It’s reasonable at this stage to say that Grant Morrison’s Batman run stands as one of the greatest long-form achievements in superhero comics. It’s equally reasonable to suggest that it’s struggled for momentum over the past couple of years, due to a combination of scheduling delays and apparent disinterest from DC in the one truly great ongoing creative work they have on their hands at the moment (hence, a New 52 reboot that largely renders the majority of Morrison’s story technically impossible continuity-wise).

Fortunately, after going on hiatus towards the middle of 2011, the series was allowed to regroup and refocus as part of the “Second Wave” of New 52 launches earlier this year, and – despite a couple of (unavoidable and understandable) further scheduling hiccups – we were treated to a succession of outstanding, largely self-contained issues that, for arguably the first time since Batman RIP, seemed to put the series back on track towards wrapping up Morrison’s plan and vision.

There’s perhaps a sense with some of the issues that Morrison, having finally to wind things towards the conclusion of a now over-six-year story, is gathering together as many elements that he’s still yet to touch upon as he can. So in this run we’ve had an appearance from Matches Malone, a superb single issue delving into Talia’s background and motivations, a “zero issue” that told the missing story of Bruce recruiting the Incorporated gang, the long-awaited answer to the mystery of Wingman’s identity (hardly a great surprise in the end, and one that does work well in the context of Morrison’s run alone; but one of a number of elements of this run that, in order to work, rely on simply ignoring everything else that’s going on in DC altogether), and most recently a quite remarkable and horrifying return to the “Damian future” of way back in Batman #666 that suddenly slots over five-year-old pieces into place and demonstrates the deep underlying plan beneath it all.

An undoubted factor in the rejuvenation of the series has been in Morrison finally having another artistic collaborator that he simply clicks with. In an ideal world, he’d have Frank Quitely drawing everything he writes, but this isn’t an ideal world – and in fact, Chris Burnham has shown himself to be a more than adequate substitute. In fact, arguably, he’s elevated himself above that by now – it’s true that when taking over for the last few pre-relaunch issues he did seem largely preoccupied with replicating the “feel” of Quitely’s work, but over the course of this run he’s undoubtedly been developing storytelling techniques of his own (while deliberately retaining Quitely’s character styles to give a strong sense of continuity), and on the Talia issue in particular he was simply outstanding.

Unsurprisingly, DC’s focus when it comes to the Bat-books has been squarely on Scott Snyder’s run on the main title – but where that run has been very strong in places, it’s also made missteps here and there (the current Joker plotline feels misguided in a number of ways, but that discussion’s not for here). Their attitude towards Morrison seems to be that he’s had his “time” running the franchise, and he’s merely being allowed to see out his run in a way that quietly complements, rather than defines, the current version of the character. That’s a shame, as the recent Incorporated run shows him to still have a strong focus on the story he’s been telling all this time (in stark contrast to his occasionally great, but largely undefined Action Comics stretch), and DC would be better served letting it stand as the remarkable, era-defining take on Batman that it should be, rather than something shunted suddenly and casually into the background in favour of something newer and trendier.

Title: Batman: KnightQuest (The Crusade) and KnightQuest (The Search)
Publisher: DC
Creative Team: Chuck Dixon, Alan Grant, Doug Moench, Dennis O’Neill (writers); Graham Nolan, Mike Manley, Vince Giarrano, Bret Blevins, Jim Balent, Barry Kitson, Ron Wagner, Scott Hanna, Eduardo Barreto, John Beatty, Frank McLaughlin, Josef Rubinstein, Steve George, Ron McCain (artists)
Core Issues: Detective Comics #667-675, Batman #501-508, Shadow of the Bat #19-28, Legends of the Dark Knight #59-61
Essential crossovers: Justice League Task Force #4-6 (The Search); Robin #1, Catwoman #6-7 (The Crusade); Robin #7 (Conclusion)
Years: 1993-94

There’s been a renewed level of interest in the KnightFall saga recently, courtesy of the announcement that the character of Bane is to feature as the (or a) major villain in the upcoming Dark Knight Rises film. Going back over the storyline in the wake of this, however, reminded me of an odd quirk in the publishing of the whole thing – in that a massive chunk of the story as told monthly has never actually been collected in trade – and thus, will never have been read by the majority of the people who’ve sought out the rest of the saga.

