SmartRemarks

Grayson, that is. (What, you thought something else…? Dirty mind. Shame on you.)

Dick Grayson, formerly Nightwing, formerly Robin, has had a strong fan following for years, especially since he grew up and stepped out of the red-and-green costume (and his mentor’s shadow) a quarter-century ago. Now the character has done what in one sense always seemed inevitable and yet in another seemed unlikely ever to see print… he’s become Batman. And it’s exciting.

Three years ago DC’s executive editor Dan DiDio wanted to kill off Dick Grayson as a superfluous character; he backed down in the face of an overwhelming reaction from both creators and fans, and now Dick is at the very center of the Bat-universe. 

I’ve written before with (ahem) less than wholehearted approval of Grant Morrison’s writing on Batman and, for that matter, on Final Crisis… but as erratic as the path may have been getting to this point, I have to give DC Comics credit for taking a fairly bold move. If the overall execution hasn’t been as dramatically compelling as Ed Brubaker’s death of Captain America over at Marvel a couple of years back, still… shuffling Bruce Wayne offstage and having his onetime sidekick take over the cape and cowl is certainly a departure from formula, and it creates the potential for some really fresh perspectives on familiar characters.

Still, as the first “relaunched” Bat-books saw print this past week, I couldn’t help approaching them with some trepidation.

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Tags: Batman, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Dick Grayson, Grant Morrison, Judd Winick, Robin, super-heroes, writers

What.

The fuck.

Was that?

Seriously. Final Crisis #7 was every bit as crashingly disappointing as I feared it would be, and more so. Grant Morrison’s reach clearly far, far exceeded his grasp.

It certainly did exemplify a writing style he earlier described (warned? threatened?) as “channel-zapping,” though, and gods willing no one will ever be tempted to try such a style again. Morrison seems not to have considered just why the practice evolved in the first place—i.e.,  when people keep clicking that remote, it’s typically because they’re not interested in the random snippets they zap through along the way, but rather because they’re hoping (usually in vain) that something better will turn up that merits ongoing attention.

Further self-descriptions of his work? Well, there’s this…

I had the idea to develop an approach to comic narrative that would actually benefit from becoming entangled in internet fan speculation, gossip and research… I’ve always liked to leave resonant spaces, gaps and hints in stories, where readers can do their own work and find clues or insert their own wild and often brilliant theories. I’m often trying to create a kind of fuzzy quantum uncertainty or narrative equivalent of a Rorschach Blot Test effect, which invites interpretation.

and this…

Superhero comics should have an ‘event’ in every panel! We all know this instinctively. Who cares ‘how?’ as long as it feels right and looks brilliant ? …

I found myself wondering what it would be like if comics’ storytelling stopped aping film or TV and tried a few tricks from opera, for instance. How about dense, allusive, hermetic comics that read more like poetry than prose? How about comics loaded with multiple, prismatic meanings and possibilities? Comics composed like music? In a marketplace dominated by ‘left brain’ books, I thought it might be refreshing to offer an unashamedly ‘right brain’ alternative.

Never a model of humility, in the same interviews Morrison attempts to compare his writing to TV and film works like Lost and Donnie Darko, and dismisses the critics of his recent work as “lazier readers” and/or “a particularly jaded minority on the internet.” Sorry, but I count myself as part of the large and devoted fan followings of the examples he names, and of many similarly “complex” works—not because they’re stylistically complex, though, but because they tell well-structured, emotionally compelling stories—and FC isn’t even in the same ballpark. “Disjointed” is the word that’s come up more than any other in reviews of Morrison’s writing in recent months, but this issue takes the adjective to a whole new level. Morrison’s effect—indeed, apparently his intent—was to have his story swallowed up by its own lacunae, and that simply doesn’t make for a satisfying reading experience.

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Tags: continuity, Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, super-heroes, Superman

My single overwhelming impression of this issue:

Wow, that was crap.

Again.

I kind of enjoyed issue #5, enough to be hoping for an upward trend as this story neared the home stretch. Apparently that was too much to hope for, though. (Which perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, given the book’s multifarious agenda to be simultaneously a big accessible “event” story, a sequel to Jack Kirby’s New Gods work, a sequel to the classic Crisis on Infinite Earths, a thematic capstone to Grant Morrison’s body of super-hero work, and a thematic capstone to Dan DiDio’s chaotic tenure as DC’s executive editor.)

What did we actually get in this penultimate issue? Well…

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Tags: Batman, continuity, Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Green Lantern, Legion, super-heroes, Superman

Okay, it came out over the holidays, but I’m just getting to writing about it now.

This issue and the previous one have to fill a number of slots:  they make up “What The Butler Saw,” Grant Morrison’s installment of the “Last Rites” short tales closing out the current era of the Bat-titles; they’re Morrison’s coda to his own current run on the character, and a sequel (of sorts) to “Batman R.I.P.”; they’re a summary of the entire career history of the Batman, and an examination of his motivations along the way; and they’re a crossover with Final Crisis, detailing what happens to Batman therein and leading back into issue #6 of said Big Event.

And they work satisfyingly on every one of those levels. I’ve been critical of much of Morrison’s recent work, on Batman and elsewhere, but I very much enjoyed this story.

