Teatime Brutality

I'm a disgrace to the internet.

2009-12-28T08:34:00.000-08:00

Look, if you'd wanted it finished in time you shouldn't have said such insanely nice things about the first two bits, now should you? How am I supposed to work with those sort of expectations? Gits.

Not really! Thanks to everyone who did say insanely nice things about Countdown to the End of Time and sorry it turned out to be about as punctual as when Invisibles counted down to the millenium.

All's not lost though. Even though I'll have to drop the "reviewing an episode without having seen it" angle now that we've seen it, I still think the material that makes up the remainder of the project will be interesting enough as a discussion of its context. I'll just call it End of Time Aftermath: Eat or something.

So, yeah. Three essay-oids left, provisionally entitled...

Merry Magha Puja, Mister Potter.

The Sheriff of Nottingham's Daughter and

Killing in the Name of Gummo.

Coming Soonish.

Countdown to The End of Time, Parts 2-4: Nominating Yourself

2009-10-21T01:18:00.000-07:00

It is said that Dickens used to make up his stories by watching the flames dance in his fireplace and writing what he saw. It is also said that every time Michael Bay has tried to use the same technique, a bunch of pesky young scamps climb up on his roof and lob fireworks down the chimney.

Hello!

Welcome to the second part of Countdown to the End of Time, an attempt to review the grand finale of Doctor Who's 'Davies Era' before having seen it by discussing everything else in human culture and constantly harking back to one quote in which Davies may, or may not, "sound like a buffoon."

Here's the first part.

And here's tonight's. In which we'll be moving from here...

"I don't think a beginning-middle-and-an-end ever goes out, but I might be wrong. Because I would say that, because I'm clinging to that hope desperately. And maybe the fact that a video game, or a Second Life or a Sims situation never ends...maybe that's the shape." - Davies.

...to discuss British television's tenth season of Big Brother and DC Comics' Final Crisis. Mister Internet has already had plenty to say about both, but I think the connections between these two problematic summer events remain criminally under-explored.

What about The Sims though, eh? What's happening there?

Well, nothing. Nobody comes, nobody goes, it is terrible. I'm talking here about the first two games, as I've not yet played the third, but the really striking thing about them is the way that nothing actually happens in the game, but an awful lot seems to happen in your head when you play it.

The Sims, the most popular computer game franchise of all eternity, involves directing little pretend people to use the toilet and feed themselves as you immerse yourself in what you'll often hear described as "a virtual sitcom" or "a virtual soap." Except...none of the things that routinely happen in sitcoms or soaps can ever possibly happen in the game. No Sim will ever comically misunderstand something another Sim has said, leading to a wacky series of hijinks and social embarassment. No Sim will ever unexpectedly reveal herself to be another Sim's long lost sister. The game will track who's friends and enemies with who, and will stage little set pieces, but no stories can ever really happen within the game. You might get turned into a vampire or social services may take your kids away, but none of those 'plots' are going to develop. The best you'll get is "SimA is cheating on SimB with SimC. SimB discovers and is cross with SimsA&C" over and over again.

But...but...but...as anyone who's ever lost hours to a Sims game know, the above is a load of bobbins. All sorts of stories happen when you play it!

Here's a site where people have uploaded lots of the lovely little Sims they've made. And here's some of the things they've been saying about them...

Mia grew up in a strict christian family and was a very easy and kind child who loved playing the piano and dreamt about being a human rights attorney. It wasn't until she went to University and got new free spirited friends that she gave herself a total makeover, inside and out. She did study law for one semester but dropped out because she thought the level of education provided did not meet her needs. She then moved in with her boyfriend Leon who lived in the not-so-glamorous part of the city.

That's the story that Mia's creator experienced while playing The Sims. The exciting thing though, is that the computer she was playing it on had no idea. When Sonic the Hedgehog collects a magic ring or Pac-Man noms up a ghost then flags are flipped and variables altered so that the game 'knows' this has happened. But the game never knew that Mia wanted to be a human rights attorney or that her parents were Christians. The game doesn't even know what human rights attorneys or Christians are.

The Sims is so popular among people who don't play computer games because you don't play The Sims on a computer. You play The Sims in your imagination, where Mia has her dreams and her regrets, while staring blankly at a rather banal computer game in which Mia is making a sandwich. At least one acclaimed novelist, Fay Weldon, is a Sims addict and it's easy to imagine her sat there, projecting inner lives onto her Sims as real as those of Ruth Patchett or Praxis, or...okay, I've only ever read two Weldon novels. It's like your mind furnishing a mirage just to break the monotony of a desert. It's like Dickens, looking into his fire. And what different ideas he and Weldon would have about how to end Mia's story.

Now, on outing yourself as a Big Brother viewer, one of the first things that people who don't 'get' the show will say is, "I don't know you can watch a load of people sitting there doing nothing."

You can probably see where I'm going with this. So before we go there, lets take a moment to see what all this has to do with Final Crisis and Doctor Who season finales.

From the perspective of Grant Morrison, the writer of Final Crisis, then his work is adjacent to the Who finales. As he said of Season Four's finale (Journey's End), "what intrigues me most are the numerous, absolutely coincidental, similarities to my comic FINAL CRISIS [..]which leads me to believe that creative people, particularly those writing or recording with a mass or populist audience in mind, have all begun to tell a very similar [...] story."

But from Davies' perspective, Big Brother is (or rather was) adjacent, being just the sort of event television to which his Who finales aspire, as we discussed in the last part.

I love reality TV. I get pissed off when actors complain there's no drama on television. Big Brother is drama; it is crafted, it's a story well told.

- Davies, New Statesman .

Quite how directly Davies' finales can be linked to Big Brother we'll go into in a later article, but for now we're left with a sense of them as being 'flanked' by these two other texts. Final Crisis on one side, and Big Brother on the other.

Not that they make such strange companions. Final Crisis and Big Brother 10 have a couple of very important things in common. Firstly there're both successful failures...BB10 took the crafting of stories within reality TV to new heights, but managed to get the entire show sentanced to a lingering execution. Final Crisis managed to pull off the trick of providing a fitting conclusion to three incongruent epics, all of which have run for between twenty and forty years, while dramatising withing a superhero fight-book a shift from a Hegalian to a Derridian dialectic and possibly inventing an entirely new category of fiction... but it failed to bring its audience with it. They carried on buying it, unlike BB's audience who just switched off, but my god did they bitch.

The more interesting thing though is that they both began after they finished.

The tag-line for Final Crisis' advertising was 'The Day Evil Won'...but when in the story did this victory take place? Well, 'evil winning' here means the victory of Darkseid, a GOD OF EEEEVIL, who it turns out has defeated the GODS OF QUITE NICE in a final battle. After that nasty turn of events then the story is over and there's nothing left for the comic to show us except the superheroes coming to realise that the story is over, and then finding a way to jumpstart it.

Steven Grant once wrote that "Story in Final Crisis isn't story, as traditionally understood in western literature" and (although I couldn't disagree more with his 'apotheosis of mad ideas' reasoning for having said that) I think this is spot on. We're not reading a story in Final Crisis, we're seeing a dramatisation of what might happen to a fictional universe and its inhabitants after there isn't any story left.

In 2008, Deepak Chopra, did a panel at San Deigo with Morrison and came out with this...

"If you had only creativity and evolution, you would have no universe," he said. "If you had only destructive forces, the universe would dissipate into a black hole." Chopra clarified, "you need the tension between the two forces."
[...]
He said the message of the superhero is "keep winning, but don't win."

This is literally what Final Crisis depicts, right down to the black hole. Evil has won, the story has ended and the fictional universe in which it played out is now collapsing into a fictional black hole.

But again...when did Evil win? In the first issue? No. If it had actually happened there the series would have contained trace elements of story. More than trace elements really - having 'The Day Evil Won' anywhere in Final Crisis would have been like having a veal escalope anywhere in a vegan carrot cake. So Morrison had it happen in his 2005-6 Seven Soldiers series. And even there had it happen off-screen.

The story ended about three years before Final Crisis began. Evil won...but since a conclusive win for either good or evil leaves a fictional universe with nothing to do, then the victory was unsustainable. Darkseid, the GOD OF EVIL, began a slow fall down into a black hole, dragging the whole of Superheroland down after him.

The moral here is that if you live inside a story, it might not be a good idea to end that story.

So, if Final Crisis was over before it really began, what actually happens in its seven issues? Well, Superman saves us all, naturally. He couldn't do anything else. But this time he can't operate within the story - flying in to save the day - this time he has to rebuild it. Bolting together scraps of meaning and bleeding chunks of narative.

We'll come back to how he goes about this later on. Because now we've returned to "these fragments I have shored against my ruins" territory then it's time to enter the Big Brother house.

Big Brother is the purest form of reality TV. Grab a load of people, lock 'em in a house with Not Much to do, and let the public successively reject them. As Final Crisis argues that the figure of Superman can 'contain' all other superheroes, Big Brother can contain all other reality TV. But before its tenth UK season started, it had already finished.

Big Brother considered as 'cultural event' concluded with the Shilpa Shetty incident and the Passion of the Jade, that grizzly chain of events discussed in the previous article. At the height of that controversy, Davina opened a BB episode with the words, "Good evening. This is the news." and she was right. But this proved to have been the telos of the Big Brother phenomena, and Jade's death three month's before the start of the tenth season capped off the era in which Big Brother mattered.

Also broadcast before BB10 was the conclusion of Big Brother considered as 'drama' or 'story'. This took the form of Dead Set, a five part horror thriller that played out the ever-popular Zombie Apocalypse scenario from the perspective of those making a season of Big Brother and those locked in the house. With all the tropes of the show in place, and continuity with previous seasons established by cameos from previous housemates, then to all intents and purposes, Dead Set was the tenth season of Big Brother. And it came with a proper end - the logic of rejection and the power we attach to shouty ignorance (Big Brother's major themes) GET US ALL KILLED BY ZOMBIES. In its closing shots, Dead Set reached a conclusion that turned the nine previous seasons of Big Brother into a narative. "Here's what this show has said about people. Here's why, if we can't escape that, WE'LL ALL GET KILLED BY ZOMBIES." Viewed as one text, Big Brother and Dead Set make a very similar case to Cloud Atlas.

So, with Big Brother's narative concluded, the producers of BB10 were in the same situation as the heroes of Final Crisis - having to build a story out of scraps. But of course, that's what they do every year, innit? Film a load of people, give them a few paltry party games, edit it into a drama. That's the skill of making reality televison, the skill Davies applauds when talking about BGT's Susan Boyle moment...

"[T]he greatest piece of drama shown on television this year was Susan Boyle. [...] It's a story. They sold that package. [...] Whoever sat at a desk in Britain'sGotTalentLand and put together that package of Susan Boyle saying, 'I'm a virgin. I've never been kissed.' Walking on stage, the reactions from Simon Cowell. It's beautifully put together. It's put together like a script. And, y'know, the cutaways to the audience mocking her before she started singing, Amanda Holden's amazement as she started singing."

And BB10's producers rose to that challenge, turning incident into story like never before. This year the episodes weren't just themed around particular characters, with a clear trajectory across the hour...this year we had ongoing story-arcs. I'll never know how they managed this considering that they were transmitting these episodes only a day behind the events in the house, but they got thier stories to progress and develop.

And even, somehow, they managed to get in plot twists. We watched first creepy stalker Sree and then creepy stalker Marcus hound poor Noirin into the ground...until circumstances with Siavash pulled the rug out from under us and revealed how in control Noirin really had been all along. Filming a bunch of events, editing them to get out the next night and repeating this process every day for three months ought to result in the 'Sims or Second Life' scenario, in pages from the infinite book. But in Big Brother 10 it sustained a classical, beginning-middle-and-end structure for the whole summer.

Didn't help much though. Everybody stopped watching and Channel 4 chose not to bother renewing thier contract for the show. They've one more season they're obligated to make next year, then that's it.

So, why? Why did a "crafted drama, a well-told story" fail so badly?

I suspect it's because its viewers were happier playing The Sims - looking into the fire and seeing the Pickwick Papers, watching an animated lady make a sandwich and seeing a thwarted human rights attorney. The nightly Big Brother 'highlight shows' had always been directive and selective, but in previous years they'd existed as part of a Big Brother that was also made up of podcasts, psychology shows, all sorts of other nonsense and, most importantly, a live feed of footage from the house - a true chance to watch people sitting around doing nothing and imagine what might be the story there.

The live feed was, being unspeakably boring, the closest thing to playing The Sims or Dickens' fireplace, but even if you never watched it, just knowing it was there was a guarantee of the fact that other interpretations of what was going on in the house were not only possible but were part of the game of watching Big Brother. In the show's heyday it wasn't unlike Joss Whedon's idea of Firefly being, "a show about nine people looking into the blackness of space and seeing nine different things" except it was a show about Dermot O'Leary looking into a house and seeing gentle absurdism, Davina McCall looking into a house and seeing romantic comedy and Russell Brand looking into a house and seeing...well, this sort of thing...

Rosebud the Horse: Rosebud the Horse is a very polite and well-spoken character who allegedly lives with Brand in his home, in which he works as his slave and is often mistreated and forced to carry out perverted misdemeanours by members of the "Womanising Circuit" including Beppe di Marco, Dean Gaffney amd David Walliams. He dresses in the style of a country gent, with tweed jacket, smart shirt and tie. He is often treated badly by Brand; in one episode he slapped him in the face.

That's taken from a Wikipedia list of characters who appeared on different Big Brother shows. I hope it makes my point that much of the draw of the British Big Brother was how spacious it was. How much room it offered for interpretation, nonsense and making stuff up.

But by BB10 then it'd all folded up and closed down. Davina McCall now presented the show, did all the interviews and editorialised about it all on Big Brother's Big Mouth. Her opinions were the only ones you got to hear at any length, and her opinions were far from impartial; one memorable interview saw her explaining to an evicted housemate that she'd 'understand' what a horrible person she was when she got a chance to watch the tapes. No one %$%$ with the Judge of all Evil.

With nothing but a directive show and a monotone commentary, Big Brother finally stabilised as classical storytelling and came to rest. It tried to escape finality by embracing finitude, and it died.

But what died in Final Crisis?

The people putting together the hardback collection reckon it was Batman, and so they put a big sad ol' World's Finest Pieta on the cover. It's totally at odds with the roaring fury of the equivalent scene in the book, but makes a lot of sense if you're looking to shift some copies of the thing. "Here's the book in which Batman dies!" is a more obvious hook than anything I'm talking about tonight.

Though (spoilers!) Batman doesn't die at all. He's last seen alive and well, acompanied by a caption saying, "But the fire burns forever." Him being alive and well tends to go against the idea of him having died, and "But the fire burns forever" tends to go against the whole idea of 'dying'.

Because that's what really dies in Final Crisis. Endings.

The title's a joke, setting us up to think it's principally the end of DC's long-running sequence of 'Crisis' events, whereas in fact it's the Crisis of Finality. The death of finitude. The death of confinement.

We learn that story's really ending not so much because of the triumph of the GOD OF EEEVIL - no, that's just a symptom - but because the Monitors, those who stand outside of story and work to keep it neatly within its borders, have themselves been infected with story.

And since stories have ends...that means they're ending. And so is everything else.

Superman's solution is to find a happy ending. But there is only one.

Glen David Gold's novel Sunnyside sees Charlie Chaplin dealing with the same problem...

'How's the war movie?' Syd asked.

'How's the war?'

'It should be over by Christmas, they say.'

'Is that a fact?' Chaplin poured himself a glass of water from a pitcher he kept on the floor behind the desk. 'I was thinking. Comedies end with a marriage. What about tragedies?'

'Death?' Syd wished they weren't discussing tragedies. Tragedies made no money. He suspected his brother had no mind for them.

'No,' Chaplin said, 'Every story ends in death, if only you follow it long enough.'

'Every story is a tragedy, then. Can we just start rolling on the next picture? What's the setup?'

'No setup.' Chaplin was feeling a new vein of energy. 'No story ends happily. The happy ending is only about knowing where to end on a smile, at the very moment where fortune is still on the ascent. The open road. The wedding.'

'I guarantee you, when the war is over, we'll all be happy.'

'Something with come along to replace it.'

'There will be dancing in the street.'

'Until there isn't.'

Syd tugged at his nose, a habit he had developed in the last year or two of these conversations. 'Then something good will happen again. Eventually'.

P.315

'To be Continued...", the words Superman wants written on his gravestone, is the only happy ending we'll ever get. It's one that's superhero comics do very well, although that's normally seen as a bad thing.

"[O]ne of the things that prevents superhero stories from ever attaining the status of true modern myths or legends is that they are open ended. An essential quality of a legend is that the events in it are clearly defined in time; Robin Hood is driven to become an outlaw by the injustices of King John and his minions. That is his origin. He meets Little John, Friar Tuck and all the rest and forms the merry men. He wins the tournament in disguise, he falls in love with Maid Marian and thwarts the Sheriff of Nottingham. That is his career, including love interest, Major Villains and the formation of a superhero group that he is part of. He lives to see the return of Good King Richard and is finally killed by a woman, firing a last arrow to mark the place where he shall be buried. That is his resolution--you can apply the same paradigm to King Arthur, Davy Crockett or Sherlock Holmes with equal success. You cannot apply it to most comic book characters because, in order to meet the commercial demands of a continuing series, they can never have a resolution. Indeed, they find it difficult to embrace any of the changes in life that the passage of time brings about for these very same reasons, making them finally less than fully human as well as falling far short of true myth."

- Alan Moore, Twilight of the Superheroes pitch.

But in Final Crisis then the most despised shall be the most loved. The irresolvability of the superhero story is made into a virtue rather than a vice. That the Final Fate of the Batman is forever deferred becomes an emblem of the fact that as idea, Batman can go anywhere. Superman doesn't want "To be Continued..." on his gravestone because he's confident that he'll be ressurected. He wants "To be Continued..." on his gravestone because he's confident that his readers will continue the stuff he's stood for, be it truth, justice or the American way, and continue his story for him.

For Moore then Superhero stories' lack of fixity in time robs them of the chance of having a proper meaning, but for Morrison then that lack constitutes their meaning. Davies talks breathlesly of this with regard to Doctor Who, "Isn't that the best thing an idea can do, go anywhere, be anything, for anyone? [...] I think that's Doctor Who's greatest legacy - an imagination that goes way beyond the screen, and all the way into your head, where it's yours forever."

It's very much the same with Superman. Seagle's It's a Bird asks the question, "Can a fictional character save a real life in the real world?" and Morrison's All-Star Superman answers it definitively; the internet is lightly speckled with exchanges like this one...

jedidotflow : This is gonna sound a bit weird, but All-Star Superman #10 prevented me from committing suicide.

edosan: Not weird at all. Good to have you here.

Brian St. Claire : That isn't the least bit weird.

If Superman's not limited by the boundaries of his text, then why on earth should he, or any of his super-friends, be limited within the text by something as dull as a 'proper ending'? I'm not even sure about half of Moore's examples to be honest - Holmes comes back from his definitive resolution at Reichenbach, Arthur's return will be any day now, and most popular tellings of Robin Hood over the last fifty years have shown that the story works just fine with his death left out of the picture. Final Crisis argues that the endless form of the superhero story is perfectly fitted to its endless function.

The big showdown takes place between Superman and Mandraak...the Vampiric Lucifer figure that the Monitors' "self-assembling hyper-story" has concocted as a narative device with which to end itself. Here's everything that takes us up to that point in six sentances.

- There was an infinite and undifferentiated substance - the monad, the absolute, the monitor, the empty page.

- Then something appeared within that substance - the multiverse, the ink, the story.

- The empty page began to mimic its contents and adopt the condition of narative...it turned from an undifferentiated and impersonal 'entity' into a pantheon of Gods.

- These 'Monitors' work to limit, control and contain story, while all the time enacting thier own - a plot that ends with the return of Mandraak, the Monitor who hates that there is now something instead of nothing, and wants it all gone.

- The end of the Monitors' hyper-story causes the stories they contained to conclude also. In Superheroland this means the victory (then death) of Evil, Earth falling into a black hole and Superman left alone as the world and the story fall apart.

- Mandraak turns up to eat the universe.

And how does Superman defeat him? Well, it's not really with a fight, but with a show and tell session. Supes fends off finality by demonstrating that his story is infinite. With a "Look up in the sky" he calls forth an army of characters who've been inspired by or ripped off from Superman, or even inspired by or ripped off from characters who've been inspired by or ripped off from Superman. Proof that he can do the best thing an idea can do... go anywhere, be anything.

This signal is receieved and understood...if the Superman concept is that free of fixity then it can even effect and change the Monitors' hyper-story. One of the Monitors has become a superhero, and is retrofitted into having been Mandraak's son. Together he and Superman pull iteration after iteration of the superhero myth out of thier A-SS; Superhero bunny rabbits, Superhero angels, Superhero poodles.

"There is no limit to what I can do," says the freshly-minted storytelling superhero god, and Mandraak dies complaining that this can't be happening - he'd read to the end of the infinite book and so knew that evil was supposed to win. What he obviously didn't know though was what a stupid notion 'read to the end of the infinite book' is.

Superhero-Monitor returns to his pantheon of meta-godly editors/game keepers/plot-police and tells them its time for them to stop pretending that they are the story. It's time for them to to become undifferentiated again and return to being the empty page. An empty page across which, without them limiting it, story can now spread out as far as it likes...in whatever direction it likes...in whatever shape it likes. Narative is left free not just of the finality of having to have a conclusion but of the finite boundaries of traditional structures. All Superman wanted was a happy ending, and we know by now what that means. The fire burns forever. To Be Continued. What's the set-up for the next picture, Charlie?

So, on one hand we've got Big Brother 10, which dealt with coming after its conclusion by clinging to the finite, and on the other we've got Final Crisis which actively rejected the finite and prised wide the infinite book.

And then, this December, we'll have The End of Time.

If Davies equates his finales with those of Pop Idol, and is modelling his drama on the SENSATIONAL MEDIA EVENT then something interesting's just happened...

And the tension when it was between Will Young and Gareth Gates was enormous and I was in a house full of like twenty people. All of us voting, all of us excited. [...] Raising the stakes until you get a finale until you don't know what's going to happen and you're at fever pitch. [...] That's drama. That was brilliant. So I remember right from the start of Doctor Who saying, 'That's what we need to hit. That's Saturday night.'

Because in Pop Idol terms then we do know what's going to happen.

Who's our winner? Will Young? Gareth Gates? Leona Lewis? Stacey Solomon?

No.

It's Matt Smith.

The little Confidential special that they put out revealing him as the Eleventh Doctor was, in a very low-key way, more like the end of a series of Pop Idol/X-Factor than the actual drama can be. Considered as a media event then 'Matt Smith becomes our new Doctor/Pop Idol' is the end of the story, but considered as a media event then that's already happened.

The End of Time is going out after its conclusion.

And if it's going to satisfy, it'll have to find a crowd-pleasing way of doing what Final Crisis attempted. It will have to end time.

To Be Continued...

Calendar Man strikes again.

2009-10-05T01:20:00.000-07:00

Hello, hello. I seem to be alternating between right-brain and left-brain posts, so before the next part of Countdown to the End of Time let's have some more Bat-chronologising.

The first part's here.
The second part's here.
The third part's here.

And this would be the fourth.

Since it's come up though, let's have some disclaimers first...

This is an attempt to generate a plausible chronology for a bunch of recent Batman stories.

This is not important. Playing this sort of game teaches you as much about how stories work as playing The Sims teaches you about raising families and making friends. It's a decadent, mechanical amusement.

