#Grant Morrison's Batman

[vertigoartgore]

2009's Batman and Robin Vol.1 #1 cover by Frank Quitely and Alex Sinclair (original pencils, sketch variant, 1st printing & 2nd printing).

[spocks-husband]

I don't care what Grant Morrison or anyone else on the planet says-- this is my Talia. She is complex and traumatized and loving and scared and as gentle as she possibly can be with hands taught only to kill, and Bruce is (until Damian) the brightest, most beautiful thing in her life. She loves that man more than anything. Fuck you. Go read Batman Chronicles #8.

[tiger-in-the-flightdeck]

I feel like making waves!

(Some of these are like my Anti-Takes, so oh god please do not come raze my home to the ground and salt the earth!)

[redrobinsrobbingrobin]

A message for DC writers:

If you make a ‘hero’ an abuser (some Batman runs), a pedophile (you know what you did, Hal), a racist, a bigot, an all around terrible person, you haven’t written a hero, you’ve written a bad person who does acts of good occasionally.

Thank you.

[7weaslesinacoat]

help.

help

help i just rediscovered “ian wayne”

help

help

(edit: IS THAT TITUS)

send help

[zeynyukine3011]

This page is so fucked up, if you stop and think about it a little. Batman, the hero of Gotham who protects everyone, the hero who comforts children with lollipops, intended to send his own 10 year old son to an abusive place.

In this context, Talia is a horrible mother who can (and did) willingly kill her own son. Damian didn't even meet her until he was eight. He was deprived of a mother's and father's love. Talia was an abusive and evil character, a cartoonish, a two dimensional villain.

In this context, League of Assassins wasn't an organisation that wanted to make world a better place for animals and plants. They gassed Damian's pets because apparently they were a weakness. They were a cult who terrorised everything and everyone with only evil intentions.

And Bruce Wayne, Batman, wanted to send his son, a ten year old child who didn't know anything other than pain, death and suffering, to this abusive cult and to his abusive mother just because he saw a dream of an evil Batman. He didn't even know it was Damian, he just assumed it was. And it took Damian's death to prove him that it actually wasn't him.

Bruce might have not abused Damian with his own hands, but sending him to League of Assassins, even while Damian said that he wanted to stay with his father, begged him to not send him to his mother, even while before this, Damian still had chosen Bruce over Talia, is abusive.

Writer tried to justify it by saying, "Oh, yes, this child will be a very evil adult when he grows up.". But that's also fucked up in it's own. No one should be punished for something they didn't do.

You see a dream in which your child allegedly becomes a villain in the future. So instead of, you know, raising him to be a better person and teaching him to be a hero, you sent him to a villain organisation where he will be a bigger threat by being a worldwide villain, not just a Gotham villain. Great idea, Bruce 😃!

Damian was desperately trying to gain his father's approval, he was desperate for his father's love. He tried, repeatedly, to prove himself to Bruce. And in return Bruce did this. And yes, Damian died because of this. Because he wanted to show his father that he could be good. Thus, this made it his end.

And no one around them said that it wasn't a good idea to send a child to his abusive mother. So they are not blameless too.

So yeah, Grant Morrison didn't only butchered Talia's character, he butchered Bruce's too. Didn't anyone in DC realize how horrible this was?

[light-the-spark-of-dawn]

There's only one thing worse than a Batman!

*dramatically rips off a sticker above "Batman"*

A Green Lantern!

[have-you-read-this-comic]

Propaganda under the cut

[one-bat-day]

One of the most deeply uncomfortable rogues scenes I’ve ever fucking read get Damian away from this freak

[sokoneedsagun]

Thinking brutalia thoughts again….

[sithexiles]

[armed-with-a-waffle-iron]

Grant Morrison's Dick Grayson is essentially "The One Man that The Joker Can NEVER Defeat".

Sources: Batman (1940) #682, Batman and Robin (2009) #12, 13 & 16.

"I love that...Dick Grayson is just happy. Just, NOTHING depresses him. His parents died and he fought back. He's been a superhero since he was 10 years-old and— THAT guy; you know, who was in the Teen Titans, who KNOWS everyone, he's Superman's pal, he's Jimmy Olson's pal, he's THAT guy, you know?" -Grant Morrison

Dick is Mr. Laughs-in-the-Face-of-Danger. He out-laughed the freaking Joker (and continues to)!

[spocks-husband]

"erm well even if the rapist Talia stuff was retconned, it really ruined her character and I'll always see her as a rapist now 🤓☝🏻--" You should be shot in the streets like a dog.

