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I personally believe that, as far as this particular issue goes, all the evidence points in direction to the (unseen) red guy with horns.

But to play devil’s advocate (heh), I’m still doubting on Joker’s comments. Yes, he made several allusions to the devil, but he also refers to Hurt as a dead man. (Who probably apparently committed suicide, as per DC Universe #0)

There’s some suggestions that The Black Glove created Batman, which when combined with the perfect motive after seeing Batman torment him so badly, makes me believe Joe Chill (or his son, considering Hurt doesn’t look like Chill at all) are behind this.

I guess we’ll have to wait until Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader.

Here’s my take on it:

Could it BE the Devil? Certainly. Batman is, for better or worse, part of the larger DC Universe, and we’ve seen plenty of “Devils” going around there, from Lucifer to Neron. Heck, I would be disappointed if Batman doesn’t have a “protocol” to deal with those (even if only by having information on how to contact the Spectre or such.)

On the other hand, supernatural elements in the Batman books have been kept to a minimum, just like the rest of the paranormal stuff in DC has, and for the same reason: Batman is supposed to a badass normal, but at the end of the day, still human. Put too much superhuman stuff in and either Bats ends up looking ineffective, OR the rest of the DCU does, which is worse. Batman works better at the “street” level. Some minor stuff, like Ra’s Al Ghul’s immortality, are OK, but not too much.

If Batman: RIP wants to say that The Devil was behind Batman’s origin, I’d have to disagree. It would make the supernatural too important in the Bat-mythos. Imagine if every summary of his origin from now on said that. Most folks would go “Huh?”

And that’s not even getting into the details. Why wait until NOW to strike at Bruce? What are the Devil’s enemies (like, you know, GOD?) doing about it? Etc.

So no, it’s better to assume that it wasn’t really the Big D. And yes, it dOES make a difference.

And was it Thomas Wayne? Not. Bloody. Likely. It would be even worse than the Devil- it would make a mockery of everything Bruce has based his life on.

That leaves it as a new villain. Which is kinda like when Doomsday killed Superman, everybody was asking, Who? Why didn’t they use a better known Superman foe? Even Luthor bitched about it! :p Of course, it could also be an old villain in disguise, like Hugo Strange.

In general, I’ m not impressed with RIP. Especially since we all know that -probably by 2010- Bruce Wayne will be back.

But still, it might be fun to see who ends as Batman in the meanwhile. Though why Nightwing isn’t the immediate choice will have to be explained pretty well.

It’s interesting that the Devil in RIP possesses people (or, at least, “wears their skin”), while the New Gods and Darkseid and his minions have been doing much the same in Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle and Final Crisis.

Is Morrison repeating himself? Is it all a coincidence? Or, is there a connection here? Is the Devil from Apokolips? Is Apokolips Hell? If Bruce is dead (ha, right), is he headed to Hell? To Apokolips? Will he transcend this world to become a new New God, as was rumored long ago? Was the helicopter explosion the work of a boom tube?

I guess we’ll find out. Eventually. Maybe in Final Crisis.

This is a question that is never going to be satisfactorily answered without input from Morrison.

However, hearkening back to Gothic, Morrison has said that he has purposefully tried to maintain a kind of continuity within all the things he’s written for DC.

I say he was the devil. If you consider Batman 666 as a glimpse of THE future as opposed to A future, then Morrison had already established early in his run that the devil had a great deal of interest in Batman. And while the devil/supernatural elements in RIP could be explained away by saying Dr. Hurt is insane, it’s hard to use the same explanation for Damien and Anti-Christ Batman. Both were shown with superhuman/demonic power and there’s no reason not to accept “deal with the devil” as their origin.

Yeah, I think he’s the devil. It’s the only answer that seems ‘big’ enough to me to work, and it ties in perfectly with The Joker’s monologue about Batman’s ability to create a new box around him every time he thinks outside the last one.

The Devil – the ultimate supernatural evil – would seem to be pretty damn far outside Batman’s ‘box’ (as evidenced by all the fans who are so reluctant to accept it), but it’s not long before Bruce has boxed him up pretty good (’…and did I see fear in his eyes?’, or something to that effect).

Really, the whole ‘boxes’ thing pretty much sums up Morrison’s whole run so far, IMO, and it was eloquently explained by The Joker in a few panels.

Well, for starters, the Devil in Gothic possesses no one. The villain there is Mr. Whisper, an immortal character created with inspiration from Don Giovanni who’s made a deal with the devil. In the end, the devil turns up in the guise of a young nun Whisper raped and killed centuries ago and drags him to Hell. There’s simply no possession elements in that story, which rather scuttles the original post here.

Second, in RIP, insisting that Hurt is the Devil is, I think, a serious mistake. He has neither the usual power nor the wit and subtlety of most literary devils: at best, he’s Screwtape’s nephew, an impotent devil-figure whose best weapon is his victim’s weakness and whose worst enemy is his victim’s basic competence.

Third, the future issue has Damien going on about “the devil,” but in a fashion that also suggests that the devil is really Batman himself. Ra’s al Ghul is often called “the demon” or “the demon’s head,” but he’s not an actual supernatural demon, is he? And other bits in Morrison’s run seem to point to the real devil being Bruce’s trauama and issues all along: that las page, the “Joe Chill in Hell” issue in which Batman (not some devil-dude) is the one who torments Chill l and even Damie’s name and parentage. (Damien in the Omen films is the Devil’s child; in the comic, he’s…Batman’s child!)

Fourth, there’s no compelling narrative need for Hurt to be some actual supernatural devil for anything in the story to work. I’d say he’s more an allegorical manifestation of the “daimon” or “shadow” side Batman alludes to in #681 and earlier, given both the nature of his plot and the way in which Batman largely thwarts that plot. But Hurt doesn’t seem to do much in the way of devilish things in the story: he’s not a tempter, really, except very indirectly through Jezebel; he’s not terrible and monstrous, since his idea of evil seems to be messing with Batman and kicking Alfred around a little; and finally, again, he evinces no real supernatural power, instead using rather standard-issue brainwashing and hypnosis that countless utterly human comic-book villains have used over decades of published stories.

The insistence that Hurt is Satan himself seems to be coming from readers who want the devil elements to be about some real external enemy Batman confronts and defeats, some foe grand enough for the grand trauma of Batman. But that seems to me to miss the point of Batman generally and even Morrison’s run more specifically: Batman is both as wacked-out as he is and as resilient as he is because he’s the human product of a human tragedy. Joe Chill is too pathetic to be the devil, and it’s Chill who is established in this run as the killer of the Waynes; Simon Hurt likes to rant that he’s the devil, but he’s too stupid to realize that crazy unpredictable Joker might not play along or that even a crazy Batman can probably still beat down the second-rate Club of Villains; no, it’s Bruce Wayne’s repressed pain and vulnerability, his fractured persona, that’s the real devil here.

