Batman #663 - Grant Morrison, John Van Fleet (DC Comics)
I’ve said that one of the reasons for this blog is to earmark things I can steal at a later date. This isn’t that, exactly.
With the exception of the odd nice turn of phrase (“shuffling selves like croupier cards”), the prose here is overwrought nearly to the point of ugliness. I’m posting this for the elegance of its ideas.
The core concept of Morrison’s run is incorporating Batman’s entire history, making space for it all. The Joker is the axis on which much of this spins. His ever-shifting persona, it’s implied, is the reason that Batman stories have jumped back and forth between camp ‘n’ colourful and grim 'n’ gritty for the past 75 years.
(Which, now I come to think about it, casts Batman himself as a reactive element, defined almost entirely by what his nemesis is doing.)
These two paragraphs contain almost all of the ideas about the Joker (and super-crime in general) that pepper Morrison’s work on Batman, all the way back to Arkham Asylum and forward to the end of his run five years later.
It joins all the dots, but not neatly, not the way Batman would: that repeated “Maybe”, slightly contradictory sentences sat adjacent to one another. This kind of pattern spotting, organising chaos into useful narratives, and the question of whether it’s healthy behaviour, is a theme we’