With Batman R.I.P. past the halfway mark, Grant Morrison isn’t wasting any time. The question implied by the previous issue’s cliff-hanger is answered almost immediately, as Wayne talks to statues, stabs himself in the mouth and concludes that he is an inevitable result of the city he protects. Batman has gone stark, raving mad… and it doesn’t remotely matter.

The diabolical strength of mind possessed by the Zur-En-Arrh Batman is communicated cleverly, as he comes very close to breaking the fourth wall. In a scene that echoes Robin’s dismissal of his small-fry opponent in the first instalment of R.I.P., Zur-En-Arrh lambastes a captive member of the Club of Villains. Previously depicted as Batman’s ultimate foes, they are dismissed as yet more washed-up copycats, the product of an unoriginal bloating of Batman’s rogues’ gallery. Sacrificing the credibility of some of his creations is a risky move by Morrison, who also shows Robin outwitting his Club pursuers, but the pay-off is a ongoing impression that this Batman is outgrowing his own franchise, being too great a personality to be contained by the everyday crime fighting which has defined the seventy years of his existence. Having previously elevated the Joker to the ethereal spectre of death he has always threatened to become, the writer now taunts the reader by making them wait another month for the face-off between these now larger-than-fiction characters.

As a consequence of spending the previous issue in a semi-imaginary excursion through Gotham’s underbelly, this instalment sees some of the most densely packed storytelling of the arc. Commissioner Gordon’s plot thread, suggesting that Doctor Hurt is Thomas Wayne, is hastily brought to the fore. The story teases its readers over this thunderbolt, and it’s far from clear whether Alfred’s denial is a literal statement or the metaphor the villain treats it as. By planting dynamite at the foundations of the franchise, Morrison begins to make good on the R.I.P. hype of providing the definitive story in Batman’s long history. It may only occupy a few panels, but this exchange suggests that the closure provided to Bruce Wayne’s story may be far more definitive than many imaged. The only cause for concern at this point is whether the writer has allowed sufficient time to resolve all the plot threads he has circling to land, as the Club of Heroes joins Robin, Talia and Damian in waiting for their turn in the sun.

The central thesis of R.I.P. is now clear, with Morrison arguing that the concept of the Batman is either so transcendental or so close to the brink of insanity that it can survive an actual journey into madness. Dwarfing the summer’s other comics events, it’s impossible not to itch with anticipation for the next episode.

A small week because Seb’s still on holiday, but there’s still plenty inside, including Russian Sitcoms, Thunderbolts, Neil Gaimen on Batman, the Watchmen trailer AND a Paul Cornell interview!

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It’s fair to say that after a succession of almosts (Spider-Man 2, X-Men 2, Iron Man, and Superman Returns if you’re feeling charitable), we’re still waiting for the first truly perfect superhero movie of the modern era. The hype, marketing campaign, trailers and early word-of-mouth surrounding Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight - already something of a groundbreaker in that, a la James Bond, it’s the first superhero movie not to name its lead in the title - suggested that finally, we might just be about to get it.

Sadly, we haven’t. The Dark Knight is a superb film, make no mistake about it - but it’s still a film that features enough flaws to dispel any use of phrases like “greatest ever”. Reviewing it as a comic book movie in particular - rather than a movie in general - places it under even harsher scrutiny, as it barely seems to qualify as part of the genre at all. Certainly, I can’t think of another superhero film in recent years where the titular character was not only sidelined by his supporting cast (hell, that’s fairly par-for-the-course as it is) but was actually the weak link.

Indeed, leaving his name out of the title was perhaps a more shrewd move than first seemed - because The Dark Knight isn’t really a Batman film at all. Rather, it’s the quite excellent story of a villain called the Joker bringing chaos to the city of, and destroying the life of, an heroic District Attorney named Harvey Dent and his lawman accomplice Jim Gordon, which just happens to include a guy in a silly costume with a stupid rasping voice getting in the way every few minutes. If that sounds harsh, it’s simply that Batman feels like a passenger in his own film - and Christian Bale, for all the positive attributes to his performance, should have had that voice toned down by someone. And, while his costume as a whole is an improvement on Begins, that mask still looks ridiculous.

