Holy embarassment, Batman!

Wow, talk about an off day. The Joker is among the criminals sandbagged and kept prisoner by this barely-mobile fungus dressed like Chef Boy Ardee. The Joker I know would have planted birthday candles in Simon the Pieman's face as the hapless wannabe breathed his last.

Well, maybe Mista J knew Simon was in for a humiliating defeat and didn't want to keep it from it. I choose to think that. It helps life make a little more sense.

Wholly Bat-funeral

There are a couple of nice reviews of Neil Gaiman's Whatever happened to the Caped Crusader? storyline currently unfolding in Batman and Detective Comics. One of these comes from Wild Tyme, while the other is by Stephen Schlecter at majorspoilers.com. Both give deserved praise and some context.

"Batman: Whatever Happened..." is meant to be analogous to the Superman story Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? That was the last adventure of the pre-Crisis Earth One Superman, and something of a counterpoint to Supergirl's death in Crisis on Infinite Earths. The current story follows Grant Morrison's polarizing "Batman: RIP" epic and Batman's transparently temporary death in Final Crisis. But it's a different situation. Wild Tyme makes a compare and contrast.

When I saw Gaiman at a Q+A / reading event for The Graveyard Book on Halloween last year, he was in the process of writing this issue, and described it as 'weird' - even in relation to his previous Batman story, from Batman: Black and White, which cast Batman and the Joker as actors in a television show, sharing chit-chat in between takes. In practice, 'Whatever Happened to...' certainly is weird, especially when read alongside its similarly-named Superman cousin 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?' (written by Alan Moore). Even though both comics were touted as being the 'end' of their respective characters, the approach is fundamentally different. Moore wrote a touching, warm-hearted send-off for a simpler age of super-hero; Gaiman, here, writes in a metafictional , abstract mode that blurs the boundaries between content, continuity and canon. The result, as marked by many readers and bloggers is stylistically very close to Grant Morrison's run on the series, especially in his concluding two-part Final Crisis tie-in Last Rites. Nevertheless, there are themes found in both these Batman stories that contrast.

Even though Gaiman has befriended Moore, and learned comics writing from him, the type of talent is quite different in the two stories. Moore was a hot talent, a game-changer, and a couple of years from falling hard out of love with mainstream comics. Gaiman is a mature creator now, successful in several media. Moore teamed up with artist Curt Swan, then the definitive Superman artist for three decades. Gaiman is working with Adam Kubert, who hadn't drawn Bats much until Morrison took over as writer a couple of years back. So where the Superman story was written by a young man working both with and on an idol of his childhood, the Batman story is written by an established man consciously writing against the grain.

As WT says, Moore's story was a sendoff to a more innocent era. Gaiman isn't doing that, because that innocence has been gone a long time. In fact the stories he pays homage to--while gently and subtly warping them--in many cases precede his birth.

The frustrating thing about reading superhero comics is the gap between what they could be and what--in the vast majority of cases--they are. There's a potential to reinvent reality on the fly, to celebrate difference and initiative. The medium has, if anything, gotten further from that kind of ideal as it has tried to function as a part of the big-event entertainment industry. Superhero comics now are mostly soapy potboilers involving people with powers. They're too locked into a pattern to really connect to anything else.

Gaiman and Kubert break this pattern, in part by reviving the conventions of Batman comics in the forties. Of course there are some twists, potentially disorienting. Catwoman arrives at the bar where Batman's wake is being held as a sleek young woman. When she gets up to give her eulogy, there's a considerable amount of grey in her hair. Then there's Alfred's tale, which deconstructs the Caped Crusader's entire career, and which also contains a grimly funny parody of Frank Miller's "I'm the goddamn Batman" bit.

In all it's done with good style and with good heart. The sad thing is that as popular as Gaiman is, others are not likely to follow him here. Oh well, you enjoy what you can while it's there.

Com-Ick! Factor

So "Batman, R.I.P" continues. One interesting aspect is that this time the Dark Knight's downfall appears to be caused not by a brokeded back but rather by a Freudian return of the repressed. Specifically, the man pulling the strings on his doom seems to be his own father, long thought dead. That dad may be alive, that he seems to suspect Bruce is the product of Alfred/Mrs. Wayne monkeysex, that he has been stalking his vigilante son all through out the latter's life... These are heavy things for any man to bear.

IGN says of Batman # 680, "it's not for the squeamish." The Joker--not too surprisingly--has been roped into the plot. At one point he DEAR GOD HE SLICES HIS OWN TONGUE IN HALF WITH A STRAIGHTRAZOR! IT'S NOT RIGHT. Making it wronger is the fact that he keeps on talking! As if it were the most natural thing in the world. If you're self-preservation instincts even allow you to do this, you won't say anything more complex than "mmph mmph." So I'm chalking this one up to Bats hallucinating. Grant too, but that goes without saying.

Bust a Bat-cap in his ass

The comic world is fairly agog with the news: at the end of the loose arc that's been winding through Batman, Bruce Wayne will be the Caped Crusader no more. Which sounds like it will give him more time to work on his tennis serve, except that Grant Morrison says

It's so much better than death. People have killed characters in the past but to me, that kind of ends the story! I like to keep the story twisting and turning. So what I am doing is a fate worse than death. Things that no one would expect to happen to these guys at all. This is the end of Bruce Wayne as Batman.

And there's speculation about whether the cowl will pass to one of the Robins (stalwart Dick Grayson, homicidal Jason Todd, pure-of-heart Tim Drake) or someone else.

One relevant response is from io9's Graeme McMillan.

Well, we've already seen Bruce Wayne giving up the identity because he was crippled (Thankfully, his magic girlfriend fixed his spine), as well as he's gone insane more than a few times in the past... So exactly what fate worse than death are we talking about here? And, more importantly, how quickly will it end up being undone?

I'm not buying the "forever" aspect either. Bruce Wayne is part of the Batman brand. He is the brand. The two have been associated for nearly 70 years. Adam West and Michael Keaton played Bruce Wayne, and Christian Bale still is. Val Kilmer and George Clooney have, too, although those movies add nothing to my argument but quantity.

Hey, did I say "almost 70 years?" It will be exactly 70 in mid-2009. Prime time for a high-profile return, wouldn't you say? So this is likely to be a broad sideways step in the manner of Knightfall, which also involved another dude taking over as Batman. But if nothing else, this storyline involves the writing of Grant Morrison, who has a way of making these spandex soaps freaky and cool.

Holy Huh? Batman!

Many thanks to Pat at Silver Age Comics for unearthing this Bat-gem. It must be said that this Brave & the Bold story looks truly insane. Not only does its idea of courtship seem to come straight out of a Betty Page photoshoot (except maybe you should have Batgirl doing the spanking, but the writer evidently forgot that Batman has a secret identity. Yes, the Caped Crusader just goes everywhere in costume, whether it's appropriate or not.

Even the warden at the jail let's him keep wearing the cowl. Do the authorities not really care to find out who it is they just arrested? Or maybe they know it's Bruce Wayne, and allowing the suspect to keep his bondage wear is just a courtesty extended to the idle rich. And senators.