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I don’t know Brian, each time that I tried to enter the Morrison’s Batman, I was just disapointed & felt it was a bad reading experience , I tried several times from the 1rst issues then the 1rst RIP then through Rip & now Batman 681 & still don’t think this is interresting reading.

All the inevitables you pointed aren’t even at the level of some lame 90′s comics (maybe i’m harsh, sorry not the purpose) & it felt that this issue only served as introduction to Battle for the cowl, Nightwing last shot (I try not to spoil it), Damian appearance in this issue as well as Thalia’s…

Never impressed by Morrison’s writing & still isn’t.

I wonder about the critics if it was another name instead of Morrison’s

Funny thing, I googled batman 681 review & Comic Should Be Good was hte 1rst link.

It doesn’t CURE cancer?!?

Pulp it!

I’d still say that the Black Glove is Didiot.

Personally, I’ve found Morrison’s Batman run to be neither good no bad, just sadly mediocre. And while, a bit like Brian, I’ve found there to be many “Hell, Yeah!” moments, there have been at least as many, “resigned groan,” moments.

But, that said, this is Morrison, so I’m going to hit the attic, break open the long-boxes, curse myself for the hundredth time for thinking arranging them by month rather than series was a good idea, and reread the run right from the start.

Fair point though that judged on it’s own merits # 681 is a good issue.

Brian,

Well said about the art. If this had been drawn by an artist who could have added the requisite mood and stylistic touches – I’ve been imagining J.H. Williams III as well – RIP could have been elevated from a merely very good and ambitious Batman story to a truly innovative and redefining work. Unfortunately Tony Daniel, when not showing the occasional techncial deficiencies, ADDS nothing to the book so it just has the veneer of being a “regular” Batman story though one that was oversold with the hype of being the death of Batman.

While I agree with a lot of what Brian says here, I would agree even more if this had been billed as “Batman MIA” rather than “Batman RIP,” or at least if the word “conclusion” wasn’t on the cover and rather the whole thing was more clearly pointed toward “To Be Continued in Final Crisis.”

Also the lack of resolution on Simon Hurt was, I thought, painful for readers and I can’t see how it gets resolved in FC.

I love Grant’s work, don’t get me wrong. But I did feel disappointed in this issue.

I think through my lack of attention to detail i’ve totally missed this whole Hurt being the devil thing that everybody keeps talking about. Am I meant to have read the Bible to understand allusions to this?

@ninjawookie

If you re-read the exchange between Batman and Dr. Hurt’s encounter, Dr. Hurt “reveals” he’s the Devil there. Whether you take it as him being literal or just an insane actor is up to you. However I think having Anti-Christ Batman shown as his lackey strongly suggests Dr. Hurt is the actual Devil.

At first I thought Batman’s deduction was the big reveal, that Hurt was just a disgruntled actor from The Black Glove. But I suppose if you take Morrison’s run on a whole, it makes sense for the Devil to be the “big bad” of RIP.

No, again, as I argue below, Hurt’s just some jerk named Mangrove Pierce. The devil is the psychic trauma of being Batman, as suggested by that last page where Thomas Wayne remarks that a masked vigilante would belong in Arkham.

It’s the only way to make the earlier “devil” stuff with Damien make sense: he’s the devil’s son, because he’s the son of Batman who belongs entirely to the Batman side of that life. The devil who created the three ghosts of Batman is then not Simon Hurt/Mangrove Pierce, but the necessary trauma for becoming even a functional surrogate Batman.

The devil is Batman’s own mental issues: they’re the weapon Hurt uses to try and break him and they’re practically embodied by the Thomas Wayne “First Batman” costume that Hurt dons when he starts ranting about being the devil.

As far as Hurt being the Devil…

Forget what he says to Batman. People will lie, just to make themselves look better (or, in this case, badder) than what they may actually be. But go back and read the page where the Joker is addressing Hurt. “devil is double is deuce, my dear doctor,” he says, “and joker trumps deuce” The Joker knows exactly who Hurt is, and is letting Hurt know in his roundabout way. This is further advanced when he gives a slight musical quote: “pleased to meet you,” which is, of course, from the Stones’ Sympathy For the Devil.

