Uzumeri x Godel #6: Lord, Lord, Mr. Whisper (Batman: Gothic)
Godel: Welcome back to Uzumeri x Godel, where we’ve been retracing the DC Comics career of Grant Morrison! Having wrapped up Animal Man a while back, we now move on to Batman: Gothic, a story originally serialized in Legends of the Dark Knight #6-10 (1990). This is a big one for David’s regular readers: it’s our first look at Morrison writing Batman, the superhero with whom both David and Grant are arguably most closely linked at this point. If you follow David’s Batman annotations over at Comics Alliance, then you know what a big moment this is.
The story here is that Bruce Wayne, in private school, had an evil teacher named Mr. Winchester, alias Mr. Whisper, who turns out to really be a 17th-century monk who sold his soul to the devil for three hundred years of immortality. Those years are almost up, and in the present-day, Batman is drawn into battle with Whisper as the latter prepares a last-ditch effort to live on past his due date.
Uzumeri: Just so we’re clear, this definitely isn’t Morrison’s first time writing Batman – there’s two precursors, one an obscurity and one a lauded graphic novel. First, Morrison actually wrote a three-page illustrated Batman prose story in a 1986 Batman Annual that was only published in the UK. Tim Callahan has it nicely scanned and archived here.
Godel: Woah – didn’t realize that. Will have to sit down and take a look at that at some point.
Uzumeri: The other big forerunner is, of course, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth with Dave McKean, which came out the previous year.
Godel: Wait…so why didn’t we read that?
Uzumeri: To be 400% honest? It’s one of my least favorite Morrison stories, it’s totally detached from his other stuff, and it’s really … it’s really basic “Batman is just as crazy all of his villains!” stuff. Which doesn’t fit in with Morrison’s grand narrative of the character at all, since everything from Gothic through JLA to the Batman run proper is all about how Batman isn’t crazy.
Godel: Gotcha.
Uzumeri: It’s worth looking at if you ever see a copy on clearance, but MAKE SURE it’s the 20th anniversary edition, because you need the script in the back to understand what’s going on.
Godel: Is it even in continuity?
Uzumeri: I think we can more or less say it’s out of Morrison’s continuity at least.
Godel: I’m comfortable with that.
Uzumeri: In contrast to Arkham Asylum, Gothic lines up almost astonishingly close to Morrison’s later take on Batman. He’s seriously got a story-boner for pitting Batman against devil figures, and that’s fairly apparent here. I’m also quite certain he came up with the idea for this story while reminiscing on his adolescence and listening to “Headmaster Ritual.”
Godel: We’ve certainly established his fondness for the Smiths! Plus, this isn’t the only time he does the “evil schoolmaster” thing; it’s in Invisbles as well for example, and Cassandra Nova maybe counts on a technicality.
Uzumeri: There’s something almost more directly personal here, with the “why did my father send me here” thing — the answer to which we never find out in Gothic, I don’t think.
Godel: Huh! I didn’t really think about it as autobiographical at all, maybe since it just felt like a stock “evil things go on at boarding school” thing. Plus, is it that odd that the Waynes would send their kid to boarding school?
Uzumeri: Well, bringing in the background, Morrison was sent by his parents to boarding school in his adolescence, and he recalls it as an absolutely awful experience where he was at his worst as a comics and general nerd and never had any interaction with girls and was generally a bundle of resentment. And whenever he talks about his father, he speaks of him as this awe-imposing, moustached Man Of Conviction who Does The Right Thing, and here you’ve got Thomas Wayne heroically rescuing Bruce, telling off the asshole schoolmaster. And also, somehow, figuring out that the schoolmaster was a monk from the monastery at Lake Dess, and leaving Bruce a message about it on a tape of poetry readings for him to buy from the school because he happened to grow up into a street vigilante who dresses like a bat.
Godel: Yeah, I’m glad we got to that up front, because I have to say, while there were a lot of elements I did like in this story, the plot is kind of a mess. I read that scene with the Lake Dess tape recording clue several times and still can’t make sense of it.