[wesavegotham]

"Talia can never be redeemed and her romance with Bruce can never come back because *falls for Grant Morrison's/DC's extreme racism towards asian and arab characters in the 2000s/2010s"

Yeah, sorry, but shut the hell up. It never fails to astound me when DC actually tries to fix the mistakes they made with Talia/the al Ghuls in general these last two decades and the fans manage to be even worse than DC by clinging to the blatant racist/sexist writing of the past instead of embracing the turn for the better.

"But she did this and that!"

She's a fictional character in a fictional universe that is aware that it goes through continuity changes/retcons. What Grant Morrison did to her character was a a complete retcon of her 30 year history and characterization with zero respect for her. Why am I supposed to take Morrison's bullshit as gospel and reject any attempts to fix her from writers who know better?

[cantsayidont]

September 2010. As Bruce contemplates his very narrow escape from the Black Glove in BATMAN #701, he fields a call from Superman, who is always operating on a completely different wavelength. Morrison's observation here about Batman's relationship with his costumed colleagues isn't exactly new — witness the well-known scene in JUSTICE LEAGUE: TAS where he plunges from the sky while laconically reminding his comrades over the radio that he can't fly, at all — but it is succinct. The central theme of the "Batman: R.I.P." story of which this is part, and really Morrison's key insight into Batman as a character, is that being Batman is part of Bruce Wayne's determination to always control the narrative, no matter what. This brief scene is a reminder that however much love or respect Bruce may have for Clark, Superman's mere presence makes that control very difficult, because Superman by his very nature exists in a world of alien visitors, cosmic crises, and evil gods.

In the late '80s and throughout the '90s, it became very de mode to insist that Batman had a sort of Luthorian dread of super-people and was never more than one or two steps away from plotting their extermination, but Morrison's take is simpler than that: The core issue for Bruce is not necessarily that he mistrusts people with superhuman powers, but that when he's around them, they expect him to be a superhero, and not just a costumed mystery-man with a head full of esoteric knowledge and a belt full of Bat-gimmicks. It's true, too — I'm reminded of WORLD'S FINEST COMICS #278, back in 1982, where Katar Hol decides it's time for some regime change on his home planet Thanagar and recruits Superman and Batman to help him. What's most striking about the story is that neither Katar nor Superman even bothers to ask if Bruce might need to stop by the cave to pick up anything before they fly off to invade an alien world 400 light years away. They just expect him to roll with it, because after all, he's Batman, isn't he?

[72-votes]

No Birds Allowed: Batman without Robin

The usual claim is that Jason Todd was singularly hated by audiences. Dick Grayson, Carrie Kelley, and Tim Drake are proper, beloved Robins—and Jason Todd is the one and only outlier so unlikable that audiences killed him off by popular vote.

But this claim ignores a massive piece of the puzzle—the Robin role has long been treated as an outdated remnant of a childish era, not only by a significant share of Batman fans, but also by Batman creative teams. While there were definitely fans who hated Jason Todd, he was at least partly chosen to be killed as a scapegoat for some long-standing complaints about the Robin role in Batman stories.

The 1988 poll to kill Jason Todd wasn't just a poll to kill Jason Todd—the poll to kill Robin was a poll to kill Robin.

Fan letters columns from Batman #221 and Detective Comics #398, reacting to Dick leaving for Hudson University in Batman #217 (1969):

Denny O'Neil Batman/Detective Comics writer (1970-1980) Batman group editor (1986-2000) on sending Robin away to Hudson University:

Dan Greenfield: Actually, last night I went back through my comics and the one thing that always strikes me is that before you came onto the character, they’d already made the decision to have Robin leave. Robin was up at Hudson University and was used sparingly from that point forward. Denny O’Neil: Well, that was a conscious decision of mine. Greenfield: Oh! O’Neil: Yeah, I mean … I had been offered Batman a year before I did it. Greenfield: No kidding? I wanna hear this. O’Neil: Because that was in the (Batman TV show) camp thing. The comics were very half-heartedly following in the footsteps of the camp because it was having a palpable effect on circulation. That’s not always true but it was in that case. Camp as in the sense — as opposed to the more erudite sense — this one-line joke about: “I loved this stuff when I was 6 and now that I’m 28 and I have a bi-weekly appointment with a therapist and a little, mild drug habit and two divorces, ‘Look how silly it is.'” I would go into the most literary bar in Greenwich Village on (Wednesday) or Thursday evenings and there would be writers and poets and college professors, all looking at Batman! But when that was over, it was over. It was like somebody turned a switch. And that’s when (editor) Julie (Schwartz) said, in his avuncular way, did I have any ideas for Batman? And at that point, I wasn’t going to be asked to do camp. I was going to be asked to do anything within the bounds of good taste, etc., that I wanted to.

