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Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Batman RIP-off


Re-reading my recent hate mail regarding Batman RIP, I am about 90% sure it was a lame-ass attempt to start a "fake feud" in the mold of recent posts. But I feel bad about not giving Batman RIP more publicity, so I will reference a post from Topless Robot reacting to the news that the ending for Batman RIP will be in Final Crisis #6:

"How fucking stupid of me to assume that the final issue of "Batman R.I.P." would be the conclusion of the story. I'm so glad that, if I were a loyal Batman reader, to be able to find out suddenly that the story I've been reading for the last half year makes no sense unless I also purchase the end of the Final Crisis saga, which I'm sure I wouldn't need to buy all its previous issues to make sense. That's real fucking swell.

And so fucking nice of you to create a bullshit lame ending for the "Batman R.I.P." graphic novel, so that people can buy that and...have absolutely nothing, because the real fucking ending is still going to be in the Final Crisis collected edition. What a huge goddamn favor for the readers...

Maybe if we all knew this was coming, it wouldn't have been a big deal--people could have been reading Final Crisis from the start, or chosen to avoid "R.I.P." altogether. But to find out "R.I.P." is meaningless without Final Crisis--AFTER "R.I.P." IS FUCKING OVER? Jesus, how much contempt can you have for your customers?"


As for myself, I didn't even blink when I heard this. I'm not surprised at all. In a way, I think this unholy marriage of two separate clusterfucks is kind of sweet.

18 comments:

  1. "unholy marriage of two separate clusterfucks"

    I do not think there is any other collection of words that more aptly describes the whole situation. That was perfect. I'm going to start using that everywhere that it's possibly applicable.

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  2. Yep...glad I dodged that bullet. (sigh)notice I said THAT bullet. I'm still in the muck of Final Crisis. ...it's almost over...and then no DC event books for a loooong while.

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  3. Grant said this months ago, that it all ties into #6, though I agree reading Didio trying to defend his decisions about collecting the separate stories makes no sense. He should package all of RIP along with FC #6 AT NO ADDITIONAL COST to the reader.

    Though I will say the art for FC #5 was pretty good and the varied artists might have helped rather than hurt as it did in FC #4.

    Though let's be real - Batman made $1 billion. So nobody is going to give a fuck about what happens in the comics.

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  4. All right. Here's where I agree with you. I dislike anytime I have to buy a title I don't usually buy in order to understand what's going on in a title I read regularly.

    That's why I gave up on the Marvel U. books (and why I'll probably give up on Ultimate Spider-man very soon also).

    Fortunately I don't regularly read Batman. I followed most of Batman RIP and wasn't impressed. I understand that it would have made more sense if I had been reading Morrison's entire Batman run. To find out that the real conclusion to it will be in Final Crisis (a title I am reading) makes me go "bleh".

    My question is: How can the guy who wrote what is probably my all-time favorite Superman story (All-Star Superman) make such a mess of Batman?

    It's all an event that ties into an event that leads into another event and sounds too Marvelous for me.

    Plus, it totally wasn't worth losing Chuck Dixon's Robin for.

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  5. Anonymous3:08 AM

    Batman R.I.P. actually is going to be my #1 of my Top Ten Worst Comics of 2008. I thought about it long and hard, and in the end, it ended up being so.

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  6. Can I say that Grant Morrison has gone too far off the deep end? That he doesn't make sense to me anymore? A pox on Batman RIP and Final Crisis!

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  7. I agree completely. With you, that is.
    I didn't see anything surprising about this, it's not like you really get well defined endings in comic book events nowadays, they either lead straight into new stunts, or feature quite essential epilogues in dozens of other books. Seems like a pretty natural evolution of that.

    Really, the Topless Robot person is a drama queen - shocked and appalled by just about everything. I think nerd rage rants are that site's main shtick.
    It even had angry rants about the Dragonball live action movie not looking very good. Yeah...

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  8. I'll say the same thing here regarding Batman R.I.P. and Final Crisis that I said in my blog: Oh, fuck this.