This is not an attempt to generate a reading order. I do not propose you wait until after Batman and Robin#3 to read the first page of RIP.

This is not an attempt to find out what order these stories 'really happened in'. As they just made them all up. The scoundrels!

This is not an attempt to find out DC's secret masterplan. Most of the time editorial seem appropriately (see "This is not important") disinterested in this sort of thing, and when they do have a go at it have a tendancy to overcomplicate things unhelpfully. This project treats the published comics as the only primary sources.

This is not exhaustive. The only comics considered in this project are those listed in this project. So it's entirely possible that some detail from, say, Cry for Justice could stuff the whole thing up. I'll sleep.

This is not impartial. Let's say you've got two different stories in which Mary comes to terms with the death of her little lamb, and nothing to indicate which of them happened first. When someone producing a chronology of those stories puts them in order, they're making a decision as to which saw Mary really come to terms with the death of her little lamb. A certain amount of subjective privileging of The Stories I Like is unavoidable.

This is not very interesting. My workings are shown below for transparency rather than with the expectation that they'll offer a riveting read. You might want to just scroll down to the actual chronology at the bottom of the post.

Okay, that out of the way, here we go. And we're into the Reborn era now, which should be a dizzying whirl as everyone's gone non-linear on us. Winnick's jumping between three four different time periods in one issue of Batman, Yost's having flashbacks within flashbacks in Red Robin, and Morrison's now catching up with his flashforwards from last year. We may end up doing this more by the page than by the issue.

Batman #687 then, which is variously set 'YEARS AGO', 'TODAY', 'FOUR WEEKS AGO' and 'TWO WEEKS LATER'. The 'YEARS AGO' section is a long-range flashback to a young Dick and a yellow-ovaled Bruce training and anticipating the day when Dick'll be in the cowl. It's somewhat outside the bounds of this project, so we'll leave it where it is. The 'TODAY' section is set post-Battle for the Cowl, with a Dick who's accepted that he's now Batman, but not accepted accepted it. He's still wearing the Nightwing costume and not getting out of the Batmobile (which is not yet the flying model). Damien's dressed as Robin, but not in his final costume. The section concludes with the move to the penthouse.

'FOUR WEEKS AGO' takes us back to a time when Tim was Robin and shows Superman and Wonder Woman returneing Bruce's cowl. A service is held for Bruce, quiet except for Dick having a little shout about the need to conceal Batman's death from the world at large. This obviously has to go somewhere between Final Crisis and Battle for the Cowl, and I'm inclined to place it quite early after Dick's return to Gotham in Nightwing #152-3. It sits well there for Alfred too, before the Outsiders special. 'TWO WEEKS LATER' takes us to a sample adventure of the new, wisecracking Dick Grayson Batman, as he (presumably) stops the Scarecrow from doing something nasty involving a bridge. Gordon and the GCPD are around, but don't interact with Batman or express any expectation of his involvement one way or the other, so it's hard to judge how much contact they've had with him by this point.

Batman #688 goes easier on us. There're just two time-frames 'THREE WEEKS FROM NOW' and 'NOW', with 'THREE WEEKS FROM NOW' being unambiguously the follow-on from the end of #690.

The 'NOW' sequence may give us trouble though - Gordon's seen using the Bat-Signal in a peculiar way for "the fourth time in ten days"...turning it on then off again after five minutes "to let him know we're here". The implication seems to be that he's not yet used it properly to summon DickBats. However we do see it used fully in Batman and Robin's first arc...which would seem to happen before events here; The 'NOW' section of Batman #688 is very concerned with Batman's very visible public profile since coming back in force, but by the end of B&R#3 then Batman's return is still a rumour. We'll see how this plays out when we look at Batman and Robin #1-3, but it's possible that we're either going to have to go against the grain of the Gordon scene here or the Le Bossu scene there.

#689 carries on from there, though not without the possibility of other adventures inbetween. Dick says he's lately been occupied with catching Arkham escappes and a separate wave of organised crime head by He Knows Not Who. The flying batmobile makes it out of the garage this issue, which we'd not seen it do in Batman previously, and we're told that the hover-tech's been working fine for weeks. #690's a direct continuation from here, and clearly establishes Penguin's new working relationship with the Black Mask, which would seem to place it before Batman and Robin's second arc.

Well, we'll have to stop there with Batman for a while, as we don't get the last part of this arc till next week and I've not got the sense to wait. So far it's looking like this...

Batman #687 - Four weeks ago sequences.
[...lots of stuff..]
Batman#687 - Today sequences.
[...probably B&R #1-3...]
Batman#687 - Two weeks later sequences.
Batman#688 - 'now' sequence.
[possible gap]
Batman#689-90
Batman #688's Three weeks from now sequence.

What shall we do next? Streets of Gotham I think.

"The signal goes on and he shows up. That's the way it's been, that's the way it will be." says Gordon, so by Streets #1 then we're after B&R#2's "It's been a long time..." The Harley scene also works as a prelude to Gotham City Sirens #1. It'd be nice to place this issue after Batman #689 and assume that the foam gun used here is a small-scale application of the tech first tested in that issue, but there's nothing compelling us to. The issue leads directly into #2.

Streets #2 is where Hush escapes, so we're before all further references to his antics as FakeBruce in Sirens and B&R and whathaveyou. We're in a new Batmobile, but it's not the flying one. Dick encounters Black mask, but is given no reason to suspect that he's at the top of the new food chain, so we could still be before Batman #689 if we need to be. Kate Spencer is DA by this point, which we'll have to remember when we come to build the Second Features in. The JLA appear to be Firestorm, Zee, Vixen, John Stewart and Doctor Light at the time, should that later turn out to be relevant, and R'as is watching events with amusement.

Streets #3 is set long enough after the preceeding issue for Hush's reign of Benevolance to have built up a head of steam. Penguin references the events of Batman #690, so we're after that. Dick and Damien are able to call on the League and the Outsiders. Zsasz rebrands himself. Hush is under the Bat-family's thumb by the end of the issue.

Streets #4 shows enough time has passed since the last issue for both the Bat-family's arangement with Hush and Zsasz's new operation to have become established. Dick references the events of Sirens #1. He also mentions Two-face being at large, which might turn out to be a problem if Batman #691 ends with him captured, since Penguin's monologue in Streets#2 puts us after that story. Looking at solicits, it seems that this story won't be picked up on again until Streets #7.

Makes sense to do Sirens next, since Dini bounces a few characters between the books, and the first issue opens with Selina telling us it's two months on from Battle for the Cowl. We're explictly after Streets#1 and before Streets#4.

Sirens #2 follows on directly from the first issue...well, alright, except for a 'THREE YEARS EARLIER' sequence, but I'm not fussing about with that. Hush has gone public with his stimulus package, and his level of autonomy suggests we're between Streets #2 and #3.

Sirens #3's a fill-in, which picks up where #2 left off ("Harley's been taken!") and then follows the Riddler rather than the main cast. Dick's involved, but there's nothing to tie it to any particular events in his life. By the end to picks up the ongoing plot where it found it.

Sirens #4 picks up directly after #3...the Joker (or possibly 'the Joker') is watching the same broadcast as the Riddler. The reference to Hush having moved into the Elliot estate, and being free at Batman's leisure shows we're actually after Streets #3.

So the Diniverse chronology is quite straightforward...

Streets #1-3
Sirens #1-4
Streets #4

...and appears, from the Black Mask references and Dick's relationship with Gordon, to be set entirely after what Winnick's up to.

Lets do the first arc of Batman and Robin next. It features...
...the widespread assumption that Batman's dead, placing it before the media blitz of Batman #688.
...possibly the first field use of the flying Batmobile ("Told you it would work")
...scenes of Dick decamping from the Batcave.
...Alfred saying, "And so begins in earnest your first week as Batman"
...Dick's (facetious?) comment that he could offer Tim his old job back.
...The first time in months that Batman responds to the Bat-signal.
...The timeframe catching up with RIP's flashforwards.

Other than the fact that it makes Gordon's fooling around with the Bat-Signal in Batman #688 look a little strange, this fits perfectly before that issue. And since there's nowhere else that Batman's 'first week' can go, there we have it.

So as things stand...

Batman #687 - Four weeks ago sequences.
[...lots of stuff..]
Batman#687 - The 'TODAY' sequences.
Batman and Robin #1-3
Batman #681 and #676's 'SIX MONTHS LATER' sequences (concurent with the conclusion of the above)
Batman#687 - The 'TWO WEEKS LATER' sequences.
Batman#688 - The 'NOW' sequence.
Batman#689-90
Batman #688 - The 'THREE WEEKS FROM NOW' sequence.
Streets of Gotham #1-3
Gotham City Sirens #1-4
Streets of Gotham #4

Red Robin #1 and, arriving in Madrid, Tim needs to work out the aggression of "the last few weeks".

In the flashback sequence then Tim's discussing Damien's role as Robin with Dick. Damien's seen in his final costume during this, which could place us after Batman #687, as could Dick being Bat-suited up. We've not moved out of the Batcave yet and The Batgirl costume is still available.

It took Tim 'a few days' to get out of Gotham and 'a few more to figure out where to start'. As of the end of the issue he's been in Europe over seven days. That'd seem to put the present of this narative roughly contemporary with Batman #688's 'TWO WEEKS LATER'.

#2's flashback takes place the day after the first issue's. It also appears to show Harper still in Gotham, which I'll have to remember in case I ever decide to sych all this up with the Superman books. The narative in the present continues on directly from the previous issue.

#3's flashback seems to be, given the failure of Cassie's earlier attempts to contact Tim, a sequel to the flashback in the previous issue. Through Cassie's call to Dick it then leads into the flashback in the next issue. Dick's got the flying Batmobile in #4's flashback, but there's nothing to suggest it's flown yet.

Obviously, Tim's European/Middle Eastern adventures in the present of Red Robin take place over an extended period of time, so I'll just put them as starting round about the same time as the end of Batman #687 and note that much of what follows occurs concurrently.

Right! What's left?
Well, there's Outsiders (which I've not caught up on yet, and I've a terrifying feeling is going to make me have to think about incorportating FC: Revelations).

Batgirl (with which I'll wait until there's a few more issues out before thinking about).

Detective Comics (which I'm not sure what I want to do with yet, since its placement is so intentionally vauge). The Second Features (which I can't be bothered with this afternoon)

The new Batman and Robin arc (which I'll leave 'til its done) and Blackest Night/Blackest Night: Batman (which I'll also leave until the monthlies have caught up with it).

I think that's it for today then. And that the new chronology looks like this...

PART ONE - BATMAN BEATS THE DEVIL.

DCU #0
Detective Comics #846-50 ('Heart of Hush')
Batman #676-8 ('RIP' parts 1-3)
Robin #175-6
Batman #679-681 ('RIP' parts 4-6)

PART TWO - BATMAN'S MISSING FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.

Batman and the Outsiders #11-14
Nightwing #147-151 ('The Great Leap') - concurrent with early chapters of 'Search for a Hero'
Robin #177-82 ('Search for a Hero')
Dectective #851, Batman #684 ('The Last Days of Gotham') - concurrent with later chapters of 'Search for a Hero'

PART THREE - BATMAN KILLS GOD.

That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-3
Superman Beyond #1-2
Final Crisis #4
Batman #682-3
Final Crisis #5-7

PART FOUR - WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER?

Batman #686
Detective Comics #853

PART FIVE - BATMAN APPEARS DEAD FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.

Nightwing #152-3
Batman #687 (the 'FOUR WEEKS AGO' sequence)
Detective #852, Batman #685 ('Reconstruction/Catspaw')
Batman and the Outsiders Special #1
The Outsiders #15-20 ('The Deep') - provisional placement.
Robin #183

PART SIX - EVERYONE BATTLES OVER CAWL, A TRADITIONAL WELSH LAMB AND LEEK STEW.

Oracle: The Cure #1-3
Secret Six #9
Gotham Gazette: Batman Dead?
Battle for the Cowl #1
Man-Bat #1, Commissioner Gordon #1 and Azrael: Death's Dark Knight #1-3 (all concurrent with the above)
Battle for the Cowl #2
The Underground #1/The Network #1
Battle for the Cowl #3
Arkham Asylum #1
Gotham Gazette: Batman Alive!

PART SEVEN - YOU'RE WRONG! BATMAN AND ROBIN WILL NEVER DIE!

Batman #687 - The 'TODAY' sequences
Red Robin #1-4 - The 'BEFORE' sequences
Batman & Robin #1-3 ('Batman Reborn')
Batman #681 and 676's 'SIX MONTHS LATER' sequences - concurrent with the conclusion of the above.
Red Robin #1-4 - The 'NOW' sequences - concurrent with much that follows.
Batman #687 - The 'TWO WEEKS LATER' sequences.
Batman #688 - The 'NOW' sequence.
Batman #689-90
Batman #688 - The 'THREE WEEKS FROM NOW' sequence.
Streets of Gotham #1-3
Gotham City Sirens #1-4
Streets of Gotham #4

Countdown to The End of Time, Part 1: Mister Saturday Night meets the Endless Story

2009-10-01T06:59:00.000-07:00

"It is said that in the final days of Planet Earth, everyone had a cameo."

Someone in work yesterday said that the Jordan and Peter thing had gone on too long, and it started me thinking about how much Russell T. Davies' Doctor Who has meant to me.

By early 2005, Who had settled into a comfy bit of my brainspace where it sat on a big cushion, quietly informing Everything I Think About Fiction and Everything I Think About What It Might Be Like To Be A Good Person, but not really showing much signs of movement except for giving a little shove with its elbow when 'That Time I Broke The Potted Plant' or some other formative experience tried to take up too much space on the cushion. Who as something that mattered directly had finished for me round about The Ancestor Cell.

But then, suddenly, Doctor Who wasn't this deep-rooted multimedia myth that informed Everything I Think About Blah Blah Blah...it was just this really good tellybox show that I was into. Forty-five minutes every Saturday. And somehow that seemed more important.

I'm not sure I've ever been comfortable with Davies' version of Doctor Who, but most of the time it's been the discomfort of the rollercoaster rather than the discomfort of dentistry. I've bloody loved it.

And it's ending. Ending ending. Ending ending in an end so endy that it's called The End of Time. That's the endiest ending title ever!

We once thought The Parting of the Ways sounded quite endy, but now we look back we notice that if ways part then that's at least doubling the amount of continuance, so it's the opposite of endy. And while Doomsday and Journey's End sound pretty damn endy, that's nothing compared with The End of Time! If Time's ending then that precludes any subsequent beginnings! If time's ending then that means that nothing ever started! THIS IS IT! THIS IS THE FINAL CRISIS! I know it's over, and it never really began.

Quiet Mozza2! Quiet Mozza1! Back on the cushion!

Let's hear what Davies has to say about endings...

"I think it's terrifying for traditional writers like me who just have a beginning, middle and end because [...] the greatest piece of drama shown on television this year was Susan Boyle. [...] It's a story. They sold that package. [...] Whoever sat at a desk in Britain'sGotTalentLand and put together that package of Susan Boyle saying, 'I'm a virgin. I've never been kissed.' Walking on stage, the reactions from Simon Cowell. It's beautifully put together. It's put together like a script. And, y'know, the cutaways to the audience mocking her before she started singing, Amanda Holden's amazement as she started singing.

[...]

I think [Dennis Potter] would be worried by Britain's Got Talent if he was alive today. I think we all should be. Because... name me the drama that's had that effect!

And that's why we build Doctor Who up to such huge heights sometimes, because it's such a vivid and sensational and sensual show that it can have the feeling of a Saturday night finale. We we get to our finales, they are done like other people's finals. Like a Pop Idol final. And that was something I said right from the start, before I even wrote the first episode. I said, the one thing people are gathering to watch on a Saturday night was [...] the Pop Idol final. And the tension when it was between Will Young and Gareth Gates was enormous and I was in a house full of like twenty people. All of us voting, all of us excited. That's drama. That was brilliant. So I remember right from the start of Doctor Who saying, 'That's what we need to hit. That's Saturday night.'

[...]

Raising the stakes until you get a finale until you don't know what's going to happen and you're at fever pitch. [...] Not every story can be like that but these sort of fantasy epic adventure stories should be like that, and you get it very rarely these days. I remember sitting in the cinema watching the last half hour of Back to the Future when that first came out and it was just joyous. And you get that very rarely off blockbusters now. I can tell you now that Transformers won't do that when that comes out, because a lot of skills have been lost I think in terms of good old-fashioned adventure climaxes. So I do that really deliberately on Doctor Who. They're bigger every year. They're madder every year. And every year the ratings have gone up and find me another drama that's done that.

[...]

I'm 46 and there should be, any day now, a wave of programmes that leaves me confounded and gobsmacked and saying, 'It wasn't like that in my day and I don't like this.' I should be as uncomfortable as my dad watching Boy George on Top of the Pops. [...] The writer Brian Elsley spoke very brilliantly about this a good few years ago, before he set up Skins, actually. [...] Saying, 'We are a generation that's passing, those of us writing in out forties. And people growing up come from a gaming background and a user generated content background and it is going to fundamentally alter the way things are told'.

I think it was visible in The Phantom Menace, where an entire generation said, 'That's rubbish.' And we hated it. We'd literally look at classical story shapes and say, 'Where have they gone? Where have they gone in The Phantom Menace? Where's that simple structure of Star Wars gone?' And I think the most important thing you have to remember is that George Lucas has got teenage sons. And, as ever, probably ahead of the market, because that was a huge success. It was huge with children. And it doesn't satisfy us, that film. [...] It's a sort of rolling, complicated, bitty narrative. It's bitty. [...] We feel, at our age, there's a lack of coherence to it, a lack of satisfaction. But obviously kids get it. [...]

Interviewer: So are those classical structures then, on the way out?

Well, maybe they're being joined by something. I don't think a beginning-middle-and-an-end ever goes out, but I might be wrong. Because I would say that, because I'm clinging to that hope desperately. And maybe the fact that a video game, or a Second Life or a Sims situation never ends...maybe that's the shape. Maybe that's why Susan Boyle becomes the ultimate story. Because that's never going to end. My God, we'll be having updates on her in twenty years time whether she likes it or not. Y'know, it's going to go on and on. So maybe you're looking at the Endless Story now."

- Interviewed on Night Waves, 23rd June 2009.

It's going to take a while to unpack that. It's probably going to take a series of twelve themed blog posts counting down to The End of Time. Here's one.

We've got the Ultimate Ending coming our way, with the full knowledge that it won't really end anything at all, and with the demand that it provides us with a satisfying ending. It's written by a chap who's "clinging desperately" to the idea of beginnings-middles-and-endings, while suspecting that a large portion of his audience has outgrown them, and looking to Britain's Got Talent both as a fulfilment of classical storytelling and as a way past it... out and into the Infinite Book.

Over the next twelve weeks we're going to examine ALL HUMAN CULTURE (by which I mean whatever random stuff I've been reading, watching or listening to) in light of that Davies quote in order to definitively identify 2009's expectations of story structure (by which I mean whether or not The End of Time is going to be satisfying or not).

We're going to take Susan Boyle up Greek Street. We're going to recruit new Sugababes from The Sims. We're going to Unwrite Mr Toppit. We're going to solve the mystery of what happened in Bristol on September the 18th. We're going to stand the kids from Skins by Superman's grave and ask them why Big Brother's been cancelled. We're going to mention a number of cute things my daughter's said recently. We're going to hear an awful lot about Jordan and Peter's divorce.

Which won't suit everyone. Someone in work yesterday said that the Jordan and Peter thing had gone on too long. It was being strung out. I think it was the Mirror she had in her hand, and she was glaring at the thing in such a way as to make her exact feelings quite clear. She'd been enjoying the Jordan and Peter thing, but...she didn't like the way the story was being told any longer. The outrage in her voice was the same as that you hear when you talk to people who didn't like the end of Battlestar Galactica - "I liked that story, but now the people telling it have RUINED IT! Who do they think they are?"

Jordan/Katie Price (a dichotomy we'll probably have to come back during this Countdown) met Peter Andre on a reality TV show called I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. Their union blessed in magazine deals and tabloid exclusives, they settled into a married life in the reality TV series When Jordan Met Peter, Jordan and Peter: Laid Bare and Jordan and Peter: Marriage and Mayhem, before reproducing for our pleasure in Jordan and Peter: The Baby Diaries. Their lives continued in Katie and Peter: The Next Chapter, Katie and Peter: Unleashed and Katie and Peter: Stateside.

Following the split, Jordan's story continued in HER reality TV series, What Katie Did Next, and Peter's in HIS, Peter Andre: Going it Alone. As Henry Miller and Anais Nin battled to control their lives and relationships by competing to see who could best transform their lovers into prose, Jordan and Peter battle to control their lives by competing to see who can best transform their family into reality TV. Forged in the fires of just the right sort of Saturday night, twenty people round your house all fighting for the phone, spectacle, Katie and Peter have become a truly endless story.

But there's a weird conflict of expectations there...because we want to know the end. We've got a new form, endless, 'bitty' story...one that couldn't exist as anything else...and we're still expecting it to fit the classical storytelling structure.

The Death of Jade Goody was probably the most desperate example of this. Perhaps because her story fooled us into thinking it was playing by the old rules. It seemed to have a perfect beginning, middle and end.

Beginning - Jade goes on Big Brother. Says comically ignorant things. Becomes a national joke.

Middle - Jade goes on Celebrity Big Brother. Does some racist bullying. Becomes a national hate figure.

End - Jade goes on Big Brother: India. Is diagnosed with cervical cancer during the filming. Becomes a national saint.

Jade in the hospital, brave and serene, was a powerful image. That she allowed the cameras and newspapers access to areas of a dying woman's life that are normally shrouded in privacy meant both that the story could play out in full before us, and meant that we could justify her narratively necessary redemption. For the story to work, we needed some reason why Jade was suddenly a saint now, and that reason became the way she was sacrificing her own dignity in death in order to accumulate cash for her kids. Jade was the Good Mother. It all worked perfectly. Someone's bitty, unsatisfying, incohesive life had been turned into good, old-fashioned storytelling.

Every tabloid had JADE NEAR DEATH as its front page every day. But there was one problem... she wasn't dying quite fast enough. In and out of the hospice she went. JADE HAS HOURS LEFT we're told on Monday. JADE'S LAST GOODBYE we're shown on Thursday. On and on it went. Every tabloid wanted to have a Dying Jade cover on the day Jade died, but nobody knew which day that'd be. George V's doctors famously finished him off with cocaine and morphine so that his death would make the Times, but since they couldn't go that route, the storytellers were left trying to manufacture any number of last minute dramas to fill the space - nonsense about a heroic struggle to be christened before death, all sorts of hoo-hah. Watching Jade die in the media we saw many things, but one of them was the ultimate stubborness of a human life to fit into a neat story.

But if the advent of the Endless Story has left us with mixed feelings about the duration of a narrative, I think it's left us even more confused about its boundaries.

On September the 17th in Bristol, a bunch of anti-capitalists went on a bit of a spree around the financial sector. You know the sort of thing, slogans and scuffles and smashing things up and what have you, and you probably know what you think of this sort of behaviour (me, I mostly feel a sense of jealousy that anyone this century can still manage to be so earnest). But what the Bristol Evening Post wasn't sure about was how much this had to do with the Jordan and Peter thing.