In the current print editions, KnightFall consists of three distinct chapters (collected in three separate books). Part one, “Broken Bat”, concerns Bane’s arrival in Gotham and eventual defeat of Bruce Wayne. Part two, “Who Rules the Night”, tells the story of Jean-Paul Valley taking over as Batman, and his initial descent towards being a more brutal version of the hero, before redesigning the costume and then taking on – and beating – Bane himself. The third part, “KnightsEnd”, then sees a healed Wayne return to reclaim the mantle of the bat from the increasingly deranged Valley.

However, when originally published, KnightsEnd was actually the third of a trilogy of Knight-prefixed storylines that ran consecutively from one-another, rather than just being a chapter of KnightFall itself. Indeed, the first edition of the trade didn’t say KnightFall anywhere on the cover – it’s only later ones that called it “Part Three”. And missing completely from any sort of trade collection is the entire middle section of the trilogy – KnightQuest.

Running through about eight months’ worth of comics (but taking in a lot of different titles – the four Bat-books of the time, as well as issues of Robin, Catwoman and Justice League Task Force), KnightQuest actually followed two major plot strands – and referred to each by its subtitle on the banners of the issues. The shorter one, “The Search”, is a particularly odd little tale, in which a recovering Bruce Wayne investigates the disappearance of Dr Shondra Kinsolving – the woman who had begun the process of miraculously healing his injuries through little more than her touch. It loses its way badly towards the end, when it gets bogged down in the sort of story that really doesn’t feel like it has a place in a Batman comic – but in the first half, there’s some decent material, particularly the Alan Grant-written three-part segment set in England, which introduces the UK-based vigilante Hood (of note at the moment due to the character’s apparent planned use by Grant Morrison in Batman Inc).

The bulk of KnightQuest, however, is the storyline “The Crusade”, which sees Jean Paul Valley struggling more and more with the weight of the Batman identity, coupled with his own delusions (brought about by the brainwashing/programming that turned him into Azrael). Along the way, he continually makes tweaks to his costume – until it becomes the fully armour-based suit, complete with extensive weaponry, seen in KnightsEnd – and shows less and less care for the well-being either of Gotham’s criminal population, or even its innocents. This comes to a head with the most significant part of the story, seen in Batman #508, in which Valley allows the serial killer Abbatoir to fall to his death in a vat of molten metal. Although he strictly speaking doesn’t kill the villain, it nevertheless represents a significant watershed moment, as he crosses a line that Bruce Wayne never would have. More importantly, by not bringing the killer in for questioning, he slows down the police in their efforts to track down his latest torture victim, Graham Etchinson – who subsequently dies before he can be found.

At the very least, the Abbatoir story should have made it into collected print somewhere. Anyone reading the story in trade, or years after the fact, would surely be left baffled by reading about a hugely important event in the overall story, but not actually getting to see it happen on the page. The sudden shift in costume between the end of Knightfall Part Two and KnightsEnd is also jarring if you haven’t seen the incremental changes (and the reasons given by Valley each time, as heldover elements of the original outfit, such as a cloth mask and the cape, are increasingly considered detrimental).

As for the rest of the story, there are good parts and bad parts – although in terms of tone and overall quality, it’s pretty consistent with the other parts of the run (the same goes for the art, too – some of it’s good, some of it’s lousy, and whenever Bret Blevins gets his hands on it it’s an absolute joy). Perhaps one reason for not bothering to collect it in trade is that Valley is a difficult character to spend much time with as a lead. One of the storylines, a crossover with Catwoman, shows a conflicted side to him as he becomes obsessed with Selina while chastising himself for doing so – but even that comes off a bit creepy, and in a general sense, as a character whose sole purpose is to be shown to be unfit for his job, he’s largely just irritating. And when I was younger, I thought the “subway rocket” he uses (taking convenient advantage of an abandoned rail station that backs on to the Batcave) was cool, but nowadays its existence, and importance in helping AzBats stop a particular crime, just seems contrived.