To close with a line from “Gothic,” the story wherein mobsters summon Batman with an inverted Bat-signal (i.e., the inverted Anti-Christ cross in this arc for the third ghost of Batman…an evil anti-trinity idea), I’ll point to Batman’s first words in that arc: “Gotham City is Hell. And I am the King of Hell!” Batman’s the devil, the devil who haunts Bruce Wayne. The Black Glove, the three ghosts, the Club of Villains, and Simon Hurt are wannabes destroyed by the better side of that truer devil.

I had to re-read it to be sure, but yeah, it’s the Devil. The text is all there.

I don’t have a problem with the Devil being the villain of RIP, since DC has already clearly shown the Judeo-Christian God in action (Morrison created Zauriel after all). What I don’t like is if the Devil is involved in Bruce’s origin–any creative decision that removes the randomness from the Wayne murders tends to dilute the character. If the Devil really did do it, Bruce should devote the rest of his life to capturing him, not fighting crime in general.

Put another way, a lot of the argument for “Hurt’s really Satan” seems to be a fannish desire to say “Batman can even beat SATAN FREAKIN’ ANTICHRIST with enough prep time!” And that’s really not there in an arc where Batman’s ridiculous prepping is what gets him into trouble in the first damn place.

I say who cares? This run of Batman was confusing, muddy and, in the end, very, very unsatisfying. Most of the time I couldn’t even tell what was going on and I don’t think it was just the problem of the terrible artwork. Did someone write this or just jot down random thoughts when they were drunk? A total waste of time and a very sad end to another supposed “Event”. Final Crisis is even worse. These series are pretty much responsible for the kind of comics non-readers criticize as juvenile and poorly done. Both books have certainly made it easier to trim my DC reading list down to a very few titles- and I say this after having bought Batman’s books uninterrupted since the late 60’s. Whatever happened to editors who made sure stories were clear and that continuity had some bearing on what was happening? A very sad state of affairs and, with the rising price of comics, not a good one for the longevity of the medium.

I hate to say it but Grant Morrison is the new Bob Haney.

I touched on this briefly in the Batman #681 thread, but I think “amypoodle” says it better than I do.

PAGES 25 & 26

The Black Glove really is just an amorphous architecture of evil. He’s anything that’ll HURT Bruce Wayne: the Anti-Mum/Dad/Alfred. The comic isn’t insisting we literally interpret him as the Devil, although, given all the satanic referencing (and not just in the dialogue; in the comic’s iconography, its mise-en-scene, its themes, its tone, and the gothic genre conventions that Morrison has deliberately brought into play), and, ostensibly, supernatural shit that’s come pouring out of this book since day one, we could quite confidently endorse this take, but that’s not really the point. True to form Batman 681 refuses to pick a side. It denies conclusivity. Anyone that says otherwise does not understand Morrison’s writing. That might annoy some of you out there, but it’s a fact. Sorry. The symbolic/thematic reading is just as important to this book as the literal one. The mythic sphere serving as the Joker’s base of operations that I discussed last time? Well, that’s a key component of Morrison’s comic. Grant understands the Joker’s reading of the text to be just as valid as Batman’s. Sure, we may err on the side of there being an earthly explanation, but that doesn’t matter. Bruce still awoke the last demon in the cave in Nanda Parbat/during the isolation experiment, a demon that cast it’s wrathful reflection on the surface of the material plane, irrespective of the skin this dreadful afterimage decided to dress itself in. That’s how magic works, kids.

From: http://mindlessones.com/2008/11/29/rip-batman-rip-if-grant-morrison-leaves-this-title-now-i-shall-hunt-him-down-like-a-dog/

I think Hurt was the Devil. I think he’s probably the Devil operating through a mortal. My basis for this is his MOTIVATION. Very few villains these days get up and say “I’m the villain. I’m here to do evil. I want you to join me as a force for corruption,” but the Devil would. So he doesn’t have any supernatural powers, so he just exploits Batman’s preexisting weaknesses, that’s how the Devil always operates. The assumption is generally that he’s working under certain restrictions. He’s not allowed to walk around the mortal world and bully people with hellfire because God won’t let him. However, he is allowed to tempt people and operate through secondary agents. I don’t think I’m relying on any particularly sophisticated theology here (quite the reverse actually).

I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with basing some theories on the fannish attitude “Batman can beat the FREAKIN ANTICHRIST!” because I think Morrison has that attitude. I think basing a theory on genuine psychoanalysis is risky because Batman doesn’t have a genuine psychology. Yes, all of his behavior is a reaction to a serious trauma. However, the whole point of Batman is that he doesn’t respond to that trauma the way other people would. The devil may try to exploit Batman’s trauma, but Batman is still a superhero. I don’t think his ridiculous prepping got him in trouble in the first place. I think he confronted an enemy who prepped almost as well as he did, *almost.* Batman pulls through at the eleventh hour because he still prepped better.

“Hurt’s really Satan” seems to be a fannish desire to say “Batman can even beat SATAN FREAKIN’ ANTICHRIST with enough prep time!”

Heck, if anything “Hurt’s NOT really Satan” seems to be a fannish desire to keep Batman more “realistic.” Heaven forbid a comic book be too comic book-y.

What… Mephisto… AGAIN!?!

~P~

My brother brought up this possibility: What if Doctor Hurt is just a dude? Like, he got Batman in the isolation chamber and learned everything about him and now just wants to eff him up?

Not terribly likely, considering it’s Morrison we’re talking about, but still.

What… Mephisto… AGAIN!?!

~P~

Nooooooooooooooooooo! Next thing you know he’ll (no pun intended) undo the Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle marriage!

And then where would Huntress come from…….

I like the devil for Hurt’s identity provided there’s still the “Is he, isn’t he?” dynamic. Any overt demonstration of mystical being powers would kill the whole thing. Keep it subtle, keep it so that he could just be some nutso rich guy with a mad on for Batman, and I’m in.

Hurt doesn’t NEED to be the devil, but Morrison’s entire run has been so larded with references to Satan that it seems more reasonable to conclude that Hurt is a literal demon rather than just a Really Evil Guy. Lane (the Third Ghost of Batman) says in no uncertain terms that Hurt is the devil. Joker seems to agree, and the fact that he quickly spots the true nature of the Bat-Radia suggests that, insane or not, he’s very perceptive.

