Mindless Ones

In which I throw up some random, barely organised/edited thoughts about a couple of comics I think you might’ve read.

Here’s a few thoughts. Not many. Not enough time this week

What follows is probably incredibly obvious to anyone who’s been reading Morrison’s recent Batman and DC stuff and is familiar with Morrison’s obsessions generally, but I think someone needs to get this down and explain everything already. Here goes.

Note how reassuring Wonder Woman is trying to be here. Unfortunately, as a royal demigoddess, she always trouble staying this side of patronising, and her apparently innocuous choice of words betrays the concern she’s trying so hard not to burden the room with. All the ‘Black Alert… End of Time… Resourceful Batman’ stuff is common enough for Monday night around the Justice League dinner table, but certain words give you an indication as to the social subtext of this meeting. Everything from her serious eyebrows to her deliberate use of reassuring, gently authoritative keywords (‘Officially… Naturally We Don’t Want To Alarm Anyone… But We All Know… We’ll Have To Assume…’) says one thing: Don’t let the children think they’re in charge.

Because honestly, these days Tim ‘Henman*’ Drake is the kind of guy it’s impossible not to patronise.

*See what I did there with the ‘Henman’ thing? It’s double clever of me, because obviously there’s the Tim Henman: Famous English Tennis Loser connection, but also Hen-Man, which is an appropriately stupid name for a spurned ex-sidekick needily clinging to pointless avian themes for his choice of grown-up supername, unintentionally demonstrating just how unsuccessfully he’s ‘moved on’ from the whole, y’know, ‘abandonment thing‘ thing…

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’.

Amy beyond the end of time continues after the jump

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)