And so it appears in the preview of Battle For The Cowl #2. . . oooops, spoilers already . . .

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Robin ends on a note of triumph.  Or rather, its character does.  Kind of.  Tim Drake has established himself as someone so righteous he can dictate The Rules Of All Superheroes to Spoiler, so cunning he can set it up so he beats Shiva in a fight, so self-sacrificing that he can break up with the girlfriend that I am flat-out shocked he still has, since he hasn’t seen her in the last six or so issues, and so fair-minded that he can pacify Jason Todd, who comes by to view Batman’s last will and testament, which has been set up to be recorded in a big black obelisk in the Batcave.

Truly, Tim is the badassiest of all badass heroes, and that newfound badassery is worth the several dozen pints of personality he lost.  What the world needs is another grim n’ gritty superhero with a tortured past, and what the Batverse needs is another adult hero in the shadow of the bat, and if I were a lesser blogger, I’d sneak in a little jab about how Detective Harper, Zoanne, Stephanie Brown, and Lady Shiva all got nudged aside so the male character could commune with their dead daddy figure in a big, erect phallus but I’m far too – oh did that slip out? 

Well, it’s not like I’ve made a secret of my feelings toward this character’s trajectory.  I will sum it all up with this – when anyone told him that something sucked, my old physics teacher used to say, “There is no ‘suck’ or ‘blow.’  There are only differences in pressure.”  I can now prove him wrong, since this new grim, infallible, omnipotent Robin somehow manages to both suck and blow at the same time.

The character is on top of the world, but I’m feeling pretty cold about him.  Of course it’s natural for characters to progress as their comics go on, but this one grew out of any interest I had in him.  Oh, well.  With comics, every Wednesday has the possibility of  a fresh start.  So, out with the old, in with the Battle For The Cowl, and on to next Wednesday.

The last issue of Nightwing has been published.  No one is taking much notice of it, and it is with a heavy heart that I admit that I can see why.

A number of books are ending this month – Nightwing, Robin, Birds of Prey, and The Blue Beetle – leaving me with a severely reduced pull-list.  But while Robin has ended with developments that, in my opinion, suck so hard that they could depressurize a space shuttle, the final few stories leave us with some sense of completion for the series.  Tim Drake has become someone new.  Sucky, but new.

Nightwing, on the other hand, is a sad example of one of those books whose characters are never quite heavyweights in their own right, but are close enough to the larger fictional universe that they get sucked into all plot lines.  Bludhaven was flattened in Final Crisis.  The main character undertook a pointless trip to New York because everything needed to be different One Year Later.  He had a girlfriend.  She moved away.  He found another.  She moved away.  Given another year or so he would have found another and she would have disappeared just as abruptly, because he’s practically betrothed to a character in another book.  Vigilante hijacked the plot for about three months in order to publicize that character’s upcoming book.

Then it was time for the unfortunate Pre-Event-Release-Date, Post-Event-Continuity to kick in.  This happens during every Big Event.  All the characters in a minor book hint incessantly at all the wild and crazy things that have happened in Event books that have yet to be released, leaving the reader confused and missing the emotional impact of the story.

I like the character of Dick Grayson, who is, of all the Bats, the cheeriest.  But after Devin Grayson left the series was helmed by too many different authors going too many different directions.  It was lurching and staggering like a punch-drunk boxer, and it was merciful to throw in the towel now.  I just wish that there were more of a sense of completion, rather than the books just being cut off. 

But who knows?  Maybe it will come back after the next Big Event.  At least that way it will have a fresh start.

In the first part of Neil Gaiman’s Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader, two disembodied voices discuss Batman’s funeral.  One of them is, apparently, Batman.  The other is an unknown guide.  Given the fact that I’d burned out on the hallucinogenic tone of much of Batman RIP I expected to dislike this story.

I have to say, I dig it.  The overall playfulness of the story makes it work. 

First there are the weird, funny little messages in the art, such as a giant typewriter billboard with the slogan, “Don’t Type It . . . Finger it!”  There’s the fact that Two-Face drives around in a half-trashed car.  There’s Batman, in the coffin, in his full uniform.  There’s the ridiculous cat mask that Selina wears when she and Batman fight during  a flashback.

I also like the different eras and obvious lack of continuity of the story.  It reminds me of the Legends of the Dark Knightseries, in which any nutty thing could happen, from Batman starring in a vampire version of Sunset Boulevard to a supervillain a fashion show.

Of course the fact that the entire tone of the story is funereal puts a damper on my spirits, but overall I enjoyed Gaiman’s take on the Batverse.  It’ll be interesting to see how he makes sense of the situation he sets up, but if he’s up to that challenge this could be a more memorable Bat-story than several of past few years’ big events.

Obviously, the winner, as previously suggested on this site, should be Ted Kord, who I am assuming is not in the picture in order to preserve the element of surprise.

But if it ends up being Alfred?  In that uniform?  It’s all been worth it.

Know what sucks about character death?

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The day after the last issue of Batman RIP, I’ve been thinking it over, and you know who would make a great writing team? Judd Winick and Grant Morrison.

No! Wait! Don’t go!

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You said it, Batman.

I think I’m spoiling things under here, so don’t read this unless you’ve already read the issue.
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So far in Batman RIP: Everyone is evil. Unless they’re dead. Unless they were already dead, in which case they’re probably alive again. And evil.

Provided, of course, that all of this isn’t going on inside of Bruce Wayne’s newly re-crazied head.

Although I enjoy Grant Morrison’s mind leaving orbit and cruising the galaxy as much as the next person, with one issue to go it’s beginning to look like a center-cannot-hold type situation. For a long time, I couldn’t think of any ending that would satisfy me. Yesterday, however, I remembered a scene way back in Batman #656.

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There has been plenty of criticism of Superman/Batman, most of it deserved. The comic is where kitsch goes to die a long, agonizing death. Its inhabitants often act so baffling out of character that it’s hard to believe that their names aren’t misprints. Many of the issues play fast and loose with continuity.

The most cynical part of this book is right on the cover. Whoever conceived of this book took the two most lucrative characters in the DC universe and stuck them in a book without even a proper title. No ’The Adventures of.’ No, ’Duo.’ No ’League of.’ They just put a forward slash between the names, presumably so no one will think the book’s about a mutant hybrid. As grabs for reader’s money go, that falls somewhere between having the Birds of Prey go undercover as porn stars and just gripping readers by the ankles, holding them upside down and shaking them until their wallets fall out.

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