Hurt’s overall demeanor in 680 and 681 is more compatible with the Devil than with any of the other candidates:

*he’s not afraid of the Joker and generally seems unconcerned for his own safety (except possibly during the helicopter crash, but he might just be frustrated that he’s failed to corrupt Bruce);

*he turns on the Black Glove members (’your sins have found you out’);

*he claims to be Thomas Wayne but clearly isn’t very committed to the ruse: he archly asks Bruce whether Bruce is prepared to consider the other possibility, and threatens to expose Bruce’s father as a criminal pervert (suggesting that he is not Bruce’s father);

*he offers Bruce a deal and demands that Bruce serve evil.

None of this means that he has to be the devil, but I don’t see the need to reach for another answer when there’s so many clues supporting the devil theory. Of course, this being Morrison, we’re deliberately given room for interpretation. There’s probably more to it than just “it was the devil” (for one thing, I think Thomas Wayne really was involved somehow), but if you were forced to boil it down to a one-word answer, “Satan” seems like the safest bet.

Yes, Hurt’s dialogue and methods seem surprisingly banal at times, but perhaps we’re meant to understand that the devil *is* a bit banal when you come right down to it, as amypoodle suggests.

“I hate to say it but Grant Morrison is the new Bob Haney.”

Well, it does kind of confirms my secret suspicion that Grant Morrison is the Anti-Christ in disguise as the “God of all the Universe.”

Maybe now, he and Case will get back to another volume of DOOM PATROL.

It’s high time to give the devil his due, eh?

Hello all
I think its pretty immaterial if Hurt *IS* the Devil or not, as he’s acting the role of the Devil anyway. Who Hurt ‘really’ is has no bearing on Batman’s actions throughout, they’re driven by his internal conflicts; his insatiable need ‘to know’. Indeed, I think the story is richer and more open to personal interpretation for not explicitly delivering a stock villain reveal at the conclusion. Would we be discussing it in these sorts of terms if it had turned out to be Alfred?
RIP has had a fantastic ambiguity about it that I can’t ever remember seeing in a comic before and reminds me specificaly of Philip K. Dick’s VALIS books and more broadly of contemporary fiction in general; Auster, Easton Ellis, Ackroyd etc. This truly is a thematically complicated, adult story that still manages to use all of the tropes and trappings of the comic books we love. Not only that, but its serial nature has caught our imaginations in a way that none of the acknowledged ‘classics’ of the form ever did. Even in the days before the internet, do you think anyone expended this much thought and effort trying to figure out what Ozymandias’ plot was going to be?
I desperately hope Morrison does return to script the book after his hiatus. This run has been astounding in so many ways and a perfect counterpoint to All Star Superman.
Everyone looking forward to the end of Final Crisis now?

Also, DC could *really* do with a new Bob Haney. Hell, we all could…

I don’t want to live in a world where “the new Bob Haney” is an insult.

I think Morrison would be cool with the Haney comparsion

I think there are several serious textual problems with reading Hurt as some sort of literal devil, to wit:

— The idiom of Morrison’s run has been largely pseudoscientific, with zero mysticism involved: Man-Bat serum, the Bane/Monster Man Batman, even the “Antichrist” Batman and the future one-off do not. The one time tHe supernatural has turned up — The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul — it was a) unconnected to Hurt’s schemes and b) utterly and unambiguously supernatural. Ditto for the past storylines being invoked: Mr. Whisper is unambiguously a supernatural immortal, and “Gothic” makes no bones about showing devils and ghosts and more besides; and so far as I can recall, when Morrison involves supernatural villains, he does so without ambiguity (Neron and angels in JLA, for example).

— Batman himself seems to utterly reject the fanciful elements of the story in the story itself: Hurt is Mangrove Pierce, the tricks and traps are all mind games or super-science, and so forth. If the arc is about Batman being omnicompetent, then the “Hurt is Satan” idea requires him to have gotten the solution to the mystery seriously and thoroughly wrong.

— Hurt is not merely banal, not merely ineffectual in the end, but painfully transparent and insane. No one int he story buys his “Thomas Wayne” bushwah, nor does anyone in the story other than the Joker — that beacon of insanity — even hint at believing hge’s the devil because he says so in the midst of a rant containing the psychotic “I’m Thomas” stuff everyone’s dismissing. To make Hurt Satan, you have to introduce inconsistency into your own reading of Hurt’s dialogue, so that he’s sane one moment and full of it the very next, and back again. In short, you have to make a deliberate error of interpretation, a deliberate disunity t5hat is not merely ambivalent reading practice.

— Damien’s dialogue in issue #666, where he remarks that “this particular lunatic [the Third Ghost of Batman] claimed he was the antichrist and promised to return to Gotham one day, on the eve of the battle of Armageddon” must be ignored or subsumed in his later remark that “I know the devil exists, or at least something exists which might as well be the devil. I’ve met him.” Unfortunately, Damien never meets Hurt in R.IP., despite claiming that he made a deal with the devil on the night of Batman’s death. So who on Earth is he talking about? It isn’t Hurt, in any case.

>Omar

“Unfortunately, Damien never meets Hurt in R.I.P., despite claiming that he made a deal with the devil on the night of Batman’s death. So who on Earth is he talking about?”

When I read #666 I got the impression that the Batman’s death Damien refers to, isn’t the one we “see” in #681, but another, later, one.
On the 3rd page you see Damien lying over a Batman, but I don’t think its Bruce. The costume has (at least?) 3 differences to the one Bruce is seen wearing in the issues prior: the bat symbol on the chest, the gloves and the pouches. Then, when we see the 2 Batman costumes in the trophy cabinet, one is the one Bruce wears in the past and the other is the one we saw back on page 3. Commissioner Babs also says Damien was _responsible_ for the death “… of a good friend.”
This makes me think that the Batman who dies, in the flashback, is Dick; and that that’s the night Damien makes his deal.

Amypoodle said:

“True to form Batman 681 refuses to pick a side. It denies conclusivity. Anyone that says otherwise does not understand Morrison’s writing. That might annoy some of you out there, but it’s a fact. Sorry.”

And this is why I think that DC should not let him write their regular, ongoing characters. Because I’m fully behind ambiguity as a concept, even to the point of an ambiguous ending where you never know what happened…

But that doesn’t work in an ongoing series. You can’t have an ambiguous ending without an ending. If someone’s going to write next month’s issue, they can’t say, “We don’t really know what happened last time.” Everything builds on what came before it, and that can’t happen if you don’t _know_ what came before it. For Morrison’s stories to matter to Batman’s future, he has to pick a side and stick with it, or a later writer will do it for him.

