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Zero Year is better than Year One. TDKR is overrated and doesn't really hold up. Damian is the best Robin.
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Aug 13, 2016 19:07
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Realtalk you shouldn't recommend Batman Eternal, it's SUPER DUPER BAD! It's not good! It's at least twice as long as it should've been and has a really awful ending that misunderstands the entire thematic build of the comic. Although you sorta mentioned it, the best part of Morrison's run and stories you should absolutely read if you wanna read Morrison Batman at all is Batman and Son/Black Glove/Batman R.I.P. I'm not the only person who thinks that the entire Jezebel Jet reveal is maybe the only crass part of that trilogy (which is otherwise incredible), right? For reference, what I'm talking about is how the book keeps on stressing that the poison that Joker/The Black Glove uses is a binary solution that takes two otherwise inert objects, red and black petals, and only when they're combined does it kill (in other words it's hidden in plain sight until the time is right), then you find out Jezebel Jet was secretly a member of the Black Glove because she's a black person with red hair.' Still makes me roll my eyes and sigh whenever I think about how totally crass that reveal is.
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Aug 13, 2016 19:19
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I'm almost certain that panel you're describing didn't happen in B and R Eternal.
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Aug 13, 2016 19:40
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Snyder has been on record as saying that he considers Zero Year an inferior work to Year One, and that he specifically went out of his way to make it as unlike Year One as possible outside of "Yes, father, I shall become a bat". I don't agree. Having read both stories virtually back-to-back earlier this year (I read Year One, then all of Morrison's Batman run up to N52, then Zero Year through the entirety of the N52 Batbooks) I found Year One less of a story and more of a disparate collection of scenes. Now, admittedly, those scenes are some of the most powerful and iconic moments of all Batman-related media, what with, again, "Yes, father, I shall become a bat" or the dinner scene, but outside of that it's basically a story about Bruce Wayne coming back to Gotham and being Batman as hell. There's no real conflict, it's all basic Miller-patented male power fantasy. The arcing for Bruce in Year One is very loose, and as people have aforementioned Year One is more of a Gordon story anyways (especially considering Gordon goes through a much deeper and more complete character arc then Batman does. There's also no real villain in Year One. It's a very eighties book, where the villain is Crime and the institutions that Enable Crime, so it's got a more unfocused feel in direct contrast to Zero Year, which has in my opinion one of the single best Batman villains of this century in Snyder's Riddler. I love how he wrote the Riddler, I love that he turned a goofball who I absolutely hated due to the Arkham games (where he's a literal annoyance) into one of the single most intimidating threats in Batman's career, I love his plan, I love its resolution. It's just fantastic. But even beyond that Zero Year really arcs Bruce in a way Year One never really does. Bruce Wayne at the beginning of Zero Year is a loving rear end in a top hat, and the ways in which he alienates and comes into direct conflict with everyone around him but especially Gordon and Pennyworth makes his eventual character arc feel totally earned. From beginning to end of Zero Year Bruce Wayne becomes Batman, as opposed to Bruce Wayne stepping off the plane at the beginning of Year One and he's Batman. Also, the art. I consider Greg Capullo to be the single best artist Batman has had. He totally knocks it out of the park with his Bruce Wayne design, especially Young Bruce where he conveys how he's this really powerful but still really impressionable and angry kid consumed with vengeance, and his art combined with whoever does the coloring on Zero Year makes Gotham into this psychedelic crazy nightmare where blimps and poo poo can swoop out of the sky and the sky is a crazy shade of neon. It's awesome. I love the art direction of Snyder Batman, especially Zero Year, especially in direct contrast to Frank Miller's noir portrayal of Gotham where everyone's feels silhouetted constantly. Also there's a couple of parts of Year One that don't look great thirty years removed, in other words basically everything about Catwoman's/the child prostitute arc.
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Aug 13, 2016 23:41
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Oh and to finish off the Hot Takes, Dick Grayson is the best Batman.