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Tags: Batman, continuity, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, super-heroes

The first six pages of Final Crisis #5 were the highlight of the series so far for me. They take us to Oa, following up on the status of Green Lantern Hal Jordan (not seen since issue #3 back in August). Unlike the brief, hit-and-run scenes that have characterized so much of this series to date, the sequence stays with its subjects long enough to clarify why and how Hal was framed and arrested, and to clear his name in a dramatic confrontation with Alpha Lantern Kraken (possessed by Granny Goodness), moving the plot markedly forward with some spot-on character moments along the way. It all leads up to a classic line—melodramatic but oh-so-evocative—as a Guardian enjoins him, “You have 24 hours to save the universe, Lantern Jordan.”

This is why I love comics.

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Tags: Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Lex Luthor, super-heroes

Slate reports that psychologists at UC Berkeley have been using Barack Obama’s speeches (among other stimuli) to study the causes and effects of a previously neglected emotional realm, dubbed “elevation.” Jonathan Chaidt of the University of Virginia, who coined the term, describes it thusly:

Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental ‘reset button,’ wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration.

It’s that sense of transport, that lump in the throat, that great oratory can evoke. It is, almost literally, an uplifting feeling.

Done badly, it rings hollow and artificial, and only serves to affirm our cynicism. Done well, however, it appeals to something deep within us.

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Tags: Grant Morrison, humanism, morality, Obama, psychology, Superman

Hot on the heels of Grant Morrison’s dramatically anticlimactic ending of “Batman R.I.P.” comes Batman #682, the first of two parts of “Last Rites,” Grant’s coda to his current run on the title.

In a drastic change of pace from what has come before, this issue basically offers a retrospective, a recap of (the first half of) the Batman’s career. Of course, Grant Morrison being who he is, it’s not as simple as that… it’s presented as a stream of consciousness, cryptic and disjointed, impressionistic. From all appearances the memories depicted are those of Bruce Wayne… but just to complicate things, the narration comes courtesy of Alfred the butler, and there’s at least one scene in which Bruce isn’t even present.

(The art, too, is different; Lee Garbett’s work is serviceable, but no better than Tony Daniel’s.)

What the issue doesn’t offer, despite the promises of publisher and editors, is any sort of narrative “bridge” whatsoever explaining how Batman got from the end of “R.I.P.” to the beginning of Grant’s other current opus, Final Crisis, with which this tale crosses over.

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Tags: Batman, continuity, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, super-heroes

The final issue of Grant Morrison’s much-hyped “Batman: R.I.P.” storyline hit the shelves last week (after delays. what a surprise)… and the best thing I can say about the story, now that it’s complete, is that it had some lovely painted covers by Alex Ross.

Fair warning: spoilers ahead. A decent summary of the entire story arc (from Batman #676-681)—and its precursors, pretty much the entirety of Morrison’s two-year run—can be found here.

This wasn’t a case (as it seems to be with Final Crisis) of DC promoting the story as something other than what the author intended. Morrison himself pushed this tale as “the definitive story of Batman,” promising to put the character through “a fate worse than death. Things that no one would expect to happen,” and warning readers that in the final issue, “when we find out the identity of the villain, it’s possibly the most shocking Batman reveal in 70 years.” He utterly failed to deliver—not only on his grandiose claims, but even on the basic expectations of a coherent, satisfying narrative.

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Tags: Batman, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Grant Morrison, super-heroes

Looking in from the outside, it seems like there’s lots of second-guessing and retrenching going on at the number two comics company. With Final Crisis in its home stretch and major goings-on in the Superman and Batman titles, several long-term storylines are up in the air right now, and readers are left wondering whether the DCU will have any coherent creative direction when the dust settles. Omens are not good. As Tom Bondurant puts it in reaction to the solicitations for February’s books,

Cancellations, character shuffling, and general restructuring seem to be the order of business for the first part of 2009.

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Tags: Batman, continuity, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Legion, super-heroes, Superman, Wonder Woman

After a two-month gap (partially planned, but also including an extra three-week delay), DC released issue #4 of Final Crisis this week.

And… I can’t really say that it was worth the wait.

Here’s what happens in this issue:  with Earth infected by the Anti-Life Equation, the heroes try to rally their forces against those who have been possessed. Meanwhile, Darkseid finishes reincarnating in the body of Dan Turpin.

And, umm… that’s it, really.

We get nothing new about the errant Monitor (the only plot thread that even remotely ties this in to previous Crises). We get nothing about Libra and his army of villains. Nothing about goings-on on Oa. We do get more non sequitur dialogue (the sequence between Green Arrow and the Ray, for example). We’re given the puzzling factoid that about a billion people planetwide were taken over by the ALE… which sounds large but is actually only about 15% of Earth’s population, making it odd that they seem to have a zombie-movie-like numerical advantage in all the crowd scenes. And through it all, every page practically screams at me, “none of this is going to matter to the DCU at large. There is no possible way this story can end except by pressing a giant reset button.”

(Except for the return of Barry Allen, of course. Which is itself a terrible idea:  Barry had one of the best deaths in comics history, by far the most memorable moment of his heroic career, and anything flowing from his return can only undermine that moment and seem anticlimactic by comparison.)

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Tags: Darkseid, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Grant Morrison, Green Arrow, super-heroes