Batman R.I.P.

The back cover sells this as “the Dark Knight’s Darkest Hour.” I don’t know. There have been a lot of dark hours for Batman, haven’t there? I mean, at times it seems as though it’s a kind of competition to see how dark he can get, both on page and on screen.

So I can’t say if the storyline in Grant Morrison’s Batman R.I.P. is the darkest, or was the darkest at the time, but I did find it to be one of the most confusing – and confusion has been almost as big a selling point with Batman in recent years as darkness. The story here is very complicated, both in itself and in the way that it’s told.

It’s only when you get to the end that you have a more-or-less complete picture of what’s been happening all along. Basically (and I’m not going to try and unravel all of it because I don’t think I have all of it right), the criminal gang known as the Black Glove have a plan to drive Batman insane, and it mostly works but our hero is a step ahead of them and has a factory default setting called Batman Zur-en-Arrh that he’s able to reboot with after they break him down pretty much completely. Then the baddies catch Batman Zur-en-Arrh and bury him alive in a straitjacket – not to kill him, but to leave him underground long enough so that he’s brain damaged from oxygen deprivation. It’s that kind of comic! But as even the Joker knows, and tells them, you can’t keep Batman down. So then Bats rises from the grave and exacts his vengeance on the league of dirty tricksters.

This much may sound straightforward, but it’s messier than I’m making it sound. There’s stuff about Dr. Hurt trying to say he’s Bruce Wayne’s father (everyone in this comic knows Batman is Bruce Wayne, by the way). There’s an appearance by Bat-Mite, though he may be a hallucination. There’s a coda that’s also a prequel (“Last Rites”) that has Batman doing psychic battle with a creature known as the Lump.

The bottom line is that this is a comic that requires you to go back and start again as soon as you finish. Which is something that can be really irritating but I didn’t mind it here. Heaven knows we’ve been down similar Gotham streets before, with Batman as burned-out case, haunted by personal demons, so it probably took something as loopy as the plot here to sell it again. Personally I would have cut down on some of the clutter with all the people coming to help Batman at the end (Nightwing is a hero who just bores me), but I guess there was a lot of mess to get cleaned up. You could even say having the Joker involved was unnecessary, but I sort of liked how he was playing the role of an audience member at the Black Glove’s danse macabre.

Not a perfect comic then, but one that definitely stands out as above average and well worth, if not demanding of, a quick re-read.

Graphicalex