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Aug 13, 2016 23:45
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Ferrule posted:Look, you ask anyone to name the top 3 Batman books and its Year One, Killing Joke, DKR. Period. If you asked anyone to name the top three most popular Batman books, sure. Nobody's debating their popularity nor their influence. But that's not the question. Three best, if you were to poll BSS right now, Batman stories would only have Year One on that list probably, with one of the other two probably being R.I.P. and the last being a true tossup between stuff like Knightfall/Black Glove/Inc/Black Mirror/Laughing Fish. I could go on. There's been a ton of pushback against TKJ and TDKR - the former I consider a failure on DC's part in taking a one-off and making it canon despite Moore's wishes and intentions, but TDKR deserves to be raked through the critical coals a bit. I think it's a weak story that strawmans Superman to make a point, on top of its art (which I find straight-up ugly) and as aforementioned muddied plotting where people can rightly infer that TDKR Batman is a kiler because he's so grotesquely violent.
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Aug 13, 2016 23:52
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SonicRulez posted:
Yeah, that's Zero Year. What I like the most about Zero Year is that it's not the Joker - it's the leader of the Red Hood gang, and that dynamic makes for a more interesting character that isn't saddled with all the insane and awful baggage that Joker now has. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong per se with Miller's approach of having a more-or-less villain-absent story in YO, but to me it all sort of folds into how Year One is mostly an excuse for Miller to craft a bunch of scenes of Batman being a badass. And I also just don't agree with the supposition that Year One's a Gordon story, considering that again Miller drapes Batman with all these centerpiece sequences like the dinner party or the now-iconic flashback or "Yes, father, I shall become a bat" that all seems to build to "This is a story that tells the audience how Bruce Wayne became Batman". And the answer is, more or less, "He took a plane back to Gotham and immediately started punching dudes". There's no real conflict or tribulations there beyond Batman getting the poo poo beat out of him early on, which, even that is more so he can be a badass. Actually if I'm being 100% honest the best part of Year One is that it enables issue six of Return of Bruce Wayne, a story I otherwise find too convoluted for its own good, to happen.
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Aug 14, 2016 00:17
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Let's all dunk on how loving terrible Batman Annual 1 from N52 was. gently caress that's a terrible comic. Snyder's Mr. Freeze is the worst.
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Aug 14, 2016 00:58
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You also need to read that section of Batman that covers what the hell he was doing in the leadup to and during Final Crisis, Batman 682-684 (Last Rites) and Batman 700-702 (Missing Chapter). Man Morrison couldn't have made the entirety of Batman's arc during Final Crisis more confusing to comprehend if he loving tried. Ed- Also, take this with a giant loving grain of salt because I generally don't like Batman, Incorporated and especially volume 2, but volume 2 is post-New 52 and thus integrates N52 canon. To that end it'd probably be useful to read a couple of issues of Snyder's Batman before jumping back into Batman, Incorporated volume 2 because Morrison isn't the architect of the Batbooks any more, Snyder is, and Morrison's forced to tailor volume 2 to the canon that Snyder implements in his book. The experience is less disorienting if you're aware of the heavily rewritten canon and status of Snyder's Bruce Wayne and various members of his supporting cast when jumping back to Batman, Inc. Finally, you should probably also read Tomasi's Batman and Robin and Tom King's Grayson, because King's the only one who really ends up using elements of Morrison's canon he implemented but didn't finish and Tomasi's Batman and Robin run, on top of being the probable overall best and most consistent run of comics of all the N52, takes a whole bunch of character elements and ideas Morrison ruminates on and pays them all off for incredible emotional dividends. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Aug 14, 2016 |
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Aug 14, 2016 04:31
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Morrison's best Batman story, and indeed the best Batman story ever written is Batman R.I.P. Come on. Fight me.
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Aug 14, 2016 04:45
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I genuinely don't like Return of Bruce Wayne because of how much of a convoluting confusing mess it is and I'd call it a straight-up bad story if ROBW 6 wasn't one of the best single issues of Batman ever written.
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Aug 15, 2016 02:05
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Also Final Crisis is in absolutely no loving way "optional" for Morrison Batman.
