Batman - Before 2011 Renumbering

I know some see lots of depth in Morrison’s writing but I’m not liking it. Morrison’s ‘depth’ comes at the cost of messing with the established characterizations of the characters.

Grant Morrison’s run on Batman has been steeped in controversy since it’s start. At first, I was very much into what Morrison was trying to do; with his extremely “comic book-y”, kind of 70s interpretation of Batman. I didn’t mind that he was doing some out of the box stuff with Damian, and the silver-age references. It’s Grant Morrison, and it worked. At least, I thought so.

But once he started the whole lead up to Batman RIP (#672 or so), I started to dislike what Grant was doing. The classic, fun interpretation of Batman started to become vastly overshadowed by Grant’s desire to “mind**” his readers with these extremely surreal situations, and a new writing style he dubbed “channel-zapping comics”. A style in which the reader is jerked from one event to another without any set up, and possibly without any resolution.

That style is what I really find at fault in Morrison’s more recent stories. From the start of Batman RIP on, the story he told was a cluttered, confusion, and extremely bizzare mess. In my very humble opinion, of course.

Perhaps, if Grant hadn’t attempted this “channel-zapping” style of writing, his entire run would have been as fun and enjoy as the beginning of his run was. Unfortunately, he decided to be innovative, he decided to be different…and it backfired. I think, at least.

Given that most reviews are based on Grant Morrison; this is on Tony Daniel.

His work on batman came after Judd Winick whose story from what I remember just seemed silly (two face as a batman?)

Anyway Tony Daniel seems to be one of those writers that gradually becomes better as the series goes on. The first story is good with the surprise reveal of the new black mask identity.

Where he seems to run into trouble is with tight spaces. With batman 700 coming out, his story was shortened to two issues and felt contrived and confusing.

Then grant morrison came back for some r.i.p. shenaningans

Then Peter Milligan’s oneshot that seemed to confuse that batman timeline and just typically take up space while the Return of Bruce Wayne story kicked in.

Anyway what I’m trying to say is Tony Daniel writes a decent batman.

He is also doing both the writing and the art as of issue 704 and he is definitely worth giving a shot.