#have i mentioned that i hate grant morrison's talia

[nothingofnotereally]

Unpacking the Mother of Skeletons

So I was just talking to some friends about this page and those references, and my psychology degree-possessing butt started explaining the wire mommy reference, which led me to researching the other references, and now I’m going to unpack them here for your benefit.

Before I do this, let me be clear that I am not agreeing with Grant Morrison or his portrayal of Talia nor am I agreeing with this use of these cultural, religious and social sciencey references.  Just trying to break down what he’s getting at here. 

Ahem.

So the context is this:  Morrison’s Talia is 1. On a rampage of destruction because Bruce won’t date her and 2. Rejecting Heretic’s desire for her love and approval.  Noteworthy: Heretic is Damian’s clone, so he is her genetic son.

Okay, here we go... in order, except for Kali which is last because boy is that a reference to unpack.

Tiamat: Okay so Tiamat is a goddess, in this case the ancient Mesopotamian goddess of creation, the mother of gods and monsters.  She gives birth to the gods, but her husband realizes they want to depose him, so he wars against their children and their children destroy him, and then Tiamat wages war on their children.  She is ultimately killed but not before creating the dragons who have poison in their veins instead of blood... but anyway I’m pretty sure the point he’s getting at is that her progeny rebels against her and she in turn wages war on them.  This may also link back to the final bits of Batman Inc where Ra’s is set to unleash Damian’s clones - Talia’s unnatural children.  Dragons with poison instead of blood, metaphorically.

Medusa: This is a stupid reference because the actual myth (at least the ones I’ve personally encountered) is that Medusa was r_ped in the temple of Athena.  And Athena decided to act like a Greek God does, blaming the victim and cursing her to become a monster.  Not super relevant except that Morrison has previously referenced this as the story of a beautiful woman who became a monster after her love was rejected - no idea where he got that from, but I think that’s fairly self-explanatory in the context of a Talia who has gone warpath because Bruce won’t date her.

The Wire Mommy: So I’m pretty sure this is a reference to the Harry Harlow rhesus monkey studies in the 1930s.  So basically this was a study conducted in, I believe, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Harlow got some babby rhesus monkeys and removed them from their mothers and placed them in one of two primary environments:

An inanimate substitute mother made of wire holds food and a similar substitute made of terry cloth is without food.

An inanimate substitute mother made of terry cloth holds food and a similar wire mother does not have food.

Okay so the findings of this study were basically that the baby monkeys didn’t like the wire mother.  In the case where the food was with the wire mother, they would go over and eat and then dash it over to the terry cloth mother and cling to that one.  

What I gather from this, especially in the context of the above where Heretic is looking to Talia to love and nurture him, is that she’s saying that, despite having given him life and physically supported him (in other words, having the metaphorical food), she has no warmth or love for him.  She is made of wire and without comfort or softness.

The Red Queen: I’m not superfamiliar with the Alice books beyond Wonderland so I did look this up on Wikipedia as well.  Therein lies this quote from Carroll:

The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm - she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of all governesses

So, again, a comparison between Talia and a cold, dispassionate anger/hatred, and a female/maternal figure without warmth.

Mother of Skeletons doesn’t seem to be a specific reference - if you’ve got one, feel free to drop that on me, too, but I couldn’t find anything.  I’m guessing it’s another way of reiterating this point that she is a destructive maternal figure who devours or destroys her unworthy children.

And finally...

Kali: Kali is a major Hindu deity, the wife of Shiva, and one of the more famous Hindu gods.  Please note I am not Hindu, I’m not going to front as some kind of expert and if you know better than me, feel free to correct me.  Anyway, Kali has many aspects, some of which are extraordinarily destructive and some of which are less so.  To find out which one he’s specifically referencing all we need to do is look at the art, though:

Kali’s most common pose in paintings is in her most fearsome guise as the slayer of demons, where she stands or dances with one foot on a collapsed Shiva and holds a severed head. She wears a skirt of severed human arms, a necklace of decapitated heads, and earrings of dead children, and she often has a terrifying expression with a lolling tongue which drips blood. --Ancient History Encyclopedia

So okay looking at Wikipedia because I’m lazy... some relevant references, and you’ll see how the other names she gives for herself back this up:

Rāmprasād comments in many of his other songs that Kāli is indifferent to his wellbeing, causes him to suffer, brings his worldly desires to nothing and his worldly goods to ruin. He also states that she does not behave like a mother should and that she ignores his pleas:

Can mercy be found in the heart of her who was born of the stone? [a reference to Kali as the daughter of Himalaya] Were she not merciless, would she kick the breast of her lord? Men call you merciful, but there is no trace of mercy in you, Mother. You have cut off the heads of the children of others, and these you wear as a garland around your neck. It matters not how much I call you "Mother, Mother." You hear me, but you will not listen.

To be a child of Kāli, Rāmprasād asserts, is to be denied of earthly delights and pleasures. Kāli is said to refrain from giving that which is expected.