O'Neil, quoted from “Notes from the Batcave: An Interview with Dennis O’Neil” in The Many Lives of The Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media:

There was a time right before I took over as Batman editor when he seemed to be much closer to a family man, much closer to a nice guy. He seemed to have a love life and he seemed to be very paternal towards Robin. My version is a lot nastier than that. He has a lot more edge to him.

O'Neil in 2015:

Modern Batman does not do camp. He has to evolve but to stay true to the concept he has to stay lonely. The kids, there shouldn't be many. Keep him the lone, obsessed crusader and the stories will be better. We did a story called Son of the Demon. It told a story where he had a kid, a baby. It wasn't in continuity. These days, the kid came back and became the new Robin, and I hear that Batman's got a few more running around.

Jim Starlin, Batman writer (1987-1988), writer of A Death in the Family:

I tried to avoid using [Robin] as much as I could. In most of my early Batman stories, he doesn’t appear. Eventually Denny asked me to do a specific Robin story, which I did, and I guess it went over fairly well from what I understand. But I wasn’t crazy about Robin.

I thought that going out and fighting crime in a grey and black outfit while you send out a kid in primary colors was kind of like child abuse. So when I started working on Batman, I was always leaving Robin out of the stories, and Denny O’Neil who is the editor finally said, "You gotta put [Robin] in."

In the one Batman issue I wrote with Robin featured, I had him do something underhanded, as I recall. Denny had told me that the character was very unpopular with fans, so I decided to play on that dislike. [...] At that time, DC had this idea that they were gonna do an AIDS education book, and so they put a box out and wanted everybody to put in suggestions of who should contract AIDS and perish in the comics. I stuffed it with Robin. They realized it was all my handwriting so they ended up throwing all my things out. About six months later, Denny came up with this idea of the call-in thing. [...] I didn’t find out about it until I came back [from Mexico] and found out that, just as I expected, my ghoulish little fans voted him dead. But by a much smaller margin than I’d imagined. It was only like 72 votes out of 10,000, so statistically it was next to nothing.

Dan Raspler, assistant editor/associate editor to Denny O’Neil (1988-1990):

Denny wasn’t really interested in comics continuity, and he didn’t like superheroes. And if you read his work, you see his influence was really a pushing away from the conventions at the time—it was growing old, that sort of Golden Age-y, Silver Age-y stuff, and Denny sort of modernized it, and he never stopped feeling that way. Jim Starlin’s Batman appealed to Denny. It was a little more ‘down to Earth. Nobody liked Robin at the time. For a while Robin was not—it didn’t make sense in comics. Comics were darkening, and so having the kid was just, it was silly, and even at the time I kind of didn’t. Now Robin is my favorite all-time character, but at the time when I was twenty-whatever, I accepted kicking Robin out, the short pants and all the rest of it.

Comic shop owner Phil Beracha on A Death in the Family, quoted in The Sun Sentinel (October 22, 1988):

"I got 100 copies, and I don't expect them to last past the weekend," said Phil Beracha, owner of Phil's Comic Shoppe in Margate. "I usually get 50 copies of Batman. I doubled my order, and I still expect to sell out." The readers voted right, Beracha said. "Robin is an outdated concept. He was created in the `40s, and back then in a comic book you could have a kid beating up grown men. I don't think that works today."

Writer Steve Englehart, quoted in "Batman, the Gamble; Warner Bros. is betting big money that a 50-year-old comic book vigilante will be a `hero for our times'" in the Los Angeles Times (June 18, 1989):

Writer Steven Englehart, who did a series of Batman stories in Detective Comics, also worked up some movie treatments. In a letter to Comics Buyer's Guide, he revealed the approach he had in mind, which would have pleased Batfanatics: "My first treatment had Robin getting blown away in the first 90 seconds, so that every reviewer in the country would begin his review with, `This sure isn't the TV show.' "

Michael Uslan, producer and film rights holder for the 1989 Batman film:

I only let Tim [Burton] see the original year of the Bob Kane/Bill Finger run, up until the time that Robin was introduced. I showed him the Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers and the Neal Adams/Denny O'Neil stories. My biggest fear was that somehow Tim would get hold of the campiest Batman comics and then where would we be?

