7/31/13

BEST OF THE WEEK: BATMAN INCORPORATED #13 — I started back in on that first arc with Andy Kubert, BATMAN & SON, three weeks ago and since then blasted through Morrison’s entire run. I can’t believe it’s been seven years. Three different ongoing series, two self-contained event mini-series, and three different men wearing the cowl. Actually, more than that. Many more. We even got Robin, the Toy Wonder, for God’s sake. The driving force, the engine behind the massive sprawling story Morrison crafted over the years has always been legacy. Lineage. Batman and his sons. At the close of the second act, upon his return, Bruce Wayne explicitly states that he is going to fight the idea of crime with the idea of Batman. And, as a certain terrorist in a Guy Fawkes mask once famously said, you can’t kill an idea. Ideas are bulletproof. Which makes perfect sense, the idea of Batman is the cloak that young Master Wayne wraps around himself to cope with the primal tragedy of witnessing his parents’ murder, to not only not let it destroy him but instead serve as fuel for his survival, inversely defining him, inspiring him to construct an identity and belief structure so resilient that it turns out to be immortal and that, Morrison hammers home repeatedly across space and time, will outlive him by centuries.

But it’s so easy to get lost in the web of this entire grand tapestry. This is, by my count, the eighty-fifth issue of Morrison’s run*. Legend has it that Dan Didio asked Morrison if he wanted to write Batman and right away threw out the title R.I.P. and Morrison dove right in with the novel high-concept that Everything Counted, all the pulp madness of the forties and romance of the fifties and weird Silver Age science madness of the sixties and, significantly, O’Neil/Adams’s hairy-chested love-god dark knight detective of the seventies, and Miller’s raging semi-psychotic DARK Knight of the eighties, grimmer’n’grittier than them all, and I guess the shoulder-pad-popping excess of the nineties kind of surfaced in the new Batmobile and at least the art style when Tony Daniel showed up? But at any rate, Morrison constructed a timeline in which every published adventure of Batman since 1939 could be said to have actually taken place to this incarnation, this particular character, Crises and multiversal revisions be damned, and that the first Big Bad was not The Joker, as ever, but a character who first appeared in the second of a two-part adventure published in BATMAN #156 with a cover-date of June 1963, which I think means it came out in March, which is the same month that Parlophone rush-released The Beatles’ debut album Please Please Me in the UK to capitalize on the success of the singles of the title track and “Love Me Do,” but oh, you see how this entire latticework spins you around and starts trying to pull the whole wide world into its tapestry? “A network of interlinked strands,” indeed. But so, all right. The only way to do this is linearally, page by page, or we’re going to be here forever:

Of course we open with Gordon arresting Wayne, the first scene from this second volume, Morrison’s third and final #1 writing this character. Now we’re all caught up, the kid was dead during those first couple of pages we read a year and a half ago. Still makes me so sad. The Gordon narration initially comes across as a terrific throwback to YEAR ONE. Has that ever happened during this run, Gordon captions? Doesn’t seem like it, off the top of my head. I am an insane fan of the payoff to the Page 3à4 page-turn confirming once and for all that Gordon knows. Of course he does, he always has. But, dig deeper. All the way back to DETECTIVE COMICS #27, which opens with a conversation between Commissioner Gordon and his young friend, millionaire Bruce Wayne. For his finale, Morrison takes us all the way back to first principles on every level. And but it isn’t until we first jump back to the confrontation in the cave that I realize that Morrison has now reached all the way back into the past to also subsume what's become a straight Bendis trope, having two guys sitting around talking about the climax of the story after the fact, but just killing it so hard that I don’t mind and didn’t even realize until the cut back. Just in time for Talia to let us all know that it’s the grand finale, as if we didn’t already. A bit jarring a couple of pages later, that flashback to Lieutenant Gordon there with Bruce right at the first consoling the brand-new orphan with Leslie. Is that a Snyder addition to the mythos? Seems like. You have to respect Morrison’s unflinching commitment to make everything canon. And but then wow, the title page. The stakes. Batman must kill the mother of his dead son to save Gotham. That is certainly just putting it right out there. And what a one-two punch, Bruce telling Jim that his parents’ murder made him incapable of loving anyone ever again followed by his apology to Talia for same. I had to send that particular page with no context out into the night to a dear friend, could not keep it to myself. And what a masterful resolution to the confrontation with Talia. I was thinking ahead of time that of course she had to die but Morrison really takes Goyer/Zack Snyder to school in that regard. And surely most folks figured out who the headmistress of Spyral was, it’s not like there were that many candidates, but her entrance and exit five panels later was still very well executed. I particularly enjoyed her line about it all coming full circle. I believe that Burnham’s first issue was #4 of the first volume, which was all about her.  And then, man, right up to the minute, Gordon even just goes ahead and mentions Zero Year, which, in any other context would just seem like corporate shilling but it’s almost heartbreaking how well Morrison unflinchingly roars through, tying it all together. Everything Counts. Even and especially the storyline that Misters Snyder & Capullo are good enough to be providing us across the alley in monthly installments. Only two issues have come out so far and they still get threaded in here, on the way out. And then the parting Gordon monologue is absolute perfection.  Of course it never ends. And like any truly great story, this one concludes with both resolution and the promise of so much more. Because it isn’t like these people’s lives come to an end when we run out of panels. It keeps going. It always does and it always will.

The art on this was wonderful throughout, possibly even a notch higher than the greatness to which we have grown accustomed. Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbarn outdid themselves, as ever, but I especially loved the askew angle canting back and forth panel by panel in that last scene, invoking both the Adam West series and that kind of horrifying first reveal of Batman as Bruce Wayne coming out from behind the clock on the eighth and final page of DETECTIVE #27, again. The fractal cover is also a dead-on fit with the themes that Morrison’s been playing with, Batmen within Batmen. And but that epilogue. So much work done in two pages. Setting up another adventure/last battle that will surely only play out in our imaginations (because, really, who in the whole wide world has the balls to pick this one up and run with it? I can't believe Morrison gives us those empty graves, just horrifying) but then also invoking the phrase “Sons of Batman” to further solidify the act of reaching into the future and treating Miller’s revered THE DARK KNIGHT as canon that was begun with the Mutants’ first appearance. And if all of that wasn’t enough, the last word of the entire series**, a single syllable, just goes ahead and folds in Nolan and Bale and all the rest. Everything Counts. It all happened! Rise! “What if it was all real?”