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Aug 15, 2016 02:06
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Darth Nat posted:I always want to read the Morrison Bat-epic, as there are parts I haven't gotten to, but I was so bummed by that last issue. After years of "Batman is totally awesome and can do anything," it seems to end with "Batman is totally lame and kids' stuff." I wonder if he had the same ending planned before the New 52 happened and hosed everything up. You should read Tomasi's Batman and Robin run. Again, there's an issue of it that ends up incredible emotional payoff to all of Morrison's Final Crisis on Batman stuff, and it's loving incredible. Legit makes me tear up. Equilibrium posted:I say optional because it's much more demanding than anything in Batman and people shouldn't just give up on the Morrison Batsaga if they find Final Crisis impenetrable. I'd argue it's not optional because basically everything Morrison writes in Batman post-Final Crisis is written in the context of what happened in Final Crisis, and even with Time and the Batman retelling FC from Batman's perspective and finally, finally clarifying what the gently caress Batman was doing during that event, it provides no outside context for FC so it still doesn't really make any sense if read without having read FC. It's basically a bunch of scenes that, honestly, should've been inserted into the pages of Final Crisis itself because it makes the story flow better and gives Batman a retroactive arc, but without having read FC is just that - a series of unrelated Batman scenes. Like if you don't read FC there's basically nothing of Morrison post-FC you can read outside the first two volumes of Batman and Robin, since it's all written with Final Crisis in mind. I've made clear my dislike for Final Crisis, and it boils down to what happens when I dislike Morrison - I find the story convoluted and communicated poorly, with Morrison dwelling on his own pet themes or ideas to the detriment of character moments or story comprehension, I just think it's especially bad with FC because it's basically a story split up into thirds - Final Crisis, Time and the Batman, and Return of Bruce Wayne - and there's no easy or convenient way to read any of it in a way that makes the story flow naturally. It's an especially awkward trilogy of stories, especially in direct contrast to Batman and Son/Black Glove/R.I.P., which is paced and communicated more-or-less perfectly (Clown at Midnight nonwithstanding).
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Aug 15, 2016 03:27
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They shouldn't have done the New 52, but if they did they should've done what Rebirth eventually made it anyways and done a fifteen year timeskip from Zero Year, especially since Bruce has always come off as a forty-year-old in his past interactions with Damian. The issue with what they did in the New 52 was their attempts to continue with Morrison's canon but with the new stakes of the N52 and specifically the canon that Snyder established, not that Batman didn't get a full wipe like N52 Superman did. The best parts of Batman have been Damian and Steph and Nightwing and Dickbat and Oracle and the shifting relationships of the extended Batfamily, and resetting everything to Kane/Finger era with Dick Grayson's Goody Two Shoes-rear end Robin would've been just as bad as the lovely as gently caress erasure of all Batgirls besides Babs and Oracle, and the weird technical elimination of Tim Drake as a Robin. But instead they tried to stuff 70 years of bullshit and canon into five, and that creates the awful erasure that ended up happening in N52 Batbooks because four Robins in five years is just absurd, so better make it so Tim Drake was never technically Robin, even though that made no loving sense. And let's revert Barbara Gordon to the one and only Batgirl even though she's the arguable worst of the Batgirls depending on how you feel about Betty Kane, eliminating Oracle which is her by-far best incarnation, but we gotta keep Killing Joke canon because we're DC and can't stop sucking TKJ's dick, so that means that the entirety of Barbara's tenure as Batgirl to being paralyzed to being rehabilitated happened within that five year span, and because we're DC and it'd make a ludicrous amount of plot absolutely absurd if during Barbara's insane amount of trauma there were a bunch of other Batgirls running around, let's straight-up eliminate Cass and Steph from existence because gently caress it, we're super bad at this whole "rebooting" thing. Because three Robins and one "Red Robin" in five years, that totally checks out, but three Batgirls? No way. And then you pile the entirety of Morrison's canon onto it, which exacerbates all the issues. Seriously, if N52 had just made it so Zero Year was fifteen years before the N52 everything could've been avoided. It's the sheer compressed time schedule that makes none of this make any loving sense, because Snyder's Bruce Wayne and Morrison's Bruce Wayne are two completely different people with two completely different life stories and priorities. Batman., Inc volume 2 having to conform to Snyder's canon obviously really pissed Morrison off because of the way the story just straight-up drops a whole bunch of characters - it does not make any loving sense, at all, whatsoever that Barbara Gordon would allow Gotham to be taken over and do absolutely nothing about it, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. I may not like Batman, Incorporated, especially volume 2, but it's a story that was totally and completely hosed by a shifting editorial direction completely screwing over Morrison's overall plan and should've been left out of N52 continuity.