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  9. I found the recent Batman Last rites book helps a lot in capping off RIP. I expected (wrongly) that RIP would have some decision or event happen to batman to change things immediately. It seems like the climax of RIP is just the thing that sets Batman off reexamining his life. Last Rites is 2 issues of decision, and review (and its really good so far) and FC will have the results.

    It would have been nice to know this from the start I guess.

    I really wish Morrison wouldn't write so obscurely. If we're transitioning to a "what might have been" imaginary batman, it could be set off to make it more obvious, instead of deliberately jarring the reader. IMHO

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  10. Wow. It's like some weird dance of death DC has got going on - while the rest business world in worried about how to survive, DC seems intent to burn off as many customers as possible.

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  11. This disappoints me. I really love Grant's writing, including FC--I can't understand what's the problem with it if you ignore the clusterfuck of clusterfucks: Countdown (glad I never read it!)--but to have the Batman run end on another book is just cheap and sleazy business. However, I am somewhat inclined to think that D-man the D-bag had something *cough*a lot*cough* to do with this decision.

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  12. I'm so glad that I dorpped both Final Crisis and RIP early on. I don't regret it one bit.

    After Countdown and OYL, my bullshit hype detector had been getting a lot better, and both of these had way to much hype to actually be any good.

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  13. Anonymous11:52 AM

    I don't follow Batman, because while I like the character, I've only ever liked his comics when they were written by Frank Miller. (Talk about another guy who's lost it.)

    I fairly recently got into DC comics...largely by accident, as a friend at work gets all of them and gives me the cast-offs. The only books I've enjoyed consistently from the DC stable have been the Johns JSA and Lantern stuff. Everything else just seems like hyperactive drivel, though I have found a few gems and interesting story lines in amongst the rabble.

    This R.I.P. and FC debacle seems to reek of rabble.

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  14. I wonder how this will impact sales of FC?

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  15. I'll go farther in saying that Grant Morrison's work is overrated and he's a shit writer compared to the likes of Johns, Brubaker, Faction, and BKV.

    The whole "you have to reread it a couple times to understand the depth and meaning to his writing" argument is a festering pile of horse shit. He's not Shakespeare, Voltaire, or even a poor man's Emerson. He's a narcissistic piss poor writer that's mentally damaged due to an influx of drugs. Batman R.I.P. was evidence of it. Final Crises is evidence of it ALONG with proving Didio's ineptitude to properly run DC and anally rape the consumer.

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  16. OK, i didn't read Didio's comments that prompted TR and now I have.

    WOW! Its the "world of collected editions fault?"

    He had to make up something that seems like and ending in RIP, so the collected edition can have an ending? BUT IT ISN'T AN ENDING.

    The RIP trade buyer is going to be just as annoyed as the floppy buyer when he gets to the end of RIP and finds no proper ending. Is the trade going to contain Last Rites and FC6 too?

    Sheesh, what a moronic claim.

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  17. Course, it would also make more sense if the first series was Batman, Last Rites, and then Batman, RIP. Since you do Last Rites before you RIP.

    meh.

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  18. Lessee... I bought into Secret Wars (it got me hooked on comics). Then there was Secret Wars II. Wasn't a big DC fan, so skipped Crisis and Legends, but did buy the Millennium tie-ins. Also the 2001 series. After the X-Men went through the Siege Perilous (and thus removing ALL of the interesting characters from the book), I pretty much stopped buying Marvel, except for She-Hulk and Excalibur.

    So I dodged the biggest, great-grand-daddy CF of them all: Onslaught, which begat Heroes Reborn. And which didn't seem to have any effect on the Marvel Universe. I actually tried to read the collected trades years ago from the library, and they didn't make sense... stories continued in comics in the other volumes.

    The 52 trades were well done, especially with the commentary. But the big events? I'll wait and read the synopsis on Wikipedia.

    And I wonder... what sort of offspring will result from an "unholy marriage..."?

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