The other negative elements of the film are, to be honest, largely based around plot elements and turns that I can’t really talk about without badly ruining the film. The character journey undertaken by one particular figure has been kept largely under wraps in a pre-publicity campaign that was already quite brilliantly constructed around the Joker before Heath Ledger’s death threw the character into even sharper focus - and to say too much about it here, both in the excellence and the missteps, would surely hamper enjoyment with too much advance knowledge.

What we can at least talk about, however, is the Joker, as his role in proceedings is one of instigator, not reactor, so there’s nothing in the way of character change or growth to spoil. He weaves in and out of the film, causing quite deliberate chaos wherever he glances, and is an absolutely mesmerising creation. There’s almost certainly a hint of oversentimentality among those who have called for a posthumous Oscar for Ledger (he’s bloody good, but it’s not an Oscar-style performance by any stretch of the imagination; he gave one of those in Brokeback Mountain) but there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the Joker is one of the all-time great cinema villains, and the film utterly belongs to him. From the first moment he saunters onscreen and performs a “magic trick” that you’ll never forget, to the multiple-choice stories of how he got his scars (a neat nod to The Killing Joke), and the sight of him fiddling with a bomb detonator while dressed as a nurse before calmly skipping away, just about every scene he has is an instant classic, and most will leave you laughing while simultaneously horrified. Flitting between unflappable charm and demented mayhem, Ledger takes a brilliantly-conceived character and turns him into an absolute force of nature. The portrayal of the character may differ more significantly from the comics than any previous version, but no matter - this is the definitive Joker, and Ledger will surely prove irreplaceable.

The structure, story beats and even character notes (particularly Alfred, who in Michael Caine’s hands has gone from being Bruce’s moral conscience to someone who practically pushes him into his role) feel misjudged at times, but what can’t be denied is that in terms of its dialogue and thematic intelligence, this is one of the strongest scripts that a simple superhero movie has ever seen. While perhaps overwrought in places, it nevertheless dares to philosophise rather than reducing the world to black-and-white, and never patronises its audience with cheap or simplistic soundbites. It’s as well, really, because much of the action is formulaic - despite a quite spectacular truck sequence that you’ve probably already seen from trailers - and it’s in the quieter moments (or any featuring you-know-who) that the film excels, despite getting bogged down early on in an unnecessarily lengthy sequence in Hong Kong (one that somewhat matches the “Tibetan ninja” snooze-fest of Begins). That said, for all the grumbling about the apparently cynical toy-selling motives for the Batpod, an applause-worthy in-film reason is given for its existence, and as it zooms in and out of traffic in some intense chase sequences, it makes a refreshing change from the Miller-esque “Tumbler”.

But it’s the cast, really, that define the film. Despite never really convincing in the Batsuit, Bale remains the best Bruce Wayne there’s been, and Caine and Morgan Freeman (the latter given a suprising amount to do) are as reliably solid as ever. Maggie Gyllenhaal is an improvement on Katie Holmes, so it’s a shame that her character has less definition than in the first film - and her importance is weighed by what happens to her rather than what she does. But Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent has the temerity to almost wrestle control of the film from Ledger - it sounds cheesy to say it given the pre-publicity tagline, but he makes you believe in Harvey Dent. A character that’s almost too whiter-than-white, you can nevertheless empathise more with his desire to clean up the city, and do it right, than you can with the plight of Wayne himself. It’s true that he doesn’t quite cope as well with the inevitable angst as he does when playing the square-jawed hero, but he still leaves you walking away with the feeling that The Dark Knight has used up Batman’s two best characters in one fell swoop. And then there’s Gary Oldman, making Jim Gordon as brilliant as he did in Begins, and making you wish he could have his own film as well - and visually, he remains perhaps the most utterly perfect page-to-screen translation of a character yet.

Some will be surprised that there’s anything negative to say about the film at all; but it’s a simple fact that when you reach the highest peaks of excellence yet attained by your genre - and The Dark Knight certainly does that on occasion - the disappointing aspects will frustrate more by comparison. While the film is so far ahead of stuff like Fantastic Four or X-Men 3 that it’s not even funny, it’s still a flawed masterpiece. We’re still waiting for comic book movies to get their Citizen Kane, but The Dark Knight makes an admirable attempt to reach for worthiness when, with the box office already guaranteed, there was nothing to prove. Ledger, meanwhile, leaves a legacy that at once both honours him, and frustrates at the thought of the A-list career to which this performance would surely have propelled him.

