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Batman #680
Posted 10 Oct 2008
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Tony Daniel (interior); Alex Ross (cover)
Letters: Randy Gentile
Ink: Sandu Florea
Colors: Guy Major
Publisher: DC Comics
5.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Adam McGovern
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The penultimate chapter of “Batman R.I.P.” shows how
truly new to comics what Grant Morrison is doing is. There have been
life-and-death, good-and-evil struggles from the dawn of adventure
fiction, but the threat faced by Our Hero is typically situational,
not existential – the durability of Good is seldom in question,
just the triumph of one or another of its agents. But in “Batman
R.I.P.” it’s both more personal and more universal than
ever.
“This adventure places its hero
in the same kind of dilemma we feel threatening the hopefulness of our
own lives. ”
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The opponents in this drama are not just adversaries, but the
guilts and flaws and doubts that chip away at confidence and optimism
and ethics in every human mind. They are personified, of course, for
the physical-conflict requirements of the action-adventure genre, but
they represent much more (and in some ways much less) than individual
human beings in the manner of the greatest myths. As this phase of the
“R.I.P.” event reaches its conclusion, we see that what
Batman’s enemies need is not just his defeat as a person but his
removal as a possibility.
He is being beset by a secret cabal of decadent aristocrats and
power-brokers who live by predatory impulses; their agents are
psychological grotesques playing out sadistic imperatives they feel
are their true nature though they, like the orchestrators of the game,
live most of life in a mask of professionalism and propriety; the
human WMD all of them have unleashed is the Joker, whose aim is to get
Batman to give up – not the 70-year fistfight of the two men, but the
belief not just that humanity can triumph but that the universe really
offers any logic and mercy to restore.
Morrison is tapping the same elusive truth that Jason Aaron is over
in Vertigo’s Scalped with the outwardly brutal and
inwardly bitter mob casino owner Lincoln Red Cloud: all the grandest
villains in both life and literature are not really incorrigible,
they’re inconsolable. They’re people who have something
they can’t get over. In Red Cloud’s case it’s the
indignities of his people’s colonization and the privations of
the early ’70s’ renewed war on them, with a hardened
conviction that only power brings peace; in Morrison’s scenario
the Joker is someone driven so mad by the inhumanity of our era that
he chooses to embody it rather than oppose it. For the Joker’s
peace of mind and the shadowy Black Glove organization’s
predatory self-interest, someone who believes that more is possible
like Batman must be de-existed.
This is adventure fiction that places its hero not just in the kind
of predicament we can thrill to, but in the same kind of dilemma we
feel threatening the meaning and hopefulness of our own lives.
“Dark” comics of the preceding two decades tapped our
basest impulses in a way that shined no light into them; this comic
conveys a sense of psychological danger that, like the recent Batman
movie, illuminates the best of us by hard-fought contrast.
Morrison’s All-Star Superman, as befits that more upbeat
character and his world, lit the proverbial candle; his Batman
dares to ask the darkness why. “Batman R.I.P.” is not a
comic which, as per the current cliché, changes everything
– it is, for a change, a comic that shows how everything really
is.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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