Now, the Co-mutiny guys who were behind all these direct action hijinks list thier concerns as being to do with "Freedom of movement, climate justice, anti-militarism, food, work, financial, collapse and autonomous spaces." What Katie Did Next is notably absent from that list. And, to be fair, the Jordan and Peter thing isn't mentioned in the Evening Post's coverage of the dust-up on page 3. Nor does page 4's account of Peter Andre's visit to Bristol mention anti-militarism or autonomous spaces.

But the front page of September 19th's Evening Post is very clear...these two things are somehow one story.

The cover shows two photos. One is of a small crowd of very, very bored looking girls standing in Asda and the other is of a small crowd of boys and girls jostling with the police.

"IDOL," says the first caption, "Hundreds wait for the chance to see Peter Andre."

"IDLE," says the second, "Group of 70 anarchists march to stir up trouble in city centre."

It seems there's two Bristols (do your own Jordan joke here if you must), and the story is the contrast. Beyond that the logic breaks down altogether. 'Idle'? Really? Look at 'em go! They're giving it some welly. Regardless of how intellectually lazy anti-capitalist direct action may be, how can planning for months, sticking posters up all over the city, marching about and occupying buildings be considered an act of idleness WHEN MEASURED AGAINST STANDING IN ASDA FOR HOURS?

Also...ARE THESE REALLY MY FUCKING OPTIONS? If those idle protestors are Bad Bristol then does that mean those bored girls are Good Bristol? Is this what the world offers me as my reward for not smashing stuff up in the name of climate justice? The chance to stand in line for hours in the UK's least characterful supermarket giant hoping to catch a glimpse of the bloke who sang 'Mysterious Girl'. If so, then start the riot. So much does the front page sell the protesters' notion that they offer an alternative to a banal prison that you have to wonder if the Evening Post's been infiltrated and is running recruitment.

But no, all that's happened is a botched, half-grasped understanding of how story is changing has splatted out of the presses. Because if the Peter and Jordan story is infinite then that must mean it can contain all other stories. Perhaps it does, and perhaps whoever put that cover together intuited that but failed to work out exactly how it can contain an anarchist demo.

The big twist in Susan Boyle's story is that she didn't win Britain's Got Talent, as a classical story structure would have had her do. Instead, Britain voted for Diversity (a multi-ethnic urban dance troupe). Britain did this in the same week that they used the European and Local Elections to vote the BNP (a racist and fascist organisation who probably can't dance at all) into office.

That's one story.

To Be Continued...

Five Books of Forever: When Novels Overlap.

2009-08-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

Grant Morrison's writing a Batman novel, or at least a narative project - extending across several different comic titles - that can be analogously understood as a novel. This much we know.

We know less than we assume we do about its structure though, which is odd as Morrison's always very keen to make interesting and specific claims about structure. Many writers will be happy to tell us that they see their extended run on a title "as a novel." Mozza's the guy who'll tell us that he sees a run as a three volume novel with a fractal structure, unless you read it alongside two of his other works, in which case its best thought of as a hologram. Fair doos.

But what's he up to here? Is this project best understood as a novel, a series of novels, a big bundle of comics, or something else? And how's this attempt to create a cohesive work weathered the storm of in-continuity shared universe storytelling while using characters appearing in oodles of other books and being at the centre of a number of crossover Events? Are we in its final stages or about halfway through?

I decided to do an exhaustive textual survey of the entire run in order to find out.

Then I decided not to bother, to watch tonight's X-Factor instead, and then google a load of old interview quotes from shill sites.

There follows the result of my scaled-down ambition.

14th Nov 2006
Newsarama

This seems to be the earliest mention I've seen of the run as a 'novel'...

"Damian and Talia's comeback [...] now forms a major strand of this 15-part Bat-novel I'm planning."

Though there's no indiction of whether 'part' means issue, arc, collected edition or something else.

22nd Feb 2008
Newsarama.

A year and a bit later and (assuming 'part'='chapter') then the tale's grown in the telling...

"My run on Batman is a 25-chapter novel that reaches its climax in “RIP”

We're also told a little about what's coming next...

"[I see myself writing the book] Indefinitely! I’m having a great time. I’ve got huge plans for the book after “RIP” and Final Crisis, and I want to stay on and take the characters to the next level of the story. Having almost completed the long-form run that’s been “Batman and Son” through to “Batman RIP,” I’ve decided to be kinder to my patient readers and the new stuff after “RIP” will be more in the vein of single-issue or at most two-issue stories with lots of new villains and new situations."

So, at this point we're encouraged to understand the run from Batman and Son to Batman RIP as a 'novel'. This certainly fits the reading experience as (putting aside quibbles about whether the story truly begins in 52, the Black Casebook material, Infinite Crisis' "What do you deserve?" panel or in Detective Comics #27) those issues collected in the Batman and Son, Black Glove and RIP trades form a naratively and thematically complete unit in a way that none of those trades do individually. Together the comics that form that run make up a cohesive something, and you might as well call that something a novel as anything else.

We're also told that the work which follows will be a move away from long-form storytelling, but, even as he's telling us this, lets slip that he still sees this all as one story comprised of 'levels'.

3rd FEB 2009
IGN

A year later, and things have changed. Bruce has failed to die in both RIP and Final Crisis, while two Batman issues branded as 'Last Rites' have joined the dots between the two non-deaths, while serving as a coda to the themes of the Batman&SonToBatmanRIP novelthing and as a plot point to Final Crisis. IGN asked Grant how he thought about the connection between "these three stories."

"For me it was always one story. The thing that became "Last Rites" – that's just one of these names that gets slapped on there by editorial to give it branding across the line. For me, there's a Batman story that I started in issue #655 with Andy Kubert, and the whole story is that Batman is up against the ultimate diabolical mastermind – and by that, I mean it quite literally. And it's about how he cheats him. And that leads into the next phase of Batman, which I'm starting in the summer. The whole thing should wind up as five book collections that tell one, big story. So I kind of just thought that you could read this big Batman story without even seeing Final Crisis. But we wanted this big Death of Batman moment to happen in Final Crisis, so I just made the two things coincide. But Batman's story in RIP was always meant to lead into the next chapter of my Batman story. I'll be picking up threads from Final Crisis, of course, but you won't need to have read it to get up to speed. "

Right, so we know we can treat Final Crisis as 'detachable' from all this, and that Batman and Son/The Black Glove/Batman RIP still comprise a unit of story. But now they're also part of something bigger - "Five book collections that tell one, big story"

Unless he's thinking far into the distant future, when everything from #655- 683 will be in one Omnibus and comprise one 'book collection', this seems to suggest that he thinks he's 3/5ths through the "one, big story" and that it'll be complete in twelve more issues or thereabouts, the number of comics it'd take to generate two more collections.

So as things stand... Final Crisis is a side-story, while Batman and Son, The Black Glove and Batman RIP make up both a three-volume novel and the first part of a five-part novel.

11 MAR 2009

This comes up again at IGN the following month...

IGN Comics: We've chatted at length with you in the past about your plans for Batman and how you view your work on the series as a long novel. Despite this being a new series, do you view this as a direct continuation of the previous work or would you consider this the beginning of a new novel?

Morrison: This is the next book in what will be a 5-volume series beginning 'Batman & Son' but it can be read on its own too. 'Batman and Robin' welcomes new readers!

[...]

IGN Comics: Do you consider Batman & Robin, despite featuring new people under the mask, yet another lens on the life of Bruce Wayne?

Morrison: No, this isn't about Bruce Wayne at all, except in as much as it deals with his absence.

It's a bit tricky by this stage to know what he means when he says 'book'. Does he mean book as in 'collection' or as in 'narative unit'?

After all, The Invisibles is structured as a three-volume novel, but is collected in seven trades. While Seven Soldiers is collected in four trades but is made up of seven 'books', which when combined with the two issues, build into one 'novel'.

So when he says Batman and Robin is the next book of five, it's not obvious if he means that the two collections it'll generate will make up books four and five of the "one, big story" or if he's thinking of all twelve issues of Batman and Robin as book four.

If it's the former, and the "one, big story" comprises...

Batman and Son

The Black Glove

Batman RIP

'Batman and Robin vol1'

'Batman and Robin vol2'

...and if Batman and Robin doesn't deal with Bruce at all, then Morrison's "one, big story" unexpectedly doesn't include Bruce's return.

But wait! What's this...

22nd MAY 2009

IGN

IGN Comics: Speaking of Bruce Wayne – there are a lot of dangling plot threads and questions left from RIP and Final Crisis, specifically with Bruce in the past. How much of that will you be tackling in this twelve-issue run?

Morrison: Everything about that will be tied up by the end. Everything that's happening with Bruce and Bruce's world will be revealed in detail and resolved by the end of Batman and Robin's first year.

It may be worth noting for later that there's a possible dodge there. He says it'll all be tied up by the end of Batman and Robin's first year, but doesn't actually say that'll happen in Batman and Robin.

1st July 2009
io9

Here we learn that yes, Batman and Robin's twelve issues was to have been the end of the Morrison Uber-Bat Epic, but that things may be changing...

io9: You've talked before about how the first year of the series works out, with artist Frank Quitely drawing the first and last three issues. What happens after the first year of the book? Are you planning on sticking around with Batman as a character, or will you be finished with Gotham for awhile once #13 rolls around?

Morrison: That was the original plan but I can't seem to stop coming up with ideas for Batman, so we'll see how it goes.

24th JULY 2009.
Newsarama

By the end of the month, then we've seen how things are going, as Dan Didio's telling us this...

Batman & Robin is an ongoing series. It's not finite. So regardless of what people think...uh...this story has a beginning and middle and an end... The series of Batman & Robin, as written by Grant Morrison, will continue... It's something that he has a few years worth of stories already thought out. [...] He's created a fantastic new dyanmic between Dick Grayson and young Damien Wayne and we're really going to get a chance to explore both those characters.

Beyond, "Mozza's still on the book after #12", it's not easy to parse, "regardless of what people think...uh...this story has a beginning and middle and an end... The series of Batman & Robin, as written by Grant Morrison, will continue..."

Does he mean that regardless of people thinking this story has a structure...it doesn't?
Or that regardless of people thinking this story doesn't have a structure...it does, and that involves its being continued?
Or does he simply mean that regardless of people thinking Morrison was only doing twelve issues, he's doing more ?(with the "this story has a bginning and middle and an end" claim just being a stray thought that popped up in the middle of the wrong sentence).

Whatever it means, it no longer looks like Batman and Robin #12 will be the conclusion of a five-volume novel that ends with "Everything that's happening with Bruce [...] resolved."

So what is going on? Is Morrison pushing back the conclusion of his "one, big story" in order to extend the run? Or is he finishing his story as planned and then starting another one?

28th AUG 2009
Bleeding Cool

Sayeth Rich Johnston...

It took a long and winding path to get to this story. But here we go.

The Search For Bruce Wayne.

The Return of Batman.

Two series by Grant Morrison kicking off from Summer 2010. After his apparent death (twice) and revelation that Bruce Wayne is stuck somewhen in the past (possibly crossing the spirit path of Captain America, I dunno) word is that DC will be bringing their world’s greatest detective in rubber back in a series of series, the details of which are completely unknown (to me, I mean) save for their working titles (which may be old) and that it’s all part of the Big Grant Morrison Batplan for 2010.

If all this is true, then 2010 will see a hell of a lot of Morrison material on the shelves.
Joe the Barbarian and SeaGuy Eternal are confirmed from VERTIGO, he's staying on Batman and Robin, and then there's Multiversity.

It makes me wonder if maybe 'Search for Bruce Wayne' and 'Return of Batman' aren't series but rather perhaps story arcs that'll be told simultaneously in Batman and Robin and Batman. I could easily see DC wanting Morrison to Bendis-up and write both titles and, as everyone's noted, Batman will reach #700 at round about the time Batman and Robin reaches #12, the issue Morrision originally planned to finish with. It'd be a terrible shame if that book were still running Winnick filler in it's 700th issue.

For People Who Won't Like Waters.

2009-08-04T10:43:00.000-07:00

Canon and Sheep Shit: Why We Fight.

2009-07-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

I hate the Doctor Who canon like Dawkins hates God.

Like him, I'm convinced the target of my animus doesn't exist, but that doesn't stop me spending half my life writing about how dreadful it is.

There's a bit of a difference though; the existence or otherwise of God is fundamentally irresolvable within the bounds of human knowledge, while the non-existence of a Doctor Who canon is bloody obvious to anyone with half a brain. After all, I know loads of people who reckon they've met God, and hardly any who reckon they've met Dawkins, so from where I'm sitting then his existence sounds on shakier grounds (There's a book I keep seeing in Christian bookshops called The Dawkins Delusion. I bet it's a crap set of 'proofs' of God, but I'd buy a copy tomorrow if I thought its authors were wheeling out some kind of Baudrillard logic to disprove the reality of Richard Dawkins).

But a Doctor Who canon? There's demonstrably no such thing.

Canon isn't "what most people think is canon" (otherwise the Buffy comics, unheard of by most of the millions who watched the show, couldn't be Buffyverse canon. Which they are) .

Canon isn't "what the majority of the fanbase would prefer was canon" (otherwise Han shot first).

Canon is what the people running the franchise tell you it is. It's not a democratic thing. Star Trek fans didn't have the option of outvoting Gene Roddenbury when he wanted something stricken from the record.

Of course, people are, in these free-spirited and post-structuralist times, quite capable of thinking for themselves and saying, "Well The Animated Series is certainly part of my Star Trek", but what they're doing there isn't changing the canon, or establishing a new and individual canon; It's a rejection of the idea of canon itself. A denial of the franchise owner's authority to tell you how to conceptualise the components of that franchise.

But there isn't a canon to reject or deny in Doctor Who. In some ways that's a shame, as I'd enjoy rejecting and denying one if there was, but nobody with the authority to define a Doctor Who canon has ever done so, so I'm cruelly denied that anarchic thrill.

Here's what the BBC had to say about Doctor Who canon during the lifespan of the English Series...

*Insert Echoing Sound Effect Evocative Of Infinite Hollow Nothingness Here. The Silence Beyond Silence of a Thought Never Formed*

That's right. Not a whisper.

If that seems suprising to you, that's because you're assuming a British mass-audience show from 1963 would work like American cult-audience show from the Nineties. Nobody at the BBC back then would have had a concept of canon in its modern, fannish sense.

So they never defined one. So one never existed. And the television show just chugged along fine without one, merrily incorporating information from the comics, the novelisations and even the Find Your Fate game books as they went along.

Here's what Russell T. Davies had to say about Doctor Who canon during his time as showrunner.

That canon "is a word which has never been used in the production office, not once, not ever" (DWM #356).

That he was "usually happy for old and new fans to invent the Complete History of the Doctor in their heads, completely free of the production team's hot and heavy hands." (DWM #356)

That thinking of the audios as being 'non-canonical' is boring and idiotic. (The Writer's Tale)

That "I'm just the writer [...] I've got no more authority over the text than you!" (DWM #388)

We've moved from a canon which didn't exist because nobody got round to establishing one, to a canon which doesn't exist because the only person who could establish one himself rejects both the idea and the very logic of writerly authority on which it stands.

While this is going on, the TV series itself is making direct and explict reference to events, concepts, continuity points, planets, companies and foodstuffs from the novels and comics while establishing that Time is in flux (The Unquiet Dead) and that stable facts aren't meant to exist (Utopia). Which means that if there was a Doctor Who canon (and assuming the Welsh Series was part of it) then it would paradoxically include the fact that there was no Doctor Who canon.

Which brings us to Steven Moffat, the new showrunner and so the only person who could now be plausibly considered to have the authority to rule on what is and isn't canonical. Will he do so?

No, he won't.

"It is impossible for a show about a dimension-hopping time traveller to have a canon."

- Steven Moffat, San Diego, 2008.

So, in summary...

Canon is a matter of authority.

At first the guys in charge didn't define a canon because it didn't occur to anyone back then that that was the sort of thing programme-makers did.

Then the guy in charge didn't define a canon because he believes that it's up to us to use our own imaginations.

Now the current guy in charge believes that a Doctor Who canon is actually an imposibility.

At no point has there ever been a Doctor Who canon. Anyone who thinks there is has got 'canon' mixed up with something else...maybe with 'Consensus', with 'Majority Opinion', with 'The Stuff I Personally Count', with 'The Condition of Being On Telly', with 'That Which has Been Offically Licensed', or with half a dozen other things that don't mean 'canon'.

So, back to the introspection, why does 'Doctor Who canon' bother me so much? Why do I get drawn into, and fascinated by, debates over this non-existent thingy? Why don't I just roll my eyes, post something like this, roll my eyes and go find some nice sensible flame war about the merits of Grant Morrison's writing or something like that instead?

Those who assume there's a Who canon are wrong, but what's so wrong with them being wrong that it gets on my tits to the extent that it does? Where did I pick up this Dawkins-esque zeal to spread the joyous news of the non-existence of something, like a Bizzaro evangelist? I shall now shut myself in a floatation tank and instruct my staff not to release me until I've either worked out what it is that bugs me so much or until I'm so thickly encrusted with salt that I could be sold at Pizza Hut.

Ah. That's better.

Right then. Make a cup of tea. Put a record on. Scroll down to 'It's Evil' if you're getting bored.

Here's why I hate canon so much.

It's Frustrating.

See all the above. It's the ultimate Someone Is Wrong On The Internet.

As Paul Cornell says...

"I can’t think of any other fandom that assumes they have a canon when nobody has ever told them that they do. Especially since our show itself declares that it doesn’t now have, and probably never did have, a canon."

Many, probably most, people who find their way to Doctor Who fandom are convinced that its continuity is regulated by something that doesn't exist. For those invested in sanity, such widespread and overwhelming wrongness is annoying.

It's Just So Common.

Look, just because every other geektext has a canon, doesn't mean ours needs one.

It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better.

It's Not Very Doctor Who-ish.

Stability, certainty, order, the exclusion of difficult twiddly bits. These are the virtues of a canon.

Do they sound much like virtues the Doctor would be keen to champion?

Paul Magrs puts this very well in his afterword to Time and Relative Dissertations in Space...

So...this is important: Doctor Who is never complete.

It is about a lack. A need. A hunger.

And it is unending. There's that old cliche about the elasticity and infinitude of its format. which is kind of true, but its truer that its consumers don't half enjoy repetition and recurrent patterns. Like the Arabian Nights. Arabesques of infintie variety. Fulfillment of the design being infinitely deferred. Stories opening out into other, further stories... The nights of prevarication and story telling go on and on and on. Just as the Doctor always finds a new companion, a new incarnation, a new adventure to have.

But as we go on, the audience, the reader, the fan-consumer is always aware that we are missing something. We all always vaguely remember that there was an old Doctor. Now he's long gone. And there were others before him. They're all in our memories like family members who died or went abroad when we were small. And one day, maybe, they will come back...

[...]

Some of the fans want to complete the narrative. They construct continuity guides and canons. They want to plug the gaps. The completist wants to collect, restore, arbitrate on hefty canonical debates. They catalogue things, rather like Time Lords.

No, my impulse is always to further complicate matters.

The idea of 'completism' terrifies me. What happens when its all complete? What goes on then? Where do you go? It sounds a bit dull to me. (Remember when the Doctor eventually got to The Eye of Orion? His much-vaunted 'most peaceful place in the universe'? It was rubbish. It was boring and you could tell he was only pretending to enjoy it. It was wet and there was sheep shit everywhere.)

[...]

Its a curious irony, I think, in a series with a rabble rouser as a hero, and in a narrative about multiverses, alternities and possibilities, that the fans of this very show want to close possibilities down. Sometimes its as if fans want reality dictated to them- definitively. Canonically. They want parameters setting and concretising around them. Maybe they want a stable universe after all...

Well, they can't have one. They've got Doctor Who and they can bloody well learn to like it.

He was there, just ahead of her. Half clambered on a unicorn, clinging to its mane to keep from falling any further off. That mad coat flapping behind him. She could see his eyes ablaze with the fun of it all. Not just being swept along by the Hunt, but riding with it, leading it, celebrating it.

She kept her eyes locked on him. It was hard to focus - he was a dazzling blur. Where he was, even his face and body, nothing stayed fixed long enough for her to be sure of it. The possibilities and details of his past thrashing around like mad, shifting and overlapping. He was every single Doctor you could ever imagine at once.

But he was still there. Even without a fixed face or name or body, even if his past contradicted itself from moment to moment, that didn't matter. There was still something there, not just un-pinned-down but impossible to pin down. Something that even revelled in the fact that he couldn't be easily understood. That said more things were possible than a simple explaination would allow.

Something laughing.

- Unnatural History, Jon Blum and Kate Orman.

It's INSANE.

Some made-up stories are realer than other ones? Get away with you.

In a ideal world, every series' canon would have died of embarassment after the first panel of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?

It Sounds Like A Lot Of Work.

46 years in, and Doctor Who seems to be surviving without one, doesn't it?

Unless you reckon it'd never have gone off the air in 1989 if only we'd had a definative statement on the status of Turlough and the Earthlink Dilemma and on whether or not Disney Time is an official lead-in to Terror of the Zygons.

Other fandoms seem to think we have a hard old time of it... listen to what The Transformers Wikia reckons...

The BBC, owners of Doctor Who, have no canon policy. Indeed so little attention is paid to it that the franchise is riddled with countless irreconcilable continuity clashes despite being presented as a single continuous story, even in the TV movie and continuing television series that were made many years after the original series was cancelled.

Irreconcilable? Back over to the Moff to reconcile the lot of them in eighteen words...

"The audience just hasn't seen the adventure when the Doctor goes back in time and changes that detail."

- Steven Moffat, San Deigo, 2008.

That certainly sounds more elegant to me than, well, than this sort of thing...

G-canon is absolute canon; the movies (their most recent release), the scripts, the novelizations of the movies, the radio plays, and any statements by George Lucas himself. G-canon overrides the lower levels of canon when there is a contradiction. Within G-canon, many fans follow an unofficial progression of canonicity where the movies are the highest canon, followed by the scripts, the novelizations, and then the radio plays.

T-canon refers to the canon level comprising only the two television shows: Star Wars: The Clone Wars and the Star Wars live-action TV series. Its precedence over C-Level canon was confirmed by Chee.

C-canon is primarily composed of elements from the Expanded Universe including books, comics, and games bearing the label of Star Wars. Games and RPG sourcebooks are a special case; the stories and general background information are themselves fully C-canon, but the other elements such as character/item statistics and gameplay are, with few exceptions, N-canon.

S-canon is secondary canon; the story itself is considered non-continuity, but the non-contradicting elements are still a canon part of the Star Wars universe. This includes things like the online roleplaying game Star Wars: Galaxies and certain elements of a few N-canon stories.

N-canon is non-canon. "What-if" stories (such as stories published under the Star Wars: Infinities label), crossover appearances (such as the Star Wars character appearances in Soulcalibur IV), game statistics, and anything else directly contradicted by higher canon ends up here. N-canon is the only level that is not considered official canon by Lucasfilm. A significant amount of material that was previously C-canon was rendered N-canon by the release of Episodes I-III.

- Wikipedia on Star Wars canon.

It Frightens Me!

Look, I'm a child of the Great Who Diaspora of the 1990s. I came into the full bloom of my fandom during the New Adventures years. If there ever was a Doctor Who canon then... well, then a lot of the Doctor Who stories I care about deeply probably wouldn't make it in.

Had Davies ever been the one to issue a canon then, going on things like his Meet the Doctor article and his desire to have had the Eight-to-Nine regeneration in the DWM comic strip, we might imagine that the novels, audios, comics...all that sort of thing would have made it in. Though we'd probably have been, based on the fact that he was issuing a canon at all, more interested in who was holding a gun to his head.