This run has not only been one of my favorite stories that I have ever been lucky enough to read in a lifetime spent devouring stories, it has also been a constant in my life through a period of great change. I remember reading the first issue in May 2006 a very few weeks after moving back to Austin and tantalized with the possibilities of where Morrison might take us. Months later, I was thrilled beyond reason to discover that #663 was illustrated prose that took me an hour to read. Just about the best three dollars I spent that year. Three months later, #666 came out the week of Comic-Con and I was so in love with that flash-forward that actually and instantaneously (SUDDENLY…!) made shitty terrible Damian a great character that I brought it along to San Diego just so I could keep rereading it on the plane, not realizing that just because he didn’t have any autograph sessions scheduled didn’t mean old Morrison wasn’t happy to sign a book and so that was the only one of his I happened to have on me when I got to shake his hand and get charged up with the uncut narrative energy right after finding out at the J.H. Williams III panel that the pair of them were going to be producing the very next arc of the series, THE BLACK GLOVE, it was already all drawn, and reading even the kind of terrible #670 just apocalyptically drunk in the Omni hotel down on 8th Street where we were staying because Catherine had a conference and it was Halloween, or oh then, we got pregnant and had a little girl and she had to spend the fifth and sixth nights of her life in NICU and I read #682 over and over to her while she was had to stay down there passed out under those lights that were reducing the catastrophically high amount of bilirubins in her blood, and then FINAL CRISIS finally finally finished coming out, like one week after another, #6 and then the next week SUPERMAN BEYOND 3-D #2 and then #7 the week after that, but so just to read #6, I am never going to forget this, I was dealing with like a three-week-old at this point, who needed something pretty close to constant attention, which was all well and good until we got to Wednesday night and her mom was asleep and there were new comics to read, so as soon as I got her back down at midnight or whenever it was, I ran for the fridge and popped my Lone Star and started devouring FINAL CRISIS #6, no saving the best of the pile for last that night because the reading could end at any minute, and I didn’t make it ten pages before she woke up and needed to be rocked, well, I didn’t even break pace, just ran over, got her and rocked her and shushed her while still reading, only when it got to the great Batman/Darkseid showdown, when our boy shoots the living embodiment of evil dead with a time-travelling god-bullet and just, in the understatement of the millennium, says, “Gotcha,” right at that moment, my sleeping daughter let out a long burp and seriously crapped her diaper, could not contain the situation on either end, and all I could do was nod, that was exactly the appropriate reaction to what was going down there, and oh, on and on, I wish Dick & Damian could have had their own Dynamic Duo series forever, that’s really what they maybe should call it, THE DYNAMIC DUO, just when it seemed like Morrison had said all he had to say, everything went sideways, and but then of course the status quo had to be reset, but still in a way that we didn’t see coming, the franchising, the incorporation, and then that dear boy who worked so hard to overcome the dark side of his heritage struck down . . .

All leading to this. Which, the one thing I never saw coming was the implication of a tie-in double-sequel with ALL-STAR SUPERMAN. Which is probably not happening, is certainly the best-case scenario, but look at the two epilogues thematically. It’s almost the same ending. Our hero is gone, but his son(s) will live on. To meet one day and team up or fight. Probably not, I don’t actually think that that double-sequel is a story that will be told, but the fact that it’s implied is Morrison’s final masterstroke. I could go on and on and on about how much I have loved and will always love this epic feat of storytelling, but all that is really left to do is express my immense gratitude to the creators involved in bringing it into this world where we could experience it, teaching us not only that Batman and Robin will never die, but as Damian exclaimed when viewing the tapestry of his mother’s web for the first time, “We're at the center of this.”

*give or take fudging it ten or three issues, your mileage may vary, even though our guy is absent/captured for issues at a time, I think you’ve got to consider FINAL CRISIS part of the overall epic due to the events of #6 alone, and you can’t really read the main seven issues of the series and pass up on the glory of SUPERMAN BEYOND 3-D, and but then the trade also includes that admittedly uneven SUBMIT one-shot starring The Tattooed Man that Morrison wrote that has absolutely nothing to do with Batman at all and could be convincingly argued to be maybe the nadir/low point in Morrison’s entire and admittedly vast oeuvre, but anyway, it’s not like I was going to skip it along the way while powering through the other six dozen of these things.

**No TO BE CONTINUED . . . or certainly not THE END to be found here, just a straight cut. That THE SOPRANOS finale pissed everyone off so much but I would have really appreciated just a black page at the very end, it would have been a perfect touch.

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BATMAN ANNUAL #2 — Ah, crap. I should have done better in the due diligence department but just assumed that because Snyder’s name was on the cover, he actually wrote this instead of just co-plotting it. I wonder how many extra units they moved versus what would have sold without the Snyder credit. I certainly wouldn’t have dropped the money on an annual by a pair of unknown talents. But what’s done is done! How is the story? Pretty solid, our narrator is an ASTRO CITY-style civilian on the fringes, the new guy at Arkham who winds up sympathizing with the asylum’s retconned first patient, a lady who checked herself in voluntarily and is more than dismayed about what has befallen the old sanitarium since it became a cage for insane rogues. Wes Craig delivers good-looking pages displaying a surprising amount of uniformity, given that there are six inkers on this thing, and Marguerite Bennett’s ear for dialogue is crisp and never breaks character. This is a well constructed though unremarkable tale, I wouldn’t say you have to rush out and buy it, but I’m not sorry that I did.

