The New 52 (One Year Later...More or Less)

August 31, 2011....that marked the day that the Old DCU came to an end with "Flashpoint" and the day the New 52 was born with Justice League #1.  So as of the day of this writing, September 3rd, it has been...

- 369 days  (not counting today)
- 1 year, 33 days
-  31,881,600 seconds
- 531,360 minutes
- 8856 hours
- 52 weeks (rounded down)

Since I'm spitting out facts & figures, let me run those down before I get into the nitty gritty of this piece...ya know the part where I rant about the things I loved, liked, and hated.

So we started with 52 core books, the ones indicated in that banner right up there, but it was announced in January 2011 that the following "First Wave" books would be cancelled after eight issues:

- Mister Terrific
- Static Shock
- Hawk and Dove
- OMAC
- Blackhawks
- Men of War

Those titles were replaced with the "Second Wave" of the New 52 made up of:

- Batman Incorporated
- Earth 2
- Worlds' Finest
- Dial H
- GI Combat
- The Ravagers

Then we had a second wave of cancellations over the course of August & September, most of these ending at a #0 issue, consisting of:

- Justice League International
- Captain Atom
- Resurrection Man
- Voodoo

And now we've got the "Third Wave" kicking off in September as well with all of the following starting their runs with #0 issues:

- Talon
- Sword of Sorcery
- The Phantom Stranger
- Team 7

So obviously DC is trying to stick with a core of 52 on-going books but there are a slew of mini's, one-shots, and now a "National Comics" anthology that aren't considered part of this number for various reasons, but the one being the ability to say "we only publish 52 books" would be the top of the list I imagine.

Now as for the most important part, for the companies at least, and the primary reason for any company to do anything of this magnitude: sales!  Here's a look at the July 2012 sales charts which are the most recent:

Retail Market Share -
DC Comics - 32.71%
Marvel - 31.96%

Unit Market Share -
DC Comics - 36.55%
Marvel Comics - 35.45%

One year earlier, prior to the start of the New 52, it was the exact opposite:

Retail market Share- - Marvel 43.59 - DC 30.55%   Unit Market Share - Marvel 43.59% - DC 34.76%

 

 

So with the top ten in July 2012, DC had 6 of the top 10 spots and 11 of the top 20 compared to Marvel's 3 of the top 10 and 8 of the top 20 (all of Marvel's were tied into AVX somehow). The lone spot not belonging to Marvel or DC was the #1 and that was owned by Image's "The Walking Dead" #100.

One year earlier it was Marvel with 5 of the top 10, DC with 5, and Marvel with 12 of the top 20 while DC had 8 of that 20.

So I think it's safe to say that comparing the one year later numbers, DC did something right in generating interest in SOME of their books. There are still some books, like Grifter, Blue Beetle, & DC Universe Presents that have somehow survived the axe despite sales for their #11 issues hovering around 13,000 while books like Resurrection Man and Justice League International are getting chopped despite better numbers (14,715 & 29,802 respectively).

Personally I don't get the decision to chop the former because it's something different & unique in the DCU and with the latter it seems...based on the recent Justice League of America announcement...that the choice to kill JLI has more to do with future plans than anything the book has done wrong.
 

So it seems from a financial stand-point that DC made a good decision in this reboot but what about creatively? Well, now that I've got the BS out of the way...it's time for me to address what's worked for me and what hasn't in the form of a Best & Worst List!!!

 

 

Best of the New 52

Batman (obviously)

 

For me, and for a whole lot of folks, this has been the standout book of the New 52. With a very strong writer in Scott Snyder and art by Greg Capullo that shocked the hell out of me in how awesome it has been, "Batman" is the best example of taking what existed prior to the reset, honoring it, but continuing on with a story that didn't require new fans to know the decades of history that existed in the Old DCU. With the Court of Owls, Snyder played within the confines of what old fans know has always existed but brought us into a darkened corner of that room, illuminating it for the very first time. The Court's existence never felt shoehorned into Bruce's, or Batman's, life...well maybe a little with the back-up that ran through Night of the Owls...and it seemed like if fit right into the seams of Gotham, as if it was indeed right in front of readers for all this time but we never noticed it...just like Bruce.
 

Capullo, who I knew from Spawn & X-Force but hadn't seen on a book in forever, was the main question mark I had going into this but my doubts were very, very quickly rendered inert by the amazing work he did in everything from simple faces to page layouts. He made the Court feel horrifying, a feeling often hard to generate in comics, and made Bruce seem fragile at times...another difficult feat to pull off as well. This is the book I look most forward to every month, and cannot wait

until The Joker arc kicks off in October!

 

 Animal Man (left) & Swamp Thing (right)

 

These were both books I discovered after what many declare their creative heyday (Animal Man by Grant Morrison & Alan Moore's Swamp Thing) but those arcs quickly became two of my all-time faves, which is retroactively amusing to me with Animal Man because he was also one of my favorite aspects of the "52" maxi-series which I read way before I ever touched Animal Man.

Unfortunately these were two properties essentially dead in the Old DCU, more so Buddy Baker.  Animal Man had been relegated to an afterthought post-"52", popping up randomly in JLA stories, while Swamp Thing was seemingly in the midst of a rebirth via the "Brightest Day" maxi-series & "Search For Swamp Thing" which returned Constantine to the DCU proper after having been exclusively a Vertigo character since 1993. The "Search" book sucked...

So when the announcements of the New 52 titles came around these were two books I was psyched for, Swamp Thing because of the creative team of Scott Snyder & Yannick Paquette and Animal Man because an interview I read with Jeff Lemire essentially said he was shooting for a Morrison-esque take on Buddy Baker. Sold on both titles!

And I must say that these two books are what I would think the New 52 was all about as they took two properties that were essentially obscure to the general public and made them two of the most successful books both creatively AND financially.  In the July '12 sales, Animal Man #11 ranked 60 and Swamp Thing #11 was 55.  Not bad for two books on the fringe really...and the way the two books have been interlaced with one another, and with their pre-New 52 history, almost since the beginning has been masterful. The concepts of the Red & Green are ones forged in the Old DCU, the history between Swampy & The Arcanes is old territory, but it has all been introduced as freshly as possible to the uninitiated audience.  Hell I give Swamp Thing lots of points just based on the fact that it was the first, and maybe still the only, book to acknowledge that Superman did indeed die in the New 52:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The two books have been on a collision course since jump street and have finally reached that convergence with the "Rotworld" arc that begins in September and it has been a tremendous ride so far watching Buddy and his family, experiencing Alec Holland reluctantly embrace his destiny, and that's not even mentioning the amazing artistic work by Travel Foreman on Animal Man & Paquette on Swamp Thing.  They have defined the visuals of this new world and, honestly, Animal Man doesn't seem the same without Foreman. Now that was an artistic switch I was dreading but am adjusting to now.  This pair of "Dark" books are two of my highest recommend titles in the New 52 in large part because of how it took the obscure characters and made them top tier.

Aquaman

 

"Aquaman" on the other hand is a great example of taking a mainstream character, one who is kind of derided and mocked, and turning him into an uber-badass by tackling those jibes head-on.  Right from the first issue Geoff Johns works his magic, the same way he did on Green Lantern, and begins to change all of the preconceived notions of just who Aquaman is by basically having the randoms he encounters point out all their inaccurate beliefs. Johns even has an Aquaman fan quizzing Arthur on exactly what his powers are and how he feels about being the guy that no-one takes seriously.

 

So what does Johns do in response? Show everyone, the fans and characters alike, just how awesomely powerful Aquaman is and with each issue continues to demonstrate why he deserves to be considered one of the Big Seven.  The issues read fast, and are an absolute beauty to look at with the Ivan Reis art.  He is without a doubt one of my absolute favorites working for DC right now, up there with Doug Manhke, JH Williams III, Capullo, and Foreman..artists whose work is just stunning to look at for a varied reasons.  This, as with Swampy and Animal Man, is a great example of just how the New 52 should work to reinvigorate/redefine a character.

 

Honorable Mentions:

- Batgirl

- Green Lantern

- Batwoman's 1st Arc

- Nightwing

- Wonder Woman

 

Worst of the New 52

 

Hawkman

 

This is without a doubt the biggest disappointment of the entire New 52 for me.  I have long been a fan of the idea of Hawkman dating back to my first real exposure to the character during "Zero Hour" and the subsequent series that followed.  Yet as with nearly every iteration of the character I have read, save his role in "JSA" and "Brightest Day", the idea of Hawkman was a lot more interesting than the actual execution of the character.  Johns did a decent job in his handling of Carter in the aforementioned JSA book but that didn't carry over to his solo spin-off book and I dropped that after about a year. 