So, a mother who, having been born of stone herself, lacks mercy and warmth.  Given Morrison’s take on Talia’s background and her relationship to Ra’s... self-explanatory pretentious reference.  But that’s not all:

Vamakali is usually worshipped by non-householders. The pose shows the conclusion of an episode in which Kali was rampaging out of control after destroying many demons. Shiva, fearing that Kali would not stop until she destroyed the world, could only think of one way to pacify her. He lay down on the battlefield so that she would have to step on him. Seeing her consort under her foot, Kali realized that she had gone too far, and calmed down.

Okay this is super relevant because one thing that people often miss about Morrison’s Talia is that her acts of destruction are ultimately meant to get Bruce’s attention.  She undertakes this villainous rampage because he only pays attention to villains: she doesn’t even think it’s interesting, she mocks her own plans and calls them stupid.  She says she’s doing this because Bruce prefers things black and white and over the top.  

And in the end, she shows up in the Batcave, declares that they’re going to fight to the death, and then has a passionate kissing session with him...

...seriously, everyone remembers the kiss but no one talks about how Bruce is still into it.  

But anyway, so they make out, and she poisons him...

...then declares she’s doing all this as a gift to him, expresses frustration that he doesn’t understand, and demands that he beg her for help.

Here’s my point:  she’s not actually trying to kill him or take the world down.  She’s trying to force Bruce to submit to her, at which point she would feel satisfied and come back back from the edge.  As evidenced by her earlier panels expressing her frustration that he won’t stop or admit defeat.

In fact, a great deal of what she does in Batman Inc. seems to be done to elicit a specific response from Bruce - for example, she has a hit put on Damian, but it’s really just to mess with Bruce’s head, it’s not really meant to result in Damian actually dying.  I would say this comes back to this idea that the opposite of love is apathy not hate - love and hate are both intertwined and Morrison’s Talia both hates and loves him, or rather loves him until she hates him and hates him until she loves him.

This reminds me, one day I should write a thing about how Morrison’s Bruce/Talia story is basically a tragic romance and Talia is the actual love interest of his run... or should I because I don’t really want to be the person who writes longass meta about runs and interpretations that I actually hate.   

Anyway, SIGNING OFF AGAIN, it’s...

Me!

[stxleslyds]

Also, the writers' failure to understand, every crime Jason committed had a motive. Attack other criminals? Holy warrior destined to purify the world of evil. Attack Bruce? Joker's still alive. (Oh, Jason, it's much worse than that.) Attack Tim? A parody of what he once was. He wasn't just a "bad boy". He was dangerously insane.

Hi, Anon! Yup, there seems to be a lot of things that writers have gotten confused about Jason Todd/Red Hood and the biggest one is his motivations to kill certain criminals.

Let’s be honest, Judd Winick set a golden path for the upcoming Red Hood writers. But each and every writer that used Red Hood in their stories completely missed the point of Jason’s character. All of them. It’s so incredibly wild to me that every other writer read UtRH and came up with whichever version of Jason they came up with.

Let’s list the writers that completely missed the point.

Geoff Johns in Teen Titans vol.3 #29.

Geoff Johns was one of the first to completely mischaracterize Jason, why on earth would Jason go to the Titans Tower to beat up Tim? This is not me saying that Jason would never do that because Jason thinks of Tim as his brother or a friend or the person that he can trust the most from the Bat-Clan (can you believe Lobdell tried to sell us that one?), this is me saying that Jason wouldn’t have done that because he couldn’t have given less of a fuck about Tim’s existence.

When Jason found out that Bruce had another Robin he wasn’t bothered by his “replacement” he was mad at Bruce for having another child playing hero after he lost his life as a fifteen-year-old. Jason didn’t even think of Tim as his replacement as fandom likes to make us believe, Jason called Tim “pretender”. And that was that, but to go from minimal recognition to go out of his way to beat him up at Titans Tower is a massive mischaracterization.

Paul Dini in Countdown (to Final Crisis).

Paul Dini in Countdown did absolutely nothing with Jason, I am sorry but that’s all he did. Him writing Jason was like watching a dog trying to catch their own tail. He started with a pretty basic take on UtRH Jason, then he added a bit of Jason being an annoying man with Donna, then we had the jealousy arc because apparently, Jason had the hots for Donna but she didn’t want anything to do with him and he was all angsty when she paid attention to Kyle instead of him, and then, later on, he had that whole Red Robin bullshit (I am sorry about this, but I absolutely hated that, it was so dumb, I am so glad it didn’t last long because it was just too bad), and after all that mix of just not interesting stuff he went right back to the Jason that he had at the very start. It was a waste of time, but I guess that he had to be there because he was an anomaly and all that. I just think that was DC’s first try at making Jason Todd/Red Hood something more than just a street-level vigilante and they failed miserably.

Tony S. Daniel in Batman: Battle for the Cowl.

Even though the first two did make mistakes with Jason’s characterizations, this man was the first to just throw UtRH out of the window and make up his very own version of Jason Todd. And his version was horrendous, that Jason had no problem with attempting to kill children and innocent people, he also really wanted to be Batman because Gotham needed a Batman and he wanted to be the person to wear the Cowl and he was looking for a Robin for himself.

