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Post by paulpogue on Sept 29, 2010 18:11:08 GMT -8
Actually, more like "The Great Morrison Conspiracy of everything from Seven Soldiers Onward, and hell let's just trace it through The Invisibles while we're at it, and actually going back all the way to the 1950s, and we don't just mean cute references to Zur-enn-Arrh." This is, without a doubt, the single most impressive Act Of Nerdery I have ever seen. Credit goes to Jesse Baker for finding this one, and when BAKER posts something to the V and gets NICK LOCKING to say "Holy shit," you know all fucking hell has broken loose. If this is even one tenth right -- and to be honest, it is too fucking well-considered to not be at least 80 percent right -- then Grant Morrison has probably assembled a Grand Unified Field Of Everything that makes "Avengers Forever" look like fanfic cranked out over a weekend. Hell, I was super-impressed just when "Arkham Asylum" posited a great big Bat-killing conspiracy out of the old continuity bit about Arkham himself spending his last days scrawling gibberish in the cells. www.comicvine.com/doctor-hurt/29-54826/news/I will never, ever doubt Grant fucking Morrison again. |
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Post by K-Box on Sept 30, 2010 16:46:36 GMT -8
... At the risk of sounding rude, could you translate this into non-crazy?
Because the more I read that link, the more that my mind replaced all its text with "WORDS WORDS WORDS."
I literally have absolutely no clue what is being driven at here.
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 30, 2010 20:20:56 GMT -8
Hah! Asking to translate out of crazy is never a rude request in Morrison discussions.
Dumbed-down version because I don't fully understand it myself, plus it's filtered through my own biases:
Part the first: Morrison appears to be pulling together all of those old "Gotham itself is literally possessed by a demon" stories, which appear to be a whole lot more common than one might expect, into a grand unified theory that posits a demonic Barbatos, the embodiment of all things wrong with Gotham. (Just one example: The whole Crime Bible business seems to be derived from a series of late-1980s stories about a cult that worshipped crime-as-lifestyle.) Every so often, someone would write a history-of-Gotham piece with vague talk of people selling their souls to the devil hundreds of years ago and so forth. Morrison seems to be summing it up by setting up that Dr. Hurt really is Thomas Wayne -- the namesake of Bruce's father, the family black sheep who wold his soul hundreds of years ago.
In short: all the wacked-out stories about the nature of Gotham bundled up into one big Bat-trap.
Part the second: Morrison has been fascinated by voodoo loa, gods literally riding men like horses, since time immemorial. It was all over the place in Seven Soldiers and front-and-center in Final Crisis. It's more metaphorical than anything, but he seems to be leading up to Bruce being the Fifth World's Orion and Dr. Hurt being the Fifth World's Darkseid -- estranged father and son battling it out throughout the cosmos. This is so forthright that once it's pointed out, it stops being subtext and becomes supertext. There's an Orion reference seemingly every five pages going back the last few years, and some key phrases applied to Dr. Hurt track exactly to things said about Darkseid/Dark Side.
The Joker, of course, is Baron Samedi, which is also so obvious in retrospect -- Oberon Sexton was drawn to look exactly like him during the big reveal -- that it's also no longer subtext.
Point the third: My absolute favorite bit, though, is the theory that the long-lost villain responsible for killing Tim Drake's mother nearly 20 years ago, a voodoo baddie named Malicien, is one of the big bads behind all this -- he's DeSaad, tossed back in time and manipulating events for ages. The biggest proof -- and just one more example of Morrison hiding shit in plain sight -- is that Malicien and Dr. DeZard from "Mister Miracle" are damn near dead ringers for each other.
Point the Fourth: Turn the cover of "Batman and Robin" #3 upside down and you get a stylized version of Bolland's famous Killing Joke Joker. That doesn't actually mean anything, but it is incredibly goddamn cool.
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Post by paulpogue on Sept 30, 2010 20:24:02 GMT -8
I freely admit that I'm very excitable and easily impressed some days, and I'm a complete sucker for the kind of writing that others might accurately described as "too clever for its own good." Of course, after years of enduring the Millarization of comics, reaching rock bottom with BND Spider-Man, an engine which seems exclusively designed to relentlessly mock fans who want to read about heroes doing heroic things, it may just be that anyone trying to be Too Clever is still reaching a much higher bar.
(Remember when the violence in Morrison books seemed edgy and over-the-top? Nowadays the harshest, most in-your-face shit that King Mob pulled on-panel doesn't hold a candle to things that regularly happen to the TEEN FUCKING TITANS, let alone Sue Dibney.)
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Post by jensaltmann on Sept 30, 2010 22:40:12 GMT -8
Dr. Hurt really is Thomas Wayne -- the namesake of Bruce's father, the family black sheep who wold his soul hundreds of years ago. That was one of the things where they had lost me. Not having a PHD in Batman continuity, I read about Thomas Wayne being Darkseid as "Now they've resurrected Batman's dad too?" Point the Fourth: Turn the cover of "Batman and Robin" #3 upside down and you get a stylized version of Bolland's famous Killing Joke Joker. That doesn't actually mean anything, but it is incredibly goddamn cool. Not a point, Quitely is on the record as saying that people are reading too much into this, he never did that. |
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Post by K-Box on Oct 1, 2010 1:19:55 GMT -8
If this is true, and Morrison really is building this all up into a super-duper conspiracy theory about Bruce versus his dad and everything bad in Gotham being a demon's fault ... then it's 100-percent terrible and wrong of him, full stop.
Which pretty much personifies Morrison's entire run on Batman, because by insisting on this grand unification theory of every take on Batman being real, he's pretty much ruined all of them for all time.
Everybody keeps praising Morrison for his brilliant plotting and thread-weaving, but all of it from Final Crisis through Batman has been in the service of stories that never should have been told.
If anything, Morrison's DC work over the course of the past few years has been like Oppenheimer's work on the bomb - it's an admittedly impressive amount of mental effort that's nonetheless done nothing but destroy things, and it's now to the point where, even as someone who used to be a fan of Morrison's work, I will now avoid anything that he's touched at all costs, in much the same way that I do M. Night Shyamalan's work.
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Post by jarddavis on Oct 1, 2010 22:34:45 GMT -8
I agree with Kirk.
I'm at the same point with Morrison.
Personally, the man should have never left DC for X-Men, because he hasn't written anything I've been interested in reading since then. ESPECIALLY Batman RIP, which you know, we've seen before. Twice.
And while I like the idea of the entire city of Gotham being somehow possessed by a demon, (which, in a very twisted way makes a shitload of sense when you think about it) I just don't think Morrison's the one to pull that off these days.
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Post by jensaltmann on Oct 1, 2010 23:54:32 GMT -8
I remember, when The All-New Atom launched, it was touted that the idea behind it was based on a concept by Grant Morrison. Ivy Town turned out to be possessed by, I don't exactly remember, demons or evil aliens.
Idea recycling: is it really just hacks who do it?
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