 

So I had my hopes up for a New 52 version of the character, one with all of that utterly confusing origin wiped away.  Instead what I got was a really wtf first issue with Carter trying to burn the costume for whatever reason accompanied by some really awful art from Phillip Tan. Bad dialogue, bad art, and an opening sequence that is never addressed in the six issues I managed to tolerate this book for...massive failure.  I mean Carter Hall, the archaeologist, repeatedly states he has had the Nth Metal armor for years but apparently knows absolutely nothing about it as the villains keep having to tell him things and he just generally seems clueless as to his own abilities.  I think that works with a character who we are just witnessing come into their powers like say a Blue Beetle, but not when the lead keeps expressing that he's had his abilities for years.  I lasted six issues and from everything I saw/read, things did NOT improve when Rob Liefeld came onto the book...but that's a whole other issue for later.

 

Superman

 

Call it editorial interference or whatever...the bottom line is that this book has never been good.  I have read George Perez's statements about editorial and how he didn't know what he could do because no one knew what Grant Morrison was doing with the history-based "Action Comics", and I am sure that had a direct effect on the story Perez wanted to tell.  Does it excuse the story he ended up telling though?  I just found this book pointless and boring and it just felt old...the exact opposite of what a flagship book should feel like and that exact opposite of the feeling that Batman was, and still is, generating. 

 

The change in writers did nothing to improve the quality of the book either, despite it being Dan Jurgens who piloted Supes through his Death & Rebirth, as we got tie-ins to Wildstorm characters, a character whose name was originally Masochist but got changed to Anguish because the former was too controversial I guess, and then I stopped because I just didn't care anymore.  The art was fine I suppose, but this was a book that just felt...detached...that might be the best word, yeah detached from any other depiction of Superman we were seeing in the New 52. And the worst crime of all...it was BORING, the antithesis of everything your flagship character should be and that is why it makes my Worst Of section.

 

The Ravagers

 

 

So initially I thought I would keep my judgement to the books that had a decent shelf life to judge but when my brain keeps coming back to one book, I had to bring it up.  "The Ravagers" is bad spin-off from a really bad "Superboy", "Teen Titans", "Legion Lost" crossover that was so bad it made me stop paying for Teen Titans, insured I would never pay for Superboy, and guaranteed I would never read a Legion issue ever.  So that sounds like the perfect recipe for a spin-off doesn't it?  This book, perhaps more than any other, just screams of 90s Marvel with its creative team and it reads like it too...in all the bad ways.  There is little redeemable about any of these characters, I hate this usage of Beast Boy after falling in love with the character as a result of Geoff Johns' Teen Titans book, and I found this book so repulsive I lasted all of two issues.  They were two issues of just terrible dialogue and plot.  This is the only blight on the "2nd Wave" as I really like "Earth 2" and "World's Finest" (don't really consider Batman Inc. a New 52 book as I will explain shortly).  This book should just be set on fire....

 

Dishonorable Mentions

- Deathstroke as soon as Liefeld took over

- Superboy

- Green Arrow

- The Dark Knight (prior to #9)

 

Most Improved

 

Red Hood & The Outlaws

 

I can see getting flack for this one but I think this book has made a strong turn-around since its highly criticized debut...criticism that centered around the depiction of Starfire as a brain-dead sex kitten and criticism that was rightfully deserved.  Regardless of what Lobdell tried to claim a year ago, I think any growth in that character, and evolving her into the warrior princess she is know being depicted as, was a direct response to the extreme backlash he received after this issue hit stands. 

 

For that reason as well as the vapid depiction of Roy Harper (a character I fell in love with through Judd Winick's "Outsiders") I just about dropped the book after the third issue.  Yet something kept me going, and that something was watching the character of Jason Todd grow before my eyes.  Now JT is a character I have undying love for ever since Winick's Red Hood arc and I am always excited to see him used by a writer.  He was the draw for me to this book, and Lobdell's spin on the bastard Robin kept me coming back for more despite Arsenal having no purpose for existing and in spite of how Starfire was, at first, treated.

 

My patience has been rewarded I feel as I have watched Starfire grow into a more full character and I have enjoyed watching JT dance on the fringes of the Bat Universe as well and am quite excited for this book's Zero issue as well as it's involvement in the Joker story in coming months.  It has been fun to watch this motley crew grow into something resembling a family, now I only hope that Lobdell actually gives us some rationale as to why Harper is hanging around...he just doesn't seem to belong yet.

 

Suicide Squad, for a few months, was a contender for this one but pretty much went to pot after (maybe even during) the Harley Quinn arc and Catwoman was up there too, especially considering its similarly controversial sexy start, but it just hasn't maintained that upward momentum so I wouldn't put it in there either.

Honorables

- Green Lantern Corps

- The New Guardians

- Batman: The Dark Knight (Starting with #9)

 

Biggest Disappointment

Teen Titans

Undoubtedly, unequivocally this has been the biggest of the New 52 for me despite having the same author as my "most improved" (but also having the same author as one of my worst).  I love Tim Drake, he is my Robin, meaning that he was Robin when I started reading comics and maintained that role for the vast majority of my time as a reader.  It's kind of like how Hal Jordan is some people's GL or maybe it's Kyle, or Wally West is your Flash (certainly mine) as opposed to Barry Allen.

Well that desire to follow the exploits of Tim Drake is what pulled me into Teen Titans and I think this is the book that I had to convince myself that I liked for the first few issues.  I mean there were some moments that I liked, the inclusion of Morrison's Danny the Street character from Doom Patrol for example, and I am a sucker for Bret Booth's art , but on the whole it was just lacking.  The story wasn't there for me, didn't give a damn about Brick or Skitter or Solstice, Superboy is an ass, and that was all before the god awful crossover with Superboy & Legion Lost.  That was the straw that broke my back because it was terrible in every sense...story, art, purpose...everything. 

Oh and Lobdell had to go and state that the Zero ish will reveal Tim Drake was never a Robin...despite stating that he was a Robin in the very first issue of this book as well as it being mentioned in a few other places like so:

Which brings me to my next topic of discussion...what's the biggest thing wrong with the New 52...

Continuity Problems

 

This is something I've blogged about before (here & here) and it is something that continues to plague the New 52 one year later.  How do you cram this much crap in five years time?  We've got the birth of superheroes which is essentially chronicled in Justice League, the birth of Superman which is chronicled in Action Comics and takes place one year...ish...prior to Justice League, or at least it did at first, now it seems to be running somewhat concurrent with JL - Year One.  

 

We had multiple Crisis events in the Old DC but those are now longer canon apparently, but the problem there arises when you look at some of the necessary details that I addressed in the previous blogs, most importantly the existence of The Anti-Monitor & Superboy Prime as their existence is absolutely crucial to Hal Jordan's story unfolding as it did from Rebirth going forward.  See Anti-Monitor & Superboy-Prime were crucial parts of the Original Crisis, Prime was an integral part of Infinite Crisis, both were necessary to the Sinestro Corps War Story which was also 1000000% necessary, especially the fate of Anti-Monitor, to the Blackest Night story which we know is still canon because the current GL story is still playing off threads that Geoff Johns initiated when GL: Rebirth first started. 

 

But wait...what about all that...that all requires Hal Jordan to have died, which requires Hal to have been possessed by Parallax and gone bat-shit and destroyed the Central Power Battery to free Parallax & Sinestro which requires Coast City to have been destroyed which requires the existence of Cyborg Superman & Mongul which requires Superman to have died which requires Doomsday to have existed which requires ancient Kryptonians to have created him.

 

Which means the DCU is the worst place you could ever possibly choose to live because all of that happened in five years time.  Imagine Batman's world.... if everything remains intact he became Batman, Dick Grayson became Robin then Nightwing, Jason Todd became Robin then died then came back and became Red Hood, Tim Drake found out the secret, became Robin, his parents were killed, later he became Red Robin, Damian Wayne was born and aged ten years then became Robin, Barbara Gordon was paralyzed, Bruce was paralyzed by Bane, Jean Paul Valley became Batman, Bruce took his mantle back, there was a plague, there was round two of the plague, an earthquake, No Man's Land, a Gang War, Hush, the entire Black Glove conspiracy, a trip through time courtesy of Darkseid's Omega Effect, Dick Grayson becoming Batman after fighting it out with Jason Todd, Bruce reclaiming his mantle and finding out his big enemy is actually his relative hundreds of years removed. 

 

...Five years...

 

Of all those events what do we know for certain happened?  Well we know via flashbacks from Guy Gardner that the Anti-Monitor existed, we know from Swamp Thing that Superman died, we know that Bane broke Batman's back, we know Dick Grayson was Batman for roughly a year for some unexplained New 52 reason. We know that Blackest Night happened in some fashion and well, that pretty much everything Geoff Johns has done in the GL-verse seems intact. 