Another major problem is that the KnightQuest section is pretty long – the character had to be in the role long enough to make it seem like he was supposed to be sticking around – without the stories ever really going anywhere (beyond nudging him slightly further into demented sociopathy each time), and that too could be a reason for not bothering to collect the issues. Nevertheless, a number of the individual stories feel like little more than treading water – the Joker’s movie-directing scheme might just be his worst plot ever - and, one senses, could have been excluded to at least make a KnightQuest trade that would at least have included the important bits. It’s odd that an entire chunk of one of the most-remembered comics events of the last couple of decades should have slipped between the cracks, but while in some cases it’s justified, there’s much of KnightQuest that shouldn’t be ignored by anyone following the Bat-saga of the ’90s.

I’m treating these two comics/days as one entry, as they’re essentially two sides of the same coin – and I find it legitimately interesting that I seem to hold opinions diametrically opposed to the prevailing critical opinion on both sides of it. (Plus, I’m a little behind schedule anyway – I’d originally intended only to use one “day” on this post, but since I’ve ended up writing about twice as much as usual in this post, I may as well allow myself to use two.) So here goes – my controversial opinions on Frank Miller’s two Dark Knight comics.

First of all: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. While my opinion on it has undoubtedly softened over the years – or, perhaps more accurately, gone from liking it as much as everyone else back when I first read it, to gradually developing a distaste for it in subsequent years, to then softening – the point still stands that I simply wouldn’t agree with vast swathes of comics fandom/criticdom in describing it as the greatest Batman story of all time. I wouldn’t even class it as the greatest Frank Miller Batman story (that honour would go to the pretty much faultless Year One – although even then the brilliance of that is largely down to the fact that it should really be called Jim Gordon: Year One).

It’s true that there’s plenty about DKR that’s great – at the time it was a genuinely original and challenging comic, and although the narrative style of much of it (tiny panels, using TV news to relay exposition) has been aped endlessly in the years since, you can’t hold its innovation against it. Carrie Kelley is a great character, and there are terrific moments – notably the final culmination of the Joker/Batman relationship, in which Bruce still can’t bring himself to break his “no killing” rule… so the Joker does it for him. But there’s also a lot about it that just makes me uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s largely just being a Supeman fan, and thus having little truck with the way Miller treats the character – as a joke, basically – but there’s also the nature of the book’s politics, something I’ve never been able to fully reconcile. On the one hand, there seems to be a distinct jab at the then-current US government, and Reagan in particular – something which is also transposed to Superman, the lapdog of the government frequently drawn to look like its ageing leader – and yet at the same time, if anything the book is espousing an even more right-wing view (although it’s frequently heralded by supporters as doing the opposite, that just doesn’t come across in my reading). It turns Batman into a man who wants to stamp out crime in a near-totalitarian fashion by any means necessary – and that, to me, just isn’t the essence of the character.

Still, despite the Superman fanboy in me disliking the book, I can see the good aspects of it – as a self-contained story, it’s great, I just think it perpetuates a false perception of what Batman is and what Batman stories need to be. But if I’m going slightly against the critical tide in having my doubts about the lasting quality of DKR, then I’m actively fighting it in expressing my opinion of its 2001 sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Because, well… I actually kind of quite like it.

I don’t actually remember doing so hugely at the time – although there must have been enough in it that I felt it worth spending $7.95 an issue on it even after reading the first one – but certainly, as time’s gone on and the book has continued to be regarded as one of the most spectacular flops in the history of comics, I’ve held a sneaking regard for it that’s only grown as it’s become more apparent exactly what it was trying to do. Simply put – Dark Knight Returns was a comic that (among other things) appealed to people who didn’t necessarily already like comics. DK2 was a comic that could only ever appeal to people who did.

