The Many (Thousand) Deaths Of Batman

CSBG Archive

February 17, 2009 @ 08:45 PM

From Douglas Wolk’s excellent review of Batman #686:

Where Batman ends–the only way Batman ends–is where you stop reading Batman, which is how Batman has actually had hundreds of thousands of endings: dissatisfaction or boredom, walking out of the theater (past a dark alley?), cutting losses and wondering if it would’ve gotten better again.

So, how many times has Batman died for you? For me, he never really did.

Even when I was not reading comics regularly, I still cracked open my dog-eared Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told trade paperback that my mom bought me during the Batmania of ’89. I loved the ’90s cartoon that everyone else does, and I think that counts.

But if it doesn’t, his deaths have been pretty mundane for me. I didn’t read many comics (other than the odd Gen13 picked up at the grocery store, back when grocery stores carried comics) from the time I hit puberty until freshman year in college, when I heard that there was this pretty cool X-Men run by Grant Morrison I should check out. Once I jumped both feet first in to that and the stuff Quesada and Jemas were doing at Marvel, I decided it was time that I finally read some of those classics of the medium I’d never picked up. You know, Maus, Watchmen, Jimmy Corrigan, even that Batman thing Frank Miller did.

Once I read DKR, things really changed.

Via my introduction to tradepaperbacks, I’ve read a ton of Batman, from Miller’s to Denny O’Neil’s to Jeph Loeb’s. Yeah, I really liked the Long Halloween the first time I read it. So much so that I was really excited when Loeb and my childhood favorite artist, Jim Lee, were doing a Batman run.

I got bored with that six issues in and have since learned better than to trust a Loeb written comic, even if I kind of want to read his second arc on Hulk because holy hell, Art Adams interiors! I’m not made of stone!

From there, I didn’t pick up another Batman single until my favorite comics writer took over. Even then, I read Grant Morrison’s run on the character in starts and stops. I liked the first arc okay, but found it easy to drift away. I jumped back on for the JH Williams drawn arc, Club of Heroes. I then immediately jumped off during the R’as Al Ghul crossover. It’s always kind of bugged me that a group of comics written by Morrison, Peter Milligan, and Paul Dini didn’t appeal to me, but not enough to pay money for them.

I came back for RIP, and after years of not paying attention to these internet shit storms over event superhero comics, I got to experience that discourse over something I read and enjoyed for the most part. I miss my ignorance on how those things work. I was initially going to skip the Gaiman two parter but got the first one on impulse and wound up really enjoying it, even if the forthcoming trade sounds like it would have been worth waiting for, price be damned.

Wolk’s idea is interesting, but I’m not sure I agree with it. Even if you stop following Batman monthly for whatever reason (be it puberty, boredom, revulsion, finances, or one I couldn’t think of), you can follow his adventures a number of ways. There are entire distinct eras of the character you can delve in to, from his earliest appearances through every decade since the ’30s. You could follow him by creators (which will lead you to reading stuff like All Star Batman And Frank Miller Can Get Away With Pretty Much Anything) if you take it too far. That is, if you limit yourself to comics.

Because Batman exists well beyond the confining panels of comics, as if we didn’t all get a big reminder of that last summer. You can follow Batman by media. People who would never think of paying $4 for a single issue comic or $24 for a collection have DVD sets, video games, or DVRs full of Bat-content.

That’s one of the things that appeals to me about the character, really; he transcends any one take on him. I mean hell, you could not spend a cent and still be involved with the character if you happen to read a blog by a guy who thinks Batman him a whole lot (and chronicles his many emotional states).

So, how many times has Batman died for you? Or does this panel from RIP, that seemingly everyone seemed to forgot about whilst freaking out over the comic, sum up your thoughts on the character? Interested in seeing the responses, even if my previously antagonistic comments about the comment’s section may not get me much of a response. Hey, I’m nice when I want something from you guys!

Comments below

18 Comments

Rob McMonigal

February 17, 2009 at 10:08 pm

I’m firmly in the Batman and Robin will never die (though I bet I’m not reading them monthly) camp. My problem is that DC seems at times more interested in keeping him *out* of the cowl than in it!

Personally, since DC axed Dixon-Grant-Moench, my interest in the main titles has been spotty at best, as I pretty much think Brubaker and Rucka got him all wrong. I haven’t read all the Morrison yet, but for me, DC’s best Batman stories of the past several years have all been in JLA.

