is good. It's Batman on sugar. Yeah, overall the quality makes it kiddy-fare but nowt wrong with that. What don't you like about it?

Go to the old thread in Film/TV?

21:58 / 03.12.06

Ah, it's all hearsay and whatnot, and I've only seen like 1 1/2 eps, but I read it was brought in cos the 'suits' didn't think the Timm one was radikal and hard-edged enough and, god, the one ep I think i watched all of had like some psychopath Riddler - real ugly design - and I don't really like the style other than Batman himself one tiny bit and it was boring. Is all.

23:16 / 03.12.06

One hour later... (I was catching up with Casanova, acksh and it's 96 pages thus far > the 88 pages of our topic herein, in a very Grantmorrrisony way I reckon)

...also if you compare it to JLU (esp. the last three seasons) or any of that it is just total shit. Legion looks horrible too.

Jake, Colossus of Clout

14:56 / 04.12.06

Yeah, it really is terrible. The Joker has green dreadlocks and seems to be based on one of those morons from the Insane Clown Posse. Awful awful awful.

16:04 / 04.12.06

Batsphemers!

16:29 / 04.12.06

You better stop dissing the Church of the Sugar Batman, or I'll go Shadowhawk on your asses and...

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