...So all right, just saw a "Batman RIP" ad.
Frankly, my first reaction is "Fuck all, that's stupid."
HOWEVER. It's Grant Morrison. And his entire run, less the Ra's crossover, has been pure fucking gold. So I am looking forward to it.
So all right. #674 alludes to a new Bat-villain, who frankly Morrison has rather oversold and made out to be some sort of perfect, implacable foe.
Who is it? Batman holds up one of his gauntlets and ponders whether this foe is telling him his name. That's led to fan speculation that it's the Black Glove from the Club of Heroes arc, or that it's Batman himself. A more interesting tack would be to take #666 literally: Damian kills his father. And while I'm sure that's not actually going to happen, I'm equally sure we haven't seen the end of that story.
Morrison himself:
Everything...the "Zur-En-Arrh" graffiti, the Joker prose story, the Club of Heroes...every detail that's been in the book for the last couple of years is significant, everything is a clue to the grand design that's unfolding.
My run on Batman is a 25-chapter novel that reaches its climax in "RIP" and maneuvers Batman into the greatest danger he's ever known, at the mercy of the world's deadliest criminal lunatics.
And yeah, I've seen all kinds of speculation about "RIP," but it's not necessarily what people think it's going to be, although there are very big changes coming to Batman. When we say that this is the story that changes the legend of the Dark Knight forever, we're quite serious about that.
Again, from anyone else, that'd be a bunch of trite horseshit. But inasmuch as this is Morrison, I'm sure he IS serious about it.
Only problem is, six months after he leaves the book, everything's going to be retconned back to status quo. Look at Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle, a fresh new Grant Morrison take on a classic series, and then look at Death of the New Gods, a painfully derivative pastiche of Kirby dots and photo backgrounds. People can't deal with changing legends forever, they want to crank out pale imitations of decades-old classics. Just ask Joe Q.
So anyway. Bruce isn't going to die. He isn't going to give up the mantle of Batman. And if he does either one of those things, then the next writer, or possibly the one after that, is going to bring everything back to status quo.
The biggest changes I could see would be Bruce getting married or his identity becoming public. Both those stories have been done, over and over again, and always with a reset switch, or in a parallel universe. But then, Morrison's entire run has been about taking old stories and putting new twists on them. So I guess we'll see.
I'm going to have to guess that the "RIP" ties back to the Nanda Parbat subplot in 52, Bruce's destruction and recreation of himself -- didn't he actually SAY "Batman is dead" at one point? And then, of course, the same story was echoed with the Joker's reinvention in the aforesaid prose story.
But of course my FAVORITE theory is that it's actually Batman: Rip, as in Hunter, and will be a crossover with Booster Gold.