But the thing I like the most about that exchange is how the Joker goes on to tell him that, no matter how much the Joker likes Hurt’s/the Devil’s work, he is in no way serving him.

Which, when you think about it, makes the Joker all that much scarier.

At first I thought Batman’s deduction was the big reveal, that Hurt was just a disgruntled actor from The Black Glove. But I suppose if you take Morrison’s run on a whole, it makes sense for the Devil to be the “big bad” of RIP.

I think you’re all looking in the wrong place for the big reveal, demanding that the mess of Bruce’s life be attributable to some ultimate villain. But in this very issue, we see the problem with that supposition: Batman himself thinks of it, but for one moment realizes:

“Could I have been, even unconsciously, my own worst enemy? Beyond the visions, I found something, in the dark, inside. A shape of something I can’t even say or describe. A scar on my consciousness. As if something had been hidden there. Tattooed. Scabbed into place and long forgotten, in some ultimate black cellar where my memories just…run out.

“I found a hole in my mind, waiting to open up and swallow me whole.

“Anyway, I’ve read how traumatized children sometimes develop cover personalities to protect themselves from painful repressed memories…and something occurred to me [...]”

Now, Batman (and, it seems, all of you here) go on to assume that some outside foe has attacked Bruce’s mind here, and that he’s simply prepping for the Black Glove and Dr. Hurt’s triggers in this scene.

But think about what Bruce has described: a traumatized child, a cover personality, a black pit of memory….that’s Batman’s freaking origin! The scar isn’t Hurt’s doing, it’s Bruce’s. Hurt’s simply exploiting it, and Hurt himself could be just about anyone with a little bit of insight and access (aside from his name, hinting at the real problem: Bruce’s, well, hurt).

That’s the point of the arc: Bruce hasn’t been pushed to the brink of destruction by some omnipotent fantasy villain called “the Black Glve,” let alone by the devil himself; he’s been pushed there ecause he put imself there in order to become Batman.

Again, reread the LAST PAGE of the issue and ask yourself why that particular bit of dialogue — “The sad thing is they’d probably throw someone like Zorro in Arkham” — is the end of the story, a story in which Batman has lost his mind four or five different ways before managing to pull himself back together for the win. And then notice that this flashback, like the others, is colored in red and black…and now you’re on the trolley, chum!

Zorro In Arkham = “Zurrenarrh”

Of course you are entitled to your opinion, but I really thought 681 was a poorly narrated incoherent mish-mash. It really has heavy structural problems from the narrating point. But to be fair, his whole run in the title has been like that. Remember the mess that was “The resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul”? (And I’m notjust talking about the poorly editorial coordination, because that’s not his fault. I’m talking specefically the issues written by him). It is as if Morrison could no longer put into paper his bigger-than-life meta-stories, he can’t execute his ideas, or maybe he can’t express to the pencillers what he really wants. We are supposed to fill a lot of gaps and plot holes within each story ¿What happened between the ending of 680 and the beginning of 681? ¿Where did the zurr en arrh personality went between issues? ¿If he really knew the real motivations of Jezebel, why did he continue with the ruse? (a lot of people died, you now?). We can imagine answers (it’s like fans are Batman and Morrison is the Joker, Apophenia indeed), but I just think is sloppy and messy writing, and we aren’ t talking of a newbie here, we are talking Morrison, someone who has what? 20 years plotting and writing stories of fictional universes? Latelly the only thing he delivers are unnecesarily complicated plots that would need 100 of pages with 12-14 of vignettes to be fully comprehensible in a 4 or 5 vigenettes per page, 24 pages-of-story format. He spends, He can’t appropiately disperse information through the panels, so he uses the final pages as dialogue filled of long exposition blocks. It’s like “Uuh, I only have three more pages and I forgot I had all this unanswered questions… Meh, I can stretch that three pages, so it fits the explanations”.It’s the same with Final Crisis and Superman Beyond (Beyond comprehension, that is). His dialogs, and this is my opinon of course, also sounds so unrealistic lately (everything that comes out of Damian’s mouth for example, who sounds like what morrison thinks a brat should sound. Superboy-prime and him both sound similar, but the first one’s voice is a lot more authentic), and many times I have to re-read the thing so I can understand what he or she tried to say (for example, when Jezebel talks about how rich is the Black glove “this high… etc”, I didn’t get was she was saying/doing). Finally, and if you want, you could argue is fanboy ranting, but I think Grant as a bit of a hypocrite. He tries to sell us this idea of him being the sworn enemy of a streamlined squeaky clean continuity, i.e: to him every story from 1939 to today has really happened (in the same continuity, that is). That’s a perfectly valid point, but then Why the hell did he conveniently choose to ignore the events of Year two (I really don’t get what is DC’s problem with the story, it is always obviated, from Zero Hour to today. Granted, it’s not the best Batman story, but is definitely not the worst )? He completely reconfigured the fate of Joe Chill, and actually made Batman the indirect author of his demise in the process (he actually enabled him to commit suicide). I know everybody has his own ideal interpretation of Batman and all, more or less violent, sane or crazy, etc etc, but to me at least, He would never do that. I really think Batman is Batman not for a personal vendetta, but because he genuinely does not want a world when another kid has to endure what he endured. Batman does not kill, period, he is very adamant in that respect (again, perceptions, and that is mine). But I digress, the point I tried to prove is that Grant uses his despised continuity when it’s convenient for him (it’s the same with animal man, he just chose to ignore everything that happened after his run). Well, sorry for such a long thread, but I’m really mad at Morrison right now. I used to love his work, now I just want him out of the bat-titles and of DC Comics.