 

I would go so far as to say it almost feels as if the events in Green Lantern are taking place in some other world because it feels totally removed from the rest of the DCU, and the Hal Jordan in this book bears little resemblance to the one in Justice League.  The same can pretty much be said for every character in the Justice League, save Cyborg because he is undoubtedly a token presence in the League based on how unimportant he seems to the group, and doesn't exist anywhere else outside that book.  The characterization of the other 6 in no way reads like the fashion in which they are being written in their own books, and there's something to be said for that when Johns writes JL, GL, and Aquaman.  How does he get the voices to wrong from one to the next?  It's just one of the problems I have with Justice League...another being how I am excited for what I think is coming but not excited for the actual story that I am reading month-to-month.  The story I have in my head...the one in which the JL know that something isn't right with this timeline...that is more interesting to me than anything Johns has served up so far.

 

Anywho, these inconsistencies have been the biggest problem with the New 52 overall as a lot of lip service was given to the idea of world building but I would be hard-pressed to think that the Wonder Woman & Green Lantern as written in their own title exist in any world shared by the Superman & Batman in their books.  Hell, it would be hard convincing met that the Supes in Action & the one in Superman reside in the same reality....

 

I think, to rectify so many of these problems, DC needs to establish some key things about these characters histories, in particular for the big guns who haven't been utterly rewritten.  I think it's safe to say Wonder Woman's story is a totally new one in the New 52 but it seems important to flesh out the events in the life of a Superman or Batman or Green Lantern. 

 

In some ways it seems as if DC would have had an easier time handling this, and probably gotten less flack from fans, if they had gone all the way with the reboot and wiped slates clean across the board, especially when you have a book like "Batman Inc." that just seems to dance with whatever continuity it feels like bringing to the dance that issue.  It seems as if the "2nd Wave" version is picking up 100% where it left off, but then we've got a character like Batwing who "died" in the original Inc run but has been running around the New 52 since the beginning and yet in the new Inc are still talking like he faked his death.  My head hurts....

 

A new "Who's Who" or "History of the DC Universe" might solve a lot of these problems, but DC needs to be willing to stick to whatever new history they establish, even if it means erasing certain  parts of a character's story that were beloved in the Old DCU.  In doing so though, they have to make sure they are aware of the butterfly effect of continuity...like how do we get to Blackest Night if Superman never died & the Original Crisis didn't happen? Or how did Dick Grayson become Batman if Bruce Wayne was never sent into history by Darkseid to essentially create himself?  It can be a sticky situation when you follow the individual story threads back to their origin points...

 

So to wrap up this diatribe, let me say that I am still...one year later...mixed on the New 52.  Obviously it has been successful from a financial standpoint, and creatively it has seen some boons as well, but those story achievements are all ones that could have been done within the confines of the Old DCU.  There is nothing about Swamp Thing or Animal Man that couldn't have been done prior to Flashpoint, the Court of Owls idea certainly existed prior to the reboot, and Aquaman could have gotten the "rebirth" treatment at anytime. 

 

Sure DC might have had some problems melding the Wildstorm world into the DCU in the Old World, but seriously, has ANYTHING ported over from Wildstorm been good?  Stormwatch started with some promise but that floundered...Grifter nope...Voodoo cancelled...I guess we will see what happens with Team 7. 

 

And as far as that continuity stuff goes, let's see if the Zero issues starting this week answer any questions for us.  I am not holding my breath for that...just hoping for a few good yarns is all.  It will be interesting to see where we are with the New 25 in another year with the Trinity War on the horizon as well as the spawning of the Justice League of America title, and this underlying thread that all is not right with the Justice League and the future will go tragically because Supes & WW kissed (which btw, I thought was devoid of feeling).

 

Just like one year ago, I am excited and apprehensive but I think it is the second one winning out...

 

 

 

Batman: The Grant Morrison Odyssey - Phase Four

Well this is going to be an interesting one for me to take one because, unlike the previous blogs where I took everything on in the order it was published, I am going to make an attempt to take this one on in the chronological order it took place....which is a total trip considering it's spread out over three different collections, "RIP", "Final Crisis", and "Time and the Batman".  I said in the previous blog that "RIP" was kind of the close of the first arc of Morrison's larger story, and these stories are the reason I said kind of.  I felt differently after I finished up though, but I'll address that when we're all said and done with this installment.  So first let me get the obligatory links out of the way, and then we shall get this bad boy started!

Part 1: Batman & Son
Part 2: Club of Heroes & Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul
Part 2.1: Devil-Bats & The Bridge to RIP
Part 3: RIP

Just like Bruce, the reader dives right into this story at the point where Bruce's part in "RIP" ended.  A bit of a trip considering that this is issue #701 and that particular story ended with #681.  In-between we had the "Last Rites" story (more on those in a bit) as well as the adventures of Dick Grayson & Damian as Batman & Robin for over a year.  See what I mean about how reading this in chronological-story order can be difficult?

So where we last left Bruce he was apparently consumed in the fiery crash of a helicopter manned by Devil-Bats & Dr. Hurt (who may or may not be Bruce's dad Thomas).  Unseen in this particular crop of that image above is the "Days to Omega: 30" countdown which (given that this was published post-Final Crisis) tells the reader how far in advance of that fateful story these moments are taking place. It's a useful tool considering how much of the question floated around at the time of when RIP & FC took place relative to one another.

The narrative is once again written in the form of a casebook log, intriguing given that we know how this all ends up, leaving a question of just when/how this was written, as well as giving us insight into the mental state of Bruce following the chaos of RIP.  One of the paragraphs also gives us a time stamp, informing us of the duration of the story as Bruce laments "I tried not to think about the last five days--wandering the streets of Gotham, deranged, poisoned, deceived."

The title page also provides some focus with a story dubbed "The Hole In Things" which is just what Dr. Hurt referred to himself as, and the image of the bat also laid over with the gun & pearl necklace that are synonomous with the murder of Bruce's parents.

Bruce emerges from the water sans cape & cowl, but of course he has a spare in his utility belt, he's the goddamn Batman after all!  He's met....in a nice touch...by the hooker from "Batman & Son" that he gave a WayneTech business card to, and she informs him that she has taking a job as a receptionist, that something as simple as Bats remembering her name helped changed her life.

Bruce arrives home, Alfred...black eye and all...waits for him, and we get some more insight into just what happened in "RIP".  Bruce's bout of insanity was due to him miscalculating the dose of Joker Anti-Venom & he confirms that both he & Alfred suspected Jezebel Jet's involvement in the whole scenario.  Still, no rest for the wicked as Bruce takes a sub to the depths of the harbor in search of Hurt or Devil-Bats, and speculates on Hurt's words, "I AM THE HOLE IN THINGS...THE PIECE THAT CAN NEVER FIT."

It was a nagging statement, one that put some spectre of a supernatural nature over Dr. Hurt and his identity.  It was something Bruce couldn't shake, something that haunted his dreams as he recovered from the drugs he'd been dosed with by The Black Glove.  Bruce wanders the halls of his own home as if a stranger, referencing how Hurt found some hidden room apparently behind the picture of Thomas & Martha, a room he promised his parents to never enter, and felt obligated to apologize for as he broke that vow.

Inside the room, scrawled across the walls in...blood maybe...was the name "Thomas" and one word writtten over the top: "Barbatos".  The pages of the casebook here allude to a "sickness at the root of the family tree" or "a worm at the foundations"....and as a long-time Batman reader may remember, the name "Barbatos" initially popped up in Peter Milligan's "Dark Knight, Dark City" story from 1990, a story where a late 18th century cult in Gotham tries to bring the demon Barbathos to life.  It was recently reprinted and looks like this:

Go buy it...great story, especially if you're a Riddler fan. Anyway, it's after the revelation of this hidden room that things get really interesting/confusing/complicated as the events of "RIP: The Missing Chapter" dovetail into the events of "Final Crisis" with Alfred's statement to Bruce that "...there's something I know you'll want to see." With 27 days until Omega, the skies have turned red (DC's surefire sign of a crisis-level event) and Superman contacts Bruce about someone killing a god (in this case Orion of the New Gods).  It's an interesting look into Bruce's thoughts via the casebook notes as he states "Super-people. I've worked so hard to gain their respect, they sometimes forget I'm flesh and blood."

As he prepares to leave, Bruce informs Alfred of Hurt's last words to him....that the "next time you wear (the cape & cowl) will be your last"....as the casebook pages framing the panels question the identity (devil or dad) of Hurt.  Alfred hands him the cowl, discussing the rumors & allegations about the Wayne Family circulated into the press by The Black Glove, promising to sort it all out when Bruce returns...which we all know when this was printed never came to pass.  En route to the scene of the crime, Bruce reflects on the whole in things being everywhere he looks, a "trap I was so sure I'd escaped was locking into place all around me".

With that last panel of #701, and the first page of #702, we crash headfirst into "Final Crisis" and pages begin to overlap.  Let me state that I am not looking to address every detail of "FC" because, quite frankly, one blog isn't big enough for that.  Rather I will look at the events & elements in "FC" and how they pertain to Batman's larger story. It's too much to address the whole ice cube tray/miracle machine stuff on top of Bat-stuff.

