Batman R.I.P. Discussion (Spoilers!)

So many great lines....

"You blinked. I switched the cups. Force of habit."

"Reiki to the rescue!"

We didn't get any answers, but I felt like it was an intensely satisfying finale. I loved the explanation that the Joker has gotten progressively more and more nuts because Batman's constantly forcing his mind to adapt as he has to formulate increasingly more esoteric methods of breaking his nemesis. The twist with the Bat-Radia is great. I like the insinuations that the riddles surrounding the Black Glove are little more than smoke and mirrors, and in the end, it breaks down to a fraternity of socialites, broken down and debased for generations, incestuously intertwined, trying to **** each other's families up so bad just so they can be the last one on the hill. But all the games and mind tricks were really just masquerade. And Damian's just great.

But I wanted to know how exactly the Waynes were involved with the organization, how Alfred was involved, and who Hurt is. Incidentally, I don't think Hurt's the Devil. That's just another game. But the soap opera extended reveal was hilarious. I think it really drives home the implication that the Black Glove is just a bunch of vainglorious stage actors. Hurt seems to have serious emotional stakes in the Wayne family, beyond just being the Satanic tempter. Given the structure of the organization, I'm going to guess that Hurt is just a man, someone traumatized in an earlier Black Glove gamble, probably the same one that ended in the Waynes being shot. And I think we can determine that all the major villains throughout Morrison's run so far (with the exception of Joker) were victims of the Black Glove earlier in their life.

I have a feeling the two issue arc will be like an epilogue that fills in the blanks in the history of the Black Glove and how it weaves into Batman's career, and then it will twist off to a flash at the future, a sort of apocalyptic premonition that fuels the next series of Morrison arcs.
 
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thee great one said:
Last Rites was pretty insane.

All this different eras of Batman that was or could have been and more Hurt.
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Yeah. I also like how it explained what was happening to him in Final Crisis. Good issue.
 
******* all of you with your comics... Why isn't my LCS getting anything in until tomorrow?

Y'all is *****es.
 
I know, i mean, that's what they said, but that was a last week holiday, so why on earth would it affect shipping early this week? It is pure madness.
 
Dr.Strangefate said:
I know, i mean, that's what they said, but that was a last week holiday, so why on earth would it affect shipping early this week? It is pure madness.
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Maybe Thursday and Fridays are more important than previously thought. My guess is that all the shipments just stacked up and they couldn't afford the overtime hours so they just shipped out as much as they could in one 8 hour day. Here shipments always come out Thursdays when it's a holiday. It sucks because Christmas and New Years fall on Thursday's as well so you might see the same thing happen.

Who THEY are I have no idea.
 
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Re: Batman/Detective Comics Series Discussion *Spoilers*

I'm reading RIP again in preparation for my reread of Final Crisis and I'm pretty sure it's one of my favourite Batman stories ever. Morrison has put so much into it... it's amazing. I think, like most Morrison comics, it'll be one of those things that grow on you every time you encounter it... and you'll keep finding more things you didn't notice before. There's a lot of symbolism in it too. I don't know, it's so hard to explain... but I could ramble on about it forever. It's so unique and so different and it's something Batman really needed.
 
I just read #655-683 (excluding Ostrander's issues - which may or may not be good - and the ludicrously pretentious Joker 'issue').

What I liked:
• The atmosphere was superb. Morrison has a very capable talent at creating atmosphere through word choices and structural pacing. His DOOM PATROL run was scary and surreal, his ANIMAL MAN was poignant and desperate, his JLA run was exciting and kinetic, his ALL-STAR SUPERMAN run was flamboyant and innocent, and BATMAN RIP is harrowing and morbid. Even his bad works do this well - SEVEN SOLDIERS (as a whole, individual minis work well, but the book-ends don't) is confusing (aesthetically so - it's clear about its confusion - this is good) and ominous, FILTH is vile and anarchic, FINAL CRISIS is apocalyptic and barren... he does atmosphere well. BATMAN RIP is palpable in its feeling of a creeping, invisible death stalking Batman. The madness - Zur En Arrh, the Black Casebooks, the Isolation Chamber, the Thögal, the continuing theme of shifting identity in Jezebel Jet, in Doctor Hurt, and in Batman himself through the three Ghost Batmen, through the Batman of Zur En Arrh, and the Bat-Mite... extremely well concocted.
• Lot's new villains, which is terrific. Jezebel Jet, El Sombrero, the Black Glove, the three Bat-Ghostmen, Dr Hurt, and other characters too; Damian, The Knight... lots of great new additions. While some, if not all, are revamps of old characters and ideas, they're redone as if they've never existed before and feel like new inventions of Morrison's design. This is making them fresh, and the run unique. Great stuff.
• The Black Glove is a terrific villain. There is a quality in villains that is so overlooked; their substantive presence. Their menace. A villain's inherent ability to be a threat towards a near-ominpotent hero (such as any superhero) just by being there. Superboy Prime and Rulk resort to the top trumps effect of generating menace - they beat someone who's 'tough', ergo they must be 'tougher'. Millar does this routinely in every single one of his Fantastic Four arcs. This is not menace. It's shallow. Doom bowing to his 'master' and then being set on fire doesn't inherently make the villain appear menacing because it is contrived, shallow, and devoid of meaning. A true villain's deeds should be inherently threatening. In THE DARK KNIGHT, the Joker gets this by first, staging a bank robber from the mob and using his gang of thieves to kill themselves so he walks away with all the money, then in his second scene, he brazenly walks into the meeting of all the mob bosses, kills a bodyguard (with a pencil), offers to kill Batman for half of Gotham, insults them, threatens them with a startling number of grenades and walks out. And they still hire him. By the time Batman even sees the Joker on television, the Joker is oozing with menace. Bane and Green Goblin derive their menace from a sole act that the writers continually refer too (breaking Batman's back, and killing Gwen Stacy). The Hulk's menace in THE ULTIMATES is shown in the first page when Manhattan is on fire after ten minutes. The Four in PLANETARY get their menace because they've already won by the time Elijah is 'first' told about them. Kid Miracleman's menace is even more brilliant. He doesn't do anything except be a well-known humanitarian and philanthropist. But the artist, Gary Leach, draws him terrifyingly inhuman when he flies, and Alan Moore uses poetic choice of prose to conjure terrifying allusions between Miracleman, Kid Miracleman, and their powers as gods and devils. The Black Gove has menace. When they finally make their move, all the invisible machinations they've been making make them a terrifying, palpable threat.