681 by itself is a sold comic. The problem is that reading the comic illustrates the lack of foreshadowing and structure that mostly should have been in the rest of the arc.

Batman was playing Jezebel? Good, but Morrison should have given us some indication of this possibility other than just the flatness of the Jezebel character.

The Batmen of all Nations were coming to help? That’s cool, but there should have been some indication, since Batman doesn’t usually call for their help even if the Black Glove organization employs mostly League of Villain characters (and why ask them for help and not say, Superman, who could actually show up in time if things went terribly wrong.)

I mean, Batman got lucky that his foes underestimated him and were strictly and blindly adhering to certain protocol. For example, if he gets buried under 1600 pounds of dirt rather than 600 pounds of dirt, he likely loses. If they lobotomize or shoot him while he’s unconscious, he definitely loses.

Why do people keep asking who the Black Glove is? Morrison tells you plain as day in 681. It’s that cardinal, the general, the electronics geek who fixes the Bat-Radia, Dr. Hurt, and the Arab dude. There can only be 5 of them, as Hurt tells the Joker; and then Joker kills the General so that he can take his spot. Am I missing something? Their identity is not exactly a secret.

I’m with Omar. RIP, when considered apart from the creatively bankrupt marketing machine, has been a fascinating and complex exploration of Batman’s whole ethos. The revelation that the ‘real’ Black Glove is Bruce’s inner demons made flesh is a great and unexpected conclusion. It seems a lot of commentators on this story, and not just here on CSBG, have taken the ‘Devil’ thing to be literally the religious, Christian Devil, whereas I don’t think that’s the intention at all. Hurt could be (probably is?) actually Mangrove Pierce, but thats almost immaterial to the meaning and the power of the story. On one hand, his ‘devil’ rant is just that, ravings of a madman; on the other it so encapsulates Batman’s fears and weaknesses, the ‘devils’ inside us all. He represents Batman’s inner conflicts, his entire reason for being, and the ultimate futility of his grim quest for vengeance in a way that no conventional villain EVER has.
The Black Glove almost beat Batman, not because of the nature of his/their ‘grand plan’, but because of Batman himself, his fractured psyche and the crisis of self he’s been going through since Morrison started all of this in 52. This was so much better than ‘It was Alfred’ for 101 reasons.
As for the art, almost all of Morrison’s defining super-hero runs have had art that is serviceable at best and mediocre at worst. Richard Case on Doom Patrol, Chas Troug on Animal Man, even Howard Porter on JLA. Its great to get J.H. Williams or J.G. Jones now and again, but that certainly hasn’t been the art standard for most of Morrison’s most creatively succesful stuff. In some ways, its good to have an artist that isn’t too flashy, it makes the story dictate the art and come to the forefront in a way that you may not get with, say, Jim Lee or even the design heavy stuff of J.H. Williams.
I’ve loved Morrison’s Batman run in a way that I haven’t loved a run of comics in literally decades. I left the house early this morning specifically to make sure I got a copy of 681 as soon as it hit the shelves (we get comics on a Thursday in the UK). I can’t think of a comic I’ve done that for before. Ever. Even when I was a kid. Here’s desperately hoping that Morrison returns after the marketing machine has eaten up 6 months (or more) of the title with Batle For The Cowl etc. etc. etc.