I know, the whole concept is the perfect opposite of what Jason Todd and Red Hood were in UtRH. Every aspect of BftC Jason is based on nothing.

Jason wanting to be Batman because Gotham needed Batman is just the beginning of what’s wrong in this book. Jason became the Red Hood (in part) because he believed that Batman and his ways weren’t what Gotham needed so he made a better version of Batman with Red Hood (according to him) because Red Hood did what Batman refused to do. Another thing that is just wrong is Jason wanting, Damian, Tim or Dick to be his Robin, there is just so much wrong with this, first of all, Jason wanted Batman to stop having Robin because child soldiers ran the risk of dying at a very young age and that’s exactly how he saw the whole thing because that was what had happened to him. Second, if Jason was mad at Bruce for getting another Robin why would he now want one of his own to team up with his Batman? Damian was a child, Tim was someone that apparently Jason hated (because Jason beating Tim was mentioned in this event), and then Jason actually asked Dick Grayson, Nightwing, to be his Robin? Listen, there is no way that was Jason, nothing about him makes sense, even taking into account that Jason had beaten Tim already in this event Jason actually tried to kill both Tim and Damian (it might have been just one of them but yeah, it still doesn’t make sense).

I just don’t think that Tony S. Daniel knew who Jason Todd was, maybe he got confused but the thing is, his “villainous” and deranged version of Jason Todd allowed a villainous and deranged version of Red Hood to happen with the next writer that I will be talking about.

Grant Morrison in Batman and Robin vol.1 #3-6.

This was the birth of the villainous, deranged and bloodthirsty Red Hood. There is absolutely no trace of UtRH Jason here, not even if we are looking at the opposite of things like we could do with Daniel’s Jason. Grant Morrison wanted Dick and Damian to have a villain to match their Batman and Robin and they decided to give us a red-haired-pill-headed-red hood. Everything from Morrison’s characterization of Jason is crazy, from the red hair (hello pre-crisis) to the awful Joker’s Red Hood looking suit, everything was just weird.

I still don’t believe that was Jason, to be honest, I would rather think that version of Jason was actually a rouge Skrull that came all the way from the Marvel Universe and lost his way in Gotham City. Maybe when he made the jump between universes, he got too much information and got confused and took the form of the wonkiest Jason Todd he could come up with.

This Jason was absolutely deranged, he knew exactly what he was doing and he didn’t care if innocents died. This Jason was the one that got locked up in Arkham. This is the Jason that Dick put in Arkham for Jason and everybody else’s safety.

Dick putting that Jason in Arkham wasn’t a bad thing or something that anyone can use to shit on Dick Grayson (not on this house). This Arkham was reformed and that Jason knew that if he stayed in that new Arkham he would stay away from trouble, but here is the thing, that Jason loved trouble, so he took all the tests to prove he wasn’t insane and asked to be transferred to Blackgate (where all the Red Hood’s enemies were). That Jason didn’t ask to be sent to Blackgate because the Joker was a cell away from his in Arkham, he did it so he could go on a killing spree in Blackgate (which he did when he got there).

Skrull Jason was just bloodthirsty and nothing like UtRH Jason, he had no motive other than just killing for fun or whatever. He didn’t want to protect Gotham and he couldn’t have cared less about the drug trade in Gotham. In Batman and Robin vol.1. Jason Todd was unrecognizable. And luckily, we never saw him again.

Scott Lobdell in Everything that he ever wrote about Red Hood.

This one is pretty self-explanatory. Lobdell was the king of overpowering Jason, he was the one that drove Red Hood farther and farther away from his street-level vigilante status. He continuously added more to him, he was a big deal because he was meant to take down Ra’s al Ghul, he was a big deal because he was the only human to train in the All-Castle and learned to summon the All-Blades.

This Red Hood’s morals and ideals were kind of gone, there just wasn’t any kind of interest in Jason to get rid of drugs or try to control its trade in Gotham, he just had no interest in street-level threats, everything was extraordinary in both New 52 and Rebirth. If he wasn’t in space he was in some mystical land. His friends and allies became even more and more powerful, his level of power was completely off compared to the others. His personality was ever-changing and quite honestly you could barely see the Jason that he once was.

This Jason also was very inconsistent in the way that he felt towards people (obviously because Lobdell is a shitty writer), he wanted to follow Batman’s rules and was shown as someone that still had fond memories of his life with Bruce before he died but was also willing to let those memories go, to move on? Maybe? I don’t know. But he changed his mind about Bruce and following his rules or not for a very long time. Jason was also a little bitch about Dick, and he was a little bitch because he (Lobdell) never gave the reader or anyone a concrete reason as to why he hated him so much and then in Rebirth he decided that Dick wasn’t that bad. Also, Jason went from “Willis Todd, abusive husband and father that deserved to die” to “Willis Todd abusive husband and father but he sent me letters when he was in prison and Penguin had him killed so now, I really want to avenge him”. Yeah, I don’t really know why that happened and like most of Lobdell’s arcs and stuff it was never really completed or well thought out.

