Yanick Paquette

This is my first swamp thing outside of random appearances in crossover events and I have to say the setup for the story is pretty damn epic. Life versus rot. The fundamental forces, with avatars. In love. I mean, how sweet is that?

Romeo and Juliette can suck it.

This is the kind of romance I can dig!

Oh, fantastically gruesome art, too. Blown away.

After wounding Darkseid with a bullet fired through time Bruce Wayne is struck down by a bolt of omega energy and thrown into the deep past where he must fight his way though amnesia and follow clues he left for himself, jumping from era to era, chased by something big and nasty with teeth and tentacle, first as a cave-man, then as a witchfinder, then as a pirate, then as a cowboy and so on until he gets to a station hanging over the heat death of the universe, while his superhero friends show more search for him to stop him because he's so soaked in omega energy when he returns to his his own time he'll destroy the whole world AND I MEAN COME ON.

Return Of Bruve Wayne is the culmination of a few years' worth of build-up and it's got the usual Morrisonian high mind-mending-concept-to-page rate and also Bruce Wayne as a cave-man, a prate, a cowboy, etcetera. Really, it's got everything, and it still feels fresh and mad and fun. show less

I'll admit that I'm not a huge fan of Batman. I think I'm generally in the minority when I say that I prefer the campier versions over the serious ones. But I decided to give Grant Morrison's run of [b:Batman Incorporated|10863384|Batman Incorporated|Grant Morrison|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1391572351s/10863384.jpg|15778514] a try since I enjoyed his time on X-men. Unfortunately, I didn't like this collection. The stories tended to bore me and only managed to catch my attention in a few show more brief spots. And the idea of Batman making himself into a global corporation, of sorts, was creeping me out by the end.

It also didn't help that the artwork was all over the place. At one point we even ventured into Tron/CGI land with the "Batman and Oracle in Nightmares in Numberland". I absolutely hated the artwork in that issue. It made the story unreadable for me because the images were so bad and so busy looking that I had hard time paying attention to the text.

If you're a hardcore Batman fan, I'm sure you'd enjoy this run. However, if you're like me, and kind of picky about the franchise, then I wouldn't recommend it. show less

I have read and enjoyed many comics written by Grant Morrison, and then I have read others that struck me as a kind of low-grade metaphysical action writing: a spew of cultural information thrown at the rough grid that is the basic foundation of comics, with the expectation that readers would make sense of it, and credit him with the ability to construct disparate connections between far-flung subjects.

This book fits fully into the latter group. For all the strengths of such Morrison books show more as We3, his Animal Man writing, his run on the X-Men, his excellent Superman -- well, this collection of stories about Bruce Wayne's return from the depths of time is perhaps the strongest evidence of what could be called the "deceitful claptrap" thread running through other of his work.

On the surface, the idea is strong: Batman is the least super-powered, the least supernatural, of superheroes in the DC pantheon. To have him barrel through time, from prehistoric mythology through sea-faring pirates and Salem-era witchcraft, is to have a study in contrasts. Morrison knows what he's doing. He knows that Batman is a myth of a man, and that no myth as strong as his could grow to the fore without slowly tossing seeds back in the timeline -- all myths build on pre-existing myths, and the stronger the new myth the more likely the older ones are to come to appear less as precedent and more as prefiguring.

But the thesis is where the book stops being enjoyable. Beyond that, it is a series of pastiche renderings of various period cliches, each garbled just enough to appear mysterious, but in truth the mystery is really just sloppiness benefiting from a very strong brain and some accomplished illustrating partners.

I always thought Morrison's best work was his work-for-hire, when he had to limit his fathomless penchant for mythmaking to the contours of a pre-existing character. It was true of his X-Men, and of his Superman, and quite recently of his Batman, but this time around his worst inclinations got the better of him. show less