is seen by many as a disappointment not because of the comic itself, but because of all the hype and the discussions OUTSIDE the comic that pushed the fact that this issue was going to be huge, it was going to be climactic, it was going to be the most amazing thing ever, to the point where it would have been a disappointment if #681 had “only” cured cancer.

I don’t think the comic itself is innocent in that regard. Even without the outside discussions and hype, just reading the run in and of itself felt like it was obviously building to something huge and climactic, even if one didn’t read all the hype surrounding it.

Me am stupid. I think sohei’s exactly right – the Black Glove is comprised of five “fingers,” not an individual. Like the Joker’s whole “red and black” business, it’s misdirection of a sort. With all the speculation about the Black Glove being Alfred, or Tim, or Beelzebub, or whomever, the plain explanation gets lost in the shuffle!

IYou know? sometimes I think we elevate Morrison, or Miller or Byrne or whoever to a category of god, because, let’s face it, they deserve praise for the work they’ve done in the past. We convince ourselves all they deliver is gold, but when we read something written by these “sacred cows” that really stinks (or better put, we don’t like), we tried to convince ourselves it was indeed gold. Many, many people were disappointed with the all star batman, but because it was Miller’s it had to be good, it had to have a reason why batman acted the way he acted, it had to have a twist, it just couldn’t be poorly executed. Same here, it’s cryptic because he is Morrison, he’s omniscient, he uses drugs so he can communicates with a jaguar god. I have my own interpretation of who Dr. Hurt is, everyone who read it has one. But that is besides the point. If the story (RIP, that is) would’ve actually been good and well constructed (again, my opinion) instead of inconsistent, sloppy, all over the place and with more plot holes than a swiss cheese, the identity of Hurt would’ve been regarding as the story that was intended to be (the death of captain america comes to mind, it worked even without a captain america afterwards for a long time until bucky took the mantle). Sure, it would’ve dissident voices, but would’ve been the least.

“Never impressed by Morrison’s writing & still isn’t.”

You’re not too impressive, yourself.

While I buy the “Hurt is the devil” line (not in a Lucifer/Christian sense, but as a figure like Neron, even Darkseid. I bet the line “I curse this cowl and cape, next time you wear it will be the last” refers to Final Crisis), at the end of the day it doesn’t matter very much if Hurt is the devil literally or in a allegorical sense. It’s like the ending of The Prisoner> it doesn’t matter if 6 really is 1, or just in a symbolic way.

Brian W:
Dude, ever heard of a paragraph? That rambling rant was almost literally painful to the eyes to read as a single long glob of text.

“While I buy the “Hurt is the devil” line (not in a Lucifer/Christian sense, but as a figure like Neron, even Darkseid. I bet the line “I curse this cowl and cape, next time you wear it will be the last” refers to Final Crisis), at the end of the day it doesn’t matter very much if Hurt is the devil literally or in a allegorical sense. It’s like the ending of The Prisoner> it doesn’t matter if 6 really is 1, or just in a symbolic way.”

Who is the Black Glove?

You are Number Six.

Sorry, couldn’t resist!

This is the most reasonable and accurate review I’ve read thus far. I agree that the hype, event branding and personal opinions of Morrison turned the general impression of what is a pretty good conclusion into a huge disappointment.

Look at what’s playing at the cinema on the last page. The MASK of Zorro. So the Waynes only died 10 years ago?

Paragraph or not, he has a point, morrison’s work is seriously and abismally going downhill.

The word is “abysmal”, and that’s a wildly silly, drama-queen style overstatement.
It’s mildly disappointing in a “this didn’t totally blow me away, but would have been fine with anyone else’s name on it” kind of way, no worse than that.

