And the “Bruce Wayne shows up somewhere and then Batman conveniently does, too” was also glossed over in The Scottish Connection. And say, who wrote that book? Hmm.

The only place I’ve seen it used well was in the Sword of Azrael miniseries, of all places, where Bruce-as-Bruce does a bunch of stuff while out of the batsuit because he’s in Switzerland and, as he says, “There’s no one here who knows that Bruce Wayne shouldn’t be able to do this.”

The difference between aligators and crocodiles is all in the face – gators’ snouts are short and stout, while a croc’s face is long and narrow. Basically, pretend you have a big ball of Reptile Chow in your shoe: a crocodile could get his face inside your shoe to eat it, while an aligator could swallow your shoe whole. That make sense?

After the interesting possibilities apparently raised by #655, this the current issue seems like a genuine waste of time, achieving a fair bit of plot progress but zero in the way of thematic movement. And as a result, the superficial eccentricities of Morrison’s recent style — the deliberately stilted dialogue, abrupt and direct fourth wall breaking, and chains of catachresis — are becoming scripting liabilities here. When the new character at the start may as well be carrying a sign labeled “future love interest,” something seems to be going badly wrong. At least Hamed Ali in Animal Man was deliberately constructed as a one-note, plot-function character and then summarily deconstructed into pencil sketches and scrawled dialogue notes. I’m waiting for that to happen with “Jezebel Jet” and whoever this person in a Talia suit is.

Revise said he had almost succeeded in ridding the world of magic, but the Fable influx had reintroduced it. To get rid of magic, he has to kill the Fables.

Thanks for picking up the latest issue of Action Philosophers – I agree it was weak compared to the others, I think mostly because we were locked into whomever was voted the most popular rather than having a theme of our own choosing. Democracy simply doesn’t work.

Someone should neuter me because of my poor spelling!

Agreed.

If not original, at least the name “Ibn al Xu’ffasch” was well researched.

Mostly. I mean calling him “Damien” is such a weird choice really. But it might be for the cleverness of it all and no more, just like the paintings in the background of this issue.

All of this makes me hope desperately that the twist will not be the revelation of Ra’s al Ghul incest with Talia.

Yeah, David, I know what Wagner is doing with these series, but I don’t have to like it! With the very nice way that he has evoked the 1930s and 1940s with these books, I was hoping he would slip in some pre-Year One stuff and say screw you to the higher-ups at DC. Oh well.

By the looks of her kid, she’s been a mom for the last twelve years or so, and she spent most of that time dressed relatively sensibly for a globe-trotting supervillainness.