But even then, even with a very broad canon, it'd still leave something out. Something that matters to someone would now OFFICIALLY NOT COUNT. And that'd be both sad and pointless.

It ROTS YOUR BRAIN!

Over in Batman right now, we're in the late stages of a big five-volume serialised 'novel' that Grant Morrison's been writing since 2006. It's been mentioned occasionally on this blog.

Very early in the run, it had a LOST-style flashforward to a gloomy future. Since then almost every significant piece of information revealed in that story has played out in the present of the narative. With two exceptions - the death of Dick Grayson and the damnation of Damien Wayne.

As the story creeps forwards, the presence of that flashforward works as a device to make us anxious about Dick's life and Damien's soul. It's supposed to make us worry, "Hang on...if all that other stuff happened, does that mean...?"

So anyway, the other day I was chatting away about all this when someone took me by surprise by saying that the flashforward issue (#666) had nothing to do with the current storyline.

I explained how it worked. I quoted Grant Morrison explaining how it worked. I invented an entire 20 volume swords'n'sorcery Fantasy Epic in order to draw out a complex analogy which would explain how it worked.... I'm not sure how I could have been more helpful.

But to each of my points the guy kept coming back with, "Batman #666 isn't canon."

Over
And over
And over
Again.

Which is, as it happens, perfectly true. The DC universe has a canon and Batman #666 isn't in it.
But that's got nothing to do with the fact that it's part of the story and the way the story's being told. Because stories work by allusion, and reference, and intertextuality and all sorts of other sexy things that're the antithesis of fencing off fictions into approved lists of things that matter.

This particular Someone Wrong On The Internet had been locked into a real rigidity of thought by the importance he placed on canon. Because that's all canon is - an obstacle to understanding stories.

It's Evil.

Here's what prompted this article.

Last week Bleeding Cool reported that Tom Baker is returning to Doctor Who to play the Doctor for the first time since he left (other than hissing some nonsense into a microphone for a link sequence in Dimensions in Time).

Tom Baker. Playing the Doctor. In FIVE new plays.

The third post in the coments section was to say that, no he's not. This doesn't count because it's not canonical.

Posts follow saying that even though they're not canon, the audios are still pretty good. Or that people shouldn't worry too much about canon. Or that they can be thought of as canon until the TV series contradicts them.

These are all reasonable responses, but they miss the rather crucial fact that this whole "They're not canon" business is just something the third poster made up.

Fair enough he's not interested in them. Fair enough they're not part of 'his Doctor Who'. But not canonical?

Well, he's right. Of course they're not. They can't be. There's no canon so they can't be canonical.

Gridlock isn't canonical.
The Doctor Dances isn't canonical.
The Chimes of Midnight isn't canonical.
Lungbarrow isn't canonical.
Once Upon a Time Lord isn't canonical.
Kinda isn't canonical.
These five new Tom Baker plays aren't canonical.
Carnival of Monsters isn't canonical.
The War Games isn't canonical.
An Unearthly Child isn't canonical (neither version).

This is where Cornell's right that 'canon' is just a bullying word.

Because when you say ‘the books just aren’t “canon!”’ or ‘the books “happened” and the TV show can’t ignore them!’ you’re not saying something like ‘for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction’, you’re saying something like ‘the South will never surrender’. You’re yelling a battle cry, not stating the truth. Because there is no truth here to find. There was never and now cannot be any authority to rule on matters of canonicity in a tale that has allowed, or at the very least accepted, the rewriting of its own continuity. And you’re using the fact that discussions of canonicity are all about authority to try to assume an authority that you do not have.

In the end, you’re just bullying people.

- Cornell. This blog.

But it's one that bullies people who fall into using it as much as those it's directed at. The poor chap on that Bleeding Cool thread was just trying to say he didn't personally count non-tellybox Who (an entirely reasonable thing to do). He didn't seem to be in persuit of any power that would set him up amongst the gods - observe his IMHO and his awareness that others will think differently - but using the 'c' word puts him into exactly that position of assuming authority he doesn't have.

It is not a good word.

I Know I'm Lying.

Oh, alright then. There is a Doctor Who canon.

The Doctor defined it in The Gallifrey Chronicles...

"Sherlock Holmes solved the case before I could, as I recall."

"Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character," Trix pointed out.

The Doctor grinned. "My dear, one of the things you'll learn is that it's all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip."

"But that's just not possible. I mean some books contradict other ones and -"

The Doctor was ignoring her.

Lance Parkin, The Gallifrey Chronicles.

He later refined it in The Unicorn and the Wasp when he told Donna that there is no Noddy.

So Doctor Who canon looks like this...

My daughter grasped this the other day in a conversation we had on the bus. She said, "There's three ways of getting to all the different lands. The Faraway Tree, whirlwinds, and Doctor Who's little house."

THIS ONE'S FOR CHEESE-FIEND!

2009-06-18T05:27:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog, were the existence of such people not made impossible by this blog not being regularly written, would know that I've been putting together a chronology of the current rum goings on round Batman's way.

The first part's here.
And the second part's here.

You're reading the third part now. I'd link to it as well, but that'd trap you in an endless circle from which you'd never escape, so I shall not. Great is my mercy.

Not so great, however, that I'm prepared to extend it to myself and skip over Battle for the Cowl, the subject of today's installment. Though I'd strongly advise that most readers do.

Where Morrison left the matter of the Bat-succession in the last issue of RIP, Dick Grayson was holding the cape and cowl and taking up a whole page in order to look resolute and accepting of what must come. When Morrison returned to the matter of the Bat-succession in Batman and Robin, Dick Grayson had become Batman, commenting that he's always known this day would come. Inbetween these two "DICK GRAYSON IS THE NEW BATMAN!" moments, DC decided to publish a seventeen-issue event asking the question "WHO IS THE NEW BATMAN?"

It's those seventeen issues (two of which are pretty good) we're concerned with today, so enough with the hatin' and on to the uber-geeky pedantry which, by my very engagement with, robs me of any claim to be able to make critical judgements in the first place. Tally ho!

Right, lets start with the core mini - Battle for the Cowl #1-3 and the natural assumption that they occur in that order. Later on we might find ourselves in the position of wondering which pages from Cowl#2 take place before the final scenes of Cowl#1, but lets try and put that off as long as possible.

The two Gotham Gazette bookends are nice and clear too. Batman Dead? starts us off before any of the events of the main mini (Arkham's in disarry from the events of RIP but not yet exploded) and Batman Alive! wraps things up at the end.

Then there's a couple of stories which are only very losely related to the rest of the story... Secret Six#9 is set in a Gotham that's unprotected and in need of a Batman. There's no exploding Arkhams, burning cities or Jason Todds to tie us into any timeframe from the main series. It seems to make sense to me to place this before the main series.

Battle for the Cowl: Oracle: The Cure is notable for a number of things, among them the revelation that the Anti-Life Equation is good for you if you put it inside diamonds and that pixellated pug piss can return the dead to life. It's also notable for having no narative connection to Battle for the Cowl, other than Jim Gordon mumbling something about the situation at Arkham. This 'situation' can't be the explosion of the place that occurs in Cowl#1, since Barbara here has just moved back to Gotham as is getting little catch-up answerphone messages from Dick, rather than yet working with him to orchestrate a Network of urban superheroes. So the 'situation' has to be the one alluded to in Batman Dead? - that, following the Joker/Black Glove's occupation of Arkham, it's out of service while its inhabitants are all driven randomly around the city in poorly guarded buses.

So with Secret Six and Oracle both occuring before the main event. I propse we place Oracle first. that way if anyone ever does read the issues in the order we're generating here, they'll have the Secret Six issue to take away the taste of the Oracle mini and perhaps give them the strength to continue with their day.

Both are going before Batman Dead? in a shocking and controversial move that callously ruins its bookendyness, but has to be done in order to keep the scenes of Bullock and Harper's investigation close to the events of Azreal (That investigation also explictly places the entirity of Battle for the Cowl before Harper's involvement in the current Superman books, but that's data for a bigger project) .

There's another colon-heavy three issue mini to slot in, Battle for the Cowl: Azrael: Death's Dark Night, and it's quite eager to help. Issue three tells us that the whole mini takes place over one night, and that that night is Thursday. Issue one shows us the moment from Cowl#1 where the Batsignal is lit with the letters 'R.I.P' scratched into the middle of it. Nice and simple.

There's one little problem though...Barbara and Dick have a conversation about whether or not Jason Todd might be this story's killer, when in Battle for the Cowl Dick doesn't yet know that Jason is active. This problem goes away though when you notice that at no point in Azrael do they talk about 'The Jason Todd Batman' or anything, just the possibility that Jason Todd was the killer. So it still fits with Dick not knowing Jason is BadBats.

Lets stop a minute and see where we've got to...

Oracle: The Cure 1-3
Secret Six #9
Gotham Gazette: Batman Dead?
Battle for the Cowl #1
MEANWHILE....Azrael: Death's Dark Knight #1-3
Battle for the Cowl #2
Battle for the Cowl #3
Gotham Gazette: Batman Alive?

Right, just the one-shots now, of which there are several. The Commissioner Gordon one sees Jimbo held captive by Mister Freeze in a clearly marked Cyronics lab where the GCPD don't think to look despite it being the most prominent building visible from the windows of their offices. Freeze is determined to teach Gordon a lesson about how one bad day can change a person's life. This story, which they somehow restrained themselves from calling 'The Chilling Joke', is referenced in Cowl #2 but is subsequent to the Arkham explosion in Cowl #1, so has to occur between the pages of that first issue.

The Man-Bat one-shot in which...oh I don't care... in which Man-Bat does things, also takes place the night that the RIP-marked Batsignal is lit, so takes place alongside events in Cowl #1 and Azrael.

The Arkham Asylum one-shot takes place an indeterminate amount of time after the place has been blown up. The fires are out and it's safe to walk around in there. Since this is, along with Secret Six #9, one of the two good comics in the whole event, I'm sticking it right at the end for similar reasons to why I put Secret Six after Oracle.

Ha! One two one-shots to fit in now! What couple possibly go wrong?

Here's how events play out in Battle for the Cowl #2...

Two Face and Penguin are oblivious to the return of the Black Mask, blaming each other for their misfortunes.

This is happening at the same time as Dick is figuring out that BadBats is Jason.

Later, Tim in the Bat-costume discovers Jason's BadBatcave.

Catwoman shows up and figures out he's not Batman. She doesn't however know who BatBats is.
BadBats turns up, pistol whips her, and ends her involvement in Battle for the Cowl.

Here's how events play out in The Underground #1...

Penguin knows all about Black Mask's involvement and has hired the Riddler to find him.
Selina runs into BadBats.

"He's trying to kill me," she accurately observes, "It's not Robin. He was wearing a different suit when I ran into him yesterday."

BadBats kicks her in the vagina (there's a familiar theme emerging here), ending her involvement in The Underground.

This can just about work. On meeting BadBats, she talks about having met Tim Bats yesterday...but the only time we see her meet TimBats in Cowl is during a fight with BadBats.

That seemed to have been the historic first team-up between Selina and TimBats, and ends with Tim 'fatally stabbed' with a batarang and Selina unconcious. Fortunately, Jason hit her from behind so it still works that she sees his costume as being unfamiliar in Underground. All we've got to do is suppose that she somehow escapes from having been knocked out in the middle of the lair of a torturer who starves his victims to death, without learning who he was or giving much thought to him until a chance meeting the following day.

The Network one-shot occurs simulateously with The Underground, as we see Oracle monitoring its events.

There we go then. And here's the full updated chronology...

PART ONE - BATMAN BEATS THE DEVIL.

DCU #0
Detective Comics #846-50 ('Heart of Hush')
Batman #676-8 ('RIP' parts 1-3)
Robin #175-6
Batman #679-681 ('RIP' parts 4-6)

PART TWO - BATMAN'S MISSING FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.

Batman and the Outsiders #11-14
Nightwing #147-151 ('The Great Leap') - concurrent with early chapters of 'Search for a Hero'
Robin #177-82 ('Search for a Hero')
Dectective #851, Batman #684 ('The Last Days of Gotham') - concurrent with later chapters of 'Search for a Hero'

PART THREE - BATMAN KILLS GOD.

That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-3
Superman Beyond #1-2
Final Crisis #4
Batman #682-3
Final Crisis #5-7

PART FOUR - WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER?

Batman #686
Detective Comics #853

PART FIVE - BATMAN APPEARS DEAD FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.

Nightwing #152-3
Detective #852, Batman #685 ('Reconstruction/Catspaw')
Batman and the Outsiders Special #1
The Outsiders #15-20 ('The Deep') - provisional placement.
Robin #183

PART SIX - EVERYONE BATTLES OVER CAWL, A TRADITIONAL WELSH LAMB AND LEEK STEW.

Oracle: The Cure #1-3
Secret Six #9
Gotham Gazette: Batman Dead?
Battle for the Cowl #1
Man-Bat #1, Commissioner Gordon #1 and Azrael: Death's Dark Knight #1-3 (all concurrent with the above)
Battle for the Cowl #2
The Underground #1/The Network #1
Battle for the Cowl #3
Arkham Asylum #1
Gotham Gazette: Batman Alive!

"The Cult of the Unwritten Book"

2009-05-14T14:28:00.000-07:00

Quite excited to get my hands on The Unwritten tomorrow. I've a number of reasons, but the main one is just that I really miss having a regular dose of Mike Carey in my reading.

So, to mark its release, I present a list of...

Seventy-four things that are Unwritten.

1) Most blog posts I think of.

26) The Future

According to Joe Strummer, anyway. Dunno if he's right. Haven't seen the LOST finale yet.

27) 'O' and 'B', but no longer 'N'.

A couple of days ago I expressed some concern over Jordan calling Peter a "fucking knob."

Just because when The Mirror reported this, they printed it as "f****** k***" and I couldn't work out what "k***" was for ages.

They've taken steps to avoid causing such distress in the future.

Yesterday she called him a "complete knob" and they reported it as "complete kn**."

Well done, The Mirror! That's much clearer. Unless she was perhaps calling him a knur or a knop. One being a loop of yarn, one being a knot in a tree and both being fair comment.

32) The Dalek Invasion of Gotham.

Criminally.

34) Entries 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71 and 74

48) Some George R.R. Martin novel or another.

I've never read the chap, so have no vested interest in whether a particular book of his is written or unwritten, but Neil Gaiman's thoughts on the limits of his responsibility to get it written have caught my interest.

Because what he's saying feels so intuitively right when it comes to novels...

"You're complaining about George doing other things than writing the books you want to read as if your buying the first book in the series was a contract with him: that you would pay over your ten dollars, and George for his part would spend every waking hour until the series was done, writing the rest of the books for you.

No such contract existed. You were paying your ten dollars for the book you were reading, and I assume that you enjoyed it because you want to know what happens next." - Gaiman

...after all, I waited the fourteen years between the third and final volumes of Moorcock's Pyat Tetralogy, and I'm glad both that I did and that Uncle Mike took the time to do it justice.

But with comics I can't help but feel there is some sort of 'contract' when you start buying into a serial. Maybe this is because comics fandom is so mired in reader-entitlement that I can't think outside it, and obviously the terms of that contract don't include the creators spending "every waking hour" getting it done, but I can't shake the feeling that when people pay out for 'part one of six' then they're owed more than 'part one of six'. They're owed the opportunity to someday buy parts two to six, aren't they?

Thinking about this story from Lying in the Gutters...

"Were you one of the people buying the "Top Ten Season Two" mini-series who, like me, were surprised that it seemed to just stop rather than finish? A commentary on the randomness of life? That stories rarely end smoothly? That loose plots are endemic of our own life so why not reflect them in fiction?

No.

The series was originally planned and written as an eight issue series with two one shots on top, all written by Zander Cannon, one of the artists from the original "Top Ten" series, with Kevin Cannon. The other artist, Gene Ha, was only available for four issues. Wildstorm seem to have decided that it was only Ha's name that appealed to the consumer, so they only published his four issues, and the one shot drawn by Da Xiong that accompanied them. Without telling anyone that they would only be getting half a story." - Johnston

It's hard not to feel that some sort of 'contract' has been broken and that readers who've forked out for that half-a-story are not being unreasonable if they feel entitled to something more than the half-a-story they've paid for?

Though obviously, that one's a case of the publisher letting the readers down rather than the writer.

49) Grant Morrison's Authority #3-6

50) The second half of my big thematic analysis of Doctor Who's fourth Welsh season.

Sorry Ceribri! Sorry Eirwyn!

68) "The little mermaid lifted her bright eyes toward God's sun, and for the first time felt them wet with tears"

Does Disney's The Little Mermaid 'unwrite' Hans Christian Anderson's?

Obviously it doesn't overwrite it. It's still there.

"My books are still the same books as they were before they were made into films. The books haven't changed. I'm reminded of the remark by, I think it was Raymond Chandler, where he was asked about what he felt about having his books "ruined" by Hollywood. And he led the questioner into his study and showed him all the books there on the bookshelf, and said, Look—there they all are. They're all fine. They're fine. They're not ruined. They're still there." - Alan Moore.

But... there's something really naive about this, isn't there?

Books, like any linguistic construction, only mean anything in a context. If the context changes, then the meaning has changed. To think otherwise is to think that the word 'gift' means the same thing in English as it does in German.

The existence of Disney's Little Mermaid as the culturally dominant form of the story changes the context in which the original can be read.

For me, it makes it better. Anderson's story is darker, stranger and more etherial than it would otherwise be through the contrast with Disney's version. It's made more thrilling by the sense that you're uncovering the mysterious and forbidden secret history of Ariel. That you're reading the story that couldn't be told.

It's still there. But it's not the same book, and neither are Moore's or Chandler's whether they like it or not.

"The Little Mermaid commits a noble suicide and becomes a spirit of the air" was once an accurate statement about a fiction. It Was Written.

Now it's a variation on a myth. It's been set free. It's been unwritten.

70) The Orwell novel that informs the V for Vendetta movie.

This, of course, is unwritten because the V for Vendetta movie is informed by very little. Although fortunately that 'very little' does include an Alan Moore book called V for Vendetta which was informed by an Orwell novel to almost as great a degree as it was informed by Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree.

I'm going on about this because today's Independant briefly turned into 4chan and tried to convince its readers of the value of the Wachowski film.

"Not for the first time, but more now than ever, I commend to you V For Vendetta, the 2005 film in which a superhero in a Guy Fawkes mask sets about doing to Parliament what his role model tantalisingly failed to achieve under James I.

Slaughtered by most critics, the movie is hardly flawless in its totalitarian state allegorising, lacking the nuance of the Orwell novel that informs it, and its plot full of holes the size of Oliver Letwin's soggy tennis court.

For all that, I love it to bits, and suspect you might too, because in its crude and overblown way it caught a nebulous suspicion and gave it flesh. "The truth," V tells the watching public after hijacking the government-controlled state broadcaster, "is that there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?... How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well, certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable. But, again, truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror."" - Mathew Norman.

Oblivious to the fact that it might ever have been something other than a crude and overblown movie, the piece continues to use V for Vendetta as its central analogy as it heads towards a point that is, as it turns out, an amazingly good one.

72) The British Constitution.

There's much I love about America, but not much I envy.
One of those things though is a constitution.

Not that we haven't got one. We've got a lovely one. Smashing it is.
Now where did I see it last? I know it's round here somewhere...

Oh yeah, we haven't got round to writing it down yet. After eight-hundred years or so, you'd think we might have found time by now. Not getting round to writing shopping lists, thank-you letters to kind aunts, replies to e-mails, issues of the Authority... that's one thing. But if you're a constitutional democracy and you haven't even bothered to write down a consitution, that's just bloody lazy, isn't it?

Anyway, that what that Mathew Norman column was about as, rather excitingly he argued that the political climate is such that it could be used to finally win us one.

He even suggests that we get Stephen Fry in to help out, which sounds a good idea. Though personally I'd want to just bind the complete works of Paul Cornell and say, "This."

In fact, since the k****s are going to win anyway, I'll go as far as to say that if a commitment to a written constitution is in their manifesto then I'll do something I never thought I would and

73) The last bit of the preceeding sentence.

Because I chickened out of saying "vote Conservative."

Perhaps if I'd written the connective threads that would have turned all this into an article, we'd have learned that some things are sadly unwritten, some things are more potent after they're unwritten, and some things should never be written.

Lets assume we would have anyway, and take that as a conclusion.

Que?

2009-05-12T14:32:00.000-07:00

Jordan and her mysterious boy have sadly decided to call it a day and as a consequence far too much of my day has been spent thinking about which swear word begins with 'k'.

It was in The Mirror that I read the account of the pivotal argument between Katie and Peter and on two occasions I boggled when it said she called him a...

"F****** K***"

K? K? My first thought was, "Are the papers now so scared of the word 'cunt' that they not only have to block out three of its letters but also change the remaining one to a homophone? What madness is this?"

Everyone I showed it to, and that was everyone I work with - it was annoying me that much, had a similar reaction.

"K? K? Must be a misprint!" said the Dana Scullys.

"K? K? I always thought it began with 'C'?" said those too quick to doubt themselves.

"K? K? Are the papers now so scared of the word 'cunt' that they not only have to block out three of its letters but also change the remaining one to a homophone?" said the people who unnerved me by demonstrating how similar their minds are to my own.

It was about three hours later, and in the middle of an unrelated conversation when the answer came to me and I found myself shouting out, "OH! She said KNOB!"

The Shapeless Moment.

2009-05-09T05:20:00.000-07:00

We've been having a bit of a clearout here at the brutal tearooms, to make room for the new piano that's arriving on Wednesday. During this process My Lady Friend discovered... a document.

It's obviously my work, and obviously some sort of joke, but despite the fact that I dimly remember writing it, I'm not sure what the joke was.

The document is offered bellow without commentary or amendment, although in one instance my OCR has rendered 'Thrice-Cursed Cards of Death' as "Trice-Corset Carts of Peat" or "Tree-Cwrset Gams of Deza" and I couldn't bring myself to correct either.

'Stoatbound'

The Family Game of Groats. ..and Stoats!

1) Players take turns to roll a six-sided dice (hereafter referred to as the 'stoatcube') and to move the number of squares displayed on its uppermost face, as modified by any stoat/groat related effects discussed below.

2) The winner of the game is the first to reach the final square — "The Land That Stoats Forgot' There's none of that 'must have the exact number' stuff.

3) Should both players reach "The Land that Stoats Forgot' simultaneously, then the 'turn-taking' principle outlined in Rule One has been ignored and the game is declared to have been invalid and must be replayed from the start.

3a) At higher levels of play then the 'turn-taking' principle is re-enforced by the optional 'Exchange of Wishes' rule.

3b) If the 'Exchange of Wishes' rule is in play then a player formally signifies the end of his turn by saying, "I wish you stoats!" to his opponent as he passes the stoatcube. The player receiving the stoatcube then responds "I wish me groats!", formally signifying the start of his turn.

3C) For however many seconds elapse inbetween the previously active player saying "I wish you stoats!" and the next player replying "I wish me groats!" then the game is suspended in a state where it is nobody's turn. This brief state is referred to as 'The Shapeless Moment'.

3d) On the very first turn in a game where the 'Exchange of Wishes' rule is in play then a player obviously may not begin that particular turn by responding "I wish me groats!" to the other player's "I wish you stoats!" as the other player has not said "I wish you stoats!". What happens here is that the player begins the turn by instead saying "I wish me groats!" The inflection is different, do you see?