Just want to reiterate that Omar and Sohei are right on the money. Don’t know why this issue confused people. It was very clear…

Can’t wait for the inevitable Morrison interview on this.

Brian, if Morrison’s run had ended at Riot at Xavier’s I wouldn’t have been upset.

“…While I buy the “Hurt is the devil” line…”

That instantly made me think “Hurt’s like The Devil” (Hurts like The Devil) – Which brings us back to Bruce’s inner turmoil… I wouldn’t put it past Grant Morrison to give us a meta-metapun like that.

Zorro In Arkham = “Zurrenarrh”

Yeah, I forgot to mention that! That was awesome by Morrison.

A few of the posts here under different names seem to be written by one person. Sockpuppetry?

““Never impressed by Morrison’s writing & still isn’t.”

Oh lord. It’s high time we made the interwebs invite-only.

“Zorro in Arkham!” BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, that is effing clever. XD

Agreed about the Black Glove – it’s not a single person, it’s the group.

I’d just like to point out that for a comic that may or may not have failed to deliver upon its promises and whether or not Morrison is as good as we think he is, there seems to be an awful lot of speculation and debate about it going on here and elsewhere, which I always see as a sign of at least a decent effort.

When I read this the first time – I got it was the big D.

I read it again and picked all of the references and I was in awe and very happy to read it more than once to “get it”

I think the is essentially what the bid D is supposed to do put humans under situations by chaging the rules of the game to corrupt.

Batman is his / her / it biggest failure and that is why it goes after him as Batman has been against it the whole time and still comes up better for it. If D was in it from the begining to try and turn he has failed and that is why he had fear in his face.

The audacity of batman to cope with what was put in front of him and come on top again and again is what really did it for D and made him fear in the ability of man to overcome the greatest of sturggles.

Grant Morrison – Thanks you for a great comic book run – I really enjoyed it.

Agent_Torpor
“Oh lord. It’s high time we made the interwebs invite-only”

What is that supposed to be???

Had to scroll down real fast so as not to read the rest of the comments, as I still have not read this and won’t be able to for another three weeks…
Couldn’t keep away from reading your review, as I hoped you wouldn’t get too spoiler-y. And Lord be praised, you didn’t. Thank you for giving me something to look forward to, and not ruining it!

I will give only two links:

http://www.upi.com/Entertainment_N ews/2008/11/27/Batman_not_killed_off _in_comic/UPI-16991227843978/

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/ arts/27arts-ISBATMANDEST_BRF.html?_r=1&ref=arts

This news shows that DC Comics are a band of pathetic hipocrits who can’t make serious, shockings decisions in their universe (Marvel, however, also).

Batman isn’t dead.
He will be back, Like Arnie.

Nevertheless, we will need to see what happens in next issue of Final Crisis.

Oh, and the connection between RIP and Final Crisis will be the next two issues of Batman.

If we can believe what Morrison said and ads,

So I don’t know if anyone else has put this out there, or has something to debunk this theory, but this is my take on the whole R.I.P. Final Crisis connection. My thought is that all of RIP is what is happening to Batman after he is trapped in that container by the forces from Apokolips. The talk in Crisis about needing to break a noble spirit to fully resurrect one of their new gods, and what not. My theory is that they were trying to turn Batman into one of them they way they did with Turpin, and everything that occurs throughout RIP is what they are subjecting him to. The discussion about wanting him to submit and be the slave of the black glove and corrupt and what not was a discussion to that effect. Might be way out there but I wouldn’t necessarily put something ridiculous like that past Morrison.

Any thoughts?

[...] Batman #681 Review [...]

My thought is that all of RIP is what is happening to Batman after he is trapped in that container by the forces from Apokolips.

Except that the current runs of Nightwing and Robin would then also have to take place inside of Batman’s head. That seems unlikely.

Independent of my own assessment of 681, I’m wondering how valid people find the “it’s all the fault of the hype” excuse. In my opinion, Morrison knows that he’s writing in a serialized medium in the age of the internet, so he shouldn’t say things like “this will be the biggest thing to happen in 70 years” (I know it’s not an exact quote, but he did say something along those lines) if he’s not going to have a truly stunning conclusion (and in order to be “stunning,” I think the conclusion would need to be crystal clear; you can have a thought provoking conclusion that isn’t “stunning,” but at no point in 681 did I feel compelled to say “Oh. My. God.” or anything like it).