So the first page of #702 shares space with pages of FC #1:






























Then pages #15 & 16 (ish) of FC #2 happen as Bats examines the corpse of Orion alongside Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash (Wally West), and Alpha Lantern Krakken. The Alpha insists the "backwater" technology can't possibly determine the cause of Orion's death while Batman insists that it was via gunshot wound. Watching Bats stand up to the GLC's internal affairs division is quite amusing btw...

John Stewart finds the bullet in FC #2, gets attacked, then in the 2nd & 3rd pages of #702 we see Bats investigating the bullet while the casebook blurb reads "...I'm relying on you to hear this".  Based on the page included on the left, it is safe to assume that the "you" in question is Superman.  The only question is what is he supposed to hear?

The next page of #702 showcases Bats essentially solving the question of how Orion died. He details it to Wally-Flash, how a bullet fired through backwards through time took the life of a New God and was embedded in concrete 50 years before its own creation. "Wow"

The next several pages of #702 overlap with FC #2 including these two pages, the left from Batman and the right from FC, interesting to me because it actually feels like each page contains 1/2 of a conversation between Bats & Supes.

The importance of this bullet, the way Bruce ties it into his own parents' murder, to every murder in history, is demonstrative of the way Morrison frequently looks at time...how it all takes place simultaneously, how it's all connected, how it continously births itself, the way this first bullet has birthed others.

He wraps Bruce's entire abduction scene in two different perspectives.  The straightfoward depiction in FC #2 as he realizes that Krakken has been co-opted by Darkseid and that an evil New God is essentially riding piggyback in the Alpha Lantern's body...remember that.  The depiction in #702 is done with similar art but with captions via the casebook, questioning if the attack was when "the box" opened up and how, at the moment when he was sucked into the Boom Tube, was when he "saw the shape of the trap that had been waiting for me since the day I was born".

The next page of #702 mirrors another page in FC #2 as Bruce, now the prisoner of Darksied's minions shouts to "Warn The Justice League! Warn Everyone!" and now the third collection, the "Last Rites" portion of "RIP" enters into the picture.

Now this story technically came out immediately following RIP and as such was an odd venture through an odd world.  Part flashback, part dream, part induced fantasy world, this two part story reads like Morrison finding a way to reconcile every wierd Batman story, and every depiction over the decades, into one.  We see possible outcomes if it had been something besides a bat crashing through the window that fateful night: a mothman or a snakeman for example, or as Alfred speculates, Owlman, Catman, Pigeonman, and others.  This is a jumpy, jumbled overview of the past, tied together by Alfred's frequent moments of second-guessing Bruce's decisions. 

A moment in Professor Milo's lab, memories of Dick joining the team after his parent's death, more speculation on what if Batman & Robin existed in the world of Hamlet, the original Batwoman factored into continuity for the first time since before Crisis, discussing the ever-shifting personality of the Joker, the moment of introduction to Dr. Hurt & the Isolation Experiment...and then we begin to discover that all is not what it seems...

The Lump? Quick Wiki search tells me he was another Jack Kirby creation, a foe of The New God Mister Miracle in the 70's, who Morrison has brought back for the purpose of hiding in Batman's memories as Alfred (hence the second guessing) and allowing Darkseid's minions to essentially stripmine Bat's memories.  It's an cool story convention as it allows Morrison to explore any story in Bat-continuity that he sees fit as it can all be memory.  That's why we see the original Batwoman's life & death, the real first love of Bruce's life Julie Madison, the "death" of Alfred, as well as the various (sometimes contradictory) takes on the bat-villains throughout time.  But there was something about Hurt that shook up the scenario it seems...

Bruce questions the connections between chemicals and crazy people, there's a moment of Adam West/Burt Ward-esque interaction in his memories, Joker returns to crazy, Dick becomes Nightwing, something Alfred says as he discusses a story he wrote about a world without Batman makes Bruce aware that things aren't right.  The path of memory then takes a turn into that world as Thomas Wayne stops Joe Chill from murdering them, Martha dotes on Bruce, he goes off to college, a Joker-esque attack goes down in Gotham, and a cutback to Darkseid's minions tells us just what is going on...

They are farming Batman's memories to fuel an army of Bat-Clones to "fight and die in the name of our Dark Empire"!  What a way to leave off the issue...and jump into the next issue with this...

The night of Damian's conception I suppose; followed by Bruce fighting Ra's, fighting a shark, fighting a werewolf, then getting it on with Talia once more, only to cut back to that "if Batman didn't exist" world that the previous chapter turned into.  Bruce tells Alfred about chemical racketeers killing a circus boy's parents, the joker killer torturing the boy, and Bruce feeling he could have saved him. Elements of truth filter thru The Lump's lies as Selina Kyle plays a role as a women who stole from Dr. Bruce, the well Bruce fell into as a child appears, a dog named Ace, and the odd skeleton in circus clothes...

The discovery of the bones sends The Lump into a frenzy and true memories filter through, taking us on a quick tour of Batman's past...picking up with Bruce meeting Jason Todd, his death, Barbara Gordon's shooting, in the real world the clones are killing themselves, Tim Drake finding out the secret, Bruce figuring out that the dream-Alfred isn't who he seems to be and The Lump responding by playing up horrible memories.  Bane breaking his back, recovery, fighting AzBats, the Earthquake, Hush, Jack Drake's death, culminating in a back-and-forth between Bats & The Lump...

And the revelation that it is the memories from all these traumatic experiences that truly motivates Bruce, and how it is too much for even these clones to handle as they claw their own eyes out.  Bruce realizes the chemicals he kept talking about were his brain's way of telling him he was drugged unconscious, the Lump lays dying in Bruce's mind (potentially taking Bats with him) but it is one final set of memories...the desert experience during 52, Thogal, the discovery of Damian's existence, the events of RIP....those serve as The Lump's fuel as Mokkari further points out how awesome Bruce is by asking the question "What kind of man can turn even his life memories into a weapon?"

The next page ties this story into "Missing Chapters" as this conversation takes place in both books:

I suppose it's more appropriate to say "Missing Chapter" ran into "Last Rites" since the latter was published first. A panel of the following page overlaps with the title of #702 as Bats studies the bullet in the Bat Cave, the Lump goes on a rampage in the Evil Factory which creates another tie to the story in "Missing Chapter". Before that jump I just want to point out how the captions that close out "Last Rites" belong to the true Alfred as he gives a fitting eulogy to Batman.  His comments that "...I can see him now in the grip of implacable forces, innumerable foes. Somewhere without hope..." seem especially poignant considering how we know Bruce ends up after his coming confrontation with Darkseid.

Bringing us back to where we left off in "Missing Chapter" as The Lump is decimating the lap and a semi-coherent Bruce, back to communicating via casebook captions, realizes they have done something to his mind. He express that there are "holes in his awareness and they seem to be getting bigger", and none of this could possibly be written in the moment so the question is still when did Bruce put this all to paper?

 Bruce is finding "the hole in things" everywhere, he finds the God Bullet, loads it into a gun, flashes back to the moment where Gordon asked him why he chose an enemy as old as time back in "Batman & Son", and he enters the chamber of Darkseid, running us back into Final Crisis #7 with a text bridge...

As with the fight against Krakken, the next few pages showcase the same material in different ways. The "FC" perspective is straightforward with dialogue rather than any sort of internal monologue, culminating in the "gotcha" right before the Omega Beams strike Bats down.  The "Missing Chapters" side of things provides us with the casebook excerpts, Bruce's thoughts obviously reflecting on this events from some other point, as he questions how many times this scene had played out, speculates on the "thousand extra layers of meaning" in the myth playing out in front of him.  FYI, Morrison tends to look at comic books as today's form of myth in case you haven't read any of his other work...it's a frequent theme.  Hell it's what the whole of FC seems to be about...

The "gotcha" (which felt odd in "FC") doesn't seem quite so out of place in the "Missing Chapters" take on events as it falls in line with the casebook blurb of that moment.  Batman fires one single shot from the gun using the God Bullet, and it represents the culmination of the very first moments of Morrison's Batman-run and a plot point that was brought up many times over, "Batman doesn't  use guns".  Harley & Joker both pointed it out in reference to the false-Batman who shot Joker, Batman himself points emphatically how he doesn't use guns everytime it's brought up, and here we are...in the closing moments of his life...he makes his once-in-a-lifetime exception and without it Darkseid could not have been beaten.

Those three images sum up the "Death" of Batman moments, but it's not the end of the story thanks to "Missing Chapter".  In the closing pages of this we finally discover (given that this came out over a year after the death pages) just what happened when the Omega Effect struck Batman.

Darkseid references an Ancestor-Box containing a "hyper-adapter" and tells the reader just what Omega Sanction does, creating an unbeatable "life trap" using history...essentially dumping the victim into increasingly terrible realities until they can figure out how to escape them.  The only person shown to have figured it out previously was Mister Miracle in Morrison's "Seven Soldiers"....