4) Certain squares will contain an instruction. The player who lands on such a square is to follow this instruction immediately, with no messing about.

5) Certain squares instruct you to draw a card from either the "BUREAU OF MYSTERIES" pile, the "Ubi, Obi, Ibi" pile or the "Trice-Corset Carts of Peat" pile. The player who lands on such a square is to draw the appropriate card immediately with no messing about and then follow the instruction on the card immediately with no messing about.

6) When all instructions written on the squares and cards have been completed, messing about is permitted. Messing about is also permitted at the start of a player's turn before rolling the Stoatcube. The exact forms of messing about permissible are discussed later.

7) The exact sequence of play is therefore...

Start of a Player's turn. (Signified, if the 'Exchange of Wishes' rule is in play by saying, "I wish me groats!' unless it is the opening turn of the game in which case it is signified by saying "I wish me groats!")
Primary Messing about phase (optional)
Rolling of Stoatcube
Moving the appropriate number of squares.
Obeying any instructions written on the square, or written on a card the square has directed you to draw.
Secondary Messing about phase(optional)
Concluding your turn by passing the stoatcube to the next player (and, if the 'Exchange of Wishes' rule is in play, saying "I wish you stoats!')

8) You begin the game with two stoats and two groats. Use them wisely.

9) Most squares or cards will cause you to either gain or loose a quantity of either stoats, groats or even both! To ensure honesty and lack of confusion, tokens should be used to represent each player's stock of stoats and groats. The tokens used to represent stoats should differ from those used to represent groats.

9a) At international championship level it is expected that real groats and stoats be used.

10)The number of stoats you posses modifies the number displayed on the upper face of the stoatcube. Subtract one from it for each stoat you possess.

11) For example, should you own three stoats and roll a five, the number of squares you must move is in fact two. Or should you own one stoat and roll a six, the number of squares you must move is five. This rule is key to the game. Perhaps the best way to understand it is to visualize the horrid little things physically dragging you to a halt as you struggle to crawl forward — the more stoats, the slower your progress.

12) Becoming stoatbound: A player cannot posses more than six stoats. A player who has six stoats is said to be 'stoatbound'.

13) Entering `negative stoatage' : A player enters Negative Stoatage when the number of stoats they possess is fewer than zero. For example, if a player has three stoats and is instructed by a card to loose five stoats, the number of stoats in their possession will be -2. A player in negative stoatage adds to their stoatcube roll the number of stoats by which they are below zero. So a player with -4 stoats who rolls a 3 must advance 7 spaces. There is no limit to the extent by which a player may be in negative stoatage. Neither is there a helpful way to visualize the condition, although you may wish to try and picture the player being dragged forwards by some kind of ghostly conceptual anti-stoat.

14) Groats may be spent during the primary and secondary Messing About phases of your turn and at no other time.

15) During the Primary Messing About Phase (prior to rolling the stoatcube) then groats can be spent to increase the number you are about to roll. Spend a number of groats, roll the stoatcube and then add to the number shown the number of groats spent. Don't forget to also adjust for stoats before moving!

Example: I have three groats and two stoats. I spend all three groats to increase my dice roll. I roll a four. To this I add the three extra I gained from my groat-spending then subtract two due to the two stoats with which I am afflicted. I move forward five spaces.

16) During either the Primary or Secondary Messing About Phases then groats can be spend to remove stoats. Remove one stoat from yourself for each groat spent in this way. A PLAYER IS NOT PERMITTED TO ENTER `NEGATIVE STOATAGE' BY THESE MEANS.

17) During either the Primary or Secondary Messing About Phases then groats can be spent to transfer stoats from yourself to your opponent. Transfer one stoat from your stock to your opponent's for every two groats spent in this way. A PLAYER IS NOT PERMITTED TO ENTER `NEGATIVE STOATAGE' BY THESE MEANS.

18) Many cards will instruct you to save them and deploy them at the moment of your choosing. This can be in either the primary or secondary Messing About phase of your turn, or the primary or secondary Messing About phase of your opponent's turn.

19) The only permissible forms of messing about are therefore:

Spending groats to increase your stoatcube roll.
Spending groats to remove stoats.
Spending groats to transfer stoats
Deploying cards you've earlier acquired.

20) Congratulations! You now know all there is to know about Stoatbound!... except of course for what lurks within the "BUREAU OF MYSTERIES", the "Ubi, Obi, Ibi" cards and the "Tree-Cwrset Gams of Deza"- Have fun finding out!

We wish you groats!

£1.15

2009-04-28T14:47:00.000-07:00

The coffee machine in my work's canteen does not want to tell you what it vends. There's no indication of what sort of coffee it contains, what blend, what brand, or what bean. It's probably seriously pissed off about the fact that it dispenses some sort of coffee being contextually implicit. This machine is playing its cards close to its chest, and I can respect that.

But it nevertheless offers us options. It offers us buttons. Here are the four buttons on the coffee machine in my work's canteen...

Black Coffee
Fair-Trade Black Coffee
White Coffee
Fair-Trade White Coffee

Right, so, lets say we want white coffee. We've no information as to whose white coffee, nothing to tie us to an existing brand-loyalty or expectation of a particular flavour. We've no choice to make except whether we want our coffee to be Fair-Trade or not. What's going to sway our decsion?

Well, it's probably going to be the price, isn't it?

So here's the price of a cup of White Coffee from the machine... £1.15.

And here's the price of a cup of Fair-Trade White Coffee from the machine... £1.15.

And here's the question I've been struggling to get my head round all day...

WHAT SORT OF A BASTARD PRESSES THE 'WHITE COFFEE' BUTTON?

It's just a direct and uncomplicated choice..."Are you a bastard? Click Y for 'Yes', Click N for 'No'."

The 'White Coffee' button offers you nothing! It offers you no assurance of a familiar taste and it offers you no saving of cash! What can anyone gain from pressing the white coffee button?

Then it became obvious. What we've got in this unique scenario (so unique it sounds like I've invented it as some sort of allegory, but no, it's TWUE!) is such a simple choice between pressing a button that says, "I would like some of my £1.15 to go to the poor impoverished bastards who grew this stuff" and a button that says "I would like all of my £1.15 to go to the greedy bastards who're exploiting them" that there's no reason for that button to be there except to give people an oppertunity to do something wrong.

And that's its genius.

Because I work in a hospital. Hospitals are full of oppertunities to do things that are very wrong. They're full of physically vulnerable patients, emotionally vulnerable relatives, onnerous responsibilities and staff who're either exhausted, bitter or jaded. There's a very real desire to do wrong seething away in the heads and hearts of a lot of people in a position to do something horribly, monstrously wrong. So they've been given a saftely valve. They've been given a trivial, daily evil they can commit. They've been given a button.

One day this week I shall sit in the canteen and count how many press 'White Coffee' button, and I shall feel safer for knowing that many Harold Shipmans have been averted.

These things are fun for the person writing them.

2009-04-23T01:55:00.001-07:00

It's the second part of my Bat-Chronology! Rejoice in that news.

The Story so Far -

In the first installment we deduced that the timeline offered by DC Editorial at their San Deigo panel was a bumper basket of bollocks. This didn't take much deducing since it involved Batman recovering from a helicopter crash before it happened.

We also discovered that, no matter how tidy it would be to have all of the tie-ins in which Gotham goes mental over Bruce's apparent death occur after Final Crisis, and thus refer to the same apparent death, a fair chunk of them simply have to happen inbetween RIP and FC and refer to a different apparent death.

So we ended up with this...

PART ONE - BATMAN BEATS THE DEVIL.

Detective Comics #846-50 ('Heart of Hush')
Batman #676-8 ('RIP' parts 1-3)
Robin #175-6
Batman #679-681 ('RIP' parts 4-6)

PART TWO - BATMAN'S MISSING FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.

Batman and the Outsiders #11-14
Nightwing #147-151 ('The Great Leap') - concurrent with early chapters of 'Search for a Hero'
Robin #177-82 ('Search for a Hero')
Dectective #851, Batman #684 ('The Last Days of Gotham') - concurrent with later chapters of 'Search for a Hero'

PART THREE - BATMAN KILLS GOD.

That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-4
Batman #682-3
Final Crisis #5-7

PART FOUR - BATMAN APPEARS DEAD FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.

Nightwing #152-3
Detective #852, Batman #685 ('Reconstruction/Catspaw')

What I'm up to in this post is a little tidy-up to take us up to the start of Battle for the Cowl, which I'll do in one big lump once that's all over.

So, the things I need to slot in today are... Robin #183, Batman and the Outsiders Special #1, Outsiders #15-17 and Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? Can't see anything that might be ambiguous there.

Starting with Robin #183, then we've references back to everything that's been going on in Gotham's RIP/Last Rites issues, but no references to Final Crisis. Gang Wars - worth mentioning, the End of the World - not so much. Taken with Tim's expectation that Bruce will be back, an expectation that's more reasonable if you've seen a big splash than if you've seen a charred corpse, then this might suggest we're still in the post-RIP/pre-FC interregnum. But were're not. This issue is explictly set after Alfred's "taken over the Outsiders", which happens in Batman and the Outsiders Special #1 and that issue does directly reference FC when it has has Black Lightning monologuing about its apocalyptic goings-on.

Batman and the Outsiders Special #1, hereafter known as Why Didn't They Just Make This One Batman and the Outsiders #15?, occurs "a predetermined length of time" after Batman's 'death', but an unspecified one. We might as well just stick to publication order and have it take place after the Faces of Evil thingy.

The new Outsiders' first mission, which begins in Outsiders #15, picks up directly from the end of Why Didn't They Just Make This One Batman and the Outsiders #15?. So until a reason presents itself in the four issues yet to be published, I'm going to assume for now that the arc which runs from #15-20 ('The Deep') takes place immediately after the special. This fits nicely with the fact that this Outsiders team is established before Battle for the Cowl: Man-Bat, but nevertheless four issues is a long time in comics, so this placement remains very provisional. Teatime Brutality Inc. accepts no responsibility for any distress caused should I later decide it goes later.

Right, what's left?

Well, it'd obviously be a travesty of limitation and reduction to misread Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? in order to fit it into continuity. So let's do exactly that. Sorry, Neil. Love ya, but if you're going to do a summation of all the different takes on the Batman Myth in the middle of someone elses' more extensive and insightful summation of all the different takes on the Batman Myth then the big fish noms the little one.

Caped Crusader depicts an 'essential' or Platonic Batman dying and being reborn in endless variations of his own life.

'The Omega Sanction' is established in Seven Soldiers as being a cycle of death and rebirth that sees its victim condemned to endless variations on his own life. Batman falls foul of the Omega Sanction in Final Crisis.

While Gaiman probably intends Caped Crusader to be 'continuity-transcendent', and while that's undoubtedly the best way to read the story on its own terms, putting Gaiman and Morrison's cycles of multiple Bat-lives together is irresistible in a project like this.

Actually, something rather pleasing happens when you let yourself pretend that Gaiman and Morrison are purposefully telling the same story. What makes the Omega Sanction a hell is that each life is increasingly without hope. But what makes Batman Batman, according to Gaiman, is that he never gives up. The single trait that makes this reincarnating self a consistent, self -identical, A=A, self is its refusal to surrender hope. So it's logically impossible to reincarnate Batman in a spiral of increasingly hopeless lives, as if the hope doesn't carry over then it's not Batman you're reincarnating. Fun, fun, fun.

So in it goes, as an FC coda, whether it likes it or not.

Couple of other things I'm going to stick in on this update are Superman Beyond (since FC's unreadable without it, and since the "selfless act...meet hate crime" synthesis sets up the logic by which Batman's able to kill Darkseid) and DCU#0. That issue doesn't really occur at any fixed point in a chronology, what with it showing Barry Allen condensing down from union with all space-time, but I'm bunging it in before RIP, since that's where its most Bat-relevant scene goes.

Here's how it looks...

PART ONE - BATMAN BEATS THE DEVIL.

DCU #0
Detective Comics #846-50 ('Heart of Hush')
Batman #676-8 ('RIP' parts 1-3)
Robin #175-6
Batman #679-681 ('RIP' parts 4-6)

PART TWO - BATMAN'S MISSING FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.

Batman and the Outsiders #11-14
Nightwing #147-151 ('The Great Leap') - concurrent with early chapters of 'Search for a Hero'
Robin #177-82 ('Search for a Hero')
Dectective #851, Batman #684 ('The Last Days of Gotham') - concurrent with later chapters of 'Search for a Hero'

PART THREE - BATMAN KILLS GOD.

That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-3
Superman Beyond #1-2
Final Crisis #4
Batman #682-3
Final Crisis #5-7

PART FOUR - WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAPED CRUSADER?

Batman #686
Detective Comics #853

PART FIVE - BATMAN APPEARS DEAD FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.

Nightwing #152-3
Detective #852, Batman #685 ('Reconstruction/Catspaw')
Batman and the Outsiders Special #1
The Outsiders #15-20 ('The Deep') - provisional placement.
Robin #183

PART SIX - EVERYONE BATTLES OVER CAWL, A TRADITIONAL WELSH LAMB AND LEEK STEW.

Coming Soon.

My third consecutive post about SeaGuy

2009-04-07T14:38:00.000-07:00

Not that I've anything more to say about it. Other than perhaps how interesting it is as a companion piece to Irredeemable. In one you've got heroes robbed of their powers by a methodical attack on self-esteem, in the other you've got heroes robbed of their morality by the random grinding down of self-esteem by This Cruel World and... NO! I've nothing more to say about it.

Just thought I'd link to a commentary done proper, to Marty being typically generous about mine, and to to another interesting post of Marty's which seems very SeaGuy-relevant.

One thing that occured to me while reading it is that most dystopian/dystopian-ish SF does seem to fall on either side of a divide about whether or not it's Evil Government that'll steal our liberties or Evil Corporations that'll steal our liberties. But there's a broad agreement about the fact that some manner of Evil Bastards will steal our liberties, and there's a broad agreement in populist SF that you then tell the same sort of story about how bad this is.

Them political grids what you can do, the ones you can fold diagonally to PROVE that Thatcher is the exact opposite of Ghandi, well... the standard SF 'dark future' seems much more concerned with the social authority/liberty axis than it does with the economic left/right axis, which it almost treats as fungible.

That's interesting since that's more or less the opposite way round from how we all seem to think when we're considering the present. In HollywoodLaserGunTomorrow then we must heroically fight for our freedoms and it doesn't matter terribly much whether it was Big Government or McEvilCorp that half-inched 'em. In the here and now we're all crazy tribal about whether we identify as being right or left wing, and almost entirely indifferent to massive erosions of our civil liberties.

Except when surrendering our liberties means that some bunch of people we're not sure about lose thiers. We like that. Or when we we're giving up concrete, specific, real freedoms in order to better safeguard something undefined and rhetorical called FREEDOM. We like that too.

I sense the Loco Man is very near

2009-04-05T15:09:00.000-07:00

Second bit of SeaGuy thoughtstream, continued from previous post...

"Everyone knows the world's made of science and history"

Forget Morrison versus Moore, the Morrison versus Morrison feud begins here!
New Morrison hearts the secular rationalism that'd endorse this, but Morrison Classic still reckons all myths are TWUE! Who will win?

Inevitable Spoiler: They'll be synthesised in some way.

"I'm Flyin'!"

Anybody read the curious afterword Mozza's done for Irredeemable #1? In amongst the wildest hyperbole since his endorsement of The Umbrella Academy he draws an analogy between the events in the comic and the effect on writers' self-esteem of Internet criticism. Those of us who disliked Final Crisis had better make our peace and tell our families we love them.

"Some poor unfortunate just...stops being happy."

The perfect Doctor Who co-text to this issue is The Happiness Patrol. There's so much in that story that would fit perfectly into SeaGuy's world. Fifi, Trevor Sigma, the Kandyman, Priscilla P and the rest of them are practically part of SeaGuy's world already. It's got such a similar narative logic and, for this middle mini, a similar theme.

The perfect musical accompaniment to this issue is any Smiths album you might chose. I'm thinking Meat is Murder myself.

But despite this I can't get 3AM Eternal out of my head while reading it. Just because I know the mini that follows this is called SeaGuy Eternal and I'm extremely suggestable. And old.

Speaking of "just because", the peacock coughing up a clock in this panel is exactly the sort of randomness/symbolism I'm talking about when I talk about the "Should I be interpreting this or not?" panic that SeaGuy engenders. If it is right to call this book surreal, and I think it probably is, then it's surreal in the way Magritte is.

"I don't want to eat any more tuna sandwiches, doctor... please"

Feels like a callback to the "Hell of a way to join the ranks of the carnivorous" scene from The Filth. Which I hope and pray will someday get out of my head.

"This research proves there are no such things as fish..."

SeaGuy might seem a comic as mad as the doctors think SeaGuy is, but I'm increasingly convinced that it's what superhero comics look like in the 2009 where the industry isn't crazy.

Accessible but challenging, self-contained but richly intertextual, imaginative but disciplined.

In the sane 2009, the one where truly psychopathic books like Battle for the Cowl: Man-Bat or Bomb Queen V don't exist, then the racks are filled with superhero comics that're just like SeaGuy (whilst also being totally different).

"I'm a sane, educated man and I, too, saw the fish!"

Should SeaGuy: The Movie ever hit cinemas, the audience will stuggle not to join in with the clapping.

The Chewy Deserts of the Plasticine Era

2009-04-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

It's a SeaGuy thoughtstream!

Not annotations, or a review or anything that takes work. Just some bobbins that went through my noggin while reading it.

It's all spoilers and that.

"I feel terrible"

One of the things that makes SeaGuy a challenge to navigate through is that it's a mix of the symbollic and the "Just 'cos." The skeleton of Claudette on the first page obviously stands for the skeleton of a different fish altogether, but take something like...I dunno, the smoking Moai from the last mini. I don't think we're 'meant' to wiki Polynesian religious practises and apply the weight of the reference to the text, and I don't think we'd get much out of it if we did.

It's a little like what I was talking about with regard to Lynch films the other day - the unease they create by not letting the viewer know which absurd elements they should be trying to interpret as Clooos, and which they should just be going with as visual music.

I mention this here because in Slaves of Mickey Eye the art has picked up a similar uncertainty of interpretability. Stewart's style has changed. Some of this is deliberately significant...

"You can see Cameron’s drawn his features a little sharper. He looks a little more adult. You can see his cheekbones. It’s about a guy learning who he is and trying to figure out his place in the world [...] you’ll see how it all starts to patch together, how the child-like elements of the first book actually mean something. It’s almost like growing up" (Mozza, CBR)

...so should we be reading all of the style changes as significant?

If newly sharp features means thematic adolesence, then does the thick, thick inking thats appeared around every discrete object mean there's now a greater conceptual separation between the world and its contents? Does She-Beard's much more cartoony new look mean that her object status within the story causes her to become progressively less defined as the guy with subject status aquires cheekbones?

Or is all this just because it's about five years since Stewart last drew this world, his style's moved on and that's all there is to it?

"B-B-Beakeye Unlike"

More obvious symbolism...but again to concepts within the story. It's almost as if SeaGuy works like some sort of partially closed system. All the individual symbols are in reference to other things going on inside SeaGuy, but when put together they build a story that derives its meaning from being a metaphor for stuff outside itself. Which makes it a total inversion of Morrison's Batman, which hoards its meaning internally but generates it by hoovering up symbols from eighty years' worth of Batnonsense.

This idea doesn't entirely stand up - we all know why Mickey Eye is called 'Mickey' - but I think it's the general tendency. Though all this goes right out the window if I decide that the butterfly is the one from Watchmen #11. I might.

"Don' Go SeaGuy. Not without your pal."

Six pages in and I feel creeped out and close to heartbroken. This is going well.

"For you shall this day have neither! Nor shall any man who fails to best me first in open combat!"

I love how She-Beard's extended the logic of the first mini. There she could only give her virginity to a man who defeated her in combat, here she's further constrained in that she can't pay rent unless defeated.

"Why is death playing chess here on the street corner anyway? Shouldn't you be way more important?"

MorrisseySeaGuy is questioning all the random Whimsey that RupertTheBearSeaGuy just went with! And once he does...it's dragged away. Don't worry, it comes back in adulthood.

There's very little 'invention' going on in this issue, come to think of it. Most of it is SeaGuy walking around the world of the first mini asking himself, "How did I ever think this is normal?"

"Mumble mumble spacetime mumble nonsense mumble"

Grant's "I am whatever you say I am" to the Internets?

"Say, I'd like you to meet Prof Silvan Niltoid"

Is this, Anti-Dad excluded, the SeaGuy verse's only expy?
Though like the Hoaxer in Flex Mentallo, he seems a hybrid of a Morrison Fiction Suit and a hypertimeline of a DCU villain.

"Ah, you're admiring my brainbow, I see. Can't say I blame you"

Hanibal Tabu admired the brainbow...

"No, just ... no ... [...]
Really, "Seaguy: The Slaves of Mickey Eye" #1? If you read the first series, this will make no sense. If you've never heard of the first series, this will make no sense. Like walking into a foreign film without subtitles, just ... wow, no. Even with that one good panel about the brainbow ... still, no."

Makes you wonder why he read it really. It can't have been out of any sense of professional obligation as given the nature of his reviews he can't belive that he owed the world these particular "no"s and "..."s . And it can't have been with any expectation that he might enjoy the book as "By Grant Morrison" is a synonym for "Is a Shite Comic" in his idiom.

Patsy Walker: Hellcat earned a "No, just...no..." by being "Like Grant Morrison"

Mighty Avengers #21 earned a "No, just...no..." because "it was almost as if this issue was written by Grant Morrison."

So why would he expect a book that actually was written by Grant Morrison to be worth his time?

"Who needs heroes when life's perfect?"

THE DAY GOOD WON!

Chopra, at that panel he did with Mozza at San Deigo last year, came out with this...

"If you had only creativity and evolution, you would have no universe," he said. "If you had only destructive forces, the universe would dissipate into a black hole." Chopra clarified, "you need the tension between the two forces."
[...]
He said the message of the superhero is "keep winning, but don't win."

Interesting that Morrison went with exactly the image of the universe falling into a black hole for THE DAY EVIL WON, but that before that he'd established the world of SeaGuy as having its Final Crisis as the breaking of the "keep winning, but don't win" rule.

Good has won, and it's just as ruinous.
Or has it? And or is it?

"What did they tell you about who actually won that big war between good and evil they're always telling you about?"

If either side did Finally win, would you be able to tell the difference?

And is it a problem that the Francis Fukuyama-esque 'End of History' that we saw in the first mini isn't quite as credible in 2009? Back in 2004 there were serious, intelligent grown-ups who really did think that global capitalism really had reached a point where it offered a stable, self-maintaining endpoint to idelogical development. That we'd cracked it, could leave the system running and just enjoy the spectacle as it expanded to fill the world then chugged along nicely forever. I'm not sure that's quite so tenable right now.

This week someone asked one of the G20 rioters why they were so angry. They said it was because they'd spent all thier lives fighting capitalism, and then it just went and ended itself.

Bit of an exaggeration, of course. There's plenty of life left it in, but...the Mickey-Eye hegemony was terrifying in the first mini because there was all too easy to imagine that humanity's story really did END there in the theme park. Nowadays, not so much. Is this going to be an obstacle for the SeaGuy trilogy, which was all plotted out back in 2004 and has been postponed until now, or might it end up helping it?

Part Two tomorrow.