In this case, I have little doubt that editorial may have interfered with his initial plans, but again, that’s the nature of the medium. You can’t kill Batman. You can’t kill Bruce Wayne. It’s just never going to happen.

Revealing beyond a shadow of a doubt that Thomas Hurt was the Devil may have been stunning. Likewise, revealing beyond a shadow of a doubt that Batman was the Black Glove may have been stunning. But heavily implying either angle isn’t.

I’m getting away from my point, so here it is: You can’t say “it’s a good issue independent of the hype,” because the issue doesn’t exist independent of the hype.

Readers don’t read in a vacuum, and writers don’t write in a vacuum. This isn’t 1950, and we’re not New Critics. The hype is an essential part of the issue. Morrison contributed to it in interviews, and he contributed to it in the way he titled and structured the story, and he contributed to it by working in a serialized medium that relies on word of mouth spreading from month to month to build up steam for a story.

You can’t say “it’s a good issue independent of the hype,” because the issue doesn’t exist independent of the hype.

Sure I can.

I’ll certainly allow that the book should work as a serial work, so if it did not work as an individual issue, THAT would be a fair critique. But it did. It worked as an individual issue. It worked as the end of an arc. It worked as the middle part of a broad narrative.

The only thing it did not work as was a dramatic climax with clear changes, and the only reason we had to judge it like that was by interviews. So knock Didio, Morrison, etc. for being misleading in their interviews. Fine by me.

But don’t knock the work for “only” being a good comic book.

Hype about a book ≠ The book itself.

Brian: I’m not suggesting that the hype equals the comic. I’m suggesting that, unless we start believing in Platonic Forms, there is no objective standard for measuring how “good” a comic book is. The comic exists within a certain cultural context that informs our understandings of value. Plot, character development, dialogue, pace, etc. are only given value by us to the extent that we’ve found some common ground on what we find satisfying in a story. And what we find satisfying is predominantly based on what we’ve encountered before in our cultures.

Therefore, if a preponderance of people are disappointed because they had been led to believe that the comic would be more decisive (both by interviews and by elements of the text itself), then that disappointment is a valid response to the extent that the comic is a cultural object. It’s not outside information “clouding our judgment,” because no judgment is free from outside influence. The fact that a lot of us appreciate the story’s symmetry stems from outside influence because symmetry has no inherit artistic value.

For what it’s worth, I think 681 is a great comic that provides a thoughtful commentary on the difficulty of writing a dramatic Batman story because Batman is so well prepared for everything that the only people who could possibly pose a threat to him are a) the Devil and b) himself. I mean, at the point where we accept that Batman can reformat himself like a computer (and we do, because it’s awesome), then we have to accept that there’s not much left to challenge him.

I gotcha, Andrew, sorry if my response seemed terse!

In any event, I really try as hard as I can to look at comics as objectively as I can, and the only time I bring in subjective stuff is when I feel bad for creators who I think are getting hurt by outside factors (like Geoff Johns with Infinite Crisis #7. I really can’t blame that guy for how much of a mess that issue was, as that had editorial interference and rushed deadlines written all over it – and as we learned later due to all the corrections they made with that issue, they really did rush that book).

The first time I really noticed that the hype made the actual comic impossible to be received well was the end of Identity Crisis. There were crazy pre-crisis earth-1 Jason Todd trained by Deathstroke theories going around that the comic could never live up to.

Andrew makes a good point in there, though- as much as I loved this issue, it wasn’t terribly bright for Morrison to throw that “most shocking thing in 70 years” hype out there. I mean, unless he changed the ending on the fly, he must have known what he had in store wasn’t all that shocking (of course, he pretty much gave away the devil angle in the same interview, so I guess he just found that idea more shocking than the rest of us).

Still a great, great issue (if anything, I personally prefer the ambiguity to a more traditional ending- it’s so much more Morrisonian), but I don’t agree that delivering what you promised in interview after interview is quite the same as curing cancer.