Lobdell’s Jason characterization was a mess for ten years and that’s the prime reason why Jason is a character with no solid background, story or future.

James Tynion IV in Red Hood and the Outlaws.

Tynion’s Jason Todd was a hero, he was like a mini Tom King Batman. Everything he did was right and there was just no way that you could bamboozle him. This Jason was able to hold to Blades that drained his soul as well as hosting the Untitled in his body (that were able to drain his soul too) and on top of all that he completed his journey of the Chosen One by making those ancient martial arts moves that he learned before he was Robin even though Talia hadn’t been able to master it yet.

Scott Snyder, Tim Seeley in Batman Eternal and Batman and Robin Eternal.

A mess, this was pure New 52 levels of bullshit and they all just wanted to push the “Batfamily” and while Dick was gone, they were trying to make Jason fill the void that Dick left in Batman events. It didn’t work at all and all they did was mess around with Jason’s characterization more.

Geoff Johns in Three Jokers.

I have talked enough about Johns’ takes on Jason Todd and Red Hood, but let me tell you something real quick, if a writer thinks that the best they can do with a character is make them give up their morals/ideals for an unrequited love interest, then they can keep that idea for themselves. Geoff Johns wrote a book that was absolutely not needed and then proceeded to butcher every characterization that he could, Three Jokers was three issues long and he managed to add more trauma to Jason’s torture, push the narrative of Jason being at fault for his own murder and make Jason’s motivations to be the Red Hood weak enough to make him want to give up his work for a woman that he barely knows (and doesn’t like him at all).

Joshua Williamson in Future State: Red Hood and Robin #5.

Now, with Williamson I have issues only when he writes Jason, not because his stories are bad, don’t get me wrong, I would have completely enjoyed FS: Red Hood if it weren’t for the completely unnecessary Rose/Jason side plot he had going on. Jason was clearly working undercover for some people that he hated working with. He had to arrest or kill “masks” (vigilantes, just like he “used” to be) for the Magistrate.

His ideas were pretty solid, Jason did the job but he never killed the masks and actively didn’t trust the Magistrate but he was working there to tear them apart from within, and that’s amazing if Williamson had given us Jason Todd/Red Hood working undercover to dismantle an organization I would have been really happy.

But that’s not all he gave us, even if I just forget about his failed attempt at giving Jason a relationship, I can still see that Williamson is the kind of writer that wants (or is just following DC) to make the “Batfamily” happen no matter how dumb and out of place it looks in comics’ canon. So, I am a little bit weary, any writer that leans too much towards making Jason and Bruce work together and become a family makes me want to scream, but I do understand that is just me, many people want those two to be buddy-buddy, I, personally, would love to see Jason kick Bruce in the balls and tell him to lose his number.

Chip Zdarsky in Urban Legends: Cheer.

Ah, yes, I remember the days in which I thought that this could have been something good. Well, I was utterly wrong and I suffered all the way through this mini. I feel like now I can safely say that Zdarsky only wanted to write a Batman book but DC told him, “Hey you can write Batman but it has to be within a Red Hood story, but don’t worry, you don’t have to know much about the Hood guy, just come up with something and write Batman around that”.

I know that’s what happened because I read that story and all we got from it was horrible characterizations for pre-Robin Jason, Robin Jason, Jason Todd and Red Hood. I don’t know how he did it but yes, he managed to mess it all up.

From Jason not really wanting to be Robin and acting recklessly every step of the way, to secret desires of a perfect family with Bruce and so many other people that he couldn’t care about, Urban Legends: Cheer is the perfect book to avoid at all costs if you believe that the concept of “Batfamily” is the biggest lie, DC is trying to profit off this time around.

Zdarsky also nerfed Jason in ways that I thought DC only wanted to nerf Dick Grayson. But I was able to see that I was wrong. Zdarsky’s run also pushed some of the most disastrous narratives that DC really wants readers to believe like: Robin Jason wasn’t good at his job, he was too reckless and ultimately his death was his own fault. Yay! I want to cry!

I will give Zdarsky two points for at the very least showing that Red Hood wants to protect children and that he has a huge issue with how the drug trade is controlled and abused in Gotham City, it had been a while since we had seen that aspect of Jason’s Red Hood make an appearance.

-

It’s just too many writers completely missing the point of Red Hood’s character or simply writers agreeing to destroy Jason’s uniqueness in the DC Universe so DC (as the publisher) can further push the abomination that is the “Batfamily” in comics’ canon.

I do agree with you Anon when you say that Jason isn’t just a “bad boy” but I also don’t think that we can call UtRH Jason “dangerously insane”. Personally, I will only use that last description for BftC and Batman and Robin Jason, those two were dangerously insane indeed.

UtRH Jason was very meticulous in who he wanted dead and who got to live. He entered Gotham’s most dangerous world and he had to make a big entrance, he invited the eight most prosperous street dealers to a meeting, showed up with the decapitated heads of each of their right-hand men and an AK-47 and said:

“I am offering you a deal. I will be running the drug trade from now on. You will go about your business as usual. You will kick up forty percent to me. That is a much better deal than the Black Mask will give you. In return, you will have total protection from both the Black Mask and Batman. The catch? You stay away from kids and schoolyards. No dealing to children, got it? If you do, you’re dead.”