Geoff Johns' WATCHMEN

2009-04-02T14:31:00.001-07:00

Rupert the Bear considered as a Spaghetti Western

2009-02-27T04:27:00.000-08:00

The Daily Express is one of those middle-brow tory tabloids that demands higher reading skills than the Red Tops and lower thinking skills than the broadsheets. It lacks the heel appeal of The Daily Mail's pantomime facism and can only ever get over its Diana obsession when there's Madeline McCann NotNews to report, to the extent that they might as well be done with it and rename the thing 'The Daily Dead Blondes'. I don't have much time for The Daily Express.

So it annoys me a bit that it's home to something truly beautiful.

"Rupert, Rupert, Rupert the Bear... everyone knows his name" went the theme tune to the crap 1990's TV adaptation of the 1920's strip. TV executives get so excited over brand recognition that they sometimes forget it's a tool for indirectly manipulating audiences rather than something the audience is supposed to get directly excited over too. "Hey Kids! Check this bear out! He's got brand recognition!"

But the other day I say an episode of a slightly less crap TV adaptation, one that knew more than the name. On the surface, Follow the Magic, 2006's CGI take on Rupert, looks like what you'd expect a 2006 CGI take on Rupert to be - a hollow monstrosity come to feast on the souls of pre-school children. But on another level it's got something very right.

Here's the basic premise of Rupert (we'll elaborate later) : Rupert's a bear. An anthropomorphised bear seen at a point in his childhood vauge enough to allow children of various ages to identify with him. He has mild adventures with his social circle of anthropomorphised badgers, elephants and so forth.

Here's the premise of the particular episode I saw: Rupert has illictly borrowed his mother's cuckoo clock to show his friends. There is some excitement. The cuckoo clock is broken.

What happens next?

We've all seen pre-school children's telly, so we all know where this story is going. Rupert must confess what he's done to his mother, right? Then he must repair or replace the clock, right? Learning valuable lessons about honesty and responsibility, yeah?

Oh no. The clock is broken and so...

TIIIIME STTTOPPPSSSS....

....THEEEE WORLD....

...IISSSS...

...FRACTURED...

NOTHING MOVES...

...OR SHALL EVER MOVE AGAIN...

UNLESS RUPERT...

(FROZEN OUTSIDE THE FROZEN WORLD)

CAN LEARN THE EXACT TIME IT WOULD BE IF TIME STILL TURNED

CAN LEARN THE TIME IT SHOULD BE IN A WORLD WHERE ALL THE CLOCKS ARE STOPPED.

He fails and is trapped forever, like at the end of Saphire and Steel. Oh alright, no he doesn't. He turns his elephant friend's trunk into a giant sundial and fixes the universe. But I put it to you that this is nevertheless a departure from what one might have expected from a "Little Bear steals Mummy Bear's old clock" story.

This is what the 2006 adaptation got right - Rupert the Bear is bloody weird.
It's also what it's got wrong, because Rupert the Bear isn't weird at all.

Lots of fantasies show us 'our world made strange', and lots of others take place in some strange new world. Sometimes these secondary worlds exist with no reference to ours, and sometimes they're connected to ours by magic wardrobes or police boxes. What the Rupert the Bear newspaper strips do is something more curious. They show us a secondary world that has access to a tertiary world of its own.

TV adaptations have either just shown the secondary world, or (like Follow the Magic) tried to integrate the secondary and teritary worlds into one strange place. But here's how it really looks...here's a map of Rupert's realites...

Rupert the Bear lives in Nutwood. It's an idealised 1940/50's English village and, mysteriously, seems to have been an idealised 1940/50's English village since the strip began in the 1920s. The home, the garden, the church, the common and the village shops are the extent of this universe, and the backdrop for a quaint life of cricket, fetes and sandwiches. Most, but far from all, of its inhabitants are smartly dressed humanoid animals who look like the English cousins of the Sylvanian Families.

That's the secondary world in which Rupert is set. But it's cracked. Someone dropped Plush England and now it's full of little holes. Gaps in the hedge, loose planks in the fence, paths through the woods and points on the horizon. Little holes that a tiny bear might fall through. Little holes through which other things might crawl.

First contact between the twee and the primal.

The clouds in the sky above Nutwood are ships with strange pilots and stranger cargos. The ground beneath it is riddled with the tunnels of an underground railway system, taking the imps who turn the seasons from their work in the fields to their rest in the blue mountain. You've only to step over the river and you've left the twentieth century for a world of knights and castles.

Nutwood is a consistent and integral conceptual space, but it's built on top of something. It's a sunny, Anglican, post-Victorian myth of England that's left the cellar door unlocked and allowed its adventurous children to sneak down into the darkness of a Pagan, Celtic myth of Britain. Then climb back out again, for tea and scones.

Part of this, I think, is because Rupert the Bear is Britain's Spaghetti Western. Those films took the most American of myths, myths so rooted to their location that they took the name of a compass point, and transplanted them to an alien landscape. The cowboy in southern Spain, singing the lord's song in a strange land, demythologising himself by finding his apotheosis in a place where he could never exist.

Rupert's world is just the same. Nutwood is the most immaculate, Picture Postcard representation imaginable of England's Dreaming, of its self-conception of its "Good Old Days." Except that it isn't England at all. Alfred Bestall, the strip's definitive illustrator, created this world by looking out of his window and drawing the landscape he saw. He saw Wales.

"It's not where you're from
It's not where you're at
It's not where you've been
It's where you're between." - Super Furry Animals.

The form of a Rupert story, also invented by Bestall, is important here too.

Each strip (or, when collected, page of an annual) would be a short prose story accompanied by four little illustrations. The illustrations were then accompanied by four rhyming couplets which summarised the story.

So, lets say Rupert was on an adventure to bring home a potion that would attract rare butterflies to his garden. The text would go...

In his excitement over the phial of essence Rupert forgets all about his bunch of flowers as he starts for home.
"Mind you keep that thing tightly corked," laughs the Professor, "or you won't be able to see where you're going because of butterflies!"

The picture would look like this...

And be captioned thusly...

He's told, "Be careful not to fall,
That scent will spill - you'll lose it all."

(Anyone who's read the wonderful Doctor Who story, 'Once Upon a Time Lord' will recognise this format from the beautiful sequence in which the Doctor and Frobisher pass through a Rupert story)

The idea here is that there are three different ways to read the story (four if you count each strip's title which was always a summary of what followed - this one's called "Rupert Heeds a Warning"), with young children being able to follow the pictures, older children able to read the verse and even older children able to read the prose.

I've never been convinced by this. To me it seems harder to read the rhymes - the constraints of space force them to be more eliptical than the prose (where did the bunch of flowers go?), and the constraints of rhyme force them to employ a wider selection of words. The rhymes are the more challenging way in which to follow the story.

When we look at a Rupert strip we're not really looking at different ways of comunicating the same thing. We're looking at one thing becoming something else. It's obvious that the prose was there first and the pictures and verse followed it, so what we're seeing on the page in front of us is a transformation.

We're watching adaptation happen before our eyes as a story becomes a different story (worrying about a swarm of butterflies isn't quite the same as worrying about a spillage) but never completing that transformation because it never replaces the original form. The original text remains right there next to the imagery and poetry it has become.

Rupert the Bear depicts an inescapable moment of transition. Captured between modes of storytelling, between moments of cultural history, between nations and between comfortable domesticity and dangerous, mythic proto-psychedelia.

Maybe it does belong in the Daily Express after all. Maybe it changes the whole of that tedious, conservative, Little England newspaper into a magic eye picture. Stare through it and watch things change.

Wide Awake and Dreaming

2009-02-24T11:34:00.000-08:00

My perfect morning involves waking up to The Today Programme, but not waking up to it entirely.

There'd be no harsher start to the day than having Chris Morris shout, "This is the NEWS!" down your lughole, but it's not like that at all. Rather than bringing you round with a brutal thud of verité, waking up with the news on puts you in a floaty place halfway between the strangeness of dreams and the strangeness of the world.

Microsleeps and hazy mishearings punctuate what you're half-listening to, and it's not until hours later you realise that you probably didn't hear what you thought you did. I never find the news quite so satisfying as when I'm semi-concious. So it occured to me to try and put this right.

What I've done is just to take a couple of random items from Today and snip out the bits that make it make sense. It's not really meant to be funny, it's just meant to let me hear something while I'm awake that I can normally only ever hear while I'm half-asleep.

The one with the dog is a little bit funny though.

ZombEE! ZombEE! Zomb -EE-EE-EE! AW! AW! HEY HEY! ELLA ELLA ELLA! Under my Umberella.

2009-02-20T11:08:00.000-08:00

Second to Final Crisis: Fantastic Four - True Story, my favourite of the non-DC Final Crisis tie-ins has been Final Crisis: Crossed by Garth Ennis. After finishing reading The Affinity Bridge yesterday I think I know why; I'm under attack from Zombies.

The Affinity Bridge is not a terribly good book. It's harmless, by-the-numbers, steampunk DetFic that sneaked out of the SF section of the bookstore in the hopes that it might trick mainstream readers who enjoyed Glass Books of the Dream-Eaters into picking it up on a Borders three-for-two deal (a reasonable hope - that's how it got me). But it does have one really good idea in it, and it's an idea about Zombies. It doesn't develop or explore the idea in any way, just bringing it in to tie three plot-threads together at the end before a bit of running about and perfunctory crashing of airships, but it's there and it's an awesome idea about Zombies.

I was excited by it. I was hungry to look around for somewhere else where it might be developed properly. Then I caught myself... since when do I care about Zombies?

Thier manky shambling antics have never interested me in the slightest. Vampires were the object of my morbid teenage fascination, and even now I cling to the general belief that you're not alowed to be undead unless you're going to make the effort to be a bit saucy. Forbidden touch of spectral lovers - good. Tearing claws of mangled hordes - bad. If you're going to cross the unbearable divide between death and life, please check on arrival that your flesh is 'porcelain' and not 'putrefying.'

Back in 2004, Shaun of the Dead did a lot to move zombies from my 'things in which I have no interest' brain-box to my 'things in which I have a potential interest' brain-box, and Ross Cambell's The Abandoned helped keep them there, but it was only last year that things really changed. I seem to have spent most of 2008 thinking about Zombies.

On telly then my favourite show of the year was Charlie Brooker's Dead Set.

Political cartoonists tend to hate it when their targets want to buy their work. Splashing a vicious, inky attack in the direction of someone only to have them hand over some cash for it and put it on the wall of thier stairwell ruins everything! It makes the level of collusion involved in satire too explict. It reduces things to the level of those Allistair McGowan parodies of Eastenders that were filmed on the sets of Eastenders, the ones which always left me wondering why he didn't just get the cast of Eastenders in to film them, or even just show a few minutes of Eastenders (both techniques later refined by Harry Hill).

A satire on reality television filmed on the Big Brother sets, broadcast on E4 and featuring Davina and Brian Belo, you'd have thought Dead Set would have run into the same sort of problem, the implict approval of its subject compromising anything it said about that subject. Instead it somehow managed to sythesise everything I love about reality TV in general (and Big Brother in particular) with everything I hate about myself for loving it.

It ended up asking a genuinely horrific question - what if the programme really does tell us something about human nature? The way contestants respond to being in the house and the way audiences respond to watching it...what if that's stuff we really can't get past? By the time I realised I was the target of its attack, it had torn my guts out. WITH ZOMBIES!

"I sincerely hope some of you vomit," said its writer. I didn't while watching, but the show's stayed with me to the extent that I might yet at any time.

Zombies stayed with me too, and plodded after me into Crossed and Final Crisis. Neither of which feature Zombies trading under the name 'Zombie', but that seems to me to be typical of Zombie films anyway. The local reality bubble of a zombie movie quivers as soon as you use the 'Z' word to describe the legions transformed into murderous savages by a mysterious outbreak. Say "zombie" and you're no longer in a 'real' life-or-death situation but at an intertextual nexus. Zombies are after us! The things from the movies!

While stories like the 28 Things Later films deny the zombie-ness of thier zombies to avoid self-conciousness, Crossed and Final Crisis have other reasons. That's a bit obvious really - when would Mozza ever strive to avoid self-conciousness?

Emmett Furey's CBR's interview with Ennis says this...

"In the post-apocalyptic setting of Crossed, the planet has been ravaged by a worldwide infection that turns its victims into remorseless, homicidal maniacs. The infection is spread by bodily fluids, often by bite, and victims can be identified by a telltale cross-shaped rash across their faces. The infestation is similar to a zombie outbreak, but Ennis insists the similarities between the Crossed and the undead end there."

A few issues in, it's obvious that it doesn't end there - their function in the storytelling is exactly that of a big bunch o' Zombies - but even if it did then that 'there' where it stops is quite far along the way to a working definition of Zombies.

But there is a big something that sets the Crossed apart from the zombies who don't get called zombies in films that don't want to say 'Zombie.' They don't want your brains. They don't want to kill you. They don't want to eat you. They just want to do evil, and thier only interest in you is that you're a potential candidate for that evil to be directed towards.

In that interview Ennis describes the dream in which the idea of Crossed came to him. At first he thought he was seeing his friends under attack from zombies, then he realised they "weren't zombies at all, they were simply people who'd turned evil-- deeply, irrevocably evil-- and were looking forward to indulging all manner of foul intentions as soon as they got their hands on their intended victims. The looks on their faces said it all, a sense of cruel yet delighted anticipation."

Anti-Life justifies their cruel yet delighted anticipation!

Exactly like Ennis's post-Zombies, the victims of the Anti-Life Equation in Final Crisis have been exposed to an infection which has given them over to radical, absolute Eeeeeevil. One fun way to read the series is to imagine that Crossed is what the DCU looks like during the month of story-time FC skips over. Now it sounds like we've won our battle and got Superman Beyond included in the Final Crisis hardcover, lets start petitioning to get Crossed bundled in there too between issues #3 and #4.

Or maybe not, since what's really interesting about comparing Final Crisis and Crossed is looking at the way two writers can respond to exactly the same ideas in totally different ways. The tagline for Crossed was even, "There is no hope"!

Morrison says "Final Crisis was written [as] a doom-laden, Death Metal myth for the wonderful world of Fina(ncia)l Crisis/Eco-breakdown/Terror Trauma we all have to live in."

Ennis is thinking along the same lines..."The world's a pretty grim place at the moment, and little is being done to alleviate matters. We're able to tolerate war, genocide, and famine; we're happy to ignore devastation by earthquake, hurricane and tsunami. Body counts mean nothing. Our governments are full of scum who plainly don't care about the welfare of their people and are happy to let them founder. Seen in that light, the notion of humor in a story of global catastrophe just didn't sit very well with me."

One thinks that a responsible writer should respond to the horrors of this time by moderating his sense of humour. The other thinks that a responsible writer should respond to the horrors of this time with a last minute save from Captain Carrot and the Zoo Crew.

You can even see in that interview the exact point at which Ennis and Morrison's understandings of reality diverge...

"I went to see 'Iron Man’ recently, which attempts to incorporate real world problems into a superhero story, and to me that simply rendered the guy-with-powers fantasy even more meaningless than usual. There is no one like this, nor will there ever be." (Ennis, CBR)

Morrison thinks there are plenty of people just like that, and that Ennis just saw one of them.

"[E]verything we can experience is real, including dreams and stories. These characters are in here, in the universe with us, and they have shit to tell us. And that's what I find really exciting. They're real in the sense that you can hold them in your hands and interact with them. They don't need to pretend to live in New York. It's much more real than that – they're actually alive in our hands. " (Morrison, IGN)

Final Crisis was all about sythesising 'opposites' (as was my experince of watching Dead Set), so maybe something will come along to officiate at an alchemical marriage of Crossed and FC's two opposing post-zombie stories. Maybe it'll be the story Geoff Johns is doing later this year about Zombie Supervillains from Outer Space? Whatcha think?

In the meantime, my favourite zombie story of recent times remains Batman RIP.

Have a look at the specific details of the Black Glove's plan.

First Bruce is paralysed with the Joker's neurotoxic roses. Then he's...

Doctor Hurt: Buried alive in his best cape! [...] But not so deep that we can't exhume what remains after dessert. [...] Air inside the coffin will run out in exactly thirty minutes. His brain will begin to die seconds after that, whereupon he will be raised up like a drooling Lazarus...

Jezebel Jet: Permanently brain-damaged! The way I like them. We can disfigure him to look like his worst enemy.

Now have a read of this...

"Though it is said that voodoo houngans (priests) can turn humans into zombies by magical means, the practice is rooted in hard, undeniable science. 'Zombie Powder,' the tool used by th e houngan for zombification, contains a very powerful neurotoxin (the exact ingredients are a closely guarded secret). The toxin temporarily paralyzes the human nervous system, creating a state of extreme hibernation.
[...]
Manu humans have been buried while in such a state, only to awaken screaming in the pitch darkness of their coffin. So what makes this living human being a zombie? The answer is simple: brain damage. Many who are buried alive quickly use up the air inside their coffins. Those that are recovered (if they are lucky) almost always suffer brain damage from lack of oxygen. These poor souls shamble about with little cognitive skills, or, indeed, free will, and are often mistaken for the living dead."

(Max Brooks, the Zombie Survival Guide)

Batman - Slideshows and Sudoku.

2009-02-16T14:35:00.000-08:00

I love chronologies. I love taking big jumbles of stories that occur in a shared universe and sifting through them for clues as to which happened on the Thursday and which on the Friday, despite the right and proper disinterest of those stories' writers and editors in such things.

Spending a winter's evening working out where exactly the 1980's issues of Mister Miracle fit around the Justice League books of the era has got nothing to do with what how stories work and what stories are for, but it's harmless after-the-fact fun. Much like how Sudoku has nothing to do with how numbers work and what numbers are for, but the time spent by enthusiasts pencilling one to nine into little boxes doesn't in anyway damage the numbers one to nine for anyone who'd like to do more sensible things with them.

Things go horribly wrong when editors try to join in though. At worst you get Countdown, a year-long 'lets try and fit everything together' chronology project disguised as a story. It failed both in its attempt to fit everything together and in maintaining the disguise.

At not-worst-but-still-pretty-bad you get the mysterious something that DC showed at the New York Comicon.

Now, I didn't go to the New York Comicon so I've not seen the mysterious something. I just listened to the podcasted panels and heard the reactions as the something was unleashed, or (at one panel) the literal groans of aprehension and terror as Editorial threatened to unleash the something a second time. What was this unseeable horror? This empty threat, implict but absent in the space inside my headphones?

Apparently it was a slideshow.

Newsarama reported it like this...

DiDio addressed confusion behind how Final Crisis and Batman R.I.P., both written by Grant Morrison, flow.

"We're going to make sense of this," said DiDio. "Just for you."

DiDio pointed to the projector, saying that story started with the first issues of "R.I.P.," going to Final Crisis #1, and then the last issue of "R.I.P.," Batman #681, then moving to Final Crisis #3.

After that falls the "Last Rites" story (Batman #682-683), and then Final Crisis #6.

The next part after that, somewhat logically, was Final Crisis #7.

"When you put it like that, it still doesn't make sense," joked Rucka

Well, no it doesn't Greg. Because that's just not what happens. There's just no way that that's what happens. There's just no way to read the comics and think that's what happens.

In terms of the Morrison-written stuff then the real chronology couldn't be clearer in the text...

The main RIP storyline happens in its entirety (Batman #676-681).
Then Batman fishes himself out of the drink and gets involved in the Orion investigation (seen in flashback in Batman #683)
Final Crisis happens in its entirety.

A better answer to the question "How do RIP and Final Crisis fit together?" would be "RIP happens first, then Final Crisis."

It's better because it's simpler, it doesn't require a slideshow and because IT'S WHAT IT SAYS IN THE COMICS. I can't stress that last one enough.

I started to think that perhaps Newsarama misreported it. But CBR said the same thing. And the Funnybook Babylon gents who were there noticed the same thing in thier podcast.

DC Editorial went to the trouble of putting together a display to give a complicated answer (to a question that only ever needed the answer "Story A happened before Story B") without going to the trouble of checking that the answer was vaugley plausible.

If there's the overlap between RIP and FC that the presentation claims then that means that the Batman we see in FC #1's Justice League meeting has to be the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh. Doesn't look or sound much like him to me, and I'm not sure he'd sit still at the table.

Also, if you follow Editorial's chart, then Batman must have rejoined Alfred to reveal that he survived the helicopter crash before the helicopter crash happened.

Happily, we can all just ignore DC's chart. Literary theorists will argue forever about where the balance of authority between writer, text and reader falls when determining the meaning of a story, but nobody's ever going to seriously suggest that inattentive editors get the final say.

Less happily, this is pretty conclusive proof that the people editing these stories, and charging themselves with the task of explaining them to fans, aren't bothering to read them.

_________________________

I'll stop moaning now and do some being constuctive. For this project I worked out my own RIP/Last Rites/FC/ThatSortOfThing chronology. I was aiming for simplicity there though, so couldn't really show my workings and talk about how I arrived at it. Nothing to stop me now though. Make a cup of tea, put a record on.

BUILDING AN RIP/LAST RITES/FC/THATSORTOFTHING CHRONOLOGY.

Step One: The Morrison Bits.

The flashback sequence in Batman #683 establishes that Batman returns from surviving RIP's helicopter crash and immediately becomes involved in the events of Final Crisis #1.

So the solid core of the chronology is...

Batman ##676-681
That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-7

Then there's just the question of where #682-3 goes. Morrison says that they should be read between Final Crisis #5 and #6. An ideal reading order isn't always the same as a chronology though, and Simyan's dialogue in FC#5 makes it clear that the conclusion of Batman#683 has happened either before or during that issue.

So now it looks like...

Batman ##676-681
That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-4
Batman #682-3
Final Crisis #5-7

Easy.

Step Two: The RIP 'tie-ins.'

'Heart of Hush' from Detective Comics first, since it's easiest. Hush makes it clear that he's makes his move in this story in order to punish Batman before a 'mysterious entity' called the Black Glove brings about his extinction. So we're before Morrison's RIP. Possibly as much as a couple of months before, as the story ends with a 'Two Months Later' epilogue showing Selina recovered from the events of this arc, but that doesn't make much difference either way.

Right, lets have a look at Robin #175 and #176, the only tie-ins to be nested within Morrison's RIP itself. The story involves Tim looking for Bruce following his disapearance in Batman #677 (the first of the three Bruce-disaperances we'll see the Bat-family react to as we work through all this).

As Tim's heroic search for Batman can't at any point involve him checking the Batcave (or otherwise he'd have run into Doctor Hurt ,who'd set up shop there throughout this time) we have to suspend a certain amount of logic while reading this. Clinging onto as much as we can though, we know...

We're after Batman #676 because Tim's already stolen the Black Casebook. We're after Batman #678 because the 'Gotham Golden Dragons' have a picture of the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh on thier phone. Tim's fight with Swagman sets up their next tussle in Batman #679.

So now we've got...

Detective Comics #846-50 ('Heart of Hush')
Batman #676-8 ('RIP' parts 1-3)
Robin #175-6
Batman #679-681 ('RIP' parts 4-6)
That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-4
Batman #682-3
Final Crisis #5-7

And now we come to the RIP tie-ins which are set after Bruce's disappearance. Since they're all full of "It's different this time! He's never coming back!" melodrama then it'd be nice so say that they take place after his 'death' in Final Crisis rather than after the helicopter crash. Sadly they don't.

The Batman and the Outsiders tie-in is very clear that it's the aftermath of the Black Glove incident that's being dealt with and features Ollie explaining that Bruce is gone to Clark, which would for obvious reasons not be the case if this were set post-Final Crisis.