Understand, I say this as a fan of Morrison. I’ve always enjoyed his writing. But when he’s done with a title, he doesn’t leave anywhere for the next writer to go. Animal Man, Doom Patrol, X-Men, all of them dropped off a cliff as soon as he finished his run because there was no logical way to continue the story once Morrison had finished with it.

He’s a great writer, but he should write self-contained stuff…because that’s what he’s doing anyway.

Something else to consider…in the Bible, Satan is also called “the father of lies”. If this really is Satan, you can’t believe anything he says. So any claims he makes to his identity, or anything else have to be taken with a HUGE grain of salt. He may have had nothing at all to do with the murder of Bruce’s parents, but he would say that he did if it would help in corrupting him.

No deal, Howie! Let’s open the next case!

All of Morrison’s work draw from so many sources/ideas/authors/thinkers that they can be almost endlessly discussed and analyzed. It’s the reason why I enjoy his work so much. I still go back to The Invisibles whenever I read some bit of philosophy or science that ties into it. I’ve done it a lot. So, man-crushing aside, I don’t think Hurt is the devil, and it isn’t because I don’t think Morrison would put the devil in the book. In fact, there are numerous references to Judeo-Christian mythology (couldn’t think of a better word, not trying to offend) and events that I consider supernatural. The man-bats, issue 666, and the Honor Jackson scenes in particularly don’t only seem spiritual, but are supernatural. To argue that Batman doesn’t take place in a world of the ‘unreal’ is just not true.

The Honor Jackson scenes are particularly interesting because it evokes the idea of an angel that helps a ’soljer’ of God, Batman. I consider the Honor Jackson interaction to be one of the important parts of the Morrison run in that it is a validation of Batman and that he is doing good, not just making it worse (i’m still not sure what Honor gave him though). And while Batman is a soldier for good, Hurt is a soldier of evil, but not the Devil. Especially in the last issue, Hurt behaves in a way that too unlike the Devil to think he is him. I do like when he is talking about Joker and says “speak of the devil”, but that could easily be looked at as just an expression (but one that I am sure Morrison recognized). It’s his attitude that is so un-devil like. He shows an adherence to social structures through the black hand. Obviously, Satan was none to into the whole community thing. He shows fear when he realizes that Batman may have outsmarted him. He says ‘oh dear lord’ which again could just be an expression, but one that I doubt the devil would use. Granted, Hurt says he was there at the ‘beginning’, but I think that just means the beginning of Batman.

If anything, 681 shows that if anyone was the devil, it would be the Joker, I don’t know if I buy this, but this issue would point to him being the devil. Joker is upset that he is called a servant (the me is emphasized), he rebels against the organization of the black hand, he wants to gamble and bet, like the devil and God often did, he references reiki when he snaps the soldiers neck, which a Chinese massage technique but one translation of the word is ’spiritual presence’, and his ominous fade into dark as he says he will collect the winnings of the black hand in do time. The fact that he is not there for the final confrontation is all the ore devil like. The devil wouldn’t be there for the fight, he would set it up and step back. Again, I’m not sure I believe the Joker is the devil, but this issue would make a good case for that.

Okay, I went on for a little longer than I wanted. Thanks to anyone who actually reads this. Being able to examine comics like this is so rare (Grant Morrison and Alan Moore writing is so alike in this way) and love doing it and I love that Grant Morrison is doing it. Cheers!

Oh, and does anybody else know who is flying the helicopter? On page 27, it looks like a Batman, but I don’t know which one. Is it one of the ghosts (I’m temporarily removed from my pre-RIP Batman books)????

Brian

I’ve not read any of the comics, but I’ve heard lots of people debating it, so I’ll just weigh in with one of my favorite movie quotes….

Dick Durkin: I don’t think this thing thinks it’s Satan, I think this thing IS Satan.
Stone: Well Satan is in deep ***t.

“But when he’s done with a title, he doesn’t leave anywhere for the next writer to go. Animal Man, Doom Patrol, X-Men, all of them dropped off a cliff as soon as he finished his run because there was no logical way to continue the story once Morrison had finished with it.”

I disagree strongly on ‘X-Men’. Just because the next few writers didn’t follow through on what Morrison wrote, and often directly re-wrote it (as with Xorn), doesn’t mean he didn’t leave them anywhere to go. I mean, he finished his own stories off, but he left the characters themselves in interesting places. [And I actually thought Joss Whedon did a decent job of following what Morrison was doing, and the one issue of Ellis I read seemed like he was aiming for that sort of thing.]

Isn’t Morrison going to continue to write Batman? Aren’t we guaranteed some follow-up here?

Isn’t Morrison going to continue to write Batman? Aren’t we guaranteed some follow-up here?

That was the hope, Jbird, but now it appears that outside forces might be moving Morrison off of the Batman title.

Brian,

“Oh, and does anybody else know who is flying the helicopter? On page 27, it looks like a Batman, but I don’t know which one. Is it one of the ghosts (I’m temporarily removed from my pre-RIP Batman books)????”

This is the 3rd Batman in issue 666 he says he made a deal with the devil so it makes sense that he would be drving the helicopter.

In the end, the devil turns up in the guise of a young nun Whisper raped and killed centuries ago and drags him to Hell

Exactly, the Devil turns up in the guise of a nun.

“in the guise of”/”in possession of” – same difference.

But if you prefer, “Hurt made a deal with the Devil (like Mr. Whisper in Gothic) rather than actually being the Devil.”

I think that Batman RIP felt more like the end of Act I than the conclusion of an entire story arc. I really hope Morrison is back on Batman after the Battle for the Cowl shenanigans, because I really want to find out what happens next.

The ambiguity of #681 re: Hurt’s identity, Batman’s fate and all the other loose ends really appealed to me.

@ Basara: Yay! A fellow “Split Second” Fan! Hoorah!

Okay… Who is Bob Haney, and what did he do?? Seriously…

Put me firmly in the Cass & Ben camp of “I don’t know, and I like it”. The case that Omar is arguing is a strong one, but I also think that if the devil (or his mythological/spiritual counterpoint, for that matter) were to go after a character such as Bruce/Batman, it would be with subterfuge and semantics – unanswerable questions and unsolvable puzzles – rather than fire or thunderbolts.