(For me, Bats will always be the guy holding the match against the White Martians. THAT to me is what makes Batman, a Marvel-level powered hero, work within a ridiculously powerful DCU.)

Brian Cronin

February 17, 2009 at 10:12 pm

If you like Morrison’s JLA Batman, Rob, then you’ll likely dig his Batman RIP Batman.

“That’s the thing about Batman. Batman thinks of everything.”

Jbird

February 17, 2009 at 10:34 pm

I think it’s neat how that “Batman and Robin will never die” panel shows up in Morrison’s JLA. There it’s “. . . can never die”, but if that “imaginary story” can be believed, Tim Drake will be Batman and Damian will be Robin.

FunkyGreenJerusalem

February 17, 2009 at 10:49 pm

How can Batman die?
The fact we all have no problem with Year One and JLA happening to the same character shows he’s got legs.

It’s like in the extras of Batman Year 100, Paul Pope talks about he and Frank Miller had a conversation about how he’s a character who no matter how hard you throw at the wall, still comes back as Batman.

Cove West

February 18, 2009 at 12:44 am

Yeah, I don’t think Batman has ever died for me, either. I started with Knightfall (and so maybe my criteria for “alive” is a little…crippled…), and apart from some times when I wasn’t entirely on board with a particular direction (“Murderer/Fugitive” era, “Hush” era, Morrison era) or stopped reading simply because I didn’t have time to keep up with it, I never felt like Batman was dead to me. And he may be the only property that accomplished that for me — even properties that, in peak times, I like better than Batman, such as the X-Men, cosmic Marvel, Flash , all have entered periods where I expected never to read another comic about them again. Even in the worst of times for Batman, I never felt alienated from him, never felt afraid of what I’d find inside his comics. I do grumble, as Rob does, that much of the excellent pre-NML stuff has disappeared, and I wish the old “DETECTIVE is noir, BATMAN is superhero, FAMILY is the Bat-squad, and LOTDK is historical” paradigm was still in use, but I’ve never been so out-of-sorts with the custodianship of the character that I rejected it. And maybe that’s it: maybe the Bat-office simply takes better care of its charge than most.

Bernard the Poet

February 18, 2009 at 5:10 am

I nearly gave up on him, when they brought in Tim Drake – “I DIDN’T PHONE IN TO KILL JASON TODD, I PHONED IN TO KILL OFF THE BOY WONDER. GIVE ME MY MONEY BACK” – but the Legends of the Dark Knight dragged me back in.

T.

February 18, 2009 at 5:18 am

If you like Morrison’s JLA Batman, Rob, then you’ll likely dig his Batman RIP Batman.

“That’s the thing about Batman. Batman thinks of everything.”

Rob, don’t be so sure about that.

I absolutely LOVED Morrison’s characterization of Batman in JLA. Actually, I loved every last thing about Morrison’s JLA to pieces. Morrison’s Batman RIP was a confusing, dull mess to me, I had no idea what it was trying to accomplish. It was like Knightfall on acid, with random pages removed.

Stephen

February 18, 2009 at 11:52 am

A more interesting question would be when did the whole “there’s no one way to interpret Batman” standard came from? We all kinda take it as gospel now, but I remember reading letter columns in the aftermath of DKR stating that the writers of the time were Doing It Wrong and Miller’s interpretation was the only right one. Was it the movie, or my suspect, B:TAS?

(Side point: I coincidentally read through the short story collection from around the time of the movie a couple of weeks ago – Greatest Adventures of Batman or something similar – and that’s obviously part of the “there’s no one interpretation” school of thought, since it ranges from 50s-era stories to ones which are quite modern.)

The Mann

February 18, 2009 at 2:38 pm

Grant Morrison has never had an original idea in his life and couldn’t script a dog food commercial for the American Cattleman’s Association. DC should be ashamed of themselves for employing this scum-sucking illiterate limey no-talent terrorist traitorous trash, I don’t care how low his rates are or how many B.J.’s he promised Lee and Noveck. Deport the slimeball.

And one more thing – if 52, Trinity, Final Crisis and this piece of dung are the best DC can come up with these days, let’s just cancel my subscriptions to all of their books. It looks like it is back to the independents and Dark Horse to find any semblance of originality, creativity or basic story telling skills.