'The Great Leap', The Nightwing story, feels like it's set a smidge later as the Batcave is in a more operational state and the characters are more in a 'coming to terms with Bruce being gone' phase, rather than in the immediate aftermath of RIP. Nevertheless, the assumption is still that Bruce is missing...perhaps forever! Rather than that Bruce just got frazzled by Darkseid and we all totally saw his corpse. So we're still pre-Final Crisis.

Detective Comics #846-50 ('Heart of Hush')
Batman #676-8 ('RIP' parts 1-3)
Robin #175-6
Batman #679-681 ('RIP' parts 4-6)
Batman and the Outsiders #11-12
Nightwing #147-151
That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-4
Batman #682-3
Final Crisis #5-7

Step Three - All the Last Rites Malarky.

It's quite easy to say which stories are certainly set post-Final Crisis.

By Nightwing #152 then people are now talking about Bruce being dead fersure, and by the 'Faces of Evil' two parter that ran from Detective #852 to Batman #685 then we're getting our first explict references to the events of the Crisis.

Detective Comics #846-50 ('Heart of Hush')
Batman #676-8 ('RIP' parts 1-3)
Robin #175-6
Batman #679-681 ('RIP' parts 4-6)
Batman and the Outsiders #11-12
Nightwing #147-151
That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-4
Batman #682-3
Final Crisis #5-7
Nightwing #152-3
Detective #852 & Batman #685 ('Reconstruction/Catspaw')

Which of the other post-Bruce stories are set after his RIP disappearance and which after his FC 'death' though?

The dialogue between Dick and Tim early in Robin's 'Search for a Hero' arc suggests that it takes place around the time of Nightwing's 'Great Leap', so that would place it inbetween RIP and Final Crisis.

Similarly, the 'Last Days of Gotham' two-parter that runs between Detective #851 and Batman #684 tells us that it's concurrent with the later chapters of 'Search for a Hero'.

What've we got left? Just Batman and the Outsiders #13-14, I think.

Well, I want to put them before 'Search for a Hero' as Steph's in costume here and 'Search' ends with Tim telling her she's not allowed to be or he'll [unspecified threat] (shortly after attempting to end her Superhero career then he assits sadistic murderer Jason Todd in escaping from prison. Tim's choices puzzle me.)

Can't see that it's contradicting anything if we stick 'em next to the other Outsiders issues for neatness' sake.

There we go then...all done.

PART ONE - BATMAN BEATS THE DEVIL.
Detective Comics #846-50 ('Heart of Hush')
Batman #676-8 ('RIP' parts 1-3)
Robin #175-6
Batman #679-681 ('RIP' parts 4-6)

PART TWO - BATMAN'S MISSING FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.
Batman and the Outsiders #11-14
Nightwing #147-151 ('The Great Leap') - concurrent with early chapters of 'Search for a Hero'
Robin #177-82 ('Search for a Hero')
Dectective #851, Batman #684 ('The Last Days of Gotham') - concurrent with later chapters of 'Search for a Hero'

PART THREE - BATMAN KILLS GOD.
That flashback sequence from #683
Final Crisis #1-4
Batman #682-3
Final Crisis #5-7

PART FOUR - BATMAN APPEARS DEAD FOR A BIT AND EVERYONE OVER-REACTS.
Nightwing #152-3
Detective #852, Batman #685 ('Reconstruction/Catspaw')

Anticipating Iris

2009-02-13T11:10:00.000-08:00

This post gets to Doctor Who eventually. It takes a while.

It takes a while because it's a strange thing to listen to people who aren't geeks having a canon debate. The serious business of which imaginary stories are more or less imaginary than others is a constant source of worry to the likes of me, but I never thought I'd see my Mam and My Lady Friend lock horns over this sort of thing. Yet there they were last Christmas, thrashing out the matter of whether or not From Barry to Billericay was an authentic account of doings within the Gavin and Stacey universe.

Hang on...the Gavin and Stacey universe?
Oh yes. For it was the very nature of that universe which was at stake.

Gavin and Stacey, for anyone who's not seen it, is a BBC sitcom/ comedy-drama thing and the air of the show is a little more mimesis-rich than it is elsewhere on Planet Sitcom. The slider has been pushed towards the Royle end of the Royle-to-Boosh axis. Perhaps the best clue as to where the show finds its level of realism is in that Alison Steadman seems to be playing an older version of her character from Abigail's Party. Gavin and Stacey fits nicely with those early Mike Leigh social comedies. Someone who misunderstands fiction could watch this show and think they were watching the world in which they live.

Except for Nessa.
Monstrous, impossible and erotic, Nessa disrupts everything.

If you want to get metafictional about it, then she's probably allowed to because she's played by one of the show's writers. If she can't tear down her own creation from within, who can?

Like a writer, Nessa tells stories. Hers are about her past; as an original member of All Saints, as a former lover of John Prescott, as being responsible for the death of her drug-running husband. If any of her stories are true then that's the mundane and domestic reality of Gavin and Stacey right out of the window. If any of her stories are true then we're no longer watching a world that's much like the one in which we live.

At Christmas round ours, everyone agreed that Nessa was the funniest joke in the show, but nobody could quite agree on what exactly the joke was.

My Mam was laughing at a joke in which Nessa was a pathological liar, confabulating her past and then trying to pass it off as genuine with her catchphrase, "I'm not going to lie to you..."

My Lady Friend was laughing at a joke in which Nessa's stories were true, but just didn't fit with the reality around her. She saw her as a piece too big for the jigsaw and the humour as lying in the way her incongruity held the whole business of constructed realities up to ridicule.

DOCTOR: You're an Impossible Thing, Nessa.

Shush now! We'll get to you in a minute.

There's a fair old bit of support for My Lady Friend's reading in the show itself (Stacey and Uncle Bryn always seem to remember Nessa going through the experiences she recounts) but the clincher would be the tie-in book Gavin and Stacey: From Barry to Billericay, which has actual documentary proof of her stories. Letters from John Prescott and everything. Hence the canon debate.

We come now to Iris Wildthyme, a woman who would have no patience with canon debates or anything else which tried to contain whatever reality she was trying to assert. Iris is the naughtier, more disruptive reading of Nessa, but louder and more explict. As loud and explict as only the very drunk can be.

But Iris isn't here to bugger up Gavin and Stacey's reality. She's come for Doctor Who.

She's come via a circuitous route. Iris first appears in the unpublished juvenilia of Paul Magrs as a Doctor stand-in, before migrating to his original literary fiction in the Phoenix Court books. Then she finally meets her 'maker' in the short story Old Flames and the novel The Scarlet Empress. Iris meets the Doctor, the character of which she's a parody. Naturally she loves him.

There's something a little Christian about this - in that theology then we're expected to love someone on account of being imperfect imitations of Him - but with Iris and the Doctor then the balance of power is a little different.

She's a self-aware parody. Iris not only understands that she's a fictional character, but understands that she's a shadow of another fictional character and that she knows rather more about how that character's world works than he does.

The Doctor, for example, experiences his adventures as they occured within continuity. If a writer in the 90s retroactively set a story inbetween two stories written in the 80's, then the Doctor would remember them as occuring in the new order. Iris would remember them as occuring in the order they were written, because Iris understands that she is being written, and the Doctor's often a little unclear on that.

She's disempowered by being a response to a story while empowered by having more perspective on that story, and The Scarlet Empress, the definitive confrontation/romance between Iris and the Doctor proceeds from there.

Manifesting as one of the sort of drunken, flatulent old baggages who Angela Carter would typically valourise as the secret rulers of the world, Iris turns up and lays claim to the Doctor's past. Half the stuff that we 'know' happened to the Doctor, she says actually happened to her. All your text are belong to us. And she makes a good case...while the Doctor has forgotten much of what he's lived through, she's got perfect records in her diaries. While much of the Doctor's life gets ignored as 'uncanonical', she's happy to take the lot...Kroton and Frobisher and all.

Iris continued to pop up in Doctor Who after The Scarlett Empress. In three more wonderful Paul Magrs novels, on occasions when writers like Lawrence Miles or Lance Parkin wanted to nod in the direction of her disruptive potential, in Big Finish audio adventures and a rather mixed anthologies of short stories.

By the time Iris got her own first season of audio plays though, it's possible her relevance had passed. She'd been the Doctor while being all the things the Doctor wasn't, and the dividing lines had been cultural and sexual.

The cultural references made by the Doctor in the English series had always been elitist and 'high-culture' but delivered without any real suggestion of enthusiasm. Much as you'd expect from writers who didn't really know what they were talking about but had a vauge idea that the character they were writing was meant to be 'posh' - think of how everyone other than Ellis and Morrison writes Emma Frost. The nadir of this may have been the Paul McGann Doctor blathering on unconvincingly about Puccini, which is why Iris had to appear when she did to blast ABBA out of her stereo. The Doctor in the English series was uncomfortably asexual. Which is why Iris had to have degrading group sex with strangers.

Here's the problem for Iris now - the post-2005 Doctor is pop-culture friendly and sexual. This Doctor dances. This Doctor dances to Kylie. There's a point in the first episode of the Welsh series where the Doctor reads an issue of heat magazine. That's the point in which Iris ceases to function as a parody. That's the point at which the Doctor integrates Iris into himself. She's no longer anything he can't be.

Time to close the book on the character? Time to admit that the critique she offered has been answered, and in being answered has oblivated the critique?

It seems not, as Big Finish have just brought out a new season of four Iris audio plays. My worries about her relevance would have saved me from forking out the thirty quid for these except for two things; they come in a snazzy pink box set, and they have this tag-line...

Time and Space. Good and Evil. Gin and Tonic.

I'll let you know how I get on.

Event Fatigue

2009-02-06T12:13:00.000-08:00

EVENT!
If I give in and end up liking The Airborn Toxic Event then I'll always carry the doubt that I've only done so because their name is a reference to a rilly rilly good novel. This is sort of the opposite of the situation I'm in with The Umbrella Academy, where I can never absolve myself of my suspicion that I'd like it more if I didn't know which band the writer's in.

My insecurities demand a full and immediate cessation of all artistic intercourse between writing and guitar pop.

EVENT!
The Today Programme, the radio show that defines Britishness each morning with the warm conviviality it directs towards listeners and the murderous rage it directs towards interviewees, recently described the weather we've been having as a 'Snow Event.'

They were immediately swamped with complaints about the use of this Americanism (the prefered British English phrase is "It is snowing") and with enquires from interested listeners wanting to know how they could get tickets for the Snow Event.

One of the presenters then kissed everything better by calling it "a snow event scenario situation."

EVENT!
My last post was a bit of a ramble on the similarities between the Final Crisis Event and Doctor Who. I ended with the Time Lord/Monitor connection, but ummed and ahhhed about whether or not to extend that into "So, if the Monitors are the Time Lords then that makes Nix Uotan..."

Didn't in the end, as I thought that might be a bit of a reach.

Then that evening, Newsarama put up an interview in which Morrison shared this thought...

"I see Uotan’s ‘hyperhero’ role in the DCU as a cross between the Silver Surfer and Doctor Who (particularly the Earthbound Jon Pertwee iteration of the character)."

Bah.

The Plans of a Future War

2009-02-04T02:00:00.000-08:00

Tim Callahan's watching Doctor Who and naturally one of the first things he's noticed is a connection to Final Crisis. He's not the first though. That'd be Grant Morrison, who had the odd experience of getting back from America to find that over here we'd already seen his comic on the telly...

"[W]atch the end of DOCTOR WHO which Kristan taped for me while I was away. More wonderful, inspirational pop art pulp madness, and what intrigues me most are the numerous, absolutely coincidental, similarities to my comic FINAL CRISIS (the machine made of worlds, the conquered Earth with its network of freedom fighters linked by a secret communications system, the reality-wiping weapon, the frantic scene changes, etc etc) which leads me to believe that creative people, particularly those writing or recording with a mass or populist audience in mind, have all begun to tell a very similar, very post-9/11 (call it ‘post Cycle 23’) story"

- Mozza.

We're talking here about Russell T. Davies' two-part finale for Doctor Who's fourth Welsh season, The Stolen Earth and Journey's End, but the coincidences may not be as uncanny as all that. The story is essentially a 'crossover' between Doctor Who and its sister shows, Torchwood and The Sarah-Jane Adventures, and Davies choice of template for a multiverse-bothering epic crossover seems to have been the obvious one; Crisis on Infinite Earths, the same story Morrsion was ostensibly sequelising. Not that Morrison really was, but nevertheless both Final Crisis and The Stolen Earth both belong in that 'Crisis subgenre' as snugly as the bit in Top Ten where the Ultra-Mice go mental.

In my personal experience there were other, more striking, connections between the two. They were both by my favourite writers in their respective mediums. They were both conclusions to plotlines in which I'd been invested for a number of years. They were both really disapointing.

But what do I know? That "mass populist audience" gave The Stolen Earth an Appreciation Index of 91, making it the best-received Doctor Who episode ever and one of the most highly rated telly-box shows OF ALL TIME. I'm sure Final Crisis was also universally loved by the popular target audience for Big Two Summer Events, though I can't seem to find numbers on that.

Putting aside my repeated failure to manage my fanboy expections, and the question of whether The Stolen Earth is like Final Crisis because of 9/11 and the end of Cycle 23 or because both their authors are referencing Marv Wolfman, there's still a lot of milage in reading Final Crisis next to Doctor Who.

Some of this is in random pattern spotting (The Monitors' have 5555 words for "nothing" and in Marvel continuity then the Doctor Who universe is Earth-5556!). Some is in finding the bits in FC's later issues where Morrison is responding to The Stolen Earth by cheerfully alluding to it (The Lanterns and Supermen dragging the Earth back into position) . Some is in geekdreaming a narative connection (Does the Final Crisis cause the events of The Stolen Earth in the same way it causes the Time Crisis on Earth-5 and the Secret Civil Invasion-War on Earth-6? Does it? DOES IT?).

One thing though is genuinely quite telling, the way they both use Wars in Heaven.

Doctor Who never had a 'creator' in the Roddenbury/Whedon sense. So, rather than venerate a commitee, Who fandom redirected its genuflection towards one of the series' most important writers, Robert Holmes. Holmes' stories, especially those produced by Hinchcliffe, became established as the Untouchable Classics of old school fandom. A while ago a tape-recorded interview turned up of Steven Moffat (writer of the Untouchable Classics of new school fandom) drunk in a pub and conversationally offering the opinion that Holmes was a hack. Many fans decided that they no longer liked the Untouchable Classics of Steven Moffat. They really did.

Holmes is important, to the extent that the mythology he introduced to the show in Season 14 of the English series still gets treated by many fans as if it were the foundational precepts of the whole show. It's not a million miles away from the "Frank Miller invented Batman" error.

Where he becomes relevant to Final Crisis is with1975's Pyramids of Mars. The story's only really got one pyramid, but it is on Mars and it contains... the interred corpse of J'onn J'onzz! Oh alright, no it doesn't. It contains the mechanism by which the Eygptian God Sutekh is bound on Earth.

It turns out that there was a war in the far future between Sutekh/Set and the rest of his pantheon. He destroyed their homeworld, but ended up trapped and diminished in Earth's past, plotting his restitution and his ruination of the world.

Two stories later in the same season, Holmes pseudonymously put the same structure to use in The Brain of Morbius. Again the plot starts with an off-screen War in Heaven, but this time its between the Time Lords and one of their own. The role of the Time Lords was traditionally the Monitoring of the universe (hmm...we may come back to that) but Morbius, one of thier leaders, fancied a bit of galactic conquest for a change. So ends up trapped and diminished. Sadly not in Earth's past this time, but as a brain in a jar, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that a brain in a jar must be in want of a new body with which to effect the ruination of the world.

The next season brings us The Talons of Weng-Chiang. This time it's not a cosmic war, just the consequences of the Supreme Alliance's fall to the Filipino Army during the 51st Century's Battle of Reykjavik. Eeeevil war criminal Magnus Greel ends up trapped in Earth's past and dependant on draining the life force out of young ladyfolk.

These three stories are the holy trinity of Doctor Who's so-called 'Gothic' era, and they all use the same set up; There's been an apocalyptic future war off-screen, and an Evil God-King has fallen down to Earth where he's parasitically restoring himself...

One place where the influence of this 'trilogy' can be seen is in the Welsh Doctor Who series, where the destruction of Gallifrey makes every single story a sequel to an off-screen War in Heaven.

Another place would be in 1980's State of Decay. In fact, the Doctor Who spin-offs written by Lawrence Miles sometimes refer to the backstory of that serial as 'The First War in Heaven.'

State of Decay tells us about the formative war fought by the Time Lords, the Science Gods who monitored the universe. It was against vampires.

RIP to Battle for the Cowl - A Reader's Guide

2009-02-03T00:29:00.000-08:00

Amazing as it may seem, recent goings-on in the Batman books have lead to some confusion. Here I attempt to help.

Batman RIP to Battle for the Cowl
- A Reader's Guide.

Contains spoilers galore.

Updated 03/02/2009
(There's a lot more to come)

What's Happening?

What's going on in the Bat-books?

A number of Batman-related titles have been cancelled (Robin, Nightwing, Birds of Prey) and a number are going on hiatus (Batman, Detective) before relaunching in some form. The storyline involves the apparent death of Bruce Wayne and the subsequent inheritance of the Batman role.

Charitably this this happening because when "one writer is doing such a big thing, then it has to impact other books [...] because this story is too big to ignore" (Fabian Nicieza, IGN, December 2008 ).

Uncharitably this is happening because "the sales on the Batman titles went through the roof with the first issue of RIP. So quite clearly DC took one look at that and said let's put some branding on the other Bat titles" (Morrison, IGN, May 2008 ).

Either way, what we're left with is a curious maze of personal writer-led stories and mandated editor-led 'events'. This is your map.

What is Batman RIP?

In the pages of Batman, 'RIP' is a six issue arc which runs from #676 to #681.It concludes a "25-chapter novel" (Morrison, Newsarama, Feb 2008 ) which has run intermittently in the title since #655.

The title was also used as branding for issues of Detective Comics (#846-850), Nightwing (#147-150), Robin (#175-176), and Batman and the Outsiders (#11-13). These stories have at best a thematic or tangential connection to the main arc. They do not interact with it "in any crucial way" (Dini, CBR, June 2008 ) and were written with no input from the main arc's writer (Morrison, IGN, May 2008 ).

The main storyline involves the attempted ruination of Bruce Wayne's soul by a source of pure evil from beyond the limits of reason, and the subsequent kicking of said evil's a** by the Undamned Batman.

What is Last Rites?

'Last Rites' was a bit of masthead branding applied to issues of Batman, Detective Comics, Nightwing, Robin and Batman and the Outsiders published following the conclusion of 'RIP'.

The 'Last Rites' storyline published in Batman ('The Butler Did It/What the Butler Saw') is set during Final Crisis and clarifies Batman's involvement in that series and its relation to RIP.

The 'Last Rites' storylines published in the other titles show various Gotham residents adapting to life without Batman.

What is Final Crisis?

A seven-issue miniseries, plus tie-ins, offered as DC's major event for 2008.

It variously attempts to be, or has been marketed as being...

...a sequel to Jack Kirby's Fourth World, OMAC and Kamadi material.

...the conclusion of the plot threads Grant Morrison has been running through all his DCU work since Animal Man.

...the third part of a 'Crisis' trilogy that began with Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinite Crisis.

...the 'Third Act' of Didio-era DC which has run through Graduation Day, Identity Crisis, and everything since.

How successful it is in being any of those things is a matter of much debate. As is the level to which the project is interested in being anything other than the first two things. As is the level of comprehensibility the series attains given these various demands.

In Batman terms the series is important since it features "the final fate of Batman" (Morrison, IGN, August 2008 ); A mischievous and ironic phrase since the death of Barry Allen (returned to life by Final Crisis) occurred in an issue of Crisis on Infinite Earths bearing the cover blurb "the final fate of the Flash."

What is Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?

A two issue story by Neil Gaiman and Andy Kubert that will run in Batman #686 and Detective Comics #853.

In both its title and its publication method, it parallels the Alan Moore/Curt Swan story "Whatever happened to the Man of Tomorrow?" which ran in Superman #423 and Action Comics #583 and which gave the Earth-1 Superman a 'final story' with which to cap off the continuity erased by Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Gaiman has said of the story, " I think the most important thing Sandman did, and it did create some important things, was that it was the first mainstream comic ever to finish a story. And I think that cannot be underestimated. The idea before that had always been that if you were writing a monthly comic, let's say Superman or whatever, you couldn't finish it. You weren't ever allowed to do the last one, to have the story mean anything. You had to turn back to the soap opera. [...] One of the things that attracted me to [Whatever Happened...] was when they asked if I would be interested in writing the last Batman story, so that's what I'm doing. The last Batman story." (Ain't It Cool, December 2008 ).

It is solicited as a "captivating and mysterious tale the likes of which Batman and friends have never experienced before. Delving into the realms of life, death and the afterlife."

What is Battle for the Cowl?

A three-issue miniseries which will be published during the March to May hiatus taken by Batman and Detective.

The story will deal with the matter of Batman's succesion. "The cape and cowl [is] the focus of the story. Should it be retired or should someone take the mantle? Will it make a difference either way? Batman was much more than just a costume, you know; putting it on doesn’t make you Batman." (Daniel, Newsarama, December 2008 )

It will be suported by a number of tie-ins, these being two further three-issue miniseries (Oracle and Azrael: Death's Dark Knight) and a number of one-shots. So far announced are Gotham Gazette: Batman Dead? (dealing with Spoiler, Vicki Vale, Harvey Bullock and Leslie Thompkins), Gotham Gazette: Batman Alive!, Man-Bat, Arkham Asylum and The Underground.

The core series is to be written by RIP's penciller Tony Daniel, who boldly invited himself to do so...

"I was casually talking to [editor] Mike Marts about the story and my thoughts on how great it could be. I consider myself a storyteller, so in my mind I guess the wheels of the story were naturally spinning. And in this case, you couldn’t shut me up.

I mentioned how this could be something really great and not just a stop gap before Grant’s or my return to the title. [...]

So after spilling my guts for about 10 minutes about the ideas that were pouring out of my head, I jokingly told Mike that I would gladly accept the invitation to write Battle for the Cowl. Only he hadn’t done that and we both laughed. But I emailed him later after thinking about it more and it was too late. I was ramped up on my second cup of Starbucks and there was no turning back. I asked him to consider it." (Daniel, Newsarama, December 2008 )

How do these stories fit together?

Batman RIP was conceived as psychological deconstruction of Batman, but on hearing the title Dan Didio directed Morrison to connect it to Final Crisis with a more tangible 'death' (Morrison, Wizarduniverse, Jan 2009).

This connection, and the sequence of events in the stories built around them, is at times a little unclear.

Many of the peripheral stories involve the Gotham cast reacting to Batman's disappearance, but the problem is that Batman disappears three times during the main storyline. Once during RIP, where he becomes a homeless drug addict for an issue, once following RIP's conclusion, in which he briefly vanishes in a helicopter crash, and once following whatver happens in Final Crisis.

The helicopter crash is the most puzzling of these, as it seems to serve no narative purpose and makes RIP look as if it has a weaker conclusion than it does.

Dan Didio explains that he mandated this extra bonus disapearance "Because we live in the world of collected editions, we needed a conclusion in the Batman series, so that we could collect it properly within Batman, without having to bring in segments of Final Crisis to complete the story" (Didio, Newsarama, December 2008 )

This logic is undermined somewhat by the fact that the collected edition of Batman RIP is including the two Final Crisis tie-in issues which follow it, so those reading it in trade will be confronted by segments of the larger story and will find the helicopter crash as much of a perplexing non-event as did those who followed the monthlies.

