please try to answer me back, my address is Izaiah Corbett-3519 Hagan,st Farmville,N.C.27828

thank you
IZAIAH

And Batman... "I’m not going to try to understand it (smarter people than I probably can explain it, and probably will)," sums up my entire opinion on Morrison's run on Batman. I'm clearly too stupid for this, and get nothing out of it, other than asking myself "what the hell is going on here?" once per issue. I'm glad that other people are enjoying it, but I'm with Alfred. Wake me when the hard boiled version comes back.

That's great about your daughter, btw.

there’s an old saying my grandpappy used to tell me - in between him muttering about how the Freemasons are going to take over some day and regretting that time he could have bagged Clara Bow but passed on the opportunity...

Man, I hope those mutterings were real.

They're fantastic.

Terrible, awful, and nigh-incomprehensible.

Ah ha! There’s a reason I’m reading Comics Should Be Good instead of your sister site: Comics Should Have Pirates!

Just wait until I launch my new blog: Good Comics Should Have Pirates.

I'm sure that before the INVASION stuff kicks in full gear (now that B.N.D. is in full swing) the scene might be re-written to be in an upcoming issue of N.A.

~P~
P-TOR

You can dislike Animal Man and Doom Patrol all you want, but he gave us reasons to care about Buddy and Ellen and Kay and Cliff.

I agree there. Even though it was the most egregious with the 4th wall breaking, Animal Man was also very forgiveable because it told a very human story as well. Honestly, the story didn't bother me too much until the very end when Morrison made his presence literal, and I found the way he wrote his own dialogue to be a little self-indulgent and trying too hard to make himself look cool. Up until then I really enjoyed it, especially the Mirror Master scenes.

Lately though he mines the past in order to deliver lengthy clinical dissertations about it and how it relates to comics today. Dan Slott for example mines the past first and foremost to tell a story.

I should have realized Mighty Avengers was written first, what with all the delays. It doesn't change the fact that Carol does the exact same thing in both books, but no one comments on how it's becoming a pattern with her.

T: No, it's just a passing reference to the fact that Alfred likes to read "hard-boiled" prose, so he keeps journals in that style. It's a minor point, and it doesn't intrude too much on the narrative.

I agree with you to a certain point about the metacommentary. It seems you don't like the fourth-wall breaking he used in Animal Man, but I would argue that it was fine because a) he hadn't done it before; and b) it was kind of the point of the book. As for his recent work, it's a "tomato-toMAHto" kind of thing with you and me. You see metacommentary, I see mining the past, which seems to me necessitates some metacommentary, because we've all moved on from those days. Morrison might want to write the kinds of stories we got in the '50s and '60s, but it's difficult because of the way the characters, not to mention the culture, have changed. So he struggles to fit a "Silver Age" sensibility into a modern framework, and it comes off as commentary on the whole thing.

Like you, I miss the Morrison who told great stories about interesting characters. One of my biggest complaints about Morrison in recent years is that he's forgotten how to make us care about the characters. You can dislike Animal Man and Doom Patrol all you want, but he gave us reasons to care about Buddy and Ellen and Kay and Cliff. That's why, of his recent work, We3, though less technically excellent than other stuff, resonates the most with me.

The New Avengers Annual is my last Avengers comic. I have been picking up both Bendis-vengers titles because I like his writing for the most part, but that Annual was absolutely AWFUL. The biggest knock against it is the incomprehensible artwork from Leinil Yu, who I remember being a good artist once. Just like in the last issue of the regular NA comic he drew, he doesn't seem to have any sense of how to stage/frame a fight sequence, resulting in a confusing series of stiffly posed figures all facing different ways. Ugh. Plus, I had no idea what was going on with Dr. Strange until you mentioned the demon possession thing. Is that what that was? I assume that must be some holdover from World War Hulk, but I wouldn't know for sure. And the Spidey status quo also left me wondering as well. Overall, it was just a mess. So, I can skip Secret Invasion now and happily save myself a few bucks the next several months.

I had a passing interest in picking up the Pirate comic, but two things stopped me:

A.) It's ad copy mentions that the main character was based off a former Baywatch star. Um, no...

B.) I've been buying Blue Water's WRATH OF THE TITANS comic. I've also been waiting 4-5 months for the last issue. Until they release it, I'm not buying another thing from the company. (And TITANS isn't even that good either, which is another strike against them...)

I don't get that at all. Seems to me that Morrison is doing the same thing with Batman that he's been doing with Superman over in All Star - Taking the character's entire publishing history (Golden and Silver Ages, Neal Adams/1970s age, 1980s and 1990s ages) and incorporating it into who the modern Batman is.
Kind of reminds me what Alan Moore did with Supreme way back, showing how, yes, a super-fortress and superdog and supersidekicks can still work and we don't have to "pretend" they never happened even though there are decades of comics that say they did.
I like what Morrison is trying to do because it defies what DC did to its line back in the 1980s and 1990s - i.e jettisoning all the "fun" and "history" behind the big three (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman).
I mean c'mon, don't we all go through major changes? Think of what you wore/did in the 1960s or 1970s or 1980s or 1990s? We all have gone through different phases, and although we'd like to forget some, they're part of who we are. It has never made sense to me for a comic company to ask or expect longtime readers to one day wake up and accept "hey, Wonder Woman never founded the JLA" or "hey, Batman was ALWAYS grim n gritty and never fought aliens or had a bat-hound or time-travelled". Morrison is completely turning this trend around, and I give him lots of credit for doing so.

It'd be real funny if he just wasn't there next issue, end of story. Conversely, if it freaked people the fuck out, like Jean's resurrection way back in X-Factor did to the X-Men when they started to discover it, would be great. Continuity of one series can't happen in a vacuum, and I always thought it was very honest of the writers then to have that mess Wolverine up so badly.

Due to Cho's lateness, Mighty Avengers is about 4-6 issues behind New Avengers. The Venom arc was suppossed to pick up right after Spider-Woman stole Skrullectra's body in New Avengers.

Just like the Ultron arc in Mighty was suppossed to end before Annihilation: Conquest #1 came out.

Morrison even takes time to explain why writers (including that kooky one writing All Star Batman) make Bruce use that hard-boiled prose when he narrates. As a comic that advances the grand plot Morrison is working on, this isn’t much. But as a comic that makes us squirm a bit when we consider the essence of Batman, it’s excellent. Many people have revisited Batman’s origins, including Morrison. None, however, have done it with as much flair.

Is this as bad as his hamfisted pseudointellectual in-story dissertation trying to explain all Joker's personality changes over the years? That was pretty awful.

I think the main problem with Morrison these days is that he's stuck in metacommentary. It's a lot more subtle than the blatant 4th wall breaking of Animal Man, but it all mainly comes down to using the stories to make observations about the history of the comic itself and the characters always seem to skirt on a vague awareness of their fictional status. He's stuck in the mindset of writing self-referential comics that intellectually interpret past comics and the result tends to come off clinically analytical and detached sometimes. I miss the JLA and X-Men Grant that used to focus mainly on writing about people.