This was Red Hood! Red Hood wanted to control the drug trade in Gotham because he knew that Gotham is far too corrupt and filled with drug lords for him to just want to eradicate drugs from Gotham. If he had tried that he would have been a dumbass, but he wasn’t. He didn’t want to start a gang war and get innocent people killed because of it, he wanted to set the rules of his new Empire and he had to start with the street-level drug dealers, from there he grew until he became a major pain in Black Mask’s ass.

We went from Jason wanting to control the drug trade and take over Gotham’s underworld so people like Black mask couldn’t have people work for him (or being dependent on him) when they were still in high school or were in a vulnerable position, to Jason fighting a war for a mystic land because he was their “Chosen One”. DC really wanted to do something grand (yet boring) with Jason instead of sticking to a street-level vigilante that could have become a Drug Lord to control the drug trade of a city that is so filled with crime and corruption that it can’t be saved by anyone.

Batman doesn’t eradicate crime, he “controls” it, puts a blank it over it, lets it nap up until it wakes up once more to make more mess.

Red Hood had other plans, certain criminals didn’t get to nap, or, better said, they would get to nap forever.

So, no. I wouldn’t call that “dangerously insane”, I will call that “vigilante that believes himself judge, jury and executioner” of a city that is drowning in crime and corruption.

Anyway, I hope you have a really nice week Anon and thank you so much for sending me this ask!

[catboybatman]

How where the Batman comics under grant morrison Scott Snyder and Tom king? I didn’t really follow the Batman comics since no man’s land

Lil' content warning, mention of rape

I haven't read anything from Scott Snyder but I heard it's rather shitty

Tom King is Tom King. He ruined the batcat wedding because apparently Bruce can't be Batman when in love?? Make it make sense. His comics are uncomfortable to read and shows perfectly that he can't write women. His Bruce is also rather aggressive. Further, he either hates the Batkids or he's from a different timeline because what was he doing with those confessions??

With Grant Morrison, honestly, I have no idea what they're up to these days. I try to avoid their work as much as possible. Their Bruce is also very aggressive and I don't like the way they treat Talia, for obvious reasons. (Making her a rap*st) Besides that, I think they should go to jail for looking like Dr. Evil

[fancyfade]

1,4,5,6,11,14,17,18,22,23,26 any fandom you'd like (i don't know much about DC comics, but you're enjoying yourself so talk about what you're enjoying atm :D)

omg a ton of asks :D and thanks for giving me permission to ramble on about DC lol (asks from here:)

1 already answered here

4 Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?

Yes. Spitfire (Artemis/Wally West in young justice) is a NoTP and also somehow popular in fandom as well so bleh -_-

5 already answered here

6 Has fandom ever made you enjoy a pairing you previously hated?

I’m not sure about enjoy, but it made me not hate the idea of Bruce/Talia when I learned that Talia’s character was overhauled for Grant Morrison’s thing, and she used to be very different and a lot more morally grey/anti-heroine than villain-ball-carrying (Grant Morrison decided Talia drugged and raped Bruce to conceive Damian. Most stuff before he came along had them having a consensual relationship where they genuinely seemed to like each other, including the story that inspired it, Son of the Demon). Obviously this only works if you “x” out all of Grant Morrison’s Talia additions from canon, because otherwise their relationship would still be creepy and toxic as hell. But given how post-morrison Talia often acts completely different from pre-morrison, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to discount it for her interpretation.

11 Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?

I’m not sure if fandom doesn’t like her, but I’ll go with Maya Ducard again. For the most part, people don’t talk about her. It also seems like when they’re doing Damian’s best friend, they include Jon/Superboy so much more than they do Maya, and nothing against Jon, but Damian’s willing to call Maya his family in canon. They obviously have a really strong relationship.

14 Unpopular opinion about your fandom?

(lots of) Jason Todd Stans are the worst. I’m pretty neutral/slightly positive towards the character depending on the interpretation, but then you go around and see stuff like “some people commit murder to cope” or “Maybe he has a ton to teach to Cass about moral ambiguity” when Cass already knows about killing people and decided not to and it’s not like she’s going to say “Oh so now I see why murder is okay” and aaaaaaaaaaaa

Anyway it seems like often the other characters are kind of made OOC for his interactions in fandom so. I don’t like that part of it.

17 already answered here

18 Does not shipping something ‘popular’ mean you’re in denial and/or biased?

Definitely not lol, sometimes ships that are popular are worse (insert that meme).

22, 23 already answered here 

26 Most shippable character?

I’m not sure for DC, since I’ve mentioned before I don’t have a ton of DC ships. So we’ll go with SWTOR and i’ll pick one of my OCs: Tank. She’s big and buff and super friendly and can get along with most people who aren’t tools.

[hogoilyo]

Gotham Gazette Exclusive: Grant Morrison 

Writer Grant Morrison wrote Batman in the Arkham Asylum graphic novel and monthly JLA before scripting a run—from 2006’s “Batman and Son” to 2013’s Batman Incorporated—that captured 75 years of comic history in a single narrative. 