Bruce figures out that the trap, the box closing in around him, is time and Darkseid essentially froze him in time and spun centuries around him.  We see Bruce looking at the "Barbatos" wall in Wayne Manor (#701), observing bats flying out of  the well on the Mansion grounds & realizing his parents will die (#673), see the "funeral" from Neil Gaiman's "What Ever Happened To The Caped Crusader?" story that came out post-RIP, and Bruce seems to put things together with talk of "the grave, the well, the cave, the missing portrait"...

There's the image of Willowood Asylum which, after doing some homework, I found out was the place pre-Crisis where Bruce's brother Thomas Wayne Jr was locked up! So is Hurt that Thomas Wayne? Is he Daddy Thomas Wayne? Or something else?  The next lines of text seem to indicate just what he may be as Bruce states that Darkseid's fall created The Hole In Things (which is what Hurt claimed to be).  Does that make Hurt an incarnation of Darkseid or a human body in which he resides like Boss Dark Side or Turpin?  That last panel ties into "Time Masters" somewhere along the line, sending Superman, Rip Hunter, & Green Lantern Jordan on the search for Bruce Wayne through time, and also answers the question of where this last casebook was jotted down.  It was Bat's last act before he lost his memories in the fog of time, a bread crumb left in the past for Superman to find, and it is this final act that brings together "Missing Chapter" & "FC"...

The cave painting is left behind along with the recording of the final casebook entry and Bruce walks out into a world that is obviously prehistoric, given the apperance/death of Anthro that takes place in both #702 & FC #7, and walks straight into the "Return of Bruce Wayne" mini-series.  The thing I really dig is how both tales end on such similar lines..."But the fire burns forever" and "It never ends".

Man this reads completely differently when taken in this chronological order like a lot of the elements from Final Crisis make a lot more sense with the "Missing Chapter" included.  Previously it just seemed like a huge jump from the close of "RIP" and the exploding chopper to Batman doing forensics on the Orion crime scene to getting abducted by Darkseid's minions.  With the gap filled in via this reading, and the exact results of Bats taking the Omega Sanction laid out, the way in which we get to "Return of Bruce" is also more understandable.

Don't get me wrong...there are still a great deal of questions unanswered even with this take on the material, after all it wouldn't be a Morrison book if that wasn't the case.  The primary question is of course how Bruce will return to "life", and of course we still don't have a definitive answer as to the identity of Dr. Hurt, if he's even still alive, nor idea of the overall significance of Barbatos in this larger tale. 

As for non-Bruce questions: what fate will befall Gotham in the absence of a Batman? Who will step up to the mantle? Well we all know Dick Grayson & Damian assume the mantles of Batman & Robin and that is where we will begin our next chapter of this lengthy tour of Morrison's Bat-Verse!

Batman: The Grant Morrison Odyssey - Chapter Three

This is it...or at least the start of it...what is it? The culmination of the 1st chapter of Grant Morrison's multi-year Batman saga.  Why do I say the start of it?  Because as it panned out over time, "Batman: RIP" served as a lead-in to Bruce's role in "Final Crisis"  BUT there was also the "RIP: The Missing Chapters" that came out after "FC" BUT bridged the gap between the end of "RIP", dovetailed directly into the beginning of "FC", then back into a couple issues of "Batman" that detailed some of what happened while Bruce was captured, then back into "FC" then straight into the beginning of "Return of Bruce Wayne".  And this is all broken up between the "RIP", "Time and The Batman", and "Final Crisis" hardcovers.

Yes it is just a tad bit exhausting if you're trying to read it all in some semblance of a chronological order, which is what I am attempting to do, and was easy for my "Batman & Son" HC blog, but made more difficult with "The Black Glove" HC because of how the "Resurrection of Ra's Al Ghul" HC took place in the middle of the two stories contained in that.  Hence why I divided it up into Part 2 and Part 2.1.

So how have I decided to handle this? Well I think I'm just going to address the actual "Batman: RIP" story itself here and not the full contents of the HC, since the latter half takes place DURING "FC", and save that, "FC", and "Time and The Batman" for the NEXT edition of this rather lengthy trip through Morrison's Bat-World!

After that equally lengthy preamble, let's get this mother started!!!

"RIP" essentially started in a one-off book, DC Universe #0, that essentially served as a jumping off point for that, "Final Crisis", and some other major events in the DCU.  As it pertains to Batman & Morrison's larger epic, as you can see from the picture above, it played heavily off the black & red themes that were present in "The Clown At Midnight" prose issue, as well as using the "Red and Black, Life and Death, The Joke and The Punchline" material from that issue as well.  This whole scene is actually very reminiscent of "The Killing Joke" meeting between Bats & Joker, something that didn't really occur to me on my first reading of that issue but hit me later on.

The two other main things from this ish that play into the larger story are the Dead Man's Hand Joker is dealing. Some quick wiki-research taught me that this was allegedly the hand Wild Bill Hickok was dealt before he was gunned down, only it was all black suites.  Joker here is playing off the whole red/black motif with his cards, his way of telling Batman he's going to die I suppose. And the other main point is a line from Bats to The Joker that I think plays heavily into Joker's actions later on in "RIP".  Bats says to him "Someone's hunting me. I can feel it. Someone who thinks they can do YOUR job better than you".  Trying to bait the Joker perhaps? Play on his sense of ownership towards Batman maybe? 

That right there is the first scene the readers sees when beginning "RIP" proper and suffice it to say, besides continuing the red/black theme, it's quite impossible to discern the figures in the Batman & Robin gear. Batman is obviously addressing some question the reader isn't privy to, and won't be for some time as the sequence that starts on the following page introduces us to a hunchback looking man whose first lines of dialogue pertain to him killing a doorman, following by a disembodied voice (save for a hand and eyes) essentially telling the hunchback, addressed as M'sieur Le Bossu, it's cool because it will all be very thoroughly covered up, "We are operators at the highest level", as the eyes say.  The next page:

We get to meet Dr. Hurt, the modern day version, for the very first time, and feast our eyes upon the "Club of Villains" speculated upon in the "Club of Heroes" arc.  Although none are named, save Dr. Hurt, and none have been seen before save El Sombrero, you know that these are the very same villains (Charlie Caligula, Scorpiana, etc) referred to by The Musketeer, The Knight, The Legionary, and the other heroes in that tale. You also know you're in for something bad when Hurt welcomes La Bossu to the "danse macabre" or dance of death. Another quick wiki-check and I get a whole new appreciation for that term in reference to this story:

Artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer.

For reasons that become all too clear in later chapters of "RIP",  this is the perfect description for what The Black Glove is all about.

We take a slight detour into the world of a weird, obviously drugged out guy in a green vulture mask attempting to kidnap a family, and the humor in this scene to me is that the parents are far more freaked out than the kid, especially when he gets a visual on something that causes him to say, "Dude. You are so dead." What is he seeing you may ask? Well it is the highly anticipated, long awaited debut of the brand new Batmobile first eluded to in Morrison's very first issue!!!!

Bad ass huh? Curious how Bruce says it's not how he envisioned it though, also funny that this "test drive" with Robin is his idea of recovery time after dying for 4 minutes. The Batmobile prevents Green Vulture guy from running over an innocuous homeless man who simply says "You have a very kind face".  The dynamic duo heads home to Wayne Manor, lamenting(?) the lack of criminals in Gotham, while Bruce de-cowls as he strolls through the halls of the manor and into the arms of...

Pretty heavy stuff right there, Bruce making out with Jet in half-bat regalia, while the story cuts back to Robin questioning Alfred on the previous women in Bruce's life. It's actually kind of nice to hear references to Silver St. Cloud and Sasha Bordeaux, it's a reminder to me how much the Bat-World as a whole (not just Grant) has generally acknowledged its continuity as one large story.  A few years ago I did a read-thru of every issue of "Batman" & "Detective Comics" from just after the Original Crisis through...well I think it was through "Face the Face"...and I was amazed at how much it all read like one ongoing story that frequently flowed, logically, from one part to the next even with different writers. There are obvious exceptions (like what happened during the 1 Year "post-Infinite Crisis" gap to Harvey Dent & Jim Gordon), but overall it's an impressive feat.

Anywho, Robin also readdresses the whole Thogal issue that keeps popping up lately and expresses his fears to Alfred about the effects that that, the Isolation Chamber experiment, and this 4 Minutes Of Death experience may have had on Bruce's mind. Alfred, ever the cheerleader, but also in this instance I think the voice of Morrison, rallies off the credentials of Batman and why he is so damn good at what he does. Still,  he also sees through Tim's fears and realizes there is something more to this all: Damian.