And I disagree with John S on keeping Morrison in his own sandbox. Given the serial nature of superhero comics, we absolutely have to know if Bruce survives the helicopter explosion and probably how he does so – we certainly don’t “need” answers about Hurt or what happened in the cave at Nanda Parbat in order to continue the story of Batman. The DC Universe is practically built on ambiguity and stories that forced future creators to interpret them – hell, Geoff Johns has made a career out of it. Hawkman, Power Girl, just about everything about the Legion. And we’ve got (good and bad) post-Morrison X-Men stories; some that incorporate his ideas and themes (mostly early in Whedon’s Astonishing), some that are in response to them/seek to reverse them (House of M, The 198…to name a few) and some that ignore them or are self-contained in their own right (any of the First Class stuff, later Claremont, etc). Morrison himself has written Buddy Baker stories after he “dropped him off a cliff” at the end of his original run…

For me, part of the appeal and charm of serial fiction and continuity is the living, breathing nature of it that Morrison often talks about. Anything is possible, nothing (or very little) is set in stone and meanings, motivations & endings are as good as the next creator.

Bob Haney wrote Brave and the Bold for years and years. His tales were … quirky. And Bob Haney didn’t do continuity. A lot of these stories take place on what is called Earth-B. I think he was a mainstay of DC’s ‘horror’ titles, as well as the war books. And I think he created the Metal Men.

Now you know about Bob Haney. And knowing is half the battle!

Ah!!! Yes! I knew the name was ringing a bell!! The Haney-verse, etc… Earth-Bob…
Thank you for waking me up!

Basara – Was that quote from Split Second?

“In the guise of” does not equal possession at all, Brian. Possession is the devil taking up someone’s body, some real and extant person in the here and now. There’s a whole vast theology of exorcism and possession there.

The devil not looking like the devil is just, well, the devil in disguise. Disguise isn’t possession, for the same reason that dressing up as a nun for Halloween doesn’t make you someone possessing a nun. You’re not even using words to mean things anymore in arguing this side of the debate.

Omar, I like the way you’re arguing your case and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to read the story your way, but we’re just seeing things differently.

-I’m not ready to concede that there are no blatant mystical elements in this run, but even if there aren’t, why assume that Morrison’s treatment of the supernatural will be the same in all his works, or even throughout this entire story? He’s telling a mystery of sorts, and he’s deliberately chosen to give us an ambiguous ending; if we saw blatant paranormal phenomena, he’d be tipping his hand. Maybe the pseudoscience is there to contrast and heighten the subtler insinuations of unnatural events. Hurt doesn’t always act exactly the way we’d expect the Devil to act, but maybe he’s chosen to amuse himself by challenging Batman on Batman’s own terms (in a mortal form, using wealth and planning and accomplices, rather than raining down fire and brimstone). We’ll see whether Hurt’s curse on the cape and cowl actually holds force.

-I see no reason to assume that Batman is 100% correct in rejecting the supernatural, because I don’t think that the story is entirely about his hypercompetence. After all, this is ‘the last Bruce Wayne story,’ and the Black Glove works him over pretty badly, and he’s ‘dead’ at the end–I think this counts as partial failure. He seems to have a blind spot when it comes to the irrational, as suggested by Bat-Mite’s inability to follow him into Arkham. Joker accuses him of apophenia, and Hurt calls himself the piece that will never fit. Saying that Hurt is Mangrove Pierce struck me as a slightly desperate attempt to stuff the mystery into whatever ‘rational’ box Batman could find. Everything else had been ruled out, and he was left with the Pierce box only because Pierce was an obscure figure he knew very little about; he might as well have said that Hurt was El Sombrero’s college roommate.

-Hurt is certainly transparent, but I didn’t see any insanity. What you’re calling psychosis struck me as clumsy attempts to keep Bruce and Alfred psychologically off-balance. He was throwing everything and the kitchen sink at Bruce just before he boarded the helicopter, but it was an inept attempt to pull off a victory rather than a sign that he was irrational. He’s inconsistent in that he doesn’t lie ALL the time, but he’d be too easy to see through if he did. The Joker’s hardly the only one who hints at a Devil ID for Hurt. Lane calls him the devil outright, and Bruce himself considers the possibility in the final Black Casebook entry.

-I also got the impression that Damian’s deal comes later. I don’t have a copy of the issue with me, but I thought he said he made the deal at age 14, and he seems to be around 10 in “R.I.P.”

“In the guise of” does not equal possession at all, Brian.

The same difference is because if it is the Devil “in the guise of” Hurt, what’s the difference?

The Devil impersonating Hurt or the Devil possessing Hurt, six of one, half dozen of the other.

@Omar

I think you just argued for Brian’s original point. Batman: Gothic showed the Devil in the guise of a nun. What prevents the Devil from assuming the role of Mangrove Pierce? The reason why people disregard the Thomas Wayne confession is because Hurt disregards it later. He’s lying to make Batman submit.

Also, I still think Batman 666 had blatant supernatural elements. The 3rd Batman is shown walking on water and Damien survives multiple gunshots. Clearly these are meant to be serious wounds because Gordon is shocked and asks, “What are you?” I suppose you could say they used some external device or genetic tampering on themselves to achieve similar results but there is nothing in the story to suggest that. The only source of these powers that is given is Damien’s confession that the Devil exists and that he made a deal with him.

Plus motivation. If it is just old Mangrove Pierce what’s his motivation and shouldn’t he be in his 60s? The Devil wanting to corrupt the “ultimate” man is good and explains why Hurt isn’t old. Although I’ll admit this could be more of a problem with the art.

All in all Batman RIP’s ending reminds me of Garth Ennis’ Punisher: Born. You can either take it literally that the Devil (or some demon) pushed him to become Punisher or just blame it on him going crazy.

I’m with whomever said that there is no real explanation because GM is all about the ambiguity and the half-truth in his writing style. We saw it with the end of his run on the X-Men books, we saw it at the end of All-Star Superman, and we’ve seen it time and again in his less mainstream works.

The problem with the whole “devil” argument is spotlit by Lawrence’s argument, to wit: Lawrence has to provide a diabolic motivation that the story simply doesn’t. Why, exactly, is the devil so damned interested in Batman and Batman alone?

A crazy actor and body double who’s obsessed with Thomas Wayne and with a movie he was in decades ago, sure, that I can see. And the story gives us that motivation. Indeed, it’s a lot more satisfying to me than “ultimate evil attacks Batman in horribly inefficient, nonsupernatural ways because it’s..er, ultimately evil.”

The devil stuff in this arc strikes me as much more a symbol of irrationality than a symbol of actual evil; and irrationality is not synonymous with evil, even in this arc itself. I much prefer the idea of Simon Hurt, the alias and/or name the villain takes on, being representative of trauma and irrationality…and, in a religious metaphor, sure, of Batman’s own weird internal deal to use his trauma to achieve what he achieves.