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Aug 15, 2016 05:29
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Yeah I totally disagree. I love Dickbat, and am pissed that N52 more or less pretends that Dickbat never happened (and although I love Snyder his clear dislike of writing Damian really loving sucks), but using Rebirth to put Dick back in the cowl would've sucked. The most hinky part of Grayson was the really constructed as hell way it gives Dick's secret identity back, and a full measure of "Hey, remember Morrison's Batman? That sure was good, huh? Let's go reset everything to pre-Snyder!" would've been especially intolerable. I mean, look at Batwing. Batwing loving sucked, either of them, and that was DC's halfhearted attempt at bringing back the "two Batmen" dynamic from the last volume of Batman and Robin pre-N52/Batman Incorporated.
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Aug 15, 2016 06:09
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Detective Comics, followed by All-Star Batman, going by that criteria. Assuming you know who Kate Kane and Stephanie Brown and Cassandra Cain are, for Detective.
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Aug 15, 2016 15:47
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I would argue between Hugo Strange, Psycho Pirate, Lark, and it very clearly being written in the context of Rebirth (on top of it eventually addressing the three Jokers thing), main Batman is kinda hard to grasp if you're not up on the canon. I think it's really good, though.
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Aug 15, 2016 17:03
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Late, but I absolutely loved the end of the last issue Batman and I found it a really powerful, effective conclusion to an arc that really came together in the final couple of issues. I'm actually really interested in seeing a Gotham Girl Year One.
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Aug 24, 2016 01:41
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I'm not the world's biggest Tim Drake fan (I mean, I like him, don't get me wrong) but god loving drat it if that final page of this week's Detective Comics isn't inspiring as poo poo.
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Aug 26, 2016 05:27
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Sorry for the doublepost, but: A couple of weeks ago, someone mentioned that the three best Batman stories are TKJ/TDKR/Year One (or, that if you were to quiz a random person that's what would be presented). I'm interested in testing that, so made up a strawpoll so everyone can choose what they consider to be the three "best" Batman stories. I think I've covered pretty much every conceivable choice one could realistically make, so go crazy. Anyways, here's the link.
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Aug 26, 2016 05:45
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gently caress, I knew I forgot at least one big. I crosschecked multiple "These are the best Batman stories ever written" clickbait lists too.
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Aug 26, 2016 05:50
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SonicRulez posted:Zero Year is getting played. What on Earth is Year 100? The adventures of Damian's grandchild? A four issue miniseries from 2006 that frequently shows up at or near the top of "best of" lists. It's set in 2039 - 100 years after Batman's premiere - and centers around a futuristic, dystopian police state Gotham. The Batman in those issues more resembles a feral animal, judging from panel pictures off Google search. I included it because, again, constantly shows up at or near the top of "25 Batman stories to read before you die"-esque lists. Haven't read it. The character design for Batman unnerves me greatly. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Aug 27, 2016 |
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Aug 27, 2016 05:24
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Tomasi's Batman and Robin is probably the best comic DC has put out in this decade, and definitely the most consistent for the longest time. Ed: I mean, he did good stuff with loving Villains' Month. Remember Villains' Month? Remember how poo poo that was? Remember how it ended up creating the worst Harley comic ever and probably the worst DC comic of the entirety of the N52? In contrast, Tomasi wrote a Batman/Two-Face teamup that actually loving worked. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 03:02 on Sep 6, 2016 |
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Sep 6, 2016 02:58
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I kinda hate N52 Batman Incorporated, but unfortunately it's kind of essential reading for Batman and Robin. Also, if you haven't you should probably read Final Crisis (another comic I dislike very heavily), because there's a moment in there that Tomasi uses as the climax of his entire run on BnR that's loving incredible. Make sure you get all of Robin Rises, I dunno if the Omega and Alpha is there in trade but hunting down single issues it doesn't show up readily, and they're both really important to the arc.
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Sep 6, 2016 15:57
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Like virtually everything about Morrison's Final Crisis on Batman stuff, Tomasi/Gleason did a better job with Batcow than he did.