(Click for full-size image, not that it makes much more sense.)
Godel : Is the idea really that Wayne Sr. left this behind as a clue? I read it as the tape being in there by complete accident, and Batman has that kind of left-field Riddler logic down so well that he goes “Of course! Lake Dess! It all fits together!”
Uzumeri: I’m honestly not sure, I think it’s supposed to be the former, because — you’ve also got the dreams about “unlock the rose,” and his father trying to warn him that way, too. It almost feels like setup for a later storyline, but he doesn’t get back to Batman as a solo title for another fifteen years, so I’m pretty sure that isn’t the case.
Godel: I guess, but it seems really weird….like, this story already involves an enormous continuity insertion into Bruce Wayne’s childhood, I think adding, rather casually, that his father was also a master detective who just never got around to solving the Lake Dess Case before being murdered is sort of insane.
Uzumeri: Yeah, but that seems to be what it asks us to do – I mean, you even have Whisper at the end bragging about how Thomas almost found him out before “fate intervened.”
To a certain degree, it’s an interpretation informed by the early Bill Finger Batman stuff, where Thomas Wayne actually was that badass.
Godel: I took it as Wayne being a smart and attentive dad who could see through how messed-up this boarding school actually was. Again, the sort of dream hero dad, the hope of all who’ve ever gotten unfairly in trouble at school hoped their parents would lay down some smack.
Uzumeri: Yeah, rereading it, it really does seem like Batman’s just going on a total ’60s movie “C is for Catwoman” style clue. Alfred even points it out, but yet it somehow works out.
Godel: It’s sort of lame because, like, he’s listening to recordings of Whisper reading Romantic poetry – – couldn’t there have been like clues buried in the selection of poems that helps the world’s greatest detective start to piece this thing together?
I guess I’m also not inclined to be charitable about the Dess clue because there are these other sort of awkward things going on in the plotting… like the reliance on dream-visions not really explained by anything, or how it turns out that the initial engine for the plot, with Whisper bumping off these mobsters, is actually just a total coincidence, him basically killing time while gearing up for his real plan.
Uzumeri: Absolutely, that reveal about the mobsters only being targetted by Whisper for fun felt totally cheap. The nun turning out to be the devil at the end isn’t particularly great either.
Godel: The nun thing is sort of set up earlier on, it’s just that the art totally fails to convey the foreshadowing. There’s a scene where some street tough is hitting on her, and then backs off for seemingly no reason – would have been nice for us to see her give him the evil eye or something.
Uzumeri: Gothic’s kind of unique and weird for a Morrison comic in that it’s a sequence of nice scenes that don’t really line up as an overall plot. It’s interesting that we’re reading this at the same time as that early Claremont stuff, since this is almost as blatantly informed by whatever the author was doing at the time – namely, reading a lot about sacred geometry and watching the Godfather over and over again.
Godel: Yeah! Morrison’s sort of known for setting up these grand payoff things, and here there’s almost the avoidance of a grand payoff. It’s all a big coincidence, Whisper is pleasantly surprised to see his old pupil Bruce Wayne, but it’s not like that was part of the plan, the mobster thing is a red herring…
Uzumeri: I mean, I think to a certain degree that’s due to – I’d suspect – Morrison trying to subsume his own natural tendencies in the interest of explicitly writing a, well, gothic narrative.
Godel: I’d buy that. Similarly, one thing that’s actually refreshing about this – for someone like me who has read very few Batman stories – is that it just feels like a Batman story. Not a commentary on the character, not a revue of the classic villains, just an interesting, self-contained Batman story. It would have made a pretty good episode of the animated series. You know?
Uzumeri: Yeah, it’s a refreshing change of scale after Animal Man for sure. It’s fully pleased just being a nice, tight little Batman mystery, or trying to be. I know this followed Denny O’Neil and Ed Hannigan’s “Shaman” arc in the book, which kicked it off. Legends of the Dark Knight‘s hook, by the way, was that it was stories set early in Batman’s career when he was still an urban vigilante and wasn’t with Robin.