 Notice anything different? Read inside for the inside scoop about the site’s recent changes! Also, news about Empire and their coverage of the Dark Knight, the new X-Men cartoon, more Dark Knight and a link to my current favourite comics blog! Continue reading for more info!

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It’s long been a tenet of Grant Morrison’s comics runs that everything makes a lot more sense once it’s finished, and that in terms of the bigger picture, it’s often better to read the complete saga altogether rather than attempting to make sense of individual issues on a month-by-month basis.

But on the other hand, Morrison is a man with a deep and inherent understanding of the medium in which he works – and despite the dense layers that sit atop his stories waiting to be unpicked, he’s not someone who simply writes for the inevitable collected edition. He’s working in a medium that is, first and foremost, serialised. As such – and this is true of both Animal Man and New X-Men, two runs that saw earlier issues significantly illuminated by what would follow – among the deep levels of mystery, he’s still aware of the importance of crafting individual, monthly issues (or shorter “mini-arcs”) that on their own terms stand out like jewels.

And that’s certainly the case with Batman #678. Ostensibly nothing more than the third part of the wider Batman RIP storyline, and with pages that advance that main plot by small measures while still retaining much of the inherent mystery and weirdness, where this issue jumps out as one of the best of Morrison’s run so far is in the relatively self-contained tale of a drugged-up, amnesiac Bruce Wayne wandering the streets of Gotham attempting to rediscover his identity.

Now, admittedly the “down-and-out with a heart of gold acting as guardian angel” is a trope that’s almost as old as story itself (even in comics, there are fairly immediate antecedents in the likes of Sandman’s Mad Hettie) but Morrison makes particularly strong use of Honor Jackson here. A character previously seen being given money on the street by Wayne (in one of those Morrisonian blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scenes that you’d never have guessed would prove to be important), here he’s Bruce’s guide (while also using those still-inherent fighting skills as a bodyguard) and it’s a genuinely touching tale – even moreso when Bruce learns that the man he’s spent the day with had actually died that morning (again, something that verges on cliché is given weight by the fact that it was probably Bruce’s money that gave Jackson the means to overdose). How much of the day’s experience was real, then, and how much in his head?

Irrespective of whether you actually know the Silver Age story of the Zur-En-Arrh Batman, meanwhile, that final page (complete with direct quotation of the issue in question) is an absolutely arresting image – has Bats truly gone bats? Or is he clawing his way back to a new kind of sanity? Throughout this run we’ve had hints and references made to a plethora of Silver Age concepts, and with some of the most blatant in this issue (Bat-Mite also makes an appearance, while Dr Hurt dons a costume not dissimilar to the one worn by Thomas Wayne in another old story that posited somehow that Bruce’s father was in fact the first Batman) a sense of the master plan is starting to become clear – by hook or by crook, Morrison is establishing, as part of his “new” Batman mythology, that these stories actually happened. Maybe they actually happened to Bruce, or maybe they all took place in his head as part of Hurt’s isolation experiment. Either way, though, it’s a ballsy move – tearing down the boundaries of “pre” and “post”-Crisis continuity to create something altogether more… dare we say it… legendary?

The last time DC decided to tear down the Batman, they had a drugged-up muscleman unleash the entire population of Arkham upon him before breaking into his home and snapping his back. This time, Morrison is playing on something rooted far deeper within the character – dark, twisted psychology. In requiring more than a cursory read to truly understand what’s going on, it perhaps doesn’t play to the gallery as much as a usual big-bucks blockbuster comics run might – but it’s bold, daring comics, especially in a title of this stature, and it’s all the better for it.

Every Wednesday we take turns to delve into our trusty longboxes, pluck out a dusty back issue, and give you our thoughts. We’ll also try and place it in the context of the time it was originally published.