Simon Hurt to me conjures Simon Magus, but where Simon Magus traded on the wisdom of the Holy Spirit (hence his title “magus,” wise man, wizard), Batman and the BG mastermind have traded on hurt and pain. But that’s not quite theological evil either, unless we want to argue the medieval idea of acedia (now called sloth) in which clinical depression is a crime against God Himself.

The interpretive possibility I support has a bit more to it than what I’ve been arguing, a bit more meta, to be honest, but I’ve left that bit out because it’s somewhat irrelevant to the story-detail debate about what Hurt “is.” It hinges on Hurt’s final soliloquy, his final statement about hismelf: he’s the missing piece, the thing that escapes rationality, the motor of conflict but also the motor of action.

It’s Jacques Lacan, isn’t it? Lacan’s “phallus” which is not an actual gential organ, but rather the placeholder for the absence of reason at the heart of reason. Batman is hyperrrational, but he doesn’t start from rationality: quite the opposite, and his world and the narrative structures in which he functions are more Bat-Mite-style 5th dimensions of imagination and irrationality than anything else. Lacan’s mirror stage becomes the mirrored “Zorro” marquee, the secret sentence “Zorro in Arkham” that pretends to explain everything but really just signifies the irrationjality of being Zorro, of being Batman, and, if you’re a reader, of identifying with what is, after all, not a real person nor even a narrative function that does a good job aping a real person.

Andrew points out above that “Batman doesn’t have an actual psychology.” Quite right, and quite smart. Bu narrative logic, in Lacan, is the way “normative” psychology works: yet every story has at its bottom the emptiness of the language it’s made of the, absence of a there to build upon. In a superhero narrative, the hero has nothing to do, has no identity, without some antagonist (villain) to oppose.

What is evil? In Batman R.I.P., it’s not the irrational: it’s the absence of a basis on which to se4parate reason and unreason. Batman is hyperrational, but his hyperrationality has led him to an experiment in which he willingly gave up that rationality for the very rational purpose of understanding his greatest enemy, the Joker. Rationality has demanded its own suspension, its own temporary elimination…and that elimination of rationality turns out to be much longer-lasting and much deeper-rooted than Batman coudl quite allow. And into that gap, the irrational experience of Joe Chill randomly murdering the Waynes — an event that is a narrative cfause but lacks narrative causality itself — lets in the villain who can pretend to make that moment make sense.

But Hurt doesn’t make sense, as I’ve been arguing. He can’t quite be the master villain he, Batman, and conventional reading want to make him. Satan does have a similar problem in theology: why would an angel of God suffer pride to start with, and why would any being make war on a definitionally omniscient and omnipotent foe? For that matter, why be a supervillain in a superhero story when the way those stories works means you’ll lose?

Because otherwise, there’s no story. How is evil born in Superman Beyond? Because it’s needed for the idea of a story to be possible. It’s the absent, irrational cause.

Hurt is the devil, I’m now convinced, but only in the same sense that the devil is just one more placeholder for something utterly absent at the bottom of the narrative, something absent from all narratives. Why does the devil go after Batman? Because otherwise there’s no Batman, no Batman stories, no conflict. The absence of diabolic motivation I’d been complaining about is the key after all. Hurt’s the devil, but it’s totally irrelevant to insist that he’s the devil because no theology is made possible by the claim. He’s a devil who tells us nothing about good or evil save that they’re alternatives on a balck-and-red board.

Why can’t Batman choose evil at the end, and why can the Joker bet on good? Because when good and evil are just things you’re betting on — when hero and villain are just empty points of possible reader identification or investment — they really are somewhat interchangeable.

Why does Batman realize Jezebel is evil when she tells him she understands? Because understanding is impossible, a lie, rthe thing to be understood doesn’t exist and never did. Understanding is the original fiction that lets human beings, in Lacan, have minds and identities and personalities.

Batman #681 isn’t about good vs. evil, it’s about the n ecessary gratuitousness of fiction. And Hurt is the devil, but the devil doesn’t exist anyway except as the thing that lets Batman and the reader pretend the mystery was soluble after all, instead of being, like every mystery, an absence of some critical fact (read: reason) from the get-go.

On a side note, a lot of the readings of Punisher: Born I’ve seen also suggest that Frank made a deal with Death itself, since there’s no real way to tell what sort of being he dealt with (or thinks he dealt with). I tend to side with the devil interpretation there if only because of Frank Castle’s established Catholic faith.

And Brian, I now concede that for the purposes of a fictional character, possessing someone else and pretending to be someone else are practically the same thing. If it’s all surface appearance and language anyway, there really is no distinction. I see your point now.

And Brian, I now concede that for the purposes of a fictional character, possessing someone else and pretending to be someone else are practically the same thing. If it’s all surface appearance and language anyway, there really is no distinction. I see your point now.

Cool beans.

Just thought of something, IF everything’s connected, according to Morrison:

then just MAYBE the Black Glove could be “Mr. Whisper” from the “Gothic” 5-parter of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight # 6-10.

After all, if memory serves me right Mr. Whisper made a Faustian deal with a devil.

Who’s to say that Mr. Whisper is the devil in disguise as the Black Glove?

It’s probably not Whisper, since he got dragged off to Hell by a very angry devil whom he’d spent centuries cheating. That’s not exactly someone who gets let back out of Hell.

Maybe the Devil is so interested in Batman because of some sort of crazy destiny Bruce has that the Devil wanted to corrupt somehow? My knee-jerk reaction is that this is a terrible idea, but I trust Morrison to actually pull it off and do something that’s really good.

Why does Satan hate Batman? He’s already Goddamned, according to Frank Miller.

I say it’s a tulpa, physical/psychic manifestation of the dark place in Bruce Wayne’s psyche they went on about in the beginning of the issue. Quasi himalayan concept (which is to say, I only know it from the pop/horror side, not whatever legit mythological or religious importance it has).

A little more supernatural than Batman has gotten lately, but fits in generally with a chaos magic worldview, and not far away from the stuff he was dealing with in (if memory serves) ‘Tec back in the Breyfogle late-80s.

Either that, or it’s not the devil, but Devil Dinosaur, and people are just getting the two mixed up.

[...] Devil or No Devil? – Have It Out! Comic Book Resources ,November 29, 2008 by Brian Cronin I’d like to see everyone’s best arguments here on whether it is the Devil in Batman or a dude claiming to be the Devil. … [...]

anyone else here notice the five silhouettes watching the waynes walk on to history in the last page of 681?

I thinksit’s a little telling that when Straczynski implied a mystical influence in Spider-Man’s origin, the consensus was that he just didn’t get the character, but when Morrison suggests that the devil himself was personally responsible for Batman, people seem surprisingly on board with it.

