The Fractal Hall Journal

Ah, Batman. What’s going wrong, eh?

I’m going to stress here that I’m not one of the people who’s disappointed in Grant Morrison’s work so far. I think many of the faults in his run have nothing to do with the writing. That said, I suspect that many of the delays are down to Morrison’s commitments to other projects (several from outside of comics, I think), and the delays have absolutely crippled these stories.

Story telling this dense requires the reader to recall things- sometimes, very subtle things- from earlier issues. This isn’t easy when (a) there’s long gaps between issues, (b) the pacing is interrupted by shoddy fill-in stories or company-mandated crossovers, and (c) the artist, for whatever reason, isn’t able to convey the story properly. And these points are all interconnected of course. After all, you may have an awesome artist on a title, but he’s slow, so you have to get an artist that isn’t as good to pick up the slack, but this effects the storytelling, and so on. It’s not a good cycle to get into, and it’s really impairing people’s enjoyment.

Setting everything else aside, I really feel like Morrison is doing something really interesting and special here. It just isn’t quite working out as well as All Star Superman. That shouldn’t be much of a surprise, mind, as All Star doesn’t have any of the same tie-in requirements of the Batman series, and the All Star writing style is very deliberately episodic. Plus, Frank Quitely.

You know who isn’t Frank Quitely? The guy who drew Batman #675.

I really, really don’t like criticising things much, as it’s not really the vibe we strive for here at the Journal. Except for that past-life X-Files episode; that seriously stank. But there’s no getting round the fact that the art on one of DC’s flagship titles has to be better than this. Why isn’t Cliff Chiang on this title? Why do pointless fucking miniseries get better artists? Why is DC wasting Mark Bagley on what will quickly become an irrelevant weekly book? The Batman #675 guy doesn’t even bother drawing pupils half the time. And that’s pupils on people who aren’t wearing the scary-blank-eyed Batman cowl.

Oh, quick aside- wouldn’t it be cool if, just for a brief time in order to do a handful of stories with a specific kind of atmosphere, DC’s house style was to draw Batman without whited-out eyes? Some damn interesting artistic possibilites, there.

Plenty of people have criticised this issue, and most of the criticisms are valid. But taken beat-by-beat, there’s actually something really exciting going on here. It’s just the execution that fails. Bruce Wayne taking out bad guys brutally but stealthily? Robin and Nightwing racing to the scene? Bursting through the doors in the light of the Bat-signal? That’s some cinematic imagery, right there, badly served by the art. And I’m a little worried that may be the final judgement on Morrison’s whole run.

It’s a long Bank Holiday weekend for me now, but I don’t plan on disappearing abruptly again this time. Expect something a little different for next week.