Unless they needed it for a crossover – then it turned into continuity soup.
Godel: I figured that from the date/numbering that it had to be a way to cash in on the movie… doing just like, classic, coherent, digestible Batman stories in a Burton-esque Gotham. In a weird way it’s like the cousin of New X-Men.
Uzumeri: Another big thing about LOTDK was that it was engineered to be mature-readers. Or at least, more mature-readers than the regular titles.
Godel: You definitely get that here! This is total 1990 mature-readers material: brutal murders, gay mobsters, Satanic monks raping nuns, severed hearts showing up in the mail…
Uzumeri: Likely, as you say, to grab those movie fan dollars. I mean, this is totally something you can hand tos omeone and be like “yeah, man, this isn’t that wussy Batman shit for kids! This is hardcore!”
Godel: “Biff! Pow! Batman’s not just for Bat-fans anymore!” One downside of the pitch is that it robs Batman of a lot of his world and certainly his supporting cast. The only person Bruce ever gets to talk to is Alfred, and that relationship is really thin in this comic, with Alfred just providing ridiculously deadpan rejoinders to everything Bruce says. Nobody really feels like a real person, unfortunately.
Uzumeri: The setup does add to the Animated Series vibe, but it also turned the book into something really formulaic, since there’s only so many shocking moments from Batman’s past you can do if you never actually follow up on them in the main books. LOTDK was basically Law & Order: Gotham City.
Godel: Flashback books are always going to have that problem. So this is Batman: The Hidden Years. We know nothing really insane is going to happen here, and if it did, it’d feel really contrived when the present-day books all of a sudden start referring to this thing.
Uzumeri: Well, they totally did use LOTDK for that eventually – Denny O’Neil’s Venom arc in LOTDK ended up leading to the entire Bane/Knightfall saga.
As you might expect, the book eventually became an inventory dump and new writer tryout title. But this is the beginning, so you get creative teams like Grant Morrison and Klaus Janson; they actually got the big guns to launch the title.
Godel: How big of a gun was Morrison at this point? I’m assuming Animal Man got him tons of attention critically, but was it a big seller at all?
Uzumeri: It sold decently enough. Doom Patrol was going on at this point too, and went on well after this and Animal Man. I mean, he wasn’t a Neil Gaiman style celebrity – I don’t think he really blew up until his run on JLA.
Godel: But they have the momentum from the movie, and if LOTDK was being put out there in the hopes of attracting non-comics readers, it sort of doesn’t matter whose names are in the credits, except to the extent that they can deliver the appropriate vibe in the stories.
Uzumeri: Well, yeah, but the big names can turn this into a Publishing Event to capture both audiences – O’Neil did some of the first few arcs, but they names they got otherwise are still like Doug Moench, Mike W. Barr, Howard Chaykin and Gil Kane!, Matt Wagner, etc.
Godel: So why is Janson is phoning it in on so much of the art?. I don’t really know him as a penciller, but I know he’s got a pretty extensive old-hand resume, and a lot of Gothic just looks terrible, IMO.
Uzumeri: Man, I’m of two minds about the art here. I really kind of like Janson’s style – but at the same time, when he pencils himself, it does have a bad tendency of looking like a Bill Sienkiewicz rip. I’ve only ever seen him pencil this and the later (and excellent) Batman: Death and the Maidens miniseries with Greg Rucka.
Godel: I was thinking about Sienkiewicz too! It’s like this reminder that bad 1990s art wasn’t just the Liefelds of the world – I feel like there were a lot of people around trying consciouscly to do “edgy” and stylized art but not having the chops of a Sienkiewicz where they could really pull it off.
Uzumeri: I’m not sure whether to credit Morrison or Janson for stuff like that great panel after they bring Bruce home, where Thomas is suggesting to Martha they go out to a movie with Bruce, and it’s shot behind that toy saloon with the bandit casting the shadow over the trio.
