“Why do I feel like a book that’s being read?”-Bruce Wayne (Batman #683)

The word “epic” has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, but Grant Morrison’s work on Batman certainly warrants that adjective. Spanning 7 years, Morrison’s run is arguably the most important and influential take on Batman this century as it laid the groundwork for the critically acclaimed runs from Scott Snyder and Tom King. However, Morrison’s run can be tough to navigate because, rather than being contained to the main Batman title, it crossed over into other projects they were writing at the time and spun off into assorted miniseries and one-shots. Despite the sometimes confusing reading order, I believe it is a trail worth following. Taken as a whole, it represents an attempt by Morrison to reinvent the character by examining and diagnosing the trauma at Batman’s core; a chaos magick ritual performed through serialized fiction to heal the most popular superhero in comics. It also happens to be some very fun Batman comics that celebrate the whole history of the character.

On a more personal level, these comics are important to me because they inspired me to get back into monthly superhero comics–a world that I had drifted away from after graduating highschool in 2000. I remember walking out of an afternoon showing of The Dark Knight with an overwhelming  desire to read some Batman comics and discovering that Morrison, who’s work on JLA in the 1990s I had enjoyed, was writing Batman as well as Final Crisis, the massive DC crossover at the time. Those comics captured my imagination as a life-long DC fan, and, more importantly, showed me just how far the idea of superheroes could be stretched. I was hooked again, going back to the shop every week as the twisting paths of those stories unraveled.

Since the reason I am now a co-host of a successful comic book podcast is inextricably linked to reading these very comics, it only made sense to do a close reading of them for IRCB. In doing so, I’m not only looking forward to revisiting them for the sake of nostalgia, but also to put them under the microscope and tease out some of the recurring themes and images Morrison introduces. Again, part of what makes their interpretation of Batman interesting is the idea that every Batman story is canon, which not only makes for some fun Easter eggs for which to hunt, but more importantly asks what psychological impact those countless stories would have on the character. Throughout their story, Morrison tries, in my opinion, to unpack the psychological trauma at the heart of the character and find a way to resolve it: to separate the idea of Batman from the tragedy of Bruce Wayne. This series of podcasts will trace Morrison’s various attempts at this task, from some of their earliest Batman stories all the way through to the surprising conclusion.

-Paul Jaissle (Feb. 2022)