Thanks to this editorial masterstroke, we've got a stack of RIP tie-ins and Last Rites comics set "after Bruce's disapperance" and two disappearances this could possibly refer to - the helicopter crash or the events of Final Crisis.

I would argue that the balance of evidence seems to suggest that most of the "OMG! Batman's gone forever!" stories we've seen so far do not occur after his "final fate" in Final Crisis but rather while he was temporarily missing following the helicopter crash; Last Rites does not appear to be set in a post-Final Crisis world and there are references to the disapearance in clearly pre-Final Crisis books (such as Supergirl #34).

This changes around Nightwing #52 and Batman #685 where we start getting clear references to Batman being dead, rather than missing, and to the events of Final Crisis.

The broad sequence of events would then seem to be...

Batman RIP
(In which Batman defeats a 'source of pure evil' but has a curse placed upon him - his next case shall be his last! He then disappears in a helicopter crash.)
Various RIP tie-ins and Last Rites books
(In which everyone goes mental about Bruce being gone forever. Except in Tomasi's excellent Nightwing, where they sit around eating popcorn and waiting for him to return)
The flashback sequence shown in Batman #683
(In which Bruce returns from the helicopter crash as if it were no big deal. He is then dragged immediately into the events of Final Crisis #1)
Final Crisis #1-4
(In which Batman falls into Darkseid's clutches)
Batman #682-3
(In which Batman escapes Darkseid's clutches)
Final Crisis #5-7
(In which we learn the "final fate of Batman" )
Further Last Rites books.
Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?
Battle for the Cowl

A more detailed, issue-by-issue, chronology is offered in the next section.

How do I read it?

How do I read any superhero comics set in a seventy-year-old continuity?

You've two options.

The first is to accept that every story, no matter how self-contained and no matter how good or bad a jumping-on point, has a "Previously..."

We're all of us finding our seats after the movie's started and spilling our popcorn on those around us. Don't stress about this. Just find somewhere, anywhere, that looks like an interesting place to start and jump in.

Be prepared to ask questions. Be prepared to look things up. Be prepared to ignore everyone who says you have to have read "X" before you can read "Y". Be prepared to be confused, and to work through that confusion if you find anything that fires your imagination enough to make that feel like work worth doing.

The other option is to start in 1939 with Detective Comics #27 and plough on through from there.

How do I read Batman RIP?

The six issues of Grant Morrison's Batman RIP printed in Batman #676-681 (and collected in the Batman RIP hardcover) comprise the final chapter of a longer storyline.

Morrison says that, "This is the first story I had planned when Peter Tomasi, the editor at the time, asked me to do Batman [...] the very first story title I noted down was “Batman RIP”. [...] So it came from there…and out of that notion came the idea for the big overarching story I’ve been telling since I first came on the book. 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" (Newsarama, Feburary 2008 )

The complete story is collected across the Batman and Son, The Black Glove and Batman RIP trades.

Morrison also lays groundwork for the storyline in issues #30 and #47 of the 2006-7 weekly series 52. The relevant events from that story are well sumarised in the main Batman title but can be found in the third and fourth trade collection of 52.

The story also relies very heavily on events from two Silver Age stories; The Superman of Planet-X from Batman #113 and Robin Dies at Dawn from Batman #153. Although the relevant events from these stories are eventually recapped in the storyline, this doesn't happen until a point where many readers will have become exasperated. DC have yet to make these stories available to readers, but will remedy this in the Black Casebook trade available from June 2009.

A reader wanting the 'complete RIP experience' could then find it by reading...

The Black Casebook trade.
Weeks 30 and 47 from the third and fourth 52 trade.
The Batman and Son trade.
The Black Glove trade.
The Batman RIP trade.

Since it contains no major Status-Q changes, WHY should I read Batman RIP?

You might enjoy it. Then again, you might really not. The storyline has been fairly polarising and divisive among the readership.

As a rough guide I'd suggest that you'll probably enjoy Batman RIP...

...if you're frustrated with LOST for giving out too many answers.
...if your favoutite TS Eliot poems don't involve cats.
...if your personal 'top ten' films include The Fisher King, Jacobs Ladder, Angel Heart, The Name of the Rose or anything by David Lynch.

Matt Fraction best explains the run's appeal...

"It's a pretty spectacular example of [...] using Batman as frame of reference for Batman. The gag is that everything that's happened in the Batman comic actually happened to Batman, right? And what would that do to a human mind? From the bleak noir stuff to the bam-sock-pow stuff and everything in between. [Morrison]'s using the whole history of the character to comment on the character as the character endures it. And to comment on the comics mainstream, and on heroes, and all that great stuff. I mean, the first fight scene takes place in an art gallery during a Pop Art retrospective where these faux-Lichtenstein paintings of comics are commenting on the comic we're reading as we're reading it, for god's sake. And as the run went on, Morrison really used the entirety of the character's history as a frame of reference and context to comment on the character. Batman-as-Batman-as-Pop-Culture-in-toto. It's a mess, and a glorious one at that, and his reach might have exceeded his grasp for a couple reasons not exactly germane to this discussion, but it's been a pretty amazing piece, all the same. It's the Cremaster of superhero comics." (Fraction, The Comics Reporter, January 2009)

How do I read the Batman RIP tie-ins?

Dini's 'Heart of Hush' storyline in Detective # 846-850 is set shortly before Morrison's RIP issues and has no connection to them except the the idea that Hush is making his move now in order to destroy Batman before someone else beats him to it.

Robin #846-850 is set during the events of RIP, seemingly inbetween Batman #678 and Batman #679.

Batman and the Outsiders #11-13 and Nightwing #147-50 are set following RIP's conclusion.

Since they've no impact on the main plot, WHY should I read the Batman RIP tie-ins?

If you're following the characters in those particular books, or if you're looking for a Paul Dini story about Hush and a Peter Tomasi story about Two-Face.

There's no other strong reason, although events from 'Heart of Hush' may eventually prove important in Battle for the Cowl.

How do I read Final Crisis?

Final Crisis consists of a seven-issue miniseries, four accompanying miniseries (Revelations, Rogues' Revenge, Legion of Three Worlds, Superman Beyond) five accompanying one-shots (Requiem, Rage of the Red Lanterns, Resist, Submit, Secret Files) and two tie-in issues (Batman #682-3).

It was preceeded by a weekly series called Countdown to Final Crisis, published against Grant Morrison's wishes and in contradiction to his storyline (Morrison, Newsarama, June 2008 ). Considered alongside its own spin-offs, but not counting tie-ins in the monthlies, Countdown to Final Crisis comprises at least 102 issues, none of which make any fucking sense. It is best ignored.

Someone approaching Final Crisis to see Batman's story play out can happily confine themselves to Batman #682-3 and the seven-issue core Final Crisis mini.

Final Crisis is however, as discussed in 'What is Final Crisis?' above, the conclusion to a great many long-running stories. Readers may find their experience of its accessibility varies.

For example, when confronted with Turpin, a tough cop with prior history with superheroes, some readers will say "Hey! This is Dan Turpin from New Gods #5." They will get on fine.

Some readers will say, "I don't know who this guy is. But it says here that his name's Turpin, and that he's a tough cop with prior history with superheroes. That's probably enough to be going on with." They too will get on fine.

Some readers will say, "I don't know who this guy is! How am I expected to follow all this continuity?" They will get hopelessly confused.

You probably already know what sort of a reader you are.

Someone looking to read everything that feeds into this story would be faced with reading the complete DCU work of Jack Kirby and Grant Morrison, the complete Wildstorm work of Warren Ellis, Wanted, Sin City, Secret Invasion, every prior Crisis crossover and every DCU book published for the last four years.

Someone looking for a more manageble project of preparatory reading might just want to check out the four Jack Kirby's Fouth World Omnibus volumes and Grant Morrison's JLA and Seven Soldiers runs.

What's the chronology of all this?

What follows is an attempt to place the books considered by this article into an issue-by-issue chronology. Bare in mind that a chronology is not the same as an 'ideal reading order' or a list of 'essential reading' and also that in many places this is based on my own textual sleuthing and subjective judgement, rather than on anything official.

Detective Comics #846-50 (Heart of Hush)
Batman #676-8 (RIP parts 1-3)
Robin #175-6
Batman #679-81 (RIP parts 4-6)
Batman and the Outsiders #11-12 (Outsiders No More).
Nightwing #147-151 (The Great Leap)
Robin #177-182 (Search for a Hero)
Detective Comics #851 & Batman #684 ('The Last Days of Gotham')
Happens concurently with 'Search for a Hero'.
Batman and the Outsiders #13
Bruce returns from the heli-crash, as flashbacked to in Batman #863 .
Final Crisis #1-2
Final Crisis: Requiem
(Concurrent with FC#2. I've only included this because of the awesome scene of Bruce with the Oreo.)
Final Crisis #3-4
Batman #682-3 (The Butler Did It/What the Bulter Saw)
Final Crisis #5-7
Nightwing #152
Detective Comics #852 & Batman #685
Whatever happened to the Caped Crusader?
Battle for the Cowl.

What does it mean?
Note: Batman RIP is polysemic, ambiguous, elliptical and all those other things that're great for literature and troublesome for bald 'fact files' like this. The section that follows therefore cannot aim to be as 'definitive' as does the rest of the guide, but can only aim to be plausibly interpretive.

What do the red skies mean?

Red skies appear on a number of occasions throughout Morrison's Batman RIP.

In the opening 'flash forward' sequence to events six months after the main storyline, over the skies of contemporary Gotham as Batman pursues 'The Green Vulture', during the sunset Honor Jackson shares with Bruce, and during Bruce's subsequent transformation into the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh.

Red skies have a particular meaning in DCU-lore. They were first seen during the Crisis on Infinite Earths, most notoriously in what became known as "Red Sky Crossovers" - issues marketed as Crisis tie-ins which had little connection to the storyline other than that particular colouring choice.

They are now a familiar omen of disaster. As DCU#0 puts it, "When the Multiverse is on the verge of destruction, when the skies drip red as the barriers between parallel universes bleed... When Earth's greatest heroes rise up together, willing to sacrifice everything they have in defense of all they hold dear... That war is called a Crisis."

2006's Ion maxiseries eventually revealled that the reason for this is that the weakening of the walls between universes during times of Crisis allows for a glimpse of 'the Bleed', an arterial channel between realities first introduced in Warren Ellis's Stormwatch run which went on to become a major part of the cosmologies of both Wildstorm and Final Crisis.

The association of red skies with Crises raises the question of RIP's association with Final Crisis. Addressing this in an interview Morrison says, "it could be the start of it, because those red skies have been seeping in for a while, but it's certainly not happening at the same time as Final Crisis #1. It could be happening a week before or something, but I haven't exactly specified it." (IGN, August 2008 ). So the red skies should be seen as signs that the Final Crisis was immanent, rather than that it was underway. This fits the sequence of events in the story.

This leaves the red skies in the six-months-later 'flash forward' sequences however...

"That's actually even more in the future than Battle for the Cowl," says Tony Daniel, "[That] would, hypothetically, appear at the very end of it" (Daniel, Newsarama, December 2008 ).

This places them well after the conclusion of Final Crisis, and would seem to suggest that on that occasion a red sky was simply a red sky.

Red also has a significance (or at least a significant lack of significance) in the red and black pattern the Joker is making throughout the story. The red skies also serve as visual references to this.

How exactly did the Joker talk with his tounge sliced in half?

In Batman #680 the Joker reveals that he knows Doctor Hurt's true identity by mutilating himself to display a serpent's tongue. It has troubled many readers that he appears capable of comprehensible speech after doing so.

It is however entirely possible that the Joker wasn't capable of comprehensible speech before doing so, and the tongue slicing merely serves to make this explicit.

The Joker was shot in the face in Batman #655 and, when he reappeared in #663 had undergone facial reconstruction surgery leaving him incapable of producing any sounds except "a subhuman paste of of slobbery vowels and clicking consonants." The prose story in that issue makes it very clear that, while the Joker thinks he's talking, all that's coming out is "mangled phonetics and toxic intent."

When this version of the Joker reappears in DCU#0, Tony Daniel draws him with retracted lips which would be unable to manufacture any rounded vowels or labial/labio-dental consonants. Daniel is careful never to actually show him speaking.

It seems very likely that the Joker we see in RIP is talking in the same "subhuman paste" and that his speech balloons (coloured green to distinguish them from conventional dialogue) contain the words he's trying to say rather than the actual noises coming out of his mouth.

Careful reading of the arc shows that nobody, from the Arkham psychiatrist, to the Club of Villains to the members of the Black Glove, show any sign of understanding him before or after the tongue-slicing. They respond only to the fact that he has spoken or to actions that he's taken rather than to the content of anything that he has said. There's no evidence that any characters with whom he converses in Batman RIP can makes heads or tails of what he's saying.

There's one exception to this.

The Batman of Zur-En-Arrh has an extended and two-sided conversation with the Joker, and is able to fully understand him both before and after the tongue-slicing.

But then, the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh also has two-sided conversations with gargoyles.

Batman typically works by gathering evidence and consciously interpreting it. In RIP we're shown that as the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh this process is unconscious. Whereas normally he'd read the city and deduce what the clues were telling him, in this state of mind he experiences this as direct linguistic information; "Shh! The city's talking" (Batman #679).

It follows then that he'd also be the only one able to converse with the Joker. Just as he interpreted the city's clues and experienced them as talking gargoyles, he'd be able to read the Joker's body language, intent and phonetics and experience them as actual speech.

It's also worth looking at what the conversation is about. The Joker is insisting that all life is fundamentally meaningless and that all attempts to make sense of it are doomed. And the World's Greatest Detective is making a liar of him...just by the simple act of understanding it.

Who (and why) was the Black Glove?

At San Deigo 2008 Grant Morrison said that the Black Glove's true identity would be someone "everybody in the world knows." Curiously, when the identity was eventually revealed, much of the readership failed to recognise him.

Lets go back to when Morrison first took on the Batman monthly and he mentioned that he'd "rather Batman embodied the best that secular humanism has to offer" (Newsarama, 2006). This take on the character has proved vital to how Morrison has written Batman throughout his career and is crucial to understanding why the Black Glove is who he is.

By 'Humanism' here, we're talking about the whole raft of philosophical ideas that came out of the Renaissance and told us that it was possible for us to stop thinking of life as one long downhill ride from the Fall or the 'Golden Age' and to start thinking that humans had a chance to improve the world and themselves if they started playing smart and making a bit of an effort.

Where Batman comes in is that humanism does this through reason, rationality, science and all that sort of stuff, to the exclusion of all the irrational mumbo-jumbo that's also a part of being human. Arkham Asylum, by a younger and angier Grant Morrison, punishes Batman for his humanism by painting him as a repressed, joyless prig and having him suffer humilation and agony for his failure to integrate into himself myth, ritual, chaos, the Id, and all the other things reason excludes.

By the time of Morrison's JLA run things are very different. Here Batman is routinely defeating gods and ur-gods by holding to these values.

Inbetween we get Batman: Gothic, where reason and rationality are shown to be effective but limited. Batman solves the mystery, but an epilogue reveals that he's been blind to a major player in the events....the Devil himself! Humanism works here, but remains oblivious to the man behind the curtain.

The Devil next reappears in Morrison's Batman mythos during RIP, where he's wearing Mangrove Pierce's body and using the name 'The Black Glove'.

Batman is invested in a project which attempts to improve humanity through reason and rationality. There's no greater threat to that than the possibility that deep down inside humanity is a kind of irrational evil from which it can never escape.

The Devil's the ultimate supernatural bogeyman. There's no greater threat to it than the possibility that people might one day be able to work and think their way free. If that's true then the Devil's days are numbered.

The Joker is well aware of who the Black Glove is, making numerological references to the Devil, quoting the Rolling Stones and illustrating the point by fashioning himself a serpent's tougue. He also claims to know why the Devil hates Batman (#680) and it has to be because of this; the possibilities for humanity that Batman's values and achievements represent scare the Devil (#681).

Batman has to acknowledge though that the Devil is a part of him. Just as humanism tried to exclude from its discourse the irrational side of human experience, Batman tried to fence off the nonsensical aspects of his own life experience inside The Black Casebook; "All the things we'd seen that didn't fit and couldn't be explained went into the Black Casebook" (#665) but when he writes the final entry in the Casebook he faces the posibility that he's reached the limits of reason.

In the various isolation experiments, initiations and Thogal rituals we've seen Batman undertake he's found this 'source of pure evil' deep down inside himself. And as Doctor Hurt breathes, "The Black Glove always wins" it is Batman's own black glove we see smashing through the helicopter window.

Since we're talking about a book set in the shared universe of the DCU we have to mention that this is a world not short of Devils and Devil-analogues... Neron, Satanus, the First of the Fallen, Lucifer and plenty of others could all in different ways be thought of as 'The Devil' in DCU continuity.

I would suggest that it is not helpful in understanding Batman RIP to do so here. What Batman triumphs against here is the idea of the Devil rather than any specific pre-existing variation on that idea. Although perhaps we should mention Orion's warning from Final Crisis #1 concerning Darkseid and his retinue of evil gods - "They did not die! He is in you all!" - and Darkseid's own admission in Final Crisis #7 that he'd have chosen Batman's soul to ruin over Turpin's were it not so difficult.

It'd be tempting to give the last word to Damien, who says, "I know the Devil exists, or at least something exists which might as well be the Devil. I've met him." (Batman #666)

The Black Glove is something which might as well be the Devil.

What does 'RIP' stand for if not 'Rest in Peace'?

I don't know.

Final Crisis Questions

Are we really supposed to believe that DC would kill Bruce Wayne?

No. The day Final Crisis #6 came out, Morrison was giving interviews saying, "I keep on stressing for people not to think of this as death. This is part of the story. There's more cool s**t to come. It'd be too easy to think of this as the end" (Wizarduniverse, January 2009)

The week before it came out, Didio was saying things like this, "when you mention a name to people who aren’t familiar with comics, they know who that character is – for everybody from Superman to Aquaman. We want to make sure we have the character that is the most recognizable to the largest number of people. That’s something that we’re always working towards" (Newsarama, January 2009)

What was the 'Final Fate of the Batman'?

With Darkseid fully incarnate, and destroying the universe with the mere weight of his unsustainably godly presence, Batman confronted him beneath the ruins of Blüdhaven.

In a scene which parallels and inverts Shilo Norman's confrontation with Darkseid from Seven Soldiers #1, Batman shot Darkseid with the god-killing bullet which came into his possession while investigating the death of Orion.

Darkseid's last act was to direct his Omega Beams at Batman. They made contact, leaving Bruce a charred and ruined corpse with burnt-out eyeballs.

But it's not all bad news.

Darkseid's last words were, "Can you outrace the Omega Sanction? The death that is life!"

'The Omega Sanction' was introduced in Seven Soldiers: Mister Miracle #4 where it's described as "The ultimate hell...trapped in an endless succession of synthetic lives [...] Each new existence more degraded than the last. More hopeless. More meaningless. Neverending."

In 'Rock of Ages' Morrison describes it as "Out of time, out of space. Beyond what even Gods know." but Shilo Norman has already shown us that it can be escaped. One scene of particular relevance from Mister Miracle #4 is the exact moment at which Shilo first began to realise he was trapped inside a synthetic life; It was while looking at the Bat Symbol.

In Final Crisis #7 we rejoin Bruce on prehistoric Earth, witnessing the death of the first boy on Earth. He's in possession of a little rocket ship full of superhero memorabilia sent through time from the point in Final Crisis where all seemed lost.

There would seem to be two immediate explanations for how he got there.

One is that all this talk of the 'Omega Sanction' is irrelevant and that Darkseid's beams simply relocated Batman in time, as they've previously done to the Forever People and Sonny Sumo. This is perhaps the simplest explanation, but leaves the dialogue as being very misleading and fails to account for there having been a corpse.

The other is that Batman escaped the Omega Sanction and for some reason returned to the material universe at that point. One might speculate that he's been returned to his (restored) body and that it had been laid to rest in the little rocket ship.

The details have yet to be revealed, but some things are abundantly clear; The fire burns forever, the story is To Be Continued, and Batman and Robin will never die.

Jughead

2009-02-02T15:22:00.000-08:00

There is much that is remarkable in LOST's latest episode, from the Amazing New Look with which Desmond greets Oxford to the actress who responds to having been cast against type by playing her part without moving her jaw.

What stands out most for any parents watching though is the sequence in which Des exposits at his Eastenders-mute child...

DESMOND: Beyond where you can see, there's--there's an island, and it's a very special island. (Chuckles) I left it a long time ago. I never thought I'd see it again.

(Penny ascends from below deck.)

DESMOND: It's called Great Britain. And the most beautiful part of the island is Scotland, and that's where your daddy's from. There's mountains and glens and monsters in deep lochs, and... and it's where your mummy and daddy... fell in love.

PENNY: It's also where he broke her heart.

VIEWING PARENTS: Alright, Alright! Not in front of the kid, Penny!

DESMOND: Yeah, well, I... I thought I'd leave that wee bit out of it.

PENNY: You also left out the bit about his grandfather--the man who sent a boat to the Island to kill all Daddy's friends.

VIEWING PARENTS: Did he? Did he really? Can't think why! Thank God you're here, Penny. No child should ever get to the age of four without being given the full details of their parents' unstable relationship and bloodthirsty relatives.

DESMOND: We'll be in and out. He'll never know we're here, Penny.

PENNY: Don't underestimate him, Desmond. If he finds out we're here, I don't know what he'll do.

VIEWING PARENTS: You'd better be the one doing the settle tonight, that's all I'm saying.

(Cheers to Lostpedia for the original transcript)

Omission statement

2009-02-02T11:45:00.000-08:00

I think I'd like a blog.

Most of my time online seems to be spent talking about comics, and when I look at most posters on comic forums and at most bloggers then I find myself wishing I was in the latter group. Lets give this a try then.

Things I'm likely to end up talking about here include...

Comics - Probably to the exclusion of much else. There's so many of them! Most of them are quite little! Absurdly strident opinons are the expected response! Why talk about anything else?

Doctor Who - Though not often directly. I've a habit of relating any point I'm trying to make about any concept in life or fiction to a Doctor Who episode or novel.

Tedious Details From My Life - Let's be honest about this from the start.

Cute Things My Daughter Has Recently Said - As above.

Girls Aloud - It is time I worked out my complex feelings about these performers, and where better than in a journal potentially read by people who once respected me?

Big Brother - Once it starts up. Though part of me feels Dead Set was the real BB10 and the only natural end to the series.

LOST - I demand fewer answers! Stop collapsing all my lovely possibilities with your manky resolutions.

Skins - If season three picks up from the first episode.

Books - But not often. There's something a bit off about reading hundreds of pages that someone's sweated blood over and then dashing off a few paragraphs in appraisal, so in most cases I'd rather keep schtum than put in the work to do a decent essay or review. I realise my attitude here might not be convincing anyone that they're in for the finest in web-journalism.

Podcasts - I travel to work on a bus, and as I do so I like to have '90s comedians swearing in my ears.

How Evil The Daily Mail is - Everyone says it, but it can't be said enough.

My Parents' Caravan - Their attempts to rent it out meant it had a blog before I did. A rivalry may develop. Or it may become a guest columnist.

Comics and Doctor Who - It really will be mostly just them.