Just to be a bit more positive after that last comment, something I really loved about the ‘reveal’ in this issue (whether Hurt turns out to be a literal representation of the devil, or the hole in Batman’s psyche is a metaphorical devil) is that it’s not a cheat.

Even before Morrison’s interview, even outside of the fact that everyone already knows who the devil is, you didn’t need to know that to guess the ending. There were clues pointing towards the involvement of the devil in one way or another from the first issue of Morrison’s run. So even though it seems kinda leftfield, it was actually set up better than your standard Loeb/Dini ‘mystery’.

Brian: No apologies necessary. Your response definitely helped me clarify my ideas. I think where I differ from you is that I prefer to the strategy of trying acknowledge my subjectivities over the strategy of trying to be objective.

In this case, if I had been disappointed due to the hype, I would have prefaced any evaluative comments with that idea (and discussed why I felt my expectations were valid). As it is, I wasn’t disappointed because I just never really believed we would get anything *that* shocking in a Batman comic. The genre just doesn’t work that way. But even there, my reaction to the comic is based on an expectation; it’s just an expectation that stems from a different external influence: What the writer the said v. what’s happened in the past.

I have never been a huge fan of Morrison, and I didn’t buy into the hype…but out of curiosity I borrowed a friend’s Morrison Batman run on Wednesday and read through until the end of RIP…basically in one sitting.

Other than Damian being the single most annoying character I have ever seen in a comic, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing…I’ll likely own the trades.

I’m pretty sure that not only is Hurt the actual devil, but he erased Batman’s marriage, and this time he did it so thoroughly that even the readers don’t remember it!

What marriage are you referring to? ^

Outstanding comments on this board by the way. Much more constructive and dare I say mature than what I’m encountering on other sites.

“That’s the point of the arc: Bruce hasn’t been pushed to the brink of destruction by some omnipotent fantasy villain called “the Black Glve,” let alone by the devil himself; he’s been pushed there ecause he put imself there in order to become Batman.”

= brilliant summation by Omar K.

This arc was fun, if not altogether immediately coherent. I’m about to sit down and re-read this from the beginning and bash my brains out over this whole thing once more.

Any more thoughts on the whole black and red thing? Just misdirection on GM’s part (& Joker’s) or something more?

“Any more thoughts on the whole black and red thing? Just misdirection on GM’s part (& Joker’s) or something more?”

I found the way red was used in the flashbacks interesting, although I think that was more misdirection on Morrison’s part. For all The Joker’s craziness, we really don’t have much reason to think he’s lying in this issue – he seems to be there to spell the story out, to a degree.

I think Morrison needs to stop with the meta-anvils, stop trying to tell the defnitive story about each particular character, and just go ahead and focus on telling a good story. Stop trying to show us how clever you are. We know you are, just get on with it already.

Was it a good Batman story? Yeah, it was all right. The best I’ve ever read? Hardly. Would I recommend it someone who has never read comics or Batman? Not really…there are many other stories about Batman or titles by Morrison I would recommend over this. I’d give it a B- overall.

I do agree with Brian regarding Tony Daniel. He’s not kidding about the dramatic improvement part. I remember when he first started on X-force, and yes, he definitely is someone whose work is improving and evolving. Still needs some more time to be great. I’m curious who else you think would have done a better job, Brian…I kind of wonder if having an inker with a darker style would have helped…Bill Sienkiewicz, maybe? He probably would have really overpowered Daniel though….

The only thing it did not work as was a dramatic climax with clear changes, and the only reason we had to judge it like that was by interviews.

It also had the title “Batman RIP: Conclusion” in big letters on the cover…

Kind of like in The Simpsons when they’re walking out of NAKED LUNCH and Nelson says “that title was wrong on TWO counts”.

It also had the title “Batman RIP: Conclusion” in big letters on the cover…

Right, and it was, in fact, the conclusion of this storyline, which is only part of the larger narrative (a la Imperial in New X-Men).

I wonder about the critics if it was another name instead of Morrison’s
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I think this applies to every type of critic; those for him and against.

[...] Batman #681 Review Comic Book Resources ,November 27, 2008 I look at All Star Superman and then I look at the non-Williams Batman issues and I just shake his head in disappointment. Tony Daniel is a fine artist. … [...]