We’ve taken our fair share of pops at Jeph Loeb of late – it’s not something we’d apologise for, as he genuinely is writing some of the worst comics Marvel are publishing at the moment, but it is worth noting that in this industry, writers don’t tend to achieve his level of success and repute by being entirely worthless. There must have been a point at which Loeb was writing comics good enough to grant him his current reputation – and, indeed, there was. In his collaborations with Tim Sale, he’s turned in some genuinely great work – Batman : The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, Spider-Man : Blue, A Superman For All Seasons. But before his switch to Marvel (and indeed before his descent into a world of cack with his Superman/Batman run), his biggest success was Hush, the mega-selling twelve-part Batman story.

It’s not as fondly regarded now as it was at the time, mind – largely because it’s one of those stories that has far less going on than appears, once you begin to peer under the surface. Essentially, it’s a “blockbuster” series designed to bring together as many famous Batman characters as possible (plus Superman) for Jim Lee to draw – because, really, the book’s success was more down to the return of Lee to mainstream interior artwork than anything else. As such, Hush is seen as something of a “style over substance” effort. Not that said “style” is unwelcome – Lee’s artwork is gorgeous from start to finish, almost career-best work.

And it’s not as if Loeb doesn’t try to bring the substance. In this final issue, he finally brings together the disparate threads of his “mystery” – the identity of the murderer of Bruce’s childhood friend Tommy Elliott. The main problem, though, is that it doesn’t really work as a mystery at all – despite the assertion that “all the clues were there from the beginning”, and references to things like The Purloined Letter, it really isn’t a fair game. Essentially, the story is a succession of “ah, you thought it was them, but it’s not!” rug pulls – the apparent identity of Hush jumps from Two-Face to Jason Todd to Elliott himself, while characters such as Ra’s al Ghul and even Lex Luthor make appearances without it ever really being clear what their true role in the plot is. Even after Elliott is unmasked as his own “killer” (with some really quite ludicrous motivation for his hatred of the Waynes – because he’d engineered his parents’ car accident as a child in order to inherit their money, but Thomas Wayne saved his mother), there’s a further “twist” to come as it transpires that the Riddler, after a dip in a Lazarus pit, had figured out Batman’s identity and engineered the entire thing.

It’s not a bad ending in and of itself, but the problem is that it feels like an epilogue after one sudden “reveal” too many – and it’s hard to see what purpose it solves. Nigma having knowledge of Bruce’s identity opens a whole can of worms that even Loeb seems aware of, as he offers the flimsy cover-up clause that “a riddle that everyone knows is worthless”. It’s almost as if Loeb realised that Elliott made a less compelling villain than first thought (or that the dots didn’t simply join together as regards his knowledge of the double-life), and felt obligated to bolt on an even wider conspiracy. But unfortunately, it doesn’t really fly, and furthermore, it’s a difficult bit of status quo to leave hanging for the future (I’m not even sure how it was resolved for the Riddler to have become the money-grabbing celebrity detective he is in the current run) – even as Loeb cancels out the one major change that did seem to have legs (the intriguing Batman/Catwoman relationship, left in ruins at the end by such a hasty moment that you wonder if it wasn’t forced on the writer by editorial decree).

That’s not to say that the book is totally worthless as a read. While it suffers from one of Loeb’s most annoying tropes – masses of in-character narration that consists of little more than recapping plot or explaining who various characters are as they appear - it’s clear from this and other work that the mythology of Batman is one that Loeb gets. He has a good understanding of the character and his wide supporting cast, and it makes him a decent choice for this “pick ‘n’ mix” of a story, even if said story is more lightweight than it fancies itself. Of particular note, among the many twists that the story piles on, is the use of Harold, an oft-forgotten member of the early-mid ‘90s Batcave team, and the ending to his story is genuinely tragic.

In the end, though, while Hush was lauded at the time, and sold by the bucketload, reading it now leaves you with a similar feeling to an overdose of sugar – it’s oversaturated, too reliant on Lee’s artwork to gloss over the holes in the plot, and creates more problems for itself than it can solve. It’s certainly not without worth – and gets points for being a genuine, self-contained Batman story at a time when the Batbooks were still being used for endless annual interminable crossovers – but it does mark the beginning of the end for Loeb’s “golden touch”, and you can’t help but wonder if the hype and success of such a mediocre story may have set him down the road towards thinking dross like Ultimates 3 and Hulk was in any way acceptable.