What was the driving force behind your multi-year run on Batman? 

The simple take was I imagined all of Batman’s history was one man’s biography. That opened everything up. Because suddenly you got something that was almost like a human being. Because if you have contradictions between, say, Neal Adams’ Batman and Dick Sprang’s Batman and Frank Miller’s Batman—imagine they’re the same guy. Because in our lives we’ve gone through periods where maybe we’re a little more bright-eyed and utopian and some shit happens. Somebody lets you down. Someone dies in your family. Then suddenly you’re the Dark Knight. To say there’s only way of doing Batman was reductive. The pantomime, the camp Batman of the ’60s, that’s when he was 23. But then when he gets to 28, Robin’s dead, and he says, “What have I done? What is this mission? Who am I? What am I?” Then the kind of broken, twisted, psychologically inflected Batman of the ’90s makes sense. It’s like, this is a guy who’s getting older, and the mission that was virtually this carnivalesque attempt to subdue crime has left a trail of bodies and done psychological damage. So for me, that character, from the 1930s on…I imagine him being, say, 20 in his first appearance in Detective Comics; that’s just my personal take on it. So he’s 20 then, and by the time he meets Talia he’s 25. And by the time Jason Todd and everyone’s dead he’s 28. Then he’s getting his back broken, and I imagine that Batman being 35 years old. He’s lived all of this, and he’s been all of those Batmen. He’s been Adam West. He’s been Frank Miller’s Year One Batman…It just seems like such a rich character when you accommodate all of that. It became almost human. It became a thing that was generating its own personality. 

Passing through the various stages of life? 

Yeah, and actually representing how we all feel. How things can be different…I had Talia come back and suddenly she hates him. She’s had enough. People will say, “But that’s not Talia.” Talia loved him when she was 19 and he was 25. Now she’s old and she’s got a kid. It’s like, my mother once loved my father. But she ended up getting divorced and they hated each other. They tore each other apart in divorce court. For me, it was like, let the characters grow and change. Suddenly the person you loved is your worst enemy. And that’s the last thing you want. Because you know each other so well, so you can hurt each other really well. I felt like all of that was made more convincing and more powerful by just taking the notion that, every story, he’s lived them all. So that was my basic notion for Batman. 

You really embraced the reason the character has lasted so long—the fact that he can be so many different things. 

Yeah, exactly. Because we all can be. It made him more human. I find that really fascinating, and it’s why I stayed with it for seven years rather than the 15 issues that they originally planned for. Because I just got so caught up in the character. He’s so amazingly rich. So that was it, and everything else came from that basic concept. 

Your work also showed other creators how the character can evolve. Like when you gave him a son in Damian. 

Yeah. But I always just wanted to kill the kid so he wouldn’t affect the future of Batman. Because I knew [writer] Scott Snyder didn’t want to have to deal with the son. Because his Batman was a loner, he was a bit more human. He could screw up more. Whereas my Batman was…Okay, you’ve done 15 years of training. You’re a zen master. You wouldn’t have those hatreds anymore. The training would have bombed you out. You’d be an optimum man by this point, psychologically quite pure. 

You’d have inner peace. 

Yeah. So that’s my Batman. He’s the optimum man. He’s solved his problems. But I understand why it’s cool to write about a Batman who’s a bit more angry and angst-driven and just dealing with the mission. So that’s why I wanted Damian out of the picture—“Here’s the story and then he dies and Batman can move on and you need never mention the kid again.” But the kid then proved popular, and he’s in there again, screwing up the continuity. So I’m kind of pleased with that. But, you know…[Laughs.]

McCabe, Joseph. 100 Things Batman Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die. Triumph Books, 2017.

[davidmann95]

Agree or disagree: the Court of Owls was more interesting back when it was called the Black Glove, and those guys were more interesting back when they were called the League of Assassins.

Agreed on your first point, not certain I could possibly disagree harder on the second.

Certainly, it’s pointless at this stage to argue that Snyder’s Batman work wasn’t…inspired by Morrison’s tenure, and that the first thing he does is have a group of ultra-rich sadists with ties to Batman’s past try to snuff him out once and for all is very much in line with that, but the Court is ultimately something different than the Black Glove. The Glove, as I’ll get to in a minute, is all about the pain they can inflict, whereas with the Court, while they certainly revel in the suffering that comes with their rituals, at the end of the day they’re all about the business. They’re not out to conquer Gotham in order to summon Barbatos and drink deep of the starry black venom of eternity, they’re in it for money and power. They’re Gotham’s weird gangster class - your Penguins, your Black Masks - ascendant, tied into the power structures of the city on every level and supplied with their own labyrinthine cave, their own molded circus orphans. Even their own vengeful Wayne child, deliberately poisoned and armed by crime as a weapon against the Batman by convincing him to see Bruce as his very own Joe Chill.

