And yeah, Greg, enjoy the break! Maybe I should do more reviews...

Enjoy your review vacation, though I will miss them.

Not even the press is going for it this time because they are a lot smarter now then they were when DC pulled Death of Superman.

Also, when DC under jeanette Kahn did their publicity stunts, they made sure the storytelling for the stunt issues was as low-context as possible, easy to grasp with little to no knowledge of the character, and incredibly straightforward. Death in the family, Death of Superman, Knightfall...whether or not you like the actual storylines, they were low-context and incredibly easy to understand. With Batman RIP, even if the media wanted to fall for it and jump all over it for a story, it's too high-context and impenetrable. You need a bunch of annotations to sort through the metafiction and symbolism and obscure references in Morrison's current DC work. Look at a roundup of the media coverage for RIP and it seems no two news sources can even agree on what supposedly happened, they all sound like they're describing extremely different stories.

Dan: the sequel to the first Terminal City was subtitled "Aerial Graffiti." In case you get around to reading them!

And there were two TERMINAL CITY series? Duh. Not that I've gotten around to reading the one that I own, but stil.

As I’ve written over and over about Morrison on Batman, I expect more. I expect magic, and what I’ve gotten is a messy epic that has its moments but fails to add much to the Batman legacy.

I dunno. I don't actually mind that it's not 'magic.' In fact, I think I am suspicious of guys that come on a flagship commercial book and try to create magic, groundbreaking stuff. I think there are inherent limits on corporate-owned franchise characters that you will trip over if you try to do that.

In fact, every time someone has tried to do that, with Batman or any other company-owned character that's one of the Big Ones, it's gotten one of two responses-- A) fans throw a fit, or B) the corporate owners throw a fit. Either way, the response is always the same-- undo it, walk it back, get it undone. I used to think that the only major changes that really stuck were Spider-Man's marriage and Superman's parents being alive, and we just saw those both get undone.

It's hard for me to get invested in a Big Batman Death Story-- REALLY THIS TIME THEY'RE CALLING IT R.I.P.-- when the common-sense part of my brain is telling me, "DC is never going to do anything seriously radical when the Bruce Wayne Batman just had the highest-grossing superhero movie ever in the history of the planet. And even if they try Warner's will put a stop to it." Not even the press is going for it this time because they are a lot smarter now then they were when DC pulled Death of Superman.

My feeling is that you get better superhero comics when the creators acknowledge up front that there are things that aren't going to seriously be done, and instead of dancing around them and teasing the audience with stunts that look like they MIGHT be trying something we all know is impossible on a commercial level, they just get on with telling good solid stories within the form. Morrison 'magic' is far more likely to be found on the books that are not Big Names, like Doom Patrol or animal Man, or originals like We3, or even special-permission-to-go-outside-the-box projects like All-Star Superman. But looking for it in the regular monthly Batman book is just setting yourself up for constant disappointment and annoyance no matter who's working on it.

DC's new trick is to be constantly teasing a new status quo that somehow never seems to actually arrive. We countdown to a crisis that counts down to a crisis that leads into a new reign of the blackest night before the countdown to the new morning of whatever. After a while you start to feel like you're just getting jerked around. Even if it's Grant Morrison doing it, it's still annoying; and I'd think the various reports of editorially mandated rewrites on Final Crisis would clue people in to this crap by now. But for whatever reason, this silliness of the constant tease and no payoff is still working. The books keep selling. I don't get it.