"Death Knell for the Campy Crusader" in the Orlando Sentinel (23 June 1989):

For most people, the name Batman summons up a picture of a clown in long johns, a Campy Crusader who - with the young punster Robin - ZAPed and POWed his way into our lives. That's the Batman that appeared on TV in the mid-'60s, and that's the Batman that the world at large knows. Such is the power of television. But this ludicrous image may become obsolete now that the new, $40 million Batman movie has opened. Robin is absent from the film, as are the perky Batgirl and the utterly superfluous Aunt Harriet of the TV series. And though the movie has plenty of sound effects, they don't appear on the screen as words, spelled out in neo-Brechtian absurdity.

Sam Hamm, writer for Batman (1989 live-action film):

The Case of the Disappearing Robin is high comedy. Tim (Burton) and I had worked out a plotline that did not include the Boy Wonder, whom we both regarded as an unnecessary intrusion. Really: Our hero was crazy to begin with. Did he have to prove it by enlisting a pimply adolescent to help him fight crime? Was Bat-Baby unavailable? But the studio was insistent: There was no such thing as solo Batman, there was only Batman and Robin. So, after holding off the executives for as long as we could, Tim and I realized we had better try to accommodate them. He flew up to my house in San Francisco and we walked around in circles for two days, finally deciding that there was no way to shoehorn Robin into our story. [...] We figured that if we managed to squeeze him in, the lame hacks who were making the sequel could worry about what to do with him next. When the film went into production in London, and ran seriously over budget, WB started looking for a sequence that could be cut to save money. And there was one obvious candidate: Intro Robin! So Robin was cut from the movie and shoved back to Batman Returns— from which he was cut yet again and shoved back to Batman Forever.

Grant Morrison on creating Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (written 1987-1988, published 1989) with Dave McKean (see the annotated script's fourth page):

The original first draft of the script included Robin. Robin appeared in a few scenes at the beginning then remained at Police Headquarters for the bulk of the book, where he spent his time studying plans and histories of the house, in order to find a way in to help his mentor. Dave McKean, however, felt that he had already compromised his artistic integrity sufficiently by drawing Batman and refused point blank over for the Boy Wonder — so after one brave but ridiculous attempt to put him in a trench coat, I wisely removed him from the script.

Paul Dini on Batman: The Animated Series (1992), as told in the 1998 book Batman Animated:

The Fox Network, on the assumption that kids won't watch a kid’s show unless kids are in it, soon began insisting that Robin be prominently featured in every episode. When Fox changed the title from Batman: The Animated Series to The Adventures of Batman & Robin, they laid down the law-no story premise was to be considered unless it was either a Robin story or one in which the Boy Wonder played a key role. Out were underworld character studies like “It's Never Too Late"; in were traditional Batman and Robin escapades like “The Lion and the Unicorn.” A potentially intriguing Catwoman/Black Canary team-up was interrupted in midpitch to the network by their demand, “Where's Robin?” When the writers asked if they could omit Robin from just this one episode, Fox obliged by omitting the entire story. Looking back, there was nothing drastically wrong with Robin's full-time insertion into the series—after all, kids do love him. Our major gripe at the time was that it started turning the series into the predictable Batman and Robin show people had initially expected it would be. For the first season, Batman had been an experiment we weren't sure would work. We were trying out different ways of telling all kinds of stories with Batman as our only constant. For better or worse, having a kid forced him, and the series, to settle down.

Christian Bale, star of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy (2008):

If Robin crops up in one of the new Batman films, I'll be chaining myself up somewhere and refusing to go to work.

Summed up

Among the keepers of Batman, there has been a vocal contingent arguing against the inclusion of Robin. They argue that Robin damages Batman's brooding, solitary persona. They argue that the concept of Robin is too ridiculous and fantastic for the grounded, gritty ideal of Batman. They argue that a respectable version of Batman shouldn't allow, encourage, or train "child soldiers" to endanger their lives fighting against violent evil-doers.

The original and most iconic Robin, Dick Grayson, has definitely benefited from his deep roots in DC lore and his consistent popularity among fans—and yet even he has been shunned from various Batman projects over the decades. When even he struggles to get his foot in the door, his successors face stiffer opposition.

So it's not quite correct to say that Jim Starlin hated Jason Todd. In his own words, Starlin wasn't fond of Robin, and his storytelling (most obviously A Death in the Family) set out to argue against Batman having any kind of "partner" at all. This, following the wildly successful comic that treated Barbara Gordon as a disposable prop. A growing audience welcomed the Dark Age, and the gruesome spectacles made of kid-friendly elements like Batgirl and Robin.

This trend could be broken by the upcoming sequel to The Batman and by the planned slate of upcoming DCU films. But most Robin fans will tell you that many movie-going Batman fans still have their doubts about Robin sharing Batman's spotlight.