By: Jason Stoneroad
Someone asked me once who would win in a all out superhero brawl of the DC universe. As quickly as my flabby nicotine stained lips and chewed up sausage of a tongue could form the words in the morose language we call English I responded with “Batman”. Soon after came the long-winded explanation for why and how batman would take down all the assorted heroes like superman (pimp slap with a kryptonite ring), the green lantern (beat him with the yellow pages), aquaman (lunch at long johns silvers) wonder woman (shopping with a platinum card) and the flash (tie his shoelaces together when he isn’t looking) and so on and so forth. It serves as no surprise that when I heard rumblings of DC comics “Batman R.I.P.” running through the current titles, I thought it was full of shit. No one can beat the batman! I then put some thought into it and became curious…
The current writer of the Batman books, Grant Morrison, is a madman. He has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is insane. “How?” He made me believe he could kill batman. The story opens like any other good batman story with batman and robin fighting crime in Gotham city. Over the course of his run on batman Morrison had been planting seeds with a grand conspiracy; the Black Hand. The Black Hand seeks the termination of batman, or in lieu of his life he must join forces with them. What follows is the flawless execution of batman. No, they didn’t break his back this time folks…they did the un-expected, they drove him insane. The Black Hand targeted what they felt was the weak point in batman, Bruce Wayne. What they didn’t expect was that Batman was ready for such an attack with a back-up personality that subsequently takes over for him. The best way to imagine this is to imagine Batman/Bruce Wayne as a tall jack and coke. Now imagine someone reaches into your drink and pulls the sweet smoothing nectar of coke out and leaves you with a straight, bitter double shot of whiskey, that’s batman without Bruce Wayne.
While this book had a lot of potential it had one hell of a problem…you have to go back and read the back issues to get the full scope on what was unfolding. Why does the joker have a scar in the middle of his head? Who’s this chick Bruce is banging? Why is this kid calling himself the son of batman? Who are these guys’ robin calls for help? What’s this about? There is too much that the casual reader has missed out on in the other issues of batman to get the full picture of what’s going on. While the whole run may read flawlessly and smooth, this hardcover collection sitting on the shelf next to the other classic batman stories like “the dark knight returns”, “year one” or “the long Halloween” reads more like a shattered mirror broken than a window into the batman universe.
0 comments:
Post a Comment