This being a limited series has a chance to work (although this first issue was just painful to read, how over the top did it have to be to get it's point across?) The artwork was great so that helped the story, but it was Mark Millar level of character dialog (which means that it sucked when it comes to showcasing the actual personalities of the established characters) We'll see how the story shapes up and I love the cast(except maybe starknight or whatever his name was) but god I hope the dialog improves into something a lot less campy.

I favor Morrison’s minimalist style over many writers’ overworked narration and mawkish dialogue.

I've given Morrison a lot of flak on this blog for what I thought were his recent forays into self-indulgent metafiction commentary, but I have to give the man his due. When he reins that in some, he can write some damn good superhero comics. Batman and Robin reminded me of the feeling I used to get from reading his JLA.

I still read comics... I have a subscription to Marvel's Digital Comics and I'm reading both Essential Spider-man and Showcase Presents: Batman... And I occasionally pic up a trade...

But both publishers have truly gotten away from everything that used to make them appealing to me.

I will admit that Morrison’s Batman and Robin seems to escape this, it doesn’t read like the other books. The prose is much less purple there. It’s quite a good book.

I favor Morrison's minimalist style over many writers' overworked narration and mawkish dialogue.

Don’t bother, Greg. T’s sort of the Mirror Universe version of a Marvel Zombie: He’ll attack DC at any given time and for any given thing, regardless of whether or not what he’s saying is congruent with reality.

In the late 80s to early 90s DC was very very good, and from 1992 to 2001 I thought there work was far, FAR superior to Marvel's output, to the point I bought almost no Marvel books at all during that period, so I'm not a knee-jerk DC hater. Since Identity Crisis I sincerely feel everyone's been plagued by the same annoying writing tics with a few exceptions. Excessive scenes of heroes bickering using first names and acting really dickish to one another (like in Robinson's Justice League book), excessive cannon fodder scenes followed by maudlin and insincere displays of overwrought emotion, lots of funeral scenes and characters going dark as a result (Wonder Girl, Robin like 3 separate occasions, Bart Allen Flash, the body bags for Teen Titans alone is out of control), overdone first person narration captions that crowd the page and are loaded with purple prose that takes itself way too seriously and adds nothing to the story), lots of scenes of "lesser" heroes bickering and acting like they have an inferiority complex because the "Trinity" is just too awesome and just seems to think they're so much better than everyone else (Black Canary had a similar recent standoff with them recently in JLA for example), and other trends I've noticed that makes it hard for me to read their books. From what I've seen this book seems to have all those post-Identity Crisis writing trends that I've grown to hate at Didio's DC, so I imagined it would be a hit with their fans, but its not. Which gives me hope. Morrison and a few others seem to avoid these trends thankfully.

Don't get me wrong, Marvel has developed its own annoying writing tics since Jemas left, around the time of New Avengers debut. I just find them a lot more tolerable. At least writers like Brubaker, Fraction and others for example seem to be able to write much better first person narration captions.

T.: It’s been a while since I read a lot of regular DC superhero books, so maybe I’ve missed it. I read Secret Six, which I like, and I was reading Morrison’s Batman (and now Batman and Robin), and even if you don’t like his work, it’s kind of hard to fit in Photoshopped jokes about it. This lends itself so nicely to it, though. Most of what I’ve seen from DC recently (and a lot of Marvel, to be honest) is more just mediocre than ridiculously awful.

Well, I put Gail Simone in the bad dialogue category too personally. When I read her in Birds of Prey the prose was quite purple at times, or trying too hard to be cute and clever. Then I read a recent Wonder Woman by her with some green villain that kind of looked like a cross between Doomsday and Turtle Boy Jimmy Olsen and the groaners were fast and furious. It wasn't quite as bad as this but it was in the same general family of terrible. I didn't read Secret Six though so maybe she's better over there. But in general, the Marvel dialogue is better on average, not perfect but better. I find over there the biggest problem isn't so much purple prose but oftentimes writers try to hard to be to clever in an edgy fashion, which I guess is the legacy of Bendis and Millar. It's annoying but still nowhere near as bad as the current DC writing style with all the annoying first name use, excessive hero worship of the Trinity by other heroes, petulant infighting and dickishness by heroes and maudlin emotion. Mind you this DC style I'm talking about only really started with Identity Crisis and seems to persist to this day.

I will admit that Morrison's Batman and Robin seems to escape this, it doesn't read like the other books. The prose is much less purple there. It's quite a good book.

http://twitpic.com/97gzp

That's a lot of word bubbles to fill.

http://www.4thletter.net/category/ultimate-edit-week/

and this

http://www.4thletter.net/2009/05/cabal-edit/

pretty sure there's a Secret Invasion one somewhere on that site, but I haven't the time to look.

Come to think of it, with anything Bendis.

Cue the anything-Jeph Loeb-related jokes!

What does Jeph Loeb have to do with this book?

LOL to the Misfits reference.