With all that you’d sure think they’d have a lot on the ball, but in practice they’ve been chumped out hard. Batman can go to screw with them anytime he likes these days, while the Talons don’t even qualify as minibosses anymore. The issue is that they’re this massive, inevitable threat in Batman’s world, and they’re enticingly easy to bring back - especially with the running start Snyder and Capullo and company gave them - but their mystique is shattered once they’re just another bunch of punks for Batman to Batman all over. It’d help if there was some kind of thematic underpinning to them that could be explored, but all they really are is Spooky Rich Bastards, excellent for the one story but essentially redundant afterwards. Tim Seeley seemed to have realized that, letting Nightwing take them down in his own book and killing off Lincoln March, but Snyder’s bringing them back in with Metal, so we’ll just have to see where it goes. As is, they’re a respectable gimmick that’s already being stretched well past its conceptual breaking point unless and until someone finds something meaningfully new to do with them, or just lets them fall into the background as a single aspect among many of Gotham’s larger underworld.

Taking a step back however we return to Dr. Simon Hurt and the Black Glove, who are basically perfect. For one, Morrison’s concepts rarely get brought back, so they’re not at risk of overexposure - when Hurt properly reemerged recently it was framed as a huge deal, and I very much doubt it’ll meaningfully extend in the long term past two or three books - and R.I.P. isn’t the kind of crowdpleasing blockbuster Court of Owls was, so you can go a hell of a lot weirder with them. The product being that these people aren’t just Spooky Rich Bastards, they’re Spooky Rich MAD Bastards, which makes all the difference. They already rule the world, so they gamble on human life for the simple sake of spreading cruelty and hate because they’re above the law, the concept of capital-c Crime Batman has devoted his life to battling blown up to as platonically grandiose and absurd a scale as Batman himself. Moreover, Hurt himself is plain and simple The Batman Of Crime - not in terms of the role he casts for himself as with Bane, but as a Wayne scion who devoted himself to a bat-shaped ideal and uses his wealth to wage an unrelenting crusade defined by symbolism and warped psychology, who takes the young who have suffered tragedy under his wing, albeit in each case in the most monstrous forms possible. Far more than the likes of Joker or even Two-Face, Hurt and his Black Glove are formed around the distressing thought of what would happen if Batman really was just the sadistic madman so many like to paint him as, reflecting the undercurrent of decadence and unwellness of his world back at him. They’re not reusable in the same way as the Court potentially could be: the Black Glove itself is secondary, and while Hurt’s amazing, he rides a fine line between intimidating and pathetic that would be easily tipped over if he showed up all the time. But for their intended purposes, no one does it better.

The League…not really sure what you’re getting at with them. Ninjas are always well and good, yes, but the League themselves are just jobbers for Ra’s. As for him, heretical as it feels to say I’m starting to get why Grant Morrison said he isn’t actually a fan. His scope is impressive, his motivations are reasonable and reflect Batman’s own, but his actual narrative potential is limited at best. You always know his plan and roughly how he’s going to enact it because his motives and psychology aren’t particularly complicated nor his resources all that outlandish by Gotham standards, you know he and Batman are going to cordially snarl at each other because Batman’s never going to consider his offer and Ra’s is too normal compared to the likes of the Joker or Riddler to really surprise him, there’ll probably be a swordfight, Ra’s will escape justice yet again - the only time I recall anyone putting a notable spin on that formula was Mark Waid with Tower of Babel (stealing the Wayne corpses being a twist he mentioned waking up for years praying no one else would use first). Ra’s, in relation to Batman, is there for 3 stories of any real substance:

1. The initial confrontation and offer of joining forces, followed by the rejection and swordfight, preferably concluding with Ra’s flipping right the fuck out and asking/screaming if Batman is man or fiend from hell.

2. Some kind of final showdown, because the material and emotional stakes are so high with Ra’s and the usual means of detaining Gotham’s villains so insufficient that there has to be an ultimate confrontation to resolve it. We’ve gotten that at least twice: Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen gave us a defacto last Batman Vs. Ra’s Al Ghul story in Detective Comics #840, while Greg Rucka and Klaus Janson gave us a conclusion focused more on the Al Ghul’s themselves with Death and the Maidens.

3. Ra’s as an immortal eventually lives to see the end of the only man he ever respected, as Pete Tomasi and Don Kramer handed us pretty excellently in Nightwing #152.

And that’s pretty much it. Granted those are three absolutely wonderful stories, but past that, when he’s treated as a regular recurring threat in the same way as your Scarecrows and Mr. Freezes Ra’s is just another stock Batman villain, even if he brings a handful of interesting aesthetic twists with the ninjas and globetrotting and doomsday weapons. That’s not really a flaw either: it’s Talia who’s the real center of the average Al Ghul story, the great lost love who Batman never really could have made it work with even though they both so desperately wanted to fool themselves into believing otherwise, eventually turning on him but with complications that make her a far more unpredictable and versatile and emotionally charged foe, and she in turn begets Damian who brings all kinds of narrative territory onto the table and depends on the context of being from an operation like the League (honestly, Ra’s would be a more consistently potent villain for Damian than he ever was for Bruce). But with Ra’s himself, while he has very specific and powerful uses, by and large he’s almost always existed mainly to facilitate other, more interesting characters.