Tim asks if there was a paternity test, Alfred tells him that Bruce wants to deliver the results himself, leaving Tim to ponder the reality that "The son of Satan is my brother?", doubly amusing given the context of what came before, Issue 666 specifically, where Damian-Bats alluded to his own deal with the devil for the soul of Gotham.

Bruce visits his parents grave with Jezebel, he tells her that he's connecting the dots on something big, and she produces a mystery of her own, a black enveloped letter that reads "The Black Glove extends an invitation to Miss Jezebel Jet and Mister Bruce Wayne. The theme this season: Danse Macabre."

Cut to Arkham Asylum and a black, red, and white scene of utter death as blood stains the walls, dead bodies litter the floor, a news reporter on TV rips his own mouth into a joker-smile, and then we see this...

The last few pages were nothing more than The Joker's bloody interpretation of a Rorschach test as administered by some doctor, but not just any doctor, because as you can see in the last panel when the lights cut out, he informs Joker that he is indeed Le Bossu (in disguise?) extending The Black Glove invitation to The Joker. Then, as the first chapter comes to a close, we get our first clear look (at least in standard art) at the newest incarnation of The Joker, the "Clown at Midnight" or "Thin White Duke of Death" as he has been labeled:

Chapter two starts off with a violent bang down in the sewers of Gotham (Grant likes putting Bats there doesn't he?) as he, somewhat out of control (at least to the point where he doesn't realize he's been stabbed), is taking down a presumed felon while hollering "Who is the Black Glove?" in front of Gordon and the GCPD. Gordon points out that the only Black Glove they can find is references to that movie brought up in the "Club of Heroes" arc.

Back at the cave Bruce, dripping blood all over the place, is trying to connect the dots just as much as the reader is. Is there a connection between the movie & organization of the same name? Are John Mayhew, Dr. Hurt, Mangrove Pierce tied together in anyway? We know the movie is about two innocent lovers corrupted by a group of super-rich gamblers...could that be Jezebel & Bruce? One of the Black Casebooks is missing, Bruce refuses to let Alfred tend to his bleeding shoulder, and all Alfie is trying to do is inform Bruce as to Tim's state of mind regarding Damian.

Over to the villains of the piece as the plot the downfall of Batman, starting with a close-up on the red/black of a roulette wheel, connecting The Black Glove to the idea of gambling. El Sombrero, the death trap master, is perusing blueprints to an unknown building while Dr. Hurt is pontificating on the aims of the Glove...and what is most interesting about that is his claims that "No one knows him better than I do.", and how he refers to Batman as "our boy". It could just be a statement of ownership, giving the Black Glove power over Bats, or it could be something more given the familial claims made later by Hurt.  Also, in this speech, Hurt confirms that the little knife wound Brucie got was loaded with "Librium" that will somehow make him more susceptible to the trigger phrase he implanted back in the Isolation Experiment (a possibility Batman showed concern for after his fight with Devil-Bats). FYI, Librium is a brand name for an anti-anxiety drug frequently used to treat alcoholism but when overdosed can lead to somnolence (difficulty staying awake), mental confusion, hypotension, hypoventilation, impaired motor functions, impaired reflexes, impaired coordination, impaired balance, dizziness, muscle weakness, and even coma.  Not good for Batman...

So back in the cave where Bruce is bringing Jet for the very first time and he begins to explain to her that The Black Glove invitation is merely a trap, starts to tell her (in a somewhat paranoid fashion) about the perceived connections to Mayhem, Dr. Hurt, and how they are "closing in on us". Jet doubts him, she mentions how some people perceive him to be mad....

...and on the side we cut to Jim Gordon busting in on the Mayor's office as news begins to seep out of a sordid Wayne Family history involving Bruce's parents, Alfred, drugs, booze, adultery, Mayhew, Pierce, Marsha Lamarr, and claims that Thomas Wayne faked his death after having Martha murdered.  I never thought of it before, and I didn't really look for it in the earlier HC's, but as I read this I start to wonder about how "above the board" the Mayor of Gotham really is, after all, Gordon stated way back in the beginning of this that the corruption in Gotham goes all the way to the top. I wonder if there's a track record of this for the Mayor?

 Back to the cave where Bruce and Jet continue their talk while someone parachutes out of a helicopter. This conversation can be taken in several ways, one definitively given how the story unfolds, but in the moment it feels like Bruce's girlfriend expressing her fears about him, but simultaneously undermining all of his work, exposing his fears, and truly playing off that "enhanced susceptibility" perhaps.  The shots of the Robin outfits (including a Stephanie Brown memorial which I thought never existed), the various trophies in the cave, Jet mentioning her father over a shot of Thomas Wayne's Bat-Costume in a glass case, it all feels like toys and she caps it all off, by asking, "What if you're not well?"

In that panel above, Bruce responds exactly how I would suspect, by questioning everything, including Jet. Pointing out how The Black Glove would use everything, including Jet & her doubt, against him. He tells her about the meeting with the Joker, the Dead Man's Hand, the "H.A.H.A" the Ace & 8's symbolized, and she spins it into the one possibility that many a fan-boy theorized as this all unfolded, that Bruce Wayne himself is The Black Glove. She turns the rationale into a psychological one, the young boy inside Bruce raging at his life being sacrificed for Batman's quest, and this is probably the most in-depth any author has ever deconstructed Batman/Bruce Wayne!

He attempts to show her the Bat-computer, with screens full of the "Zur en Arrh" tags that have been floating in the background since the beginning of "Batman & Son", but all Bruce sees is static while Jet can see it perfectly.  Then the moment happens, the second she speaks the words on the screen, it all goes to hell...

And if that face on the screen looks familiar, it's because it popped up during the Devil-Bats arc right before "RIP", go ahead and go back at my write-up, I'll wait.....

......

.....

..

Okay good, now that that's out of the way, the Cave is broken into, exposing that The Black Glove obviously knows that Bruce & Batman are one and the same, and we are left with Jet being surrounded by thugs while Alfred, returning from actually watching "The Black Glove" movie ("The bleakest filmgoing experience I've ever had the misfortune to endure..." he says), is assaulted in the mansion as it burns...

Man that cover is trippy....

So we start the next entry into this saga with a really weird collection of images, the Bat-Radia, a multi-colored monster distorting Bats & Robin, one panel depicting the Black Casebook (specifically the "Robin Dies At Dawn" entry) to give us some reference point for these odd images, and then another panel of Batman & the old Batwoman running from alien-like creatures. The next page reveals that it is indeed Tim Drake perusing the Casebook, presumably the volume Bruce said was missing last issue, and it is truly the text within the book that is intriguing.

This is Bruce's way of rationalizing the insane things he witnessed throughout his career, and on a parallel track, Morrison's way of reconciling the crazy stories from the past into continuity. All of this weirdness, these strange experiences, the things Bruce forced himself to experience, they all appear to come from one motivation and it's revealed in this quote, "I don't want to know what goes on in the Joker's head. I have to know". Bats is, in his own fashion, as obsessed with Joker as the clown is with him...

Tim is suddenly set upon by two members of the Club of Villains, unnamed to this point, but they are Pierre Lunaire & Swagman....enemies of The Musketeer & Dark Ranger respectively, and one thing I enjoy about Morrison's take on Tim Drake is how strong he is. In the page right before the two above, Tim's interest is suddenly caught by something off-panel leading to the motorcycle bursting forth, and although it's a bit hard to discern in the panel, Drake actually ramps his bike AT A TREE in order to force Lunaire to release his hold with the garrote!

Back to Gotham City, and Bruce is awoken in an alleyway by a very familiar looking homeless guy who is muttering "...maybe that's how it is on the planet of the little bat fairies.." as he walks into the story. Honor Jackson, as he identifies himself, begins to kick the unconscious body of Bruce until he takes a good look at his face (the one he called kind previously), and recognizes the de-cowled Batman, stating he "never forgets a good turn".  Bruce stumbles to his feet with Honor's help, but flashbacks to what happened between issues start to kick in...

Aside from the red/black motif of memory, the big question this evokes is why Dr. Hurt thinks Bruce should remember him? Is it just because of the Isolation Experiments or is it something more, that familial connection that seems to linger in the air, and is expressly stated later on? Whatever the case, Hurt injects our hero with Crystal Meth & Heroin before dumping him in the streets (and apparently undressing him from costume into street clothes as well).

Nightwing is beset by other Club of Villain members, in his case the minions of Charlie Caligula (The Legionary's arch-foe) & Scorpiana, while Robin takes a food break (wtf???) in the middle of his escape from Kraken to inform Grayson of what's going on and demanding he meet him at Checkpoint 5.  Maybe Tim thought he had escaped pursuit and was hungry...