Not that it appealed to all of them, of course. Far from it. But look in more detail at what initially appears to be a garbled, confused, poorly-drawn, piss-taking mess, and there’s a lot more going on than initially seems. And looking at it from one perspective in particular, it becomes apparent why I have this slight affection for it – it’s Miller attempting to be Morrisonian. It’s not as good as a Morrison comic, of course – but it’s definitely coming from a place far nearer to the likes of Flex Mentallo, All-Star Superman and Batman & Robin than it is to Dark Knight Returns or even All-Star Batman & Robin (although the latter series, I think, was Miller trying to further expand upon the same “fun” ludicrousness but with far more devastatingly awful results).

What immediately sets DK2 apart from its predecessor, for one thing, is that it’s far more obviously a DC book than a Batman book – characters not even mentioned in the original series dominate its pages, while Batman himself is often shunted into the background. Again, this is undoubtedly a reason why many fans of the original disliked it – but for me, it works well, as Miller is taking characters he’s never written about before and applying a deliberately skewed perspective to them. But it’s the perspective of someone who clearly knows far more about classic comics than we might ever have given him credit for – he’s throwing a range of different eras into the mix, from Silver Age Justice League stories, to the ’60s Batman TV series, to Kingdom Come, to the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons. If anything, rather than taking the “Dark Knight” part of its predecessor’s name, as a sequel it should probably be called something like The Justice League Returns – as one of the things it concerns itself the most with is an explanation as to just why there weren’t many other heroes around during the original series, before setting about rectifying that fact.

Crucially, it’s fun, and this is something I feel Batman comics generally need to be; people too often miss the point that Batman is inherently ludicrous in character, conceit and surrounding world. If you can’t admit that that’s the case right from the name downwards, then you need a reality check. You can do “dark” stories with him, and do them well, but they shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all. The Adam West series shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all either, of course, but there’s absolutely no foul in drawing upon the myriad different interpretations and levels of seriousness, so long as you do it well (and, crucially, so long as you never step into outright parody – a mistake the reprehensible Batman & Robin film made). So what Miller is doing in DK2, having done arguably the definitive “dark” Batman story, is cutting loose  and having fun in the garish superhero world the character spent some of his best decades inhabiting.

Of course, if there’s an element of DK2 that attracts even more flak and ire than the story, it’s the art. But again, in this instance I actually think Miller’s getting the short end of the stick based on people’s pre-existing expectations. And I speak as someone who, unlike many, isn’t normally a huge fan of the guy. It could be better-executed, there’s no question – it does feel rushed at times, and so frequently replacing backgrounds with colour washes is only forgiveable if you spend as much time drawing the foreground characters as, say, Frank Quitely does. But for all that, the visuals do deserve more credit than they’re often given – Lynn Varley’s colours are often astonishing, and even if you can’t always give top marks to the composition, you have to appreciate that the style is absolutely suited to the story Miller is telling. After all, the style employed in DKR would be as unsuited to DK2 as the other way around.

All of this is not to say the book is anything like flawless – about the kindest you can say is that it’s a failed experiment. But it’s a failed experiment that I actually enjoy reading, and unlike a vast proportion of Miller’s work (I’m just not usually fan of his style, subject matter or tone) I can say I’m pretty onboard with what he was trying to do. There are some truly standout ideas and moments – the government’s use for Barry Allen (and on that note, I find it amusing that Miller was criticised at the time for ignoring the fact that Allen and Hal Jordan weren’t the “present” incumbents of their roles and so shouldn’t be treated as the “future” versions either – it’s only taken seven or eight years for history to prove him right on that one), the death (and precognition) of J’onn J’onnz, writing the Question with Rorschach’s voice, just about all the Lex Luthor stuff, and of course every time Catgirl appears. Look past its nominal status as a DKR sequel and it’s actually a pretty darned entertaining comic – and certainly one that’s overdue a reappraisal.