EDIT: So as it turns out the Court of Owls are out to conquer Gotham in order to summon Barbatos and drink deep of the starry black venom of eternity. The idea of them as an inversion of the iconography of Batman’s family in the same way as Batbatos is of Batman himself has some punch too. Still, they’re ultimately in it for the money and power rather than a sheer belief in Evil as a guiding force unto itself, so they’re a markedly different manifestation from the Black Glove, at heart the same small-minded, high-rolling bastards they always were. Still, them leveraging their symbolism entirely calculatedly and cynically in serve of base goals might be the key to their long-term potential.

[jlaclassified]

JLA 43-46 “Tower of Babel”  by Mark Waid, Howard Porter, Steve Scott, Drew Geraci, Mark Probst.  July- October 2000.

Summary:   The story opens with Ra's Al Ghul in his mountain retreat, severely disciplining a henchman for accidentally killing an endangered tiger.  Ra's (Roz or Raysh?  I say Roz) monologues about his newest plan for wiping the scourge of humanity off the earth, once he manages to distract The Detective. Cut to Bruce Wayne at his parents' gravesite:  their coffins have been disinterred and stolen.  

In a series of quick vignettes we learn the Martian Manhunter has somehow been set on fire by nanobots, while at the UN Building Plastic Man is hit with a freeze ray and smashed into a million little pieces and Aquaman is doused with a Fear Toxin that makes him suddenly afraid of water.  At the Daily Planet building, intrepid reporter Clark Kent realizes that nobody can read English anymore, while at the same time Kyle (Green Lantern) Rayner discovers he has suddenly been struck blind.

As Part Two opens we learn that the Dyslexia epidemic is not just localized in Clark’s office building, but is affecting people worldwide, causing mass hysteria (the stock market crashes because nobody can read the ticker, planes nearly collide in midair because no one can read the flight plan, etc).  Oracle figures out that an ultrasonic frequency is messing with the language receptors in people’s brains so they can no longer read.

A tiny little nanobot crawls into Wonder Woman’s ear, causing her to fight a hallucinatory enemy who isn’t really there (and of course Amazons will fight to the death).  A tiny projectile hits The Flash in his spinal column, sparking “epileptic seizures at lightspeed.”  

 Batman confronts Ra’s at his Himalayan mountain hideaway. Ra’s explains his evil plan in his best Bond villain voice:  With the Justice League distracted, Ra’s will sow pandemonium and chaos until the human race thins itself out. Ra’s boosts the signal on the ultrasonic frequency, removing the world’s ability to understand spoken language.

 Meanwhile, in Metropolis, Superman battles the League of Assassins and gets hit with a near-lethal dose of red Kryptonite.

 It turns out Batman has kept secret protocols on how to defeat the Justice League, and now Ra's has them.

In Part Three, the League gets its shit together.  J’onn puts on an Atlantean hydration suit, putting out the fires on his skin, and gets Aquaman into a tank of water on the Watchtower, telepathically convincing him that he’s in the middle of a desert.  The Flash puts Plastic Man back together like a jigsaw puzzle, after J’onn helps Superman use heat vision to remove the device on Wally’s spine.  J’onn (have I mentioned J’onn is the best?  He is the best. I love him) then figures out that Kyle’s blindness was actually caused by a post-hypnotic suggestion and helps him to use the ring to counteract the hypnosis. The re-constructed Plas removes the bug from Wonder Woman’s ear.

Meanwhile, back in the supervillain hideout, the funniest panel in 45 issues of JLA occurs:

He’s wearing the Bat-Ears under his disguise, LOL.

The League meet Batman in the Himalayas (they communicate through J’onn’s psychic link) and wreck his base, destroying his subsonic frequency broadcasting station.  The Justice League fucking HATES Batman right now.  Talia Al’Ghul contacts the League to offer her assistance in taking out the old man.

Superman asks Batman why he created the files and Batman replies it was the Agamemno incident, as seen in The Silver Age event (which in fairness makes sense! Supervillains were controlling their bodies!!).  According to Talia, Ra’s’s Plan B is to spark a war in the Middle East by using biochemical weapons, so the League rush off to save the day.  

Once war is averted, the League return to the Watchtower.  The other Leaguers vote whether or not to allow Batman to remain in the club.  Superman is the deciding vote:  Batman has been expelled from the Justice League of America.

Thoughts:  Many people were disappointed with the Waid JLA run back in the early aughts, and I think I know why.  After four years of Grant Morrison ™ , Waid’s character-driven stories were an abrupt change of pace.  We were used to Morrison’s Kirby-on-acid approach, where crazy scifi trippiness was thrown at us at breakneck speed.  “Tower of Babel” feels downright glacial next to “Rock of Ages” or “World War Three.”  

“Babel” is by far the most popular story of the run, spawning a direct-to-video adaptation, even though the next two arcs feature art by Bryan (The Authority, The Ultimates) Hitch.  I am excited to revisit these for the first time since they came out; I bet they are better than their reputation.