DETECTIVE COMICS ANNUAL #2 — Layman continues serving up the Bat-thunder. And it occurs to me reading this one, how crucial Jeromy Cox is to the look of this title. Which is probably an obvious statement, of course the colorist is very important to maintaining continuity of presentation from one issue to the next, but it’s uncanny how close Scot Eaton, crucially abetted by Cox, comes to achieving the high artistic standard put forth every month on the main title by Jason Fabok. And it’s not like The Mighty Layman is phoning it in either. With one of the most successful creator-owned books on the market, Layman has not been shy about tossing in new additions to the Batman mythology just as fast as he can create them. In under a year, we’ve already had an entire Emperor Penguin long arc, are just getting cooking on the Wrath, and now in this title are introduced to Jane Doe, a very unsettling chameleon mimic who threads her way through expired lives, fleecing the recently departed for all they’re worth before moving on. Which is an idea so well suited to a Gotham rogue, it’s surprising that it’s taken someone this long to come up with it. The first back-up is a cool little riff on EC Comics-style storytelling, but the second one felt completely superfluous. Still, all in all, this one’s well worth the cover price.

FLASH ANNUAL #2 — Mr. Buccellato holds down the word-slinging end of things just fine without his usual partner-in-crime, as he has done in the past but the art team of Sami Basri and Stellar Labs on colors did not even come close to providing the incredible artwork we have come to expect from these pages. Flat composition and layouts, colors that also look, well, flat, nothing about this pops. Which wouldn’t be a dealbreaker, this is not a terrible comic, we’re just so trained to expect greatness, this sub-par art team completely capsize the issue. It’s a shame editorial couldn’t rope in Marcus To once again or why not talk the great Cully Hammer into drawing the lead feature? With Matthew Wilson on colors, that would have been the real deal. Which is to say that I enjoyed the ten-page backup a bit more than the main attraction.

ANIMAL MAN ANNUAL #2 — Oh my word, now this is how you do it. This annual feels not only like an indispensible chapter in the life of our protagonist but is also a hard-charging strong contender for best issue of the series so far. And of course it doesn’t hurt to welcome initial series artist Travel Foreman back to the fold. What devastating subject matter, though, particularly given that the entire reason that Foreman had to bow out of this title in the first place was due to his difficulty illustrating this rather macabre subject matter after his mother’s death. These flashback quasi-retcon stories can be a dicey thing, the whole wait-wait-also-this-happened-TOO all in the service of achieving a payoff that has maybe only just now occurred to the writer. But, man. The story of What Happened When Maxine Was Born is not only a perfect little yarn unto itself and certainly the only way that it could have happened but just a hell of a setup for an emotionally crushing two-page spread that completely tore me apart. Wracking sobs, I mean, without exaggeration. Really, I could see where it was heading with the return to The Spider Queen (and I love love love how Lemire subverts the typical monster-fighting formula with her) but the reveal of the dream, absolutely heartbreaking business.

THE WAKE #3 — Man, these bookend timejumps just get more and more intriguing. This continues to be one of the tightest written and best-looking comics on the rack. Matt Hollingsworth’s muted tones are a perfect complement to Sean Murphy’s kinetic linework. That particular shade of pink/purple he starts using for background on Page Five in particular really pops. I totally guessed that wasn’t Lee after the cut to her going for Bob. What a predator this thing is, though, I was completely unprepared for that venom-induced vision of the white whale feast. And once again, a stellar cliffhanger (though this is the first time we didn’t bookend with a timejump), I really don’t see how the survivors of our cast are going to survive seven more of these.