Or maybe it’s just that I appreciate him actually treating Superman a bit better the second time.

Of course, we’ll disregard here any comics that I own in more than one format – the likes of Sandman, Phonogram, We3 and so on – partly because most will be discussed elsewhere, and partly because they don’t really count. There are, however, a few single-issue comics that for one reason or another I’ve ended up with multiple copies of, and this is one of ‘em.

The first Neil Gaiman comic I ever read wasn’t Sandman, or Miracleman, or that Hellblazer issue I wrote about recently, or anything else particularly high-profile you might expect. Instead, it’s DC’s Secret Origins Special #1 from 1989, a comic that I read and loved probably if not around the time of publication then within a few years of it. At the time I read it, of course, I didn’t know who Gaiman was – and even upon becoming a fan of his work in later years, it took a while to go back and discover that this particular comic was also (in part, at least) written by him.

So what is it? Well, Secret Origins was a 50-issue (plus a few specials and annuals) series put out by DC in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which did pretty much exactly as it said on the cover – told in single-issue (or sometimes half-issue) form the origin stories of a variety of DC characters. At a time when said facts were somewhat in flux due to Crisis, it was handy to have a reminder of exactly how the “current” version of a character was supposed to have come to be, and often these retellings could put a new twist, perspective or other enhancement on the original tale. I’ve got a few of the issues in my collection, but one of the most memorable is this one – I’m not sure why it’s a “Special” (it was the only one, to boot) and not an annual, mind, but it’s essentially the same thing.

The focus is on three of Batman’s most famous villains – although rather than telling an “origin”, each of the three vignettes concerns itself more with alighting on a particular element of the character’s past. It’s all held together by a framing device (written by Gaiman) about a TV crew making a documentary about Gotham’s colourful criminal element – to the chagrin of Batman, who sees it simply as glorifying them and possibly inspiring copycats. It’s fairly workmanlike, though it does contain a cameo from none other than John Constantine, and also a nice twist at the end that serves to answer the obvious question of why a certain well-known villain hasn’t shown up in the issue’s pages. The two stories that aren’t written by Gaiman are decent enough – the stronger is a Penguin story by Alan Grant and Sam Kieth, which has the sort of tone you’d expect from Grant’s early ’90s Batman work; while Mark Verheiden serves up the usual “is he good or is he bad or what?” in a deliberately morally ambiguous story about Two Face and his wife.

But inbetween these two, we also get a story written by Gaiman himself – and it’s this story that’s the reason I love the issue so much, and why I’ve ended up getting multiple copies. It’s called “When is a Door?” and it features the Riddler being interviewed by Gaiman’s TV crew. It’s a wonderful little piece, in which Nygma bounds around assorted giant advertising paraphernalia and bemoans the loss of the innocent days of super-villainny (“You look around these days – it’s all different. It’s all changed. The Joker’s killing people, for god’s sake! Did I miss something? Was I away when they changed the rules?”) with direct nods to the ’60s TV series. Oh, and tells a lot of bad jokes. It’s a really nice play on the dichotomy that’s almost always existed within Batman stories – the difference between the “light” and “dark” sides – and while it may not be the only one, it is perhaps rare in doing so through the eyes of a villain rather than from the perspective of Batman himself.