Back to Bruce as he & Honor make their way through Gotham, stopping for Honor to buy drugs apparently, fending off an assault, while Bruce tries to recover some sense of identity.  He actually uses some detective skills to try and solve his own personal riddle, showcasing that even with no sense of identity these traits are so innate to his being that he can't help being the world's greatest detective. Honor gives him a "treasure", something he refers to as his best friend, but now it's broken but if Bruce fixes it, it will be his best friend too.  Honor tells Bruce he has to make a choice with a clear head... "You can fall...or you can rise".  Sitting on the riverside, with a tear in his eye, Honor tells Bruce he's never done anything to be proud of, but if he knew he could save one life, that would mean something...then he vanishes.

It gets odder as Bruce meets the man Honor told him to, a Lone-Eye Lincoln, only to find out that Honor died yesterday, "...blew a hundred bucks on smack and went out like a king", that $100 obviously being the money Bruce gave him after the near-accident with the Batmobile.  And where does this little meeting take place...

Yup, Park Row/Crime Alley, right where The Wayne's were killed...

Robin hits Checkpoint 5, no Nightwing to be found though because he's been drugged following his off-panel confrontation with Scorpiana, tossed into Arkham Asylum, labeled as Pierrot Lunaire, and is now under the watchful eye of the in-disguise La Bossu.

But what about the other man who was left hanging at the close of the previous issue? What about Alfred? Well we finally get an answer to that question as Dr. Hurt, now adorned in Thomas Wayne's Bat-Costume, toasts "crime and The Black Glove" alongside the rest of the Club of Villains. They have co-opted the Bat Cave as their base, they aim to do the same to Gotham, and now Hurt has taken the identity of Bruce's father (or has he simply reclaimed his own ID?).  Alfred sits, beaten & bound to a chair, forced to listen to all this, as Hurt states that perhaps "When Batman has finally seen the error of his ways, we may allow him to return, broken...perhaps as my butler."

Muttering "Zur en Arrh" to himself, Bruce sews something...his voice changes, he reveals that Honor gave him the Bat-Radia we saw on the first page/first panel of this chapter (but it's a broken radio), and he stand revealed, in another of Grant's throwbacks to old Bat-continuity, as The Batman Of Zur-En-Arrh with Bat-Mite at his side...

The left one is the Tony Daniel Zur-En-Arrh, the middle is the Original from Batman #113, and the right is from the "Brave & The Bold" cartoon which I included just because I thought it was so cool that take made it onto television...

Chapter Four kicks off with utter insanity as Zur-en-Arrh Bats goes nuts with a baseball bat in  hand and Bat-Mite over his shoulder as he prowls Gotham looking for answers. He discovers a bit about Le Bossu, talks to stone gargoyles after beating up thugs masked as ones,  and the gargoyles ramble on about slow-vision, the grids of Gotham, and how "people make the city and the city makes the people". The grids, once Bats is able to see them, show up as a checkerboard, continuing a theme of Morrison's run thus far, or as Bats describes it, "A checkerboard. A blueprint, A machine designed to make Batman". Meanwhile Bat-Might ("Might" is how Bats says it which is interesting) warns Bats of a tracking device that, as it turns out, is lodged in his teeth...and this being Batman, he just rips it out with a knife.

After a brief fight, Bruce hides out inside the ruins of The Majestic theater where Might drops some knowledge on us simple folk, allowing Morrison to bring the original Zur en Arrh story into logical continuity, explaining it as a hallucination induced by a Professor Milo's Gas Weapon. Milo, as it turns out, comes from a story way back in Detective Comics #247 & also appeared in Morrison's "Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth" graphic novel...

Essentially these two pages are the info-dump explaining just wtf is going on with Batman right now, and what this whole Zur-en-Arrh deal is.  Doctor Hurt, discovering the info via the Isolation Experiment, used the words as a trigger phrase to essentially shut off Batman. But being Batman, the most prepared human being in existence, he used that same phrase as a trigger for a back-up identity in the case of a serious psychological attack such as this: the Batman of Zur-en-Arrh.

Robin, still on the run from Swagman, puts in a phone call to Knight  & Squire, explaining the situation to them on voice mail, prompting them to  "...put in a call to the lads" as The Knight phrases it, the lads being the remaining members of The Club of Heroes.

Zur-Bats catches up to King Kraken & Charlie Caligula, prompting Charlie to shout "BATMAN IS DEAD", a moment that flashes me back to the very first page of "RIP" and the "Batman & Robin will never die" proclamation.

Gordon, with red shirted Ensign in tow, hit Wayne Manor, presumably to discuss the accusations against Bruce's family that have surfaced, and I must say that in one panel, Morrison does just enough to give the other cop, Bill, some character so it actually has a minute amount of resonance when his skull gets pierced with arrows on the next page after he finds El Sombrero's calling card.  Meanwhile, in the Batcave, Dr. Hurt...parading around in his own Bat-Costume...lets us all know that Arkham Asylum will be the site of the big showdown, and, while continuing to claim he is Thomas Wayne, accuses Alfred of being Bruce's father.

I really dig this scene because one panel both Morrison's dialogue & Daniel's art show the fierce loyalty Alfred has for the Wayne Family.  The look on his face of rage and disgust equals the content of his words even while Hurt smiles away, drunk on the desire to "...ruin (Bruce) in every way imaginable. Body and soul".  In a nod to history, Hurt also reveals that Robin has been promised to The Joker...and that the breaking of the Bat is scheduled for midnight.  Midnight seems to be a theme of its own in Morrison's Bat-run too. "The Clown At Midnight" story where Joker was fixated on breaking out of Arkham at exactly that time, the first chapter of RIP being titled "Midnight in the House of Hurt", and now breaking Bats at midnight.  There could be others, I would have to go back and investigate.....
...
...
...nope that seems to be it!

Zur-Bats captures Charlie, tortures him it seems, pointing out all his flaws, his desire to be The Joker, and threatening him with the Bat-Radia, still seemingly a broken old transistor radio. But what is interesting about this sequence, the reason I choose to include the page above, is Zur-Bats description of himself in the middle panel, "I am what you get when you take Bruce out of the equation" as Charlie screams "What's that thing behind you!", making me think that he somehow can see Might (even though Might is not drawn here).

The noose tightens as Arkham is prepared, Doctor Dax is definitively revealed as Le Bossu & his minions assault Jeremiah Arkham, the red/black flowers from the Joker prose issue are introduced, the floors are painted red/black, and The Joker stands revealed as being at the center of The Black Glove's plan...their maitre, or master/host. The shit is about to hit the fan...

"The Thin White Duke of Death", a reference to David Bowie & The Joker, is the title of this penultimate chapter of "RIP" and in the first few pages we get a direct correlation between the story of The Black Glove movie & the villains of the piece. It is indeed a group of the richest people gambling on human lives, and in this case, the triumph of over good over evil in the form of Batman. The table is set to look like the roulette wheel at its center, all red & black, surrounded by monitors, and even the wine is red in juxtaposition to the black clothes of those in attendance.

Le Bossu professes his evil inside to The Joker who simply grins, his bullet scar/third eye making it all the more eerie, and as Bossu dons his hunchback mask, Joker's yawn tells the exact tale of how he feels about this whole charade.  Bossu has to put on a mask and change his appearance to be a monster, The Joker just is...

Might reminds Zur-Bats that he can't run at this speed all night, while The Joker greets El Sombrero in his own fashion. A fight breaks out on Arkham grounds between Zur-Bats & the various henchmen, disks labeled red & black fly at the reader, then finally...the doors of Arkham are reached. One problem, Might can't continue the journey, "I'm the last fading echo of the voice of reason, Batman. And reason won't fit through this door."

For some reason that one panel of observation really amuses me...but I guess that is how these sundry rich folk see Batman, while Dr. Hurt continues to espouse big words and hyperbole about if "...the ultimate noble spirit can survive the ultimate ignoble betrayal?", then Sombrero, noose around his neck, crashes the party from above courtesy of The Joker.  Hurt is unfazed by his arrival while Cardinal Maggi (the only BG member named thus far) and crew look terrified.

Back to Wayne Manor as Gordon tromps through the gallery of pictures, with focus on the portraits of Silas & Mordecai Wayne (the latter looking a lot like Bruce BTW), and the Commish makes the acquaintance of Talia Al Ghul & Damian, who she doesn't hesitate to introduce as Batman's son.  Damian's "Mother I want a Batmobile" line made me chuckle...

Sidebar, this whole sequence is yet another moment in Bat-history that makes me question if Jim Gordon is willfully ignorant or just chooses to turn a blind eye towards the Bruce/Bats connection. He is in Bruce Wayne's mansion, which has been booby-trapped all to hell, and just happens to run right into Batman's son & his occasional love interest, and doesn't bat an eye? Really? I tend to think of Gordon as a man who knows the truth in his heart but prefers to ignore the uncomfortable reality of it...