I’m a little biased because I’ve always disliked when later authors “reveal” previously unintended “facts” about the origins of characters they didn’t create (it CAN be done well, but so rarely is), but further tampering with Batman’s origin (isn’t it one of the things always referred to is as happening multiple ways whenever writers want to play up how the Crisis events have changed continuity?) by overlaying some kind of “Chosen One” status seems really … unadvisable,

I know Morrison never used the phrase “Chosen One,” but why would the devil be interested in little Bruce Wayne unless he knew the kid had some kind of destiny or potential or whatnot? And why would he think killing the kid’s parent’s would avert that destiny? Is the devil completely unfamiliar with the stereotypical “Hero’s Journey”? I think a far more interesting spin – if you absolutely must weave the devil into Batman’s origin – would be for the Devil to have been trying to keep the Waynes from being killed, requiring some divine agent to ensure they die so Bruce becomes Batman.

Dr Hurt is probably a doppleganger / tulpa externalization of the ‘hurt’ within Batman that was unleashed during the thorgal.

WTF did I just write!!!

But I think that is what it is.

I made a similar assumption to Brian in the review section andi i just want to flesh it out here a bit.

If you read the entire part where the Joker speaks I think he lines it out well and clear that Hurt is the devil or being possesed by the devil, when he says i am not your servant I think this is because the Joker is beyond Good & Evil – he is Chaos.

Bruce writes in his narrtive that he sees the devil as well which leads you to think its the devil.

Also I think that if the Devil is testing Batman and the Human spirit the way he would do it – would be to try and be subtle and corrupt the spirit as by being overt its just no fun.

At the end i do firmly believe the Devil is scared of the Human spirit and how Batman has defied him again. Also the Zur en Arh where Bruce says “what?” i think is great as this insinuates the devil has been behind it all.

Well thats my meagre view.

I count two for tulpa!

OK for Captain Pedantic, pointing out that the devill didn’t posess anyone in gothic, the guise he wore was of a dead nun – Mangrove Pierce’s suicide was referenced in DC Universe #0.

For those who say that Batman can’t be involved in the supernatural, you’re clearly forgetting that smoe of the earliest Batman stories were steeped in mysticism, including Batman hunting werewolves through Gotham City, and that he’s the character most associated with Deadman.

There’s absolutely no argument that convinces me that Dr Hurt wasn’t the devil, saying that though, there’s also no real evidence to say he was.

And Batman’s not dead yet, Batman RIP’s set before Finhal Crisis, which is where we’re supposed to see the final fate of Bruce Wayne.

Who says Batman in Final Crisis is Bruce Wayne?

Didn’t Grant Morrison himself say that?

Since I already conceded the point about Gothic, I think calling me “Captain Pedantic” is rather gratuitous and ingracious at this point, Graeme.

65 posts and counting. Wow.

I’m starting to wonder whether Morrison wrote the ending specifically for the internet fanboys.

Either way, he stirred up something.

s1rude said:

“we certainly don’t “need” answers about Hurt or what happened in the cave at Nanda Parbat in order to continue the story of Batman.”

But you do need answers about Hurt to continue the story about Hurt. By refusing to answer whether or not Hurt is really the Devil, or just a crazy human, Morrison has effectively placed him off-limits for future stories. (Not completely and totally, of course, but I defy anyone here to look me in the eye and tell me that they don’t hate mysteries that go on too long because the writer’s not willing to commit to a solution. It’s the common complaint about series like “Lost” and “The X-Files”, about characters like Wolverine and the Hobgoblin…”Oh, they tried to stretch the mystery out, and I eventually just stopped caring.”)

If anyone ever wants to bring back Hurt again, they’re going to sooner or later need to pick an answer and stick with it. If nobody ever wants to bring back Hurt again, then this becomes an interesting curiosity, another Morrison plot cul-de-sac that the next writer has to wiggle their way out of. Either way, Morrison needs to understand that ambiguous endings don’t work in stories that don’t end.

I do honestly believe it is the devil or at the very least, the incarnation of “Evil”. Just within Batman 681 there are an assortment of obvious clues that when viewed within the context of everything else Morrison did on the run, make it really apparent.

To start with, Gordon asks Batman why he had to pick a fight with something “Old as time and bigger then all of us.”. That’s one of the first really blatant clues that when viewed outside of the rest of Morrison’s run just seems like Gordon making a broad statement in regards to Batman taking on “crime” or “Evil’, which it is, but it’s also allusions to “The enemy”.

Batman 666 is laden with Devil symbolism. The pentagram, blatant statements about the Devil and making deals with him. The whole thing just sets the tone for Morrison’s run.

In addition to that, Batman has to undergo the Thogal, Death and Rebirth, to even catch a glimpse of his ultimate enemy. In Death he sees the Devi, with fear in his eyes.

Moving on, we have the Black Glove, the hand of the Devil on Earth. What is it that they specialize in? The Corruption of Virtue. Specifically, the most greedy partake in the Corruption of Virtue. What was the goal in the actions against Batman “Nothing less then the complete and utter ruination of a noble human spirit.”. Not death, ruination. And that is what the Black Glove did, they ruined Jezebel Jet and turned into the same type of person who inflicted horrors against her. They take the noble and make them fall.

Joker is all over the place with devil references. The forked tongue, allusion to Jezebel’s role as the Serpent in the Garden of Evil. “Devil is double deuce, my dear Doctor, and Joker trumps deuce.”. Joker is not just saying he trumped The Black Glove, he’s saying he is beyond the simplicity of the Devil’s evil. He is chaos, the unyielding storm. And he continues “Pleased to meet you, admire your work but don’t. don’t call me servant”. Anyone who says that isn’t a Rolling Stones reference is nuts.

And continuing? What is Dr Hurt’s response when the Joker threatens the lives of the Black Glove. “But you CHOSE to be here. All of you high and mighty rollers. Your sins have found you out.” Hurt does not seem concerned, why? Because the moment those people became the fingers of the Black Glove, they were corrupted(damned). They were IN The Black Glove, the Devil’s Grasp, and now doing his bidding on Earth by continuing the cycle of Corrupting Virtue. But the Devil does not care if they are lost, because they are already his. He holds their souls

The offer to Bruce Wayne, “Dedicate yourself to the Corruption of Virtue!”. He offers him his parents reputation and wants Batman’s soul in return. And I do mean “Soul”, because that is what the Black Glove wants. The “corruption of virtue” is claiming their soul.