Given that my comics collection exists largely for reading (and re-reading) rather than preserving, it’s inevitable that sometimes a comic will come along where having more than one copy just makes sense, to guard against loss/damage. This will, I imagine, have been my reasoning behind snapping up a second copy found in a back-issue box some point a few years ago – I knew I already had the issue (although even now I can’t remember whether the one I had was the original I’d read all those years before, or another copy picked up in the interm – it’s in surprisingly good nick, you see, where other comics from that time have ended up with torn covers and suchlike). It later proved even more prudent, when I took the original copy along to a Gaiman signing – where he informed me that it’s one of his favourite stories of his, and the only example of his buying a page of original art from something he’d written, a page he later gave to his son as a birthday present – which meant that I could keep the signed copy in a bag (signed issues are about the only things I ever want to “seal”) and keep the second one for re-reading purposes. It’s not as rare or obscure as it used to be – finding a wider audience due to being reprinted in the Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? trade – but it’s a great little issue to dig out on its own every so often, and having that “backup” copy means I’m always likely to be able to do so.

Told you a subsequent announcement would make me look stupid. So: Grant Morrison will be writing Batman Inc as of November. Some thoughts:

- I like the team book idea, and I like that he’s been inspired by watching the excellent The Brave and the Bold cartoon. But.

- If Morrison’s only doing a team book, and all the other books are in the hands of other writers, is he relinquishing control of the overall direction? Or still running things in the background? Any MorrisonBatman is better than no MorrisonBatman, but I’d really rather this all be part of his Big Plan rather than simply him sticking around to play for a bit longer.

- Is Bruce Wayne doing a Steve Rogers, then, and not actually reclaiming his mantle just yet? Interesting, if so – I’d have no doubt that the idea’s been arrived at independently, but you do wonder if events over at Marvel have ever made DC think “Hmmm… let’s play this one a bit differently.” Of course, this is all just speculation – maybe he will go straight back to playing Batman, and it’s just that there’s going to be more than one of them.

- Seven Batman-led books, then. And people complain about Wolverine? Pssh. He’s got nothing on ol’ Bats.

Meanwhile:

[Cornell] added that his first arc [on Knight and Squire] featured Richard III brought back to life as a clone with an army of monarchs who try to re-conquer the world through Facebook.

Yeah, can’t wait for this one.

Okay, so it’s probably daft to write any sort of post speculating about future comics when SDCC has just begun in earnest – there’s probably an announcement about Grant Morrison’s future on the Batman titles just waiting around the corner to make this look stupid and redundant the moment I hit “publish”. Nevertheless, with a number of announcements already made by DC… I’m starting to get a bit worried.

Here, then, is a list of the various titles and their writers so far announced as starting – or continuing – in November, after Morrison finishes his current arc on Batman and Robin and the Return of Bruce Wayne miniseries, and the various Bruce Wayne: The Road Home one-shots (only one of which, Batman: The Return, is being written by The Bald One) have hit in October:

- Batman (Tony Daniel)
- Batman & Robin (Peter J. Tomasi)
- Batman: The Dark Knight (David Finch)
- Batman: Streets of Gotham (Paul Dini)
- Detective Comics (Scott Snyder)
- Batman Confidential (rotating creative teams)

So… whither Morrison? Not counting Confidential (which is out-of-current-continuity), that’s five books that will star Batman as the lead character, and Morrison isn’t writing any of them. Is there really going to be a sixth ongoing for Morrison to write? Or is he – shock horror – leaving after bringing back Bruce Wayne? If so, is it his decision to finish – leaving with his story wrapped up – or is he for some inexplicable reason being pushed? Why on earth is Batman and Robin, a book solely created for the purpose of Morrison telling stories about Dick ‘n’ Damian with an array of superstar artists (and, uh, Philip Tan), being allowed to continue without him?

One thing’s for sure – that lineup hardly inspires much in the way of confidence (David Finch? Writing? A “grim and gritty” Batbook? Please.) It’s clear that the reason the Batbooks are by far the best thing DC has to offer at the moment is for one major reason – Grant Morrison’s overarching story and overall vision and aesthetic for the series and character (and, alright, to a lesser extent the work Greg Rucka’s done with Batwoman). Take him away, and there’s basically nothing worth reading there. I don’t even trust anyone else to write Damian properly.

Is this how it all ends, then? Come on, SDCC. Bring us good news.