4 out of 5

Covers:

Batman #655-658, 663-669, 670-671 (Ra’s Al Ghul storyline), 672-683, 700-702

Batman and Robin #1-16

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne

Batman: The Return

Batman Incorporated (Vol.1, Vol.2 – ongoing)

Morrison’s run on Batman took me a couple go-throughs to get down with.  Morrie was at a high point when he was put on the book in 2007.  Already a household name thanks to game-changing, top-selling runs on JLA and X-Men and a truly loving maxi-series All-Star Superman, there was no doubt that Grant knew how to handle the big names and handle them with appreciation for their various qualities – blowing the superstar JLA team book to over-sized proportions, expanding X-Men into even a fuller world than it already was but fleshing out the history, dragging the team down into the mutated muck, and a big and bold quiet reverence for Superman, widescreen, Julius Schwartzy sci-fi story-telling.  Grant knows his history, and knows his fans.  So – Batman?  Pfft, sold.

Now from afar, I can say that Grant did something similar – and larger – with Batman (which he’s still writing via the Incorporated series, but he’s shifted things mostly into the present, having moved all of the characters past pieces around to where needed).  He adding some lasting aspects to X-Men via his development of the Weapon Plus concept, but otherwise his previous hero runs have been misleadingly massive in the sense that Grant creates aspects wholesale, but writes these series not quiet issue-to-issue but rather big start, big finish, and everything in between, excelling at using his trippy narrative skills to seed pieces of that big finish into the 30 or 50 or whatever issues.  It doesn’t feel cheap and it doesn’t feel like some magic deus ex machina, because whatever he’s doing, it is, again, with the history of the character in his mind.  But the goal with Batman has seemed a little different.  It presented a different challenge, because in order to move forward, Grant had to put the past in order.  For a character that’s survived since the start of modern comics and has gone through a slew of personality shifts and style shifts – from comedy to parody to pulp to grit to playboy to loner, Batman is a rather fractured person.  So how do you add the Grant Morrison charm without being ignorant of all that?  How do you make a lasting effect in such an environment, where just adding something wholesale can be brushed off as another blip on the giant Batman radar?

And thus we got this longer term – longer than usual term – take on the character, a risky one because, in order to get to an explanation, Grant had to play with us a little bit, presenting a side of Batman we may not currently be too comfortable with, as Bruce goes through a bit of a crisis where he feels like he’s lost touch with his humanity, that ‘Bruce Wayne’ has become the disguise.  So: he writes the 90s movie Batman, the charming spoiled brat with the big pop-colored fights who tosses off quips and one liners and then falls in love with a broad and lets her into the batcave.  Andy Kubert’s expressively sketchy pencils purposefully added to the cheeky flavor but it was just too much at the time for this reader, and when Grant delivers an incredibly over-wrought full-on text issue with computer illustrations by John van Fleet about the Joker, it was just too much.  I thought Grant had lost some of his focus, being strewn across the DC landscape via 52 and its various dangling strings.

It was over-wrought.  But it turned out it was all part of the point.  Grant would grab my attention back with a short detectivey run with the amazing art of J.H. Williams III before dipping into the “dark ages” of Batman with the Jim Lee-esque big-muscled pencils of Tony Daniel.  Explaining the ‘twist’ here wouldn’t really ruin things, because the Grant’s writing is so fractured in general that knowing where it’s going doesn’t prevent issue from issue surprises, but still, I’ll avoid the big reveal and just say that I understand why reading this in trade worked better than month-to-month.  In trade, you can see the ebb and flow of Grant summarizing all of Batman’s history, but with the pause between issues, you can’t figure out why everything is just sort of off and why it keeps changing.  And typical Morrison, there IS a reason behind all of it, and it’s still confusing as shit (as with The Invisibles, and The Filth, and even X-Men – every sprawling big-picture story Grant has worked on, which is the majority of his stuff…); you get the gist but all of the spiraling concepts are sometimes just total minutiae that only equally cracked-out fans can study and grasp, and some are very minor nods that only ‘click’ when you’ve been back and forth over the details a few times…. which is part of the fun, and part of Morrison’s lasting power.

Anyhow, the picture gets bigger and bigger – Batman is offed during the 52-related event ‘Final Crisis,’ (scripted by Grant) and god bless everything, it’s not the death of Superman – you know Batman is coming back, of that there is no doubt, but in the meantime, Grant gives us Nightwing and Batman’s son – Damian – as a new Robin, for “Batman and Robin” – and this is a full-story, part of the fuller story, the new B and R not just feeling like fill-ins but full characters.  It’s not a mini-series, it’s not a “who’s the real Superman?” bullshit.  We know who Nightwing is, and Grant has given Damian a legit feel in the Batman pages, so they were, for all intents and purposes, the new Batman and Robin.  And the series was great!  Thanks to all the groundwork, Grant was able to get back to scripting modern stories of weird and creepy villains with some excellent ‘romantic’ pencillers – frequent collaborator Frank Quitely, Chris Burnham – and again, that motherfucker, seeding in elements for his next chapter of Batman, which takes into account all that’s come before (which is a few years worth of material by the end of the B&R run plus a fun time-travel 6-issue mini of Bruce Wayne getting back to the DC Universe with “The Return of Bruce Wayne”) to get to Batman Incorporated, where Bruce Wayne says “fuck this shit” and starts hiring surrogate Batmen in countries around the globe, going public about funding it.

This will have to collapse soon after Grant leaves the book, I’m sure, but you can’t undo the mind-fuck of his ‘re-birth-death-re-birth’ cycle of Bruce Wayne (or undoing it would be repetitive), and Damian hasn’t just been introduced in a mini-series to be killed off in the regular series (hi, Aztek), or maybe he will be… but at this point has done his part in affecting longer lasting aspects of the book.  My point being: Grant has not only successfully added elements which future writers can build on, he has accomplished the seemingly impossible task of permanently affecting the character’s history without really ret-conning anything that came before.  It has been a long journey, one still ongoing, and one that was initially shaky ground – and, being written by Grant, we’re still getting confusing details and weird elements that we can’t know if they’re important or not until he wraps this whole thing up – but, though it might not be as “deep” as his indie books, or as off-the-rails as X-Men or JLA – this has been one of the most impressive runs on a cornerstone character ever.

I separated the Ra’s Al Ghul books in the issue listing above because they are a waste of time.  They spring from story aspects of Grant’s run on the DC titles at the time, but they do nothing but distract from his main Batman tale and reek of crossover b.s., hence why they are collected in a separate trade and not in one of the books being billed as Grant’s Batman books.

The end.