MORNING GLORIES #29 — I had to go with the Matthew Waite 8-bit video-game variant cover. Though if I’d seen the Lemire one with Casey, that would have been a hard call. I hear the 8-bit version of Sex Bob-Omb’s “Threshold” every single time I look at this thing. So it’s got that going for it. This is, I believe, the final part of the Season Two premiere, which, of course it makes all kinds of sense that that is the structure these guys would go with, breaking it up like that (see L O S T, episodes 2.1-2.3). But what we have here is kind of, almost, Spencer and Eisma putting the genie back in the bottle, at least as much as is possible on a title that has run off the rails from its initial premise to such a batshit degree (I mean this in a good way), much much more than I ever would have thought they could have managed. But for all the insanity that’s gone on in the woods and underneath the school and, you know, throughout space and time, we’ve got most of our original cast back in the halls of glorious old Morning Glory Academy with the Truants at least temporarily out of the picture and something like the old status quo miraculously and improbably back in place. And of course, just when we’re lulled into thinking that we’re about to get out of here without a massive WTF?, the lads drop a doozy on us. Quite possibly the gnarliest one yet, in a book whose regular stream of cliffhangers would give even poor Yorick & 355 a run for their money. This is yet another issue that hits the reader quite hard upon first pass through but that I’m sure will be much more devastating when binge-read in sequence with the couple of dozen issues that have come before. And the back-matter, I’m a bit horrified to discover just this very minute that Matthew Meylikov is a real person, I just kind of assumed Spencer was doing an Alan Moore-type back-matter thing laying out and breaking down all of the non-linear madness for the readers, and that premise was cracking me up more and more. The guy speculating on how it’s going to go and what this and that could all mean and such. Now that I know he’s a real dude, I’m certainly grateful to have someone walking us through the crazy, but it’s just . . . I actually can’t believe that he’s a real person. It shouldn’t freak me out so much, but there you go.

FF #010 — And in the noble Merry Marvel tradition first codified in #10 of the original volume, the creators crash down through the fourth wall to take direct part in the on-panel antics! Am a big fan of Fraction’s constant Q-Bert-filtered epithets. But Allred’s double-shipping crack followed by Fraction’s shot at Brevoort’s Formspring account is just too much, the greatness. Which only gets trumped by Allred telling Medusa that he’s always loved her. And Brevoort whacking Fraction upside the head after the breakdown on satisfying tragic-comic endings. This book has too much wonderful to be contained. I guess it’s too much to hope that the creators will just get folded into the regular cast, though there was that line about embedding Fraction & Allred. We live in hope!

DAREDEVIL #029 — Javier Rodriguez continues to prove that he’s more than just a pretty palette-slinger. We open with a really interesting about-face from Waid, all of the eyewitnesses immediately start lying about the insane cliffhanger and there’s nothing Matt can do about it. I can’t see a bird’s-eye angle shot of a stairway like the one on Page Thirteen without thinking of those opening pages of the second chapter of SIN CITY, first volume. And what a killer long shot on that penultimate page there, love the linework but the colors especially pop. And that’s got to be Kristen the Assistant DA in the chair, there, right? Matt’s half-smile at the end seems to confirm it.

UNCANNY X-MEN #009 — Man, I just love Bachalo on interiors. And funny to see the cover from DAZZLER #1 there. On vinyl, maybe even? Alison and Illyana’s back-and-forth rings true. Though hopefully we’re going to get more resolution into what happened with the team hijacking the Helicarrier, that’s too big of a deal to just get taken care of off-panel. And shenanigans with Phil “Big Fan” Coulson, this Bendis X-Men business really is the sequential equivalent of just straight crack, I enjoyed the hell out of another one and want more more more right now.

X-MEN #003 — Ah, so we only get this art team for this initial arc. So it goes. Coipel/Morales/Martin absolutely blew these pages out of the water and have set quite a standard for the talented individuals who are lined up to follow. Wood balances the interactions between the ensemble well but the resolution to the action is a bit anti-climactic. It doesn’t happen off-panel, strictly speaking, but it might as well. All of this building to . . . huh. That was it? Not a terribly satisfying payoff but I will definitely be hanging out with this title to see what else Wood has in store.