Batman & Robin 13: Amy’s annocomments
July 14th, 2010
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This is just perversion pure and simple. Morrison understands the best villains should be perverts, and while, yes, dodgy, perverts are people too, and we’re all perverts, etc., i wouldn’t have it any other way. That whispered ‘yes’ is gold. This thomas has waited his entire life to see his wife and child slaughtered in front of him - it’s the fulfillment of a dream, why he got married and had a kid in the first place - and now he’s off to have the biggest orgy ever while shouting ‘WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOU? INNOCENCE!’
And we all know where that leads, the spaffing out of the sun.
Batman 700: Zom’s thoughts
June 13th, 2010
A quick preambulatory moan:
Oh the art, the art was as ever a big problem. I’ll let the lovely chaps over at Comics Alliance fill you in on the specifics, all you really need to know is that the central aspects of the issue’s locked room mystery – when the Prof was killed and who did the killing - were obscured by an art error that should have been spotted by the editorial team, or, you know, someone. It’s just not okay that something like that was allowed to slip through, and it makes me wonder exactly what sort of relationship Morrison has with the editorial staff, let alone his artists. Maybe they were just in a big rush, although it’s hard to imagine why given the lead in to this issue.
That aside, I enjoyed 700 in a bitty way, but wasn’t too keen on the book as a whole. The segmented structure helped to legitimise the former response in my mind however, and consequently I feel no shame in taking the annocomment approach. Seems appropriate.
Criminology
June 11th, 2010
It’s probably an unbelievably bad idea to take DC marketing dept. at their word, but anyway. They have a difficult job, I guess.
Und so! Vorwaerts! The initial idea for this was a liveblog, but that would have involved promotion and shit, I am quite the most fundamentally lazy - physically, critically, intellectually - person I know, and also been a pretty fucking tortuous read, dying to turn the page, but having to bash out a satisfactory update before I could do so. So that didn’t happen; what we will have is the 7 pages in a polka-dotted reporter’s pad (I thought that shit was red, I was gonna give you a photo and shit, call this the Red Casebook but nah; I obviously did not buy this pad), my CASENOTES interspersed with some proper blogination. You can of course choose to believe these casenotes are an after-the-fact “ret-con”, as much a fait accompli as most Grant Morrison superhero scripts, even although Mindless Ones is the very definition of elegant verité and bold realism, and that’ll be a mystery too. Do what you like, I won’t stop you.
But one day, tomorrow, peoples will be reading Batman #700 on their infoSlates, their powerTablets, and it’ll be my polka-on-grey casebook anno’s there first; that’s my dream, and it is definitely good to have dreams. FUTURECOMICSSS.
Return of Bruce Wayne #2, the amycommentations
June 6th, 2010
PAGES 1, 2 & 3
One of the reasons Morrison loves working on Batman, even if he doesn’t know it himself, is because the character’s rapid response time, both intellectually and physically, suits his high velocity, compressed approach. Here, the guy, who I should probably add is experiencing catastrophic memory loss, has been booted thousands of years across time and half drowned, but does that slow him down? No, the fuck. He launches himself into the scrap with the uprooted sarlac pit (more on that guy later) without a second thought.
I’m fairly certain the idea that there’s a connection between Gaelic and Cthulhu-speak/fifth dimensionese isn’t an original one, and I wonder if Grant was thinking about the connection here. Annie is a first generation immigrant after all, and a pagan at that, so it would make sense that she’d speak some kind of aboriginal british tongue. Also, I’m choosing to believe she’s intoning a healing spell, which is interesting and a nice twist because lovecraftian magic is generally considered the blackest of the black. There’s the implicit suggestion that it was only later on, once the puritans were done with it, that the Cthulhu mythos gained the negative associations it has today.
The talismans represent the latest movement of Grant’s superheroes as gods theme, but because this is Batman there’s a hard(ish) sf explanation as opposed to the more fantastical noodlings of Flex Mentallo or ASS. They are pregnant with the idea, however, what with the DC pantheon zipping around the timestream like they’re popping down the shops or something, that should she clutch his sigil hard enough and whisper his name, even a slave in ancient Rome could summon Superman to her aid. Some future Superman I’m going to write in the future will definitely have this omni-hearing, that’s for sho’.
Some very quick annocommentations for Return of Bruce Wayne
May 19th, 2010
What’s going on with the stone age?
(This is all Amy’s thought-parade, except where otherwise stated)
Step into time for a vision of reality (the batual facts of)
Batman vs Robin: awesome-tations
May 17th, 2010
It’s only just occurred to me that we’ve been gipped. I went in expecting a three issue contest of wits and fists between Dark Damien and the Cartwheeling Crusader and what I got was a lot of stuff in caves, and secret passages and wotnot.
Of course the reason why I’m not complaining is because the whole thing turned out great anyway, with the last issue a serious contender for best issue of the run so far, at least as far as exciting plot beats are concerned. A doubly impressive feat when you consider that Morrison pulled it off without the pencil-pyrotechnics of Quitely or Stewart. Not to do the art team down, their efforts certainly contributed, memorably on a couple of occasions.
But enough with the preamble and on with the awesome sauce.
Batman and Robin #9 the annocommentations
February 27th, 2010
Here and in the comments, we got the shit ain’t no-one else got. Read on!
Batman and Robin #8
February 15th, 2010
Let’s annocommentate!
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PANEL 1
Amy: ‘What is it with these Crime Coven people and their obsession with stories for kids?’ What is it indeed? Perhaps it has something to do with the rogue logic of fairytales and nursery rhymes, their criminal physics? Alice in Wonderland as topology, a map of a world overturned, where reason and meaning begin their steady descent into the abyss, Cole’s ‘hole in everything’.
Fairytales also speak to our primal condition, a preverbal world of gods and nightmares. Maybe the Crime Covens see their work as an attempt to return mankind to a purer state, unrestrained by ego and superego, culture, law and society.
Shit, they sound pretty cool, don’t they?
Oh, whose side are we all on?
Batman and Robin #7: Amy’s additional annocommentations
February 7th, 2010
Here’s some of my annotations that I didn’t put up because I was too busy writing a script for my new Young Heroes in Love series that’ll be hitting the shelves in…uh, oh, I don’t know, let’s keep it positive, sometime over the next three years.
Batman & Robin #7: the annocommentations
February 2nd, 2010
Bob: This is not only the best issue of B&R yet, but the best single issue of Morrison’s batman run by some margin, and as dense and full a piece as he’s written since Seven Soldiers #1, with which it shares many links and referents, both deliberate, accidental and incidental.
Zom: Tan’s a nice chap, some of us around here were quite keen on his work, but if you ask me thank God for Cameron Stewart: Batman & Robin is back at long last. This isn’t my favourite issue and I’ll get into some of the reasons why later, but it’s a bloody good one.
