Cover your eyes, it's another team-up so intellectually invigorating that reading it all the way through at once may cause total euphoria! This time it's me and the world's leading scholar of all things Grant Morrison, Tim Callahan, going deep and subtle into the vast, seamy morass that is Mo's current extended run on the Batman character. The column's up now on Comic Book Resources, and it's a hell of a read. Tim ever-so-eruditely wallops the piss out of a few of my critiques of more recent issues, I keep on insisting that Batman #666 is the greatest thing since Mark Millar invented comic books, we both reveal that we (personally) hate the guy who drew the picture above, and uh, Henry Rollins comes up. I guess it's sort of ironic that what's undoubtedly going to be my most-read writing on comics ever takes a decisively negative approach to Grant Morrison, aka the one guy going who makes me think people who write but don't draw their comics may not be total pointless voids, but as somebody once said, all idols have to die! Go read, and don't come back until you're done!!
5 comments:
I think that last sentence probably reads more like damning with faint praise than you intended it to.
Like you my favourite part of the recent run was when Morrison was working with Quitely. I love 666 and Pyg and Hurt and Damian and The Newness. I too struggled to keep up with some of denser plot mechanics and that did affect my enjoyment. For me the most interesting thing about Batman and Robin was definitely not the Return of Bruce Wayne, figuratively or literally. I wanted lots of never-look-back novelty, much more Damian, much more Dick (fnark), more crazy as fuck villains, more neon Gotham, more electric skies, more flying Batmobiles. I was happy to do without the shuddering tones and plot of RIP and its lead in, even though I loved it, I wanted something smoother this time around but no less strange (and we got that in the first arc). I wasn’t a huge fan of RoBW, and was especially underwhelmed by those issues afflicted by sub-standard art.
But
I adored the close. That shit, that wasn’t like reading anyone else’s superhero comics, and in my book it’s nonsense to suggest otherwise. Nobody else writes comics that look remotely like the content (and juxtaposition) of B&R16 and RoBW6. If you ask me RoBW6 was the cleverest superhero ish I’ve read since All Star Superman, at least as good as any idea bomb driven superhero issue Morrison has ever written and better than most. Unlike you I couldn’t give two fucks whether that stuff’s accessible to the layman (also, was Final Crisis? Really? Or is just that you preferred it?) and I’m really not sure I buy your argument about accessibility being inextricably linked to notions of being true to the form. You really need to unpack that stuff, I’m afraid, because while I can see what you might be getting at it strikes me as pretty woolly.
Yeah, ROBW 6 definitely had its moments, but I thought the art just torpedoed it. Like I think I said in the article, it was more a case of appreciation than enjoyment. B&R 16 also came off as less than it could have (though it was a solid issue) because of the art. All the marketing mechanics of corporate comics that demanded the books be out by a certain time ended up making them so much less than they could've been.
I guess when I think Morrison = accessible it's the stuff he was doing in All Star Superman and yeah, Final Crisis, where even though there were plenty of advanced ideas being thrown around they would all be presented in toto, you'd always get a (usually really fun) word balloon that managed to reduce what was going on to a little soundbite. In these comics that approach disappears and you're just expected to have read and absorbed everything to be able to decipher the stuff everybody's hinting around. Given the abysmal, sometimes indecipherable storytelling of ROBW and some of B&R, plus the fact that the books were so late, I just didn't remember everything I needed to. And, also because of those things, I never felt like getting the books out again to reread them.
Morrison used to take a more modular approach to plotting, where every issue was its own thing, complete in and of itself (yah, even Final Crisis) -- this Batman junk just felt like your typical chopped-up serialized hero story, and if you're doing it that way you just CAN'T be as self-referential as he was without turning off some people (namely me) and turning others away (namely anyone who hasn't been with the book for over a year). As opposed to All Star Superman or the Filth, where you could come in at like issue 11 and get it all and enjoy it all.
I strongly suspect that Morrison will get back to the modular approach. It’s served him well for years, he seems to enjoy writing comics that way, and Multiversity sounds like it will lend itself to that kind of storytelling (à la Seven Soldiers). I love the modular approach and I like how it respects the monthly format, but I think there are other ways of respecting that experience: dense plot, a smattering of tasty ideas, strong atmosphere, paying off dramatic questions in a satisfying way, a general chunkiness… all of which Morrison deployed during the close of B&R in particular. I can see why he chose drop the modularity (although I don’t think he’s ever dropped it entirely, RoBW certainly had modular elements) during the close of his mega-arc as there was so much that needed re-addressing - throwing modularity into the mix might well have felt like a bridge too far. You could argue that he should’ve never got himself in a situation that demanded so much continuity referencing, but it seems to me that he’s been intending something of that nature for a very long time, perhaps in some shape or form since 52, and that maybe he’s earned it. Personally I was thrilled at how it all came together, if less thrilled by some of the journey.
The art, yeah, the art is a problem, although for me RoBW6 manages to reach those transcendental, writing over image heights that you’ve referred to. There really are some exceptionally good ideas in there. Would it have been better if JHW3 or Quitely or Irving or Stewart had drawn it, fuck yeah, am I disappointed that they didn’t, yup very, but I think the pics serve the story well enough to allow the ideas to shine through, and that’s all I need if not all I desire.
Not having FC in front of me I can’t vouch for whether it’s particularly modular or not, I don’t remember it being especially so. What I certain of is that it’s tough for many readers to get their head around in that chunks of its plot are farmed out to Superman Beyond. I say this as a big fan of the mini, but if accessibility is a big issue for you, then I think it’s worth considering that there are other ways for books to be inaccessible beyond chopped up plot, missing plot details being a case in point.
I have less of a problem with the inaccessibility that springs from FC's interaction with its spin-offs because the nature of the ideas that were brought into the book from them were so high-concept. Like, even if you didn't read Superman Beyond there was so much random stuff popping out of nowhere in that comic that in issue 7 you could just read it and go "oh, evil space vampire? Ok!" the same way you do with the Nazi Supergirl falling out of the sky and the Green Lantern Corps girl being possessed by Granny Goodness and Al Sharpton hanging around with Darkseid. There was no mystery to any it, just random craziness thrown in for entertainment.
My big problem with Batman was the way the narrative invited -- sometimes demanded -- you to shuffle around in old, diffuse plot points. To use not your imagination or your intellect, but your knowledge of previous issues. It was so much duller that way for me.
Right yeah, I get you. That was a weakness, for sure.
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