The Morrison Run, a preamble

 Part I of a continuing series of reviews on Grant Morrison's Batman Epic.

Batman by Grant Morrison

Prologue:

52 #30 and #47

In retrospect, it was all there from before the beginning.

Grant Morrison's nearly seven year run on Batman remains, 18 years and two refreshes later, the gold standard for serialized superhero adventure. It is the confluence of so many of Morrison's strengths: encyclopedic knowledge, high level conceptual thinking, and an unusual talent for the juxtaposition of silver age camp with contemporary cool. Just like his run on X-Men six years previous, it signaled a new direction for a beloved comics property, and just as with X-Men it was abandoned as soon as it ended for being too strange, too different, too idiosyncratic.

Over the course of the next year, this blog will attempt to catalogue the entirety of Morrison's run on Batman from the legendary Batman and Son story that introduced Damian Wayne; through the watershed 16-issue blitz of Batman and Robin maybe the best ever run on a Batman title; right up until the final battle with Leviathan in the pages of Batman Incorporated Vol. 2.

That said, before we can begin, we must set the stage.

 

Whether you like Crisis on Infinite Earths or not, you have to respect how DC really went all-in in holding fast to the myriad of changes to canon that it introduced, even as they divided creators and fans. Post-Crisis Batman had been born from two fathers: the bracing urban soldier take on Batman from the work of Frank Miller and the steady, story-driven, editorial vision of legendary Batman scribe Denny O'Neil. By 2006, the pattern was pretty much set: Batman was an uber-genius who could hand anyone his ass with enough "prep time", but also a lonely obsessive who had never recovered from the death of Jason Todd and continually had trouble accepting the extended family he had built for himself.

Infinite Crisis was a company wide crossover designed to put a cap on the post-Crisis era of DC Comics and infuse the current continuity with more of the whimsy and optimism the line had enjoyed before 1986. Most of the big beats the event introduced are outside the scope of this article but a key theme of the book was that Batman had been pushed too far over the post-Crisis era and as a result he had become paranoiac, bitter, and finally a man in despair.

The events of the crossover were so traumatic for Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman in particular that they all took the next "year" in continuity off. The resulting "lost year" of DC history was collected in a special weekly series called 52 which was written collaboratively by the four stewards of DC lore for the new regime: Geoff Johns, Mark Waid, Greg Rucka, and Grant Morrison. The majority of the series is, again, outside the scope of this blog. That said, Morrison gets two brief vignettes  that, in retrospect, prefigure his entire six year run and act as its mission statement.

Issue 30 opens with a short summary of Batman's history from nearly his first appearance right up until the moment he realized the OMAC system he had devised was going rogue in the opening of Infinite Crisis. The sequence, which lovingly recreates appropriate period details from Bob Kane and Dick Sprang all the way up to then-contemporary Rags Morales makes no distinction between pre-Crisis and post-Crisis stories. Nightwing, who is revealed to be relaying this information to Tim Drake's Robin while on a mission, is presenting us with Batman's history as a unified whole.

This will be enormously significant: perhaps the single biggest tell in what's to come. For now until the end of the run, everything counts-- especially the weird stuff.

Nightwing and Robin rough up the thugs as they search for Bruce, and one of them makes an important reference that further underlines this point:

"Cain of the Rock and the Rage, Maker of Martyrs, grant me swift release..."

It's very difficult for me not to read this, knowing what I do in retrospect, as a direct reference to Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham's legendary (and previously non canonical) graphic novel Son of the Demon. Long time readers of the blog will no doubt recall that the villain of that piece was a man who styled himself as Qayin and was obsessed with death. I always thought that Morrison had intended Bruce and Talia's son to be the baby sired in that story before editorial forced him to contrive a different moment, and this is the best evidence I've found for it on the page.

We pick up the thread two days later with Bruce Wayne wandering through the "Empty Quarter" of the Sahara Desert. Wandering through the desert being particularly strong Biblical symbolism here, just to note. He's accosted by exactly the men he's searching for: the Ten-Eyed Brothers of the Empty Quarter. They're presented here as mystical nomad warriors who "...fight as ghosts fight." They're also explicitly identified by Bruce as one of his key teachers in his original journey to become Batman.

Unlike with Cain, it's very clear what Morrison is referencing here: the Ten-Eyed Man, the most maligned and bizarre antagonist of Batman's Bronze Age, and a character so reviled that Marv Wolfman made his death a condition for writing the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. Not only was the original Ten-Eyed Man, who had his optic nerves shunted to his fingertips, silly in his own right but the writers of Batman in the 1970's, perhaps overcompensating, had Batman regularly refer to this mook as "the most dangerous man alive."

And in one page, Morrison completely rehabilitates the concept and makes it cool.

The Ten-Eyed Brothers perform a whirling dervish that would kill Bruce if he flinches, and when Tim finds him he's on his knees. He declares, with tears in his eyes...

The exorcism the Ten-Eyed Brothers performed included The Batman!

We're left to marinate on this for seventeen weeks until Issue 47. At a point of highest tension in Intergang's struggle for Gotham we find that Tim and Bruce have recused themselves to Nanda Parbat, mystic Tibetan city of Deadman fame. Bruce is undergoing the "Thorgal" ritual (which is not a real component of Tibetan Buddhism, but a reference to an excellent Franco-Belgian comic) of death and rebirth.

Much of the conversation surrounding this merely reiterates what was previously expounded upon but the final image of Wayne, coming out of the Cave, is the perfect jumping off point to Morrison's run proper:

Bruce Wayne, like Plato, has exited the Cave of shadows and is ready to face the real world again.

Bruce Wayne like Christ, was dead but has rolled back the stone.

From this point forward, Batman is no longer a curse, or a vow, or trauma-- if it had been, no sane man would have risked death to bring it back after the Ten-Eyed Brothers cut it out of Bruce's soul. Batman and Bruce Wayne are at peace with one another-- secure in their identity and recognizing that they do what they do because they have chosen it.

Batman is resurrected...and Gotham's criminals should start saying their prayers.