Back to Arkham where The Joker has essentially taken over the situation; his horrid smile on all the monitors as Zur-Bats searches for both he & Jezebel.  Interesting thing to me is how she liberally screams "Bruce" the entire time, in full earshot of The Joker, and on monitors that The Black Glove members are watching, with little care to protecting his identity. It's no surprise The Joker shows little interest as he as often stated that Batman is real, whoever is under the mask is fake, but this may be the first time Joker has so blatantly borne witness to the identity of the man under the cowl.

The Joker taunts Batman the whole way with lines like "the real joke is your stubborn, bone deep conviction that somehow, somewhere, all of this makes sense!", and as Zur-Bats finally comes face-to-face with his tormentor, The Joker utters four words that seem random at the time,  but given the pay-off in a few pages, make sense... "love really is blind".

I like how Joker slits his tongue in twain, it may seem extreme to some, but given the expression "speaking with a forked tongue", it makes sense that he would commit this crazy act while claiming to know who Dr. Hurt is & the reason he hates Batman.  Also, I dig how the whole "Batman shot The Joker" moment from the beginning of this comes back, primarily Zur-Bats insistence that "Batman doesn't use a gun"...

Joker continues to verbally berate Zur-Bats..."You think it all breaks down into symbolism and structures and hints and clues. No, Batman, that's just wikipedia." or "...there was some rabbit hole you could follow me down to understanding?", Le Bossu stumble through the halls of Arkham with his face now disfigured courtesy of The Joker, and it all comes to a head as the red/black petals begin to fall on a confined Jezebel.  Suffice to say Bruce should have taken heed to her first name also meaning a shameless or immoral woman...

Jet's been a part of this all along, playing Bruce from jump street apparently, which is readily obvious in the Batcave dialogue between them.  She was indeed undermining Bruce's confidence in his mission, and the joke that is always the same & is always on Bruce...well I suppose that is how untrustworthy the woman in his life always prove to be.

The last chapter opens with Bruce straight jacketed and locked in a coffin with the the dialogue looking handwritten, as if from the pages of a casebook.  There's also a loop back to The Book of Changes and the specific quote Morrison  had I-Ching drop in the "Resurrection" arc.

Flashback, in red/black/white, to the aftermath of the Thogal experience in Nanda Parbat and Bruce's realization that something was wrong in his mind..."a scar on his consciousness" as he calls it, where something was hidden, forgotten about, the "Zur en Arrh" trigger, and this is the moment where Bruce begins to create his emergency personality, his back-up OS essentially.

The rest of the Club joins the party, saving Robin from the combined assault of Swagman & Pierre Lunaire, Bruce continues his flashback to post-Thogal, and we discover that this assault on him started, at least, as far back as this experience.  The Black Glove stands around the grave while Joker places a bet on the wheel but when Hurt informs him he can't because he's not a member/memberships full, well Joker snaps the neck of the General to open up a spot. Joker's bet: double or nothing that Batman crawls out of the grave, intact, and hunts them all down.  His proof is the broken radio, Bat-Radia, that has been in fact hiding a micro-transmitter that, when activated, overrides Arkham's security and puts it in the control of the Bat-Computer.  Heh, even crazy Zur-Bats was cognizant enough to whip this up...

Flashback to Nanda Parbat, Bruce's revelations (not surprising) that he carries antidotes to poisons he's not immune to, that he is fully prepared to take on this "dark master", and that in Thogal, he "hunted down and killed and ate the last traces of fear and doubt in (his) mind."  And the dialogue/casebook entries that lead to him fighting his way out of the burial...well that is...inspiring...or maybe awe-inspiring is better...

The Joker tells The Black Glove why they will/have failed, and sums up a lot of what they tried to do with Batman in one word: Apophenia.  Looked it up and it is defined as the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.  Is Joker saying that is what a lot of the red/black, checkerboard, flowers patterns may have been in this whole story?

My other particularly favorite moment from this sequence is Joker sliding a joker card into Dr. Hurt's pocket while stating "devil is double is deuce my dear doctor. and joker trumps deuce".  If Dr. Hurt is indeed who he later claims to be, then The Joker could be seeing something...or rather implying something...that the rest of us don't get, at least not yet.

Then the moment comes when Batman,in his true uniform courtesy of BG, finally confronts them, tell Jet that he was onto her all along, ever since she said "I want you to know I understand", and proceeds to lay bare her story. Her "father" was a member of the BG who won Jet & her mother in a bet 20 years prior, Jet applauded as his enemies cut him up & made her the leader, and Bruce is now in possession of the one thing Jet places value in: a letter from her imprisoned mother.  In fact, the classic moment is when he decides to completely undermine her confidence by saying that his love for her was faked, "Love? Congratulate Alfred on the acting lessons!"  A lot of readers took this at face value, and took issue with how illogical the statement seemed given that he professed his feeling about Jet to Alfred even when she wasn't around to witness it, but I believe it was said as one last jab at her heart, the same way in which she took jabs at him in that Bat Cave conversation.

The Club of Heroes, alongside Robin, have stopped the violence in Gotham and reveal that everyone connected to The Black Glove movie is either dead, insane, or missing, and the urban legend surrounding it is that the Devil himself put a curse on it. Damian gets to drive his Batmobile finally, runs Joker off the road with it, "killing" him for like the 3rd time since Morrison took over (which upset a lot of people that he was so handidly dismissed after all this but come on, it's The Joker, it's all set-up for his next appearance), and Batman is in pursuit of Hurt.

Another bullet to the  Bat while lays out the plan, how the BG stemmed the tide of crime in Gotham to undermine Batman's reason for existence, littered "Zur en Arrh" on the walls of the city, drugged him, tried to break his mind, and all of it was done by a man claiming to be Dr. Thomas Wayne, Bruce's father. Bruce should have died alongside Martha he claims but Chill lost his nerve, Thomas' death was faked, he became Hurt, but Bruce refuses to believe.  Rather he thinks Hurt is Mangrove Pierce, a point quickly refuted by Hurt as he states in the last panel above how he skinned him alive & wore his face (as seen in the "Club of Heroes" arc).

He claims to be the hole in things, the enemy that has been there since the beginning, and tells Bruce how has has desecrated the name of the Wayne Family in the media, but a deal (with the devil?) is put on the table: Bruce joins the BG and it will all go away. I think we all know how that gets answered...and Hurt curses Bruce as he attempts to depart..."The next time you wear (the cape & cowl) it will be the last!"

The final entry in the Black Casebook (so described by Bruce himself) ends with him questioning if he "...found the Devil waiting for him, and was that fear in his eyes?" The escape 'copter containing Hurt, Devil-Bats, and Bruce explodes, going down in Gotham Harbor, leaving this somewhat iconic image behind...

But the story isn't over yet...Talia sends her Bat-Ninjas after Jezebel Jet and that ends with her presumed death while we get a "6 months later" page (like the "6 months earlier" blurb that followed the B&R can never die page in part one) where we learned Cardinal Maggi has died while Le Bossu attempts to torture and kill a cop until the bat-signal shines through the window, presumably bringing us back to that first B&R image.

We close our tale with the following image:

Another perspective on that fateful night that birthed Batman is actually a touching conversation between Bruce & his father, and in the light of what Dr. Hurt claimed, it's a nice memory to visit, of course in the black/red/white motif that all the flashbacks in "RIP" took place in.  And is there any connection between "Zur En Arrh" and "Zorro In Arkham"? I feel like there could be...

So in conclusion of this story, I think I enjoy it so much more now than I did initially.  That's not to say I didn't like it when it was originally printed, but picking up on all the disparate plot threads the preceded it, and seeing how they continue on to this day adds a whole new layer to Morrison's Bat-Saga.

In "RIP" we see a meeting of the Jezebel Jet story, the Club of Heroes, the Three Ghosts, Clown at Midnight, 52, and we also have the stage set for a lot of future tales as well.  The true identity of Dr.  Hurt is still unrevealed, will Hurt's proclamation of "next time, last time" come true, and if so who will take up the cowl in Bruce's place?  Is Damian's future indeed that of ish #666? See, in reading this, it is blatantly obvious that Bruce did not die at the end of the story because he was the one penning the final entry into the Black Casebook that provided the framework for this final chapter of "RIP".  Still it was kind of disappointing in the moment because we all expected some epic death scene to close out the story, and to be honest I was a little let down back then as well, but given the material that has come out since, this just makes me excited to reread the continued saga of Batman, as told by Grant Morrison.

And you know that I actually found most irritating about "RIP", and it reflects more on DC Direct actually, is that given the sheer number of new/original characters presented in this story via the Club of Heroes/Villains/Black Glove, not to mention the totally different takes on the standards with Zur-En-Arrh Batman & "Clown At Midnight" Joker, that not one damn action figure was released from "RIP"! I so wanted a Zur-Bats with Bat-Might, to build my own Club of Villains & Heroes, and most importantly, a crazy forked-tongue Joker!!!

Next time: "RIP: The Missing Chapters", "Final Crisis", & "Last Rites"...and reading them in a chronological fashion is going to be a fun experiment!