By the bronze age of the 1970s, the modern idea of who Batman is had been largely codified. The dark knight as we know him was defined by legendary writers like Denny O’Neil and Steve Englehart. Even later writers like Frank Miller were still working from the same template, just taken in a grittier direction. This trend was true across most of DC Comics and in many ways hold true today. That is, until the British invaded. Over the course of the 80s and 90s, DC recruited a number of writers and artists from the UK whose unique and often avant-garde style would change the way people looked at comics. These included talents such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and the person who would change Batman forever, Grant Morrison.
After getting DC’s attention with their work on 2000 AD, the Glaswegian writer pitched two ideas to the company. One was their run on Animal Man, and the other was Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. Even though it was only their first Batman story, Arkham Asylum immediately incorporated Morrison’s reoccurring themes of metatextuality and narrative representations of abstract symbols. The story, like much of their writing, was less about the literal events depicted on the page, and more about what it said about the characters themselves.
I wanted to approach Batman from the point of view of the dreamlike, emotional and irrational hemisphere, as a response to the very literal, “realistic” “left brain” treatment of superheroes which was in vogue at the time, in the wake of The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and others.
At first glance, some of the characterization in the story can come across as shocking. However, when you interpret it as a metaphor on their inner fear and psyches, it becomes a chilling psychological horror. The book straddles the thin line that can separate Batman from his villains, often pushing it to the breaking point. The inmates themselves also each get their own unique lens through which the story examines their psychoses. None of these were more lasting or impactful than the idea of Joker’s “super sanity”. With it, Morrison explained Joker’s constantly shifting personality by different writers as an in-universe reaction to the world around him. It substitutes the ever-changing, real-life editorial environment for one that diegetically exists for the characters.
Morrison would follow this up with a storyline in Legends of the Dark Knight called Gothic. At first glance, this reads like a much more “standard” Batman comic. It’s got gangsters, a megalomaniacal bad guy trying to destroy Gotham, and a detective mystery with a supernatural twist. By all these surface-level metrics, it succeeds as a fantastic Batman story that requires no more digging to enjoy. However, that doesn’t mean that it was devoid of their signature touches.
Most notably, there’s Morrison’s persistent fascination with the occult, and more specifically, mystic architecture. Morrison themself is a practitioner of “chaos magic”, which pervades much of their writing. The notion that ideas both shape and are represented by the world around them serves as the driving force of the story’s conflict. Concepts like a demonic presence built into Gotham’s foundations, satanic rituals, and the supernatural relationship between action and belief all start here before making their way into the rest of their time on Batman.
Despite its dark undertones, Morrison never treats comics as something that should be taken too seriously. Note that this doesn’t mean they don’t think comics are important. Rather, there’s a deep earnestness and love for comic stories that permeates everything they write. Gothic‘s villain might be a satanic madman wanting to murder millions, but he still has showmanship. Morrison understands that it’s the campy tropes of comics that make them what they are, even when elevated to a more complex form. That’s why Batman is tied to a Rube Golderberg-esque death trap during the climax of Gothic; it’s how these stories work. Trying to make things too “realistic” is missing the point.
Kids understand that real crabs don’t sing like the ones in The Little Mermaid. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really f***ing dumb questions like “how does superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile’s tires?” it’s a f***ing made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!
Over the rest of the 90s and early 2000s, Morrison would continue writing a fascinating mix of mainstream superhero comics like JLA alongside much weirder Vertigo titles such as The Invisibles and Flex Mentallo. One never strayed too far from the other, as Morrison’s love of the superhero genre informed the way they viewed the comic book medium, and their writing always kept a taste for the bizarre. It wouldn’t be until 2006 that Morrison returned to Batman full time, but when they did, it was something to behold.
All of these ideas that Morrison had swimming around in their previous Batman work, as well as their other stories, would culminate in their 2006 magnum opus. Morrison’s run would span eight years and be spread across four separate titles. It managed to examine Batman on a new level that used his history, changes, and contradictions in order to form a new, syncretic whole. Morrison wanted to reconcile even Batman’s strangest Silver Age stories into a single continuity.
Just as before, it’s a run about ideas and concepts above all else. Very rarely is a character just a character. Rather, they act as a representation of some sort of commentary on the nature of Batman and comics in general. Maybe a long forgotten story from half a century ago is actually the reason behind the seeming cyclicity of the comic book status quo. Perhaps the persistence of Batman over the years is the result of an interdimensional mind-bomb that rippled through the past and future in a causal loop. All of this makes for an incredibly layered story, but still one that resonates on an intimate level with characters and events you care about.
The legacy of Morrison’s time on Batman cannot be overstated. In addition to the iconic characters they created like Dr. Hurt, Professor Pyg, and of course Damian Wayne, it reshaped what a Batman run looked like. The approach of using their run to create one, grand narrative that serves as a thesis on the character as a whole has been imitated, but never duplicated, by almost every writer since. The ideas they introduced still affect the way Batman is written today. Without question, those eight years were a watershed moment.
Even at the time, the impact of the events of Morrison’s Batman run led to the “Batman: Reborn” status quo in 2009, an incredible time for the entire bat family line. It led to unforgettable titles like Bryan Q. Miller’s Batgirl, Christopher Yost’s Red Robin, Paul Dini’s Gotham City Sirens and Streets of Gotham, and Greg Rucka’s “Batwoman: Elegy” stories in Detective Comics followed by Scott Snyder’s “The Black Mirror”. Characters were evolving and growing in ways that almost never happens in superhero comics. Any of these on their own would be worthy of lasting praise, but for a shining moment it seemed like everyone was firing on all cylinders.
It’s such a deep, multifaceted story that it would be near impossible to talk about in one article. It would take me forever to write and I doubt hardly anyone would sit down and read the whole thing. That’s why for the rest of April, every Monday is going to be “Morrison Monday”, where I will dissect a different aspect of Morrison’s legendary epic. There’s a lot to cover, but by the end I hope I can share some of what I believe makes this the greatest run in the history of the character.
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