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Sep 6, 2016 21:09
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Pre-Final Crisis, absolutely. Batman and Robin post-Final Crisis, possibly his best work. Everything else? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
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Sep 6, 2016 22:18
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Blockhouse posted:By not including him? I'm speaking specifically about the moment Gleason wrote in Robin, Son of Batman where Damian introduces the Bat-Critters to each other.
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Sep 7, 2016 03:16
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I think R: SOB definitely got weaker once Gleason left, but I really enjoyed Maya and Damian's developing romance so still really enjoyed the last arc. It's a really fun comic too, on top of threading that needle of making Damian a self-centered douchey prick while still being hugely likable, relatable, and sympathetic. As I aforementioned, it's why Damian is the best Robin.
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Sep 7, 2016 03:44
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Travis343 posted:He is an incredibly smart, creative and unpredictable adversary, but Snyder especially writes him as this hypergenius who's constantly one step ahead and isn't smart so much as he is supernaturally aware of what's going on and not creative so much as increasingly, artlessly violent. This character needs an enema, to borrow a phrase from a much better written Joker. I would strongly disagree with this assessment. Snyder wrote a good Joker (I'm constantly reminded of how he was able to pull off humanizing Joker in Endgame to the point where you actually felt sorry for the guy), and I say this as someone who generally intensely dislikes the Joker and assuredly hates DC's focus on the Joker. His hypergenius/"dark Batman" characterization has been ongoing long before N52, if anything it's been his modern identity since TKJ/Death in the Family, Snyder was just keeping his character consistent. And, to be fair, the "supernaturally aware" bit was basically invented by Morrison's "Hyper Sanity" theorem that is, essentially, how DC treats the Joker.
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Sep 11, 2016 19:18
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I'd rather read Death of the Family (a good storyline as long as you only read the Batman-specific issues) or Endgame (a good storyline) over The Clown at Midnight once. I've mentioned this before but DotF is an excellent story if only because Snyder is literally the only Batman writer ever to give Bruce Wayne a decent reason for why he doesn't kill the Joker, that no writer before or since has ever managed. "My code!" makes Batman look like an actively negligent rear end in a top hat considering the amount of damage that the Joker has done just within the past decade of stories, and "Because I wouldn't know when to stop" is dumb poo poo that plays off the single worst interpretation of Batman, the guy who's just one step away from BECOMING THE JOKER HIMSELF WOOOOOOO. Oh also I made a mistake, I meant to say Joker's stuff in Superheavy - the best part of a bad storyline - made him genuinely sympathetic. Also the Joker's a huge fixture of and one of R.I.P.'s lynchpins, which is also...you know, the best Batman story ever, and certainly of this millennium. And he's basically a complete loving hypergenius from the beginning of Batman and Son to the end of R.I.P. Basically what I'm saying is Morrison wrote the absolute best Batman story ever, and it heavily features the Joker, and he also wrote the worst issue of comics ever, and it's a Joker issue. Both exemplify the "hypergenius mastermind" Joker. So. Lay off Snyder! 
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Sep 12, 2016 04:35
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Except it's not because the entirety of Joker's canon is one of escalation (note how he was introduced in the pages of Detective Comics up through Laughing Fish to TKJ and Death in the Family up to modern Joker where he's a genocidal maniac), and metatextually speaking of course DC would replace the Joker with someone even worse. It works on both levels, in-continuity and out. And it's basically "better the devil you know" logic taken to its reasonable extreme.
NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Sep 12, 2016 |
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Sep 12, 2016 06:31
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When you're writing a character whose whole gimmick is that he doesn't kill people, and his Greatest Enemy is someone who kills a whole fuckload of people all the loving time for no loving reason, and then you have to then write a reason for why the former doesn't kill the latter (when the real reason is "Because the Joker's super popular and we'd never kill him off because are you loving kidding us, we're DC", but as a writer you're supposed to integrate that cold hard business reality with the fact that a billion annoying comics spergs who can't accept "Batman doesn't kill people, period, it's a story that operates off that central conceit" as a good enough reason, you end up having to write a sequence where Batman justifies it. Until Snyder we got one of two flavors: Batman going "My code says I don't kill people" (which is either tautological and essentially what I just wrote that doesn't keep audiences satisfied, or it's Bruce Wayne being a loving coward and hiding behind his code in the face of overwhelming evidence otherwise that states that killing Joker would be an unequivocal public good, that makes Batman look actively negligent bordering on downright idiotic) or Batman going "Because if I kill him, what says I shouldn't kill the Penguin next, and then all crime-doers of any variety?! Slippery slope, man!" Which is such a bad loving justification because it does the awful "the Batman is only one dark step away from turning into the Joker" interpretation of the character that only total hacks use and completely negates any and all of Batman's agency from Batman stories. In contrast, "Because someone worse would come" works, as aforementioned, in-character to Bruce Wayne (because he's seen Joker get worse and worse over the years, more and more violent and ruthless), it works metatextually considering Joker has been made worse and knowing the symphony of errors of poo poo like Villains Month, DC would just bring on Rapey McStabsBabies or something. It works with the main themes of Snyder's run, of corruption of characters into their worst selves, it works with the common interpretation of Gotham as thie sort of living nightmare world that heightens everyone to their most extreme versions of themselves. It just works. It also works especially well in context because it's Bruce Wayne literally going "Oh, yeah, I would totally violate my code to kill the Joker, and I could absolutely do it just once and never again. But, it wouldn't actually solve anything, it'd be totally pointless." It specifically and reasonably invalidates the two shittiest and only justifications previous writers used, by showing that Bruce has absolutely thought this through and come to the only conclusion that would work. It's an excellent sequence that's able to frame Bruce's reasoning why he doesn't kill the Joker as, instead of either stupid, negligent, or cowardly, smart and pragmatic. It strengthens the character over weakens it, something neither of the two previous justifications did. I mean, in an optimal world Batman wouldn't have to be confronted with "Why don't you just kill the Joker???" because either the Joker would be written not to be a genocidal maniac or just not written, at all, period, any more, but neither of those things will ever loving happen so I vastly prefer Snyder's solution, which at the very least was an effective scene.
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Sep 12, 2016 07:15
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SonicRulez posted:I agree with this wholesale. Batman being a gigantic cynic...runs directly against two of his biggest character traits to me. I'm not gonna debate the coward stuff but I'd love to hear your justification to this because to me Batman's cynicism is absolutely one of his most defining elements. He never trusts anyone, about anything, ever, and assumes that everyone at the very least has the capacity to betray him. Like, to me, Dick Grayson is Bruce Wayne's greatest accomplishment solely because he isn't Batman. To me the whole point of Robin as a central element of the Batman mythos and specifically Richard "Dick" Grayson as the first Robin is a representation of the optimism and hope that Bruce centrally lost when his parents were killed, and as evidence that Batman works because it saves Dick from becoming Batman. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Sep 12, 2016 |
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Sep 12, 2016 07:32
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Not really. That's just a fiction to make him more friendly. And I'm not talking just about the Golden Age or adaptations or other "non-canonical" stories (canon is a lie): Batman's crime-fighting is incredibly dangerous and always potentially lethal to his adversaries. That he doesn't kill is just an inaccurate fiction that makes it more palatable. You know Batman isn't real, right? Like he's a fake make-em-up person and won't swing by your window on a zipline right? So saying a base defining element of a fictional character who's not real is an "inaccurate fiction" is perhaps the single dumbest series of words written about an, again, unreal character. Who is fake.
