Hi, All:

Last night I read Grant Morrison and Tony Daniel’s “Batman R.I.P.”  I’m not reviewing it yet, because I feel the need to read it again and think about it.  There’s just a lot going on in this book, and I don’t want to slight it.

One thing I have to watch out for is that I have to avoid reading more into the story than is really there.  Grant Morrison is arguably my favorite comic writer ever, so I hold him in very high esteem, and I may be looking harder than I need to look.  (Caveat: Some day’s I’ll tell you Morrison is my favorite writer, other days I’ll claim it’s Alan Moore.  It’s a hard call, and probably depends on the barometer or some such.)  Searching for the depth in Morrison’s writing is not without reason: the “Invisibles” worked on numerous levels, from the standard action story, to a chaos magic meta-spell or meta-sigil, and all levels in between.

Grant Morrison’s tenure on the JLA centered on mythology meeting futurist super science.  The Invisibles centered on the crossroads of pop culture and magic.  In Batman, Morrison delves deeply into the mysteries of the psyche, the bizarre mindscape of Bruce Wayne.

There’s no real shock in all this for me.  I’m convinced Morrison is brilliant, so it makes sense, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy to me, a bit of willing selection bias.  Right or wrong, that’s my perception of the thing.

What is pleasantly shocking, however, is that Grant Morrison’s Batman is really a sort of Meta-Batman, the assimilation of all the versions of Batman over the last seventy years.  Here, the Golden Age Batman wasn’t a police commissioner who died before cancer could take his life.  The Silver Age Batman, the 60’s Campy Batman, the psychopath hard case Batman of the 90’s, they are all the same man, not really different versions of the same character rebooted again and again over time.  As far as I’m concerned, this Meta-Batman is delightful.

Suddenly, everything is continuity, and yet nothing is, at the same time.  Morrison brought back the son of Batman and Talia Al Ghul in “Batman and Son.”  He brought back the Kathy Kane Batwoman from the 50’s.  He brought back the story that Alfred had apparently died, then returned as a detective in his own right, before resuming his role as Batman’s squire.  Then, there’s Zur-En-Arrh, the Club of Heroes, and Batmite.

Yes, Batmite.  In his RIP appearance, Batmite proclaims himself to be Bruce Wayne’s voice of reason, a hallucination of sorts.

As I’ve said, after I’ve read this book a few times, I’ll write up a more thorough review.  For now, however, I’m simply digging the Meta-Batman.

Scott