If we follow that train of thought all the way back to the Wayne’s murder, we see that was the Black Glove’s goal as well. To corrupt a Young Bruce Wayne and ruin him. Just like the tragedies the Dr Hurt inflicted on the Three Batmen, that corrupted them and turned them into monsters, Dr Hurt(The Devil) intended this same fate for Bruce Wayne. But instead, there was a “Miracle on Crime Alley”. The ultimate act of corruption birthed the most noble soul. “Miracle on Crime Alley.”

And we all know the Devil is greedy and hates to be denied what he wants. RIP is him reaching out to claim what he feels should be his, the corruption of Bruce Wayne, his soul. But Batman is his hubris, born from the tragedy the Devil so loves to spread.

It’s all there.

The “devil” is inside everyone, it’s just few actually let it out. Dr. Hurt is part of a group that commits evil acts just because. Is Hurt actually The Devil/Satan/Neron/Mephisto/Lucifer? No. Is he evil? Yes. I think most people are overthinking this arc, and are taking the symbolism at face value.

A bit more.

Dr Hurt taunts and threatens Batman with his identity. “If not Dad, have you dared consider the only alternative?”

“I’d like to see everyone’s best arguments here on whether it is the Devil in Batman or a dude claiming to be the Devil.”

Um….where exactly does Hurt claim that he is “the Devil?” I haven’t reviewed every issue of this run, but I’m pretty sure this “claim” is on Page Nowhere of Issue Never. Batman suggests that the guy is the Devil. But the guy himself claims to be Thomas Wayne.

And that “if not Dad” thing…. isn’t that telling? Some readers have noted that Bruce’s brother showed up in the past… and GM isn’t beyond using the old “evil twin” motif. (See Cassandra Nova / Xavier.) That might also explain Hurt’s rant about the “flaw” from the beginning.

There’s been a lot of “devil” stuff in this run, but most of it has been symbolic more than literally supernatural.

Perhaps a follow-up question for the seeming majority consensus: Is Hurt THE Devil, or is he more a devil very specific to Batman’s psyche, soul, and world? (Assume, if you will humor me, that there’s a distinction between a general Devil and a personal devil.)

You know, having re-read the issue, it does kinda seem like the ‘tulpa’ theory has a lot of weight behind it. The first flashback to Bruce and the corrupted monk, coupled with Dr Hurt’s ranting towards the end, seems to point towards it. But can tulpas time travel? Because Dr Hurt has been around a while, long before Bruce’s thogal holiday. Or would the tulpa have possessed him after his appearance in ‘Robin Dies At Dawn’? Who knows?

“It’s Jacques Lacan, isn’t it? Lacan’s “phallus” which is not an actual gential organ, but rather the placeholder for the absence of reason at the heart of reason. Batman is hyperrrational, but he doesn’t start from rationality: quite the opposite, and his world and the narrative structures in which he functions are more Bat-Mite-style 5th dimensions of imagination and irrationality than anything else. Lacan’s mirror stage becomes the mirrored “Zorro” marquee, the secret sentence “Zorro in Arkham” that pretends to explain everything but really just signifies the irrationjality of being Zorro, of being Batman, and, if you’re a reader, of identifying with what is, after all, not a real person nor even a narrative function that does a good job aping a real person.”

Morrison does have a affinity for Lacanian concepts. Large chunks of The Invisibles were born out of ideas of Lacanian psychoanalysis (the entire ‘training’ of Dane by O’Bedlam is an exercise in Lacanian psyhchoanalysis).

I have agreed with most everything you’ve you said Omar, and I do think that Hurt is a symbol of the gap in the puzzle. Slavoj Zizek, a lacanian and constant analyzer of popular culture, would say that our analysis of whether Hurt is the Devil is because of our “over-proximity of the Real”. For Zizek, Hurt is a ‘void’, an ambiguous and unexplained quantity within the comic (this is what I think he means by saying he is ‘missing piece’). By making him the devil (or not, for the matter), we are attempting to ‘fill the void’ a created by his character. Zizek believes that when we do this, we remove the innate ambiguity of subjectivity, and in filling this void we are trying to avoid this necessary fact of subjectivity. Basically, we are trying to make it easier on ourselves by trying to say what Hurt is rather than just accepting the fact that we can’t/don’t know. I am as guilty as anyone else in doing this with just about everything. Zizek (and probably Lacan) would say that this discussion is a step in the right direction to accepting subjectivity. I personally find it interesting and certainly (in at least some way) of Morrison in that his comics provoke this kind of discussion.

Also, Satanism is a spiritual recognition of this subjectivity. Satanists believe that Satan is a symbol of the a ‘god’ that rebelled against objective truths and rigid, oppressive structure. For Satanists, Hurt is could not be Satan because he is too invested in structures (the black glove and his confrontation of Joker making another bet shows this). A satanist would not make Satan a servant to the social structure of the Black Glove or to one of the most far-reaching societal structure: money. Grant Morrison is a Satanist.

to continue this discussion and play devil’s advocate:

Sat

“If you read the entire part where the Joker speaks I think he lines it out well and clear that Hurt is the devil or being possessed by the devil, when he says i am not your servant I think this is because the Joker is beyond Good & Evil – he is Chaos.”

I don’t think Joker being chaos is an argument for Hurt being the devil. In fact, it is quite the opposite. In most Christian theology (consisting of both biblical and canonical writings) , Satan’s rebellion against God in Heaven is what brings chaos, not just physical chaos, but moral and ethical chaos. If Joker is chaos, then, as I earlier posted, would be the best candidate in the story to be Satan. Magic done by satanists is called Chaos Magic.

Brian O

I meant to add that Morrison has proclaimed that ‘Satan is dead’ and that by Satanist I mean a practitioner of magic. Many ’satanists’ don’t necessarily believe in Satan. Though Morrison most likely doesn’t follow Satan or anything like that, I don’t think he would show Satan as such a ‘follower’ of certain rigid aspects of society.

That’s another way to look at the Joker’s line, too: the real threat is the irrationality that the essential ambivalence of subject formation threatens. Morrison’s Joker, of course, has no stable subjectivity per Arkham Asylum.

Basically, evil is less dangerous than simple irrationality, the dissolution of the level of the Imaginary itself through the violent irruption of the Real. Thus the Joker is a greater threat to Batman than the devil, or the evil of the (ultimately rather pathetic) Black Glove members.

Fair Point ther Brian on the Joker piece – I have not go that sort of a knowledge base and that was my take on it.

However I am looking forward to Batman 682.

Blackjak:

And is that an Atari Force avatar I spy by your name?

In a weird sort of way, that series influenced my fanfic writing career (which started long before the internet). I still have the entire series AND the 5 mini-comics leading into it from the game carts.