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Sep 12, 2016 07:49
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I agree that "Why doesn't Batman just kill the Joker" isn't a question that should be asked and definitely shouldn't be a question that should be textually answered, but DC's creative directive of heightening the Joker necessitates the former as a question even a total non-sperg comics fan would reasonably ask, which has put pressure on the comics themselves to perform the latter. And until Snyder we got two super bad excuses - "My code", which is an excuse that we've addressed its central tautological failure as a justification ad nauseum, or "Slippery slope", which is the by-far most cynical and regressive justification ever. Like, you want to talk cynical interpretations of Batman, "slippery slope" makes it explicitly clear that the only thing separating Joker and Batman is the latter's "Batman doesn't kill" rule. Not because Batman doesn't want to kill people, because "slippery slope" makes it overtly stated that he does, not because Batman and/or Bruce Wayne has compassion or a genuine desire to improve the lives of the people of Gotham, because they are justifications transparently attempting to backhandedly justify his desires for violence, not for any other reason than Bruce Wayne's infantile desire for vengeance. And not even vengeance, because the term implies justice, it's revenge. That's all it is. The slippery slope argument turns Batman into a literal knockoff Punisher, when the best and most layered version of Batman actually has a sense of morality and genuine desire to do good over dressing up like a Dracula to punch bad guys because his parents are dead.Equilibrium posted:The general metatextual thrust of Snyder's answer is correct, that there will always be another villain regardless of how many you wipe from existence, but the idea of Batman being hyperaware enough to acknowledge this but also 'afraid' of what might replace The Joker makes no sense without him also acknowledging that his existing villains are constantly being reinterpreted and coming back different and possibly more cruel than before anyways. This is coming off a run of comics where Batman recognizes that the only person that's able to defeat Batman is Batman so creates a backup personality within his psyche that is only unleashed when Batman is defeated. And that's widely (and correctly) considered the best Batman story of this century and arguably of all time. I fail to see how "Batman becomes metatextually aware that he would beat anybody except for himself" is less insanely hyperaware then "Batman looks around at how his rogues gallery has been acting for the past half-decade and realizes that things will only continue on a downward trajectory". I'm not saying Death of the Family is as good as R.I.P., because that's loving insane, but there's nothing that Snyder's Batman does that's any less believable/presents Batman as some overly Machiavellian mastermind that Morrison didn't do. I mean, gently caress, he gets shot backwards in time and he's able to create a stable closed time loop that assures his existence with the assistance of the metatextual realization that "[Batman] was never alone". That ship long done sailed by the time Snyder got to pilot it. And, needless to say, Morrison's the one who came up with the "Hyper Sanity" theorem which is 100% the modern definition of Joker, which is some of the most metatextual bullshit ever and largely why the Joker's such a mess to begin with. I like Hyper Sanity and it justifies a lot of Joker's more outrageous elements, but it also completely and totally gives him a free moral pass to do whatever he wants because he's aware that his universe is a fiction. NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 18:15 on Sep 12, 2016 |
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Sep 12, 2016 18:01
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SonicRulez posted:I mean you're not wrong that the two major answers to the question are bad. I just totally disagree that this third option is any better and you haven't said a word as to why that's an incorrect conclusion. Toxxupation posted:
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Sep 12, 2016 18:41
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Travis343 posted:The best in-text answer to that question is that Batman doesn't kill the Joker because that's what the Joker wants him to do, and the Joker wins forever if Batman kills him. That makes Batman look super loving petty, and obfuscates his entire directive of being a public good. It sorta works in the sense that it's in-character to most interpretations of Batman, but I would argue that it's some cold loving comfort to the people of Gotham that the one loving dude who could actually kill the Joker doesn't because it would make him feel bad.
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Sep 12, 2016 18:45
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Travis343 posted:
I edited it out because it specifically invalidates your point.
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Sep 12, 2016 19:08
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I seem to remember multiple actual attempts to surrepetitiously kill the Joker in jail or in Arkham, all of which end up going Extremely Bad for the person attempting to do so. If I remember correctly, one of the guards during Morrison's run attempts it only to die because the Joker's blood is some crazy lethal poison.
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Sep 12, 2016 19:35
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Chaos Hippy posted:I like RIP, but you are the only person I have ever heard describe it as the best Batman story according to any context. It's not even the best Batman story written by Grant Morrison within the same run. Obviously imprecise and anecdotal, but the poll I ran a couple of weeks ago places R.I.P. as a solid number two above virtually everything else and only behind Year One, which is...you know, Year One. And I placed every single other major Morrison Batman story on that list besides his Batman and Robin run which is less a story and more "What Dick and Damian do after FC", and only Inc scored anywhere near as high, and it still got less than half of the votes for R.I.P. By BSS's standards, at least, R.I.P. is Morrison's best work, and it's definitely the story I hear associated most closely with his run.
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Sep 12, 2016 22:18
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