You also have to consider that I had one or two issues of Gothic as a kid, so the art here strikes some sort of chord in me. This was the naughty, forbidden, adults’ Batman book I was able to sneak out of the shop sometimes. It comes off creepy to me, and that works really well with the story.
Godel: Well, to give credit to Janson, there are a lot of actually really nice panels here, like the big splash pages of the Batcave and the factory.
(Click for full-size images.)
Or, I guess they’re splash pages – this is one of those trades that does its damndest to obscure where the actual issue breaks were, with no title pages or anything.
Uzumeri: It really speaks to the writing style that if you didn’t tell me this was five separate issues, I would never have guessed it. It doesn’t feel at all like a five-part story. With some books you can still tell the chapter breaks even with that missing, but not here. It all just flows.
Godel: Huh, I sort of disagree – I missed them here for the pacing effects they produce, and there are places where I think I see where the chapter break should be, and the comic would read better with it. Like, for example, I imagine that one issue ends with Batman surviving his rooftop fight with Whisper, finding the card with the romantic poetry and going “I know you.” And then the next issue opens with the Batcave tape recording sequence. I could be totally wrong! But the story feels like it wants that break in there, the curtain-lowering thing.
Actually, it’s kind of a fun Rorschach blot getting a trade like this… you get to play editor and make up your own issue breaks.
Uzumeri: Haha! I was just doing the same thing, flipping through and trying to figure it out. Somewhere in my childhood longbox I should have my original copy of LOTDK #7, but I almost don’t want to know. Still, you’re right, it unquestionably reads differently than it was intended to, especially since it came out in the era before trade paperbacks were really A Thing. It wasn’t collected until 1998.
Godel: My trade is from 2007, by which time I feel like someone should have known better.
Uzumeri: DC’s collected editions department is infamous for being terrible. My favorite dick move of theirs was — there was this issue of Action Comics that was in 3D, and there was a copy that came with 3D glasses inside, between the staples, inserted into the fold, like a subscription card or whatever. Totally OK.
For the hardcover, they just glued them into the spine. So you had to get scissors and cut them out, and even then you had to deal with whatever you had left of the cardstock being, well, glued into the binding.
Godel: OMG, that’s terrible.
Uzumeri: Yeah, so leaving out chapter breaks almost feels like a miracle cure.
Godel: Getting back to the comic itself: I know I’m coming off pretty negative here, so let me say that I actually did totally enjoy this story. Especially anything where Batman actually got to be a detective and go figure stuff out – the entire trip to Austria with the backstory on the evil monks was great. The drowned monastery was neat.
And I love the abbot in this provincial Austrian town, who’s just like “Batman! Hello! What can I do for you? Uh, yeah, I know who you are, you’re in a bat costume.”
Uzumeri: What makes this story so interesting for me is that it’s Morrison almost consciously trying to do a really nuts and bolts mystery. It’s like a counterpoint to Animal Man, where he ran away from nuts-and-bolts comics storytelling as much as possible.
Godel: Oh totally, it was a really nice change of pace.
Uzumeri: It’s worth mentioning these five issues came out at the same time as the last five issues of Animal Man – about halfway through his Doom Patrol run, which got increasingly more disconnected from the DC Universe and really laid the groundwork for a lot of the stuff that became Invisibles. Like, it’s great that in one month you have Morrison putting out a comic where he himself appears and bemoans how people gain entertainment through the torture of characters, and then another comic where Batman pushes a motherfucker in front of a train.
Godel: He’s wrapping up this two-year project of Animal Man coming face to face with the inherent violence of superheroics on a metafictional journey past the edge of the panel. I could see him getting so fatigued with it that he, ironically enough, got a kind of escapist thrill from writing an ordinary violent superhero comic.
Uzumeri: It’s totally emblematic of that early-’90s Batman stuff – spooky supernatural shit anchored by a Bruce and Alfred who have that traditional sardonic relationship.