What I didn't like:
• The Joker. I hate the 'serial killer' who mutilates himself with cleavers. It's a needlessly horrific portrayal, and it's what Zsasz is for and it's why Zsasz isn't as popular as Joker. Joker is, no matter his incarnation, a flamboyantly dressed, theatrical super criminal. He is not the guy from SAW. He is not John Doe from SE7EN. Yes, THE DARK KNIGHT's joker is gruesome with his scarred face, love of knives, and even has elements both from SAW (in his moral set-pieces) and John Doe (in his lack of identity and insanity and endless creativity), but he was still flamboyantly dressed and theatrical. RIP's Joker was not. He was Hannibal Lector, making subtle hints and cutting people up with a scalpel. Sure, he had his moments, but he was a grotestque. But what's truly terrible, is that his inclusion, is not only wholly unnecessary, but actually damaging to the story. The Black Glove was an awesome villain, who looked lie he truly could win this and deserved to. As soon as the Joker came on, he became a bit part in yet another Batman vs the Joker type of story. It became a riff on THE KILLING JOKE pointing out that Batman and Joker are 'kinda similar'. The idea of Batman's insanity beginning by trying to understand the Joker's insanity is fine - it can work with any of his villain's, but Joker's a good one to use here - but that should've been that and it should've transformed beyond that. And it did. The Joker's return only regressed it and removed the originality of the work. He really should've just left him out. The entire 'club of villains' had enough characters to fill any role Joker needed to fill. In fact, the Bat-Ghostmen guys did a lot of that. Joker was unnecessary, and actually diminished the Black Glove's menace. Put it this way: when Joker appeared, who immediately though, "Oh, Black Glove! You've made a mistake trusting the Joker! He'll kill you all!" Who thought that? I did. And Morrison did. And that's the problem - Joker showed up, out of the blue, and immediately was full of more menace than the Black Glove. Joker showed up, and the Black Glove became the henchmen. All that, and for such an original storyline, having the big bad be the Joker again kinda ruins it.
• The end of the story is rubbish. Not just the involvement of the Joker, but all this planning and all this preparation, and it turns out ALL Dr Hurt has was Jezebel Jet, some photoshopped pictures and a hypnotic keyword. Yes, the pictures were cool, yes Hurt's refusal to be any one person from Batman's past was brilliant, and *******, I love the phrase "Zur En Arrh", but after Jezebel Jet's reveal as a villain... Hurt had nothing left to do. His final, final act to fully break Batman doesn't actually exist. He just set things up, and forgot to close the deal. He buried him alive... and that was it. I expected more mind****ery from him. What's worse is that the final fight is ambiguous, the helicopter explodes and maybe Batman is dead. Really? All this and we still don't know if he's dead or not? All that build-up... and there's no ******* ending. It's pretentious and antic-climactic. Shame.
• It's not self-complete. It's bad enough that the story doesn't end, but it's even worse that the story isn't self-contained. Batman does die (apparently), but in FINAL CRISIS. So this whole arc is "Will Batman actually die?!" (and it brilliantly makes that a true possibility by putting Batman in a situation where continuing to be alive might be worse) and at the end it goes, "Maybe" and then he dies... in another comic book that has no relation to this comic. I love the idea of Darkseid trying to turn Batman into his slave clone army, and I love that they'd do it in this way. What I don't like is that the Black Glove has nothing to do with Darkseid. With the exception of that weird purple face that said "A specimen" (which I assume is Darkseid or Orion), there is no link between the two. Which is just maddening. It's full of self-hype. For shame.

So I loved everything but the end.

It will definitely be an all-time well-remembered storyline because it's original, it's effective, and if FINAL CRISIS is removed from the equation, it doesn't actually hurt the comic because the hype of his "death" in FINAL CRISIS no longer feels linked to this and this just becomes a somewhat ambiguous "is he dead or isn't he" ending, which while disappointing, isn't infuriating.
 
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