Godel: I was actually surprised by how supernatural it was. I know Batman has Ra’s al Ghul and all that, but I still really think of him as living in a Dick Tracy universe where nobody has any real superpowers or anything, just deformities and mental problems.
Uzumeri: Oh, man, all of Morrison’s Batman stuff is heavily supernatural. Gothic is, without question, his MOST grounded Batman story.
Godel: See, that’s just so weird to me! Again, maybe this comes from mainly knowing Batman from the Burton films and the animated series. I get that the hero who’s the creepy guy who hangs around in the darkness of night is also the guy whose comic should get all the strange mystical villains and guys who sold their soul to the devil…it’s just never how I’ve thought of Batman.
Uzumeri: This is the last time we really see Morrison writing Batman beating up street thugs, since by the time he returns to the character, he finds that there are disturbing classist underpinnings to a trust fund rich boy running around beating up poor people in the streets. He assumes Batman prevents tons of murders and other violent crimes every night, but the real meat of the storytelling is seeing him going up against shit at his level.
Godel: That’s interesting! And not just for the social critique, which is totally on-point, but also because it points out a problem for anybody writing Batman, or Daredevil or Spider-Man. I’m sure those characters do spend a lot of time interrupting back-alley muggings, but how many times do you actually want to write that scene? How many artists can endure drawing that scene at the opening of every storyline?
Uzumeri: And it’s not just Morrison; I mean, you go back to the earliest Batman stories, and you’ve got that great two-parter introducing batarangs and the Batplane… where he travels to Transylvania to save his girlfriend from a goddamn vampire, and then shoots him while he’s sleeping in his coffin with a silver bullet.
Godel: Wait, Batman shoots a vampire, or the girlfriend shoots Batman?
Uzumeri: Batman shoots a vampire.
Godel: Aw man, that panel is awesome but I was really hoping it was like, Batman came this close to actually becoming a vampire.
Uzumeri: So yeah, supernatural stuff…I mean, the Nolan take is cool, and it has its place, and it works great in live-action.
Godel: The Nolan take is way more supernatural than the Burton take though! The big villain in the first film is Ra’s al Ghul!
Uzumeri: Well yeah, but it’s a Ra’s who doesn’t dip in Lazarus Pits or lived for 1000 years, he’s just a dude with a society of ninja assassins who hides behind proxies.
And Dark Knight is about as supernatural as, like, a Michael Mann flick.
Godel: Fair enough! But still, you have to grant that it’s a striking idea about how to open a Batman franchise. No Joker, no Two-Face, no Catwoman… nope, I’m doing Ra’s Al-Ghul.
Uzumeri: It’s ABSOLUTELY a striking idea, and it’s why it worked so well, it seemed original to a lot of people since Ra’s isn’t exactly a household name. But a lot of the “supernatural” shit in that first movie just comes down to all the fucked-up drugs everyone’s on the entire time. Batman spends at LEAST 50% of that movie stoned out of his mind.
That’s another thing, you can totally tell Gothic is pre-drug-culture Morrison, since he doesn’t have Batman exposed to four thousand different weaponized hallucinogens.
Godel: Good call – and as with the spirit-animal sequence in Animal Man, there’s a slightly forced weirdness about the dream sequences, although I did like Thomas Wayne stepping out of the shadows with his mouth all stitched up, that was freaky.
Uzumeri: Well, I took that as being really self-consciously gothic, you know? You need these omens and portents and dream sequences, and everything’s working on a metaphorical level where symbol is more important than action.
Godel: I wish I knew more about the Gothic novel, really.
Uzumeri: I barely know anything, I just checked the goddamn Wikipedia entry. I guess I’m picking up on the …magical way of thinking, and I mean magic in the Crowley sense. When Batman figures out to go to Lake Dess, it’s almost like he figures it out because the scene placed the tape there. His thought process is “this is here, this is the time when I figure it out, so this must be the clue.”
Maybe it’s some of the character self-awareness from Animal Man bleeding over, or maybe Morrison’s trying to say that Batman really does think at this higher level, where he makes connections between things on a purely symbolic level.
Godel: I can dig that.
Uzumeri: Or maybe it was just a shitty mystery plot point. But at the same time, he makes a similarly random connection when he gets the nun’s heart from the devil in the mail and is like “oh, of COURSE!” and throws it into the lake.
Godel: The heart is another thing that feels like it was supposed to be set up by something and wasn’t. Like all it needs is the abbot to have said, you know, anything about the nun’s heart being important at all.
I think “Gothic novel” and I think Frankenstein, Vathek, I guess Dracula, and in my mind it’s more of a style than a genre…really a matter of ambiance. General Romantic spookiness, intrigues with the supernatural, sexual temptation and so on. And we do have some of those elements here, but I don’t know enough about the genre to confidently say, oh yeah, Morrison is totally doing a riff on 19th century Gothic fiction. Frankly, his grasp of 14th century Gothic architecture is shaky enough to make me a little doubtful.
Uzumeri: Haha! I was hoping we’d get to Addison Godel vs. Grant Morrison’s Armchair Architectural Theory.
Godel: Okay! For those just joining us: I do have a degree in architecture, but, Disclaimer!, the Gothic is not exactly my main area of expertise or interest. So who cares what I think? But Batman’s discussion of Gothic architecture is kind of hilariously off. He says that the pointed arch works to focus the structural forces, which is true, but he says they direct those forces up, which makes no sense in a universe with gravity. The idea of a pointed arch is that it more efficiently directs forces vertically down, rather than kicking out to the sides, which makes it possible to build a taller and taller building with less and less wall.
But that’s sort of pedantic, because Batman’s right about the main point: the verticality of Gothic architecture had to do with sort of reaching up towards heaven and producing an irrational, spiritual transformation.
Uzumeri: Okay.
Godel: Another pedantic point while I’m racking them up: Batman says he’s superimposing the plans of the two cathedrals, when clearly he’s superimposing the elevations. Both of which feature a prominently round-headed, non-Gothic arch over the entry portal. Neither is exactly the most Gothic facade I’ve ever seen, either, but hey.
More annoying is Batman’s offhand comment that the word “Gothic” might be related to the Greek word for “magic.” I have no idea if that’s true, but if so it’s irrelevant: Gothic architecture wasn’t named that by its creators, but by its Italian Renaissance detractors centuries later. They were basically saying that this architecture of the French and German-speaking world was the architecture of the Goths, ie the barbarians who ruined Rome.
Uzumeri: I had absolutely no idea about that. Interesting as all hell though.
Godel: In the context of this comic, I almost buy it, as just another case of Batman stringing together stuff that makes no sense but still leads him to his goal. The more I think about it, the more I think maybe Morrison is deliberately doing the “madman’s logic” approach to Batman here.
Uzumeri: The thing is that there’s no madman whose logic Batman is trying to follow. It’s largely a set of coincidences; it’s not like Mr. Whisper has a complex for leaving clues.
Godel: Okay, no madman, but still: impossible flights of intuition that pan out because he’s Batman. It’s unsatisfying if you’re trying to follow the story and you want a sense of payoff, but it sort of fits the dreamy, weirdo vibe they’re going for here.
Uzumeri: Yeah, dreamy is a good word for it. Every detail is significant because it’s displayed, and only significant details would be displayed.
Godel: If the story was written so that it all fit together, with Batman starting by investigating the mobsters and thus making his way rationally to Whisper’s big plan, that would be tighter, but it wouldn’t leave much room for all the dream sequences and the school flashbacks, which Morrison clearly wants to do for personal reasons.
So, in my hypothetical “Gothic” episode of the animated series, you’d end up with a much more coherent piece of storytelling, but no way would they leave in the entire boarding school thing, which actually isn’t necessary at all to the tale of Whisper, the devil and the mobsters. And yet, I suspect the “unnecessary” stuff is what got Morrison out of bed to write this comic.
Uzumeri: Well, I mean, the dream sequences and school flashbacks are really what makes this a Batman story rather than, like, an Avenging Crusader Archetype story.
Godel: I dunno man, is Batman really characterized by having prophetic nightmares that help him solve mysteries? Or by suffering boarding-school abuse as a child?
Uzumeri: Yeah, good calls on both points. I guess I processed the first one as repressed memories, but there really isn’t any reason for him to know about “unlock the rose” or the ship of human bodies or any of that stuff.
Godel: Noooope. And no reason for Whisper to have like, implanted these subconsciously or anything like that.
Uzumeri: Oh, totally no reason for Whisper to have done that. But maybe there was for Thomas to have implanted them in him.
Godel: I think the idea might be that the devil is sending Batman these dreams, but I can understand them not wanting to explicitly write “Batman: the superhero who solves crimes by listening to the voice of Satan.”
Uzumeri: As for the boarding school abuses – I mean, I’m probably totally influenced by the weight of continuity here, since I’ll just tell you that you will find out why they sent Bruce away to that school.
Godel: Huh! Wow! Okay. I didn’t expect that, really. But now I’m sort of curious.
Uzumeri: Still, looking at Gothic atomically, it really does feel like a bunch of disconnected, half-finished ideas.
Godel: If I wanted to pan this comic it wouldn’t be hard: the plot holes are glaring, the mobsters are interchangable, Alfred’s a cipher, the art’s uneven, and some of the biggest set pieces (like Batman escaping the death trap… off-panel, ha ha!) sort of muff the punchlines. But from page to page there’s enough going on that it holds my attention.
So, until I found out that the mobsters were irrelevant to the story, I enjoyed their high-concept deaths – the whole thing with them summoning Batman and him being pissed off is awesome. Alfred is funny, even if I wish he felt more like a human being. The sunken monastery is great, even if we spend all of like two pages there, and I totally couldn’t understand what Batman accomplished by going there because Janson can’t make a parchment look like a parchment.
Uzumeri: Yeah, what’s up with perfectly detailed and preserved blueline blueprints found in a sunken building?
Godel: No idea, but again it’s something that suffers from being poorly foreshadowed. Batman is all “OH MY GOD,” but since we’ve never had our attention called to the Gotham cathedral facade before, it’s sort of hard to get excited about it. Why not have one of the issues open with a big splash page of the cathedral, with Batman glowering on the facade (like a gargoyle!) looking down at the streets for crime to fight? But now I’m just being nit-picky and writing fanfiction.
Uzumeri: Yeah, it’s totally a flawed comic. It’s probably Morrison’s first attempt at writing a “straight” superhero story, considering Zenith, Animal Man, Doom Patrol and Arkham Asylum.
Godel: It’s still not all that “straight,” and I think that’s what gets it a pass from me. If this was him trying to do a solid piece of superhero genre writing, it’d be a failure for all the reasons we’ve identified… but it’d be more charitable to say that what he’s going for is this strange nightmare-logic ambience. Maybe the art lets that down in places, but it really can’t be understood as a genre-driven story. .
Uzumeri: This is really from an era of Morrison comics where everything had that sort of disconnected dreamlike ambiance, stuff like Kid Eternity and The Mystery Play. Thankfully, it’s something we won’t have to deal with in our next Morrison installment, as we take a look at his ten-issue collaboration with Mark Millar, Aztek: The Ultimate Man. He’ll write Batman in it, too.
Godel: Sweet! I wouldn’t really recommend Gothic to non-completists, but it doesn’t make me not want to see more Batman from this guy.
But first, we’ll be swinging back around to X-Men, for the long-awaited introduction of two of Claremont’s most enduring characters: Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost.
Uzumeri: Hey, now, don’t sell Proteus short!
Godel: I felt I was saving the best for last by not once again hyping the arrival of DAZZLER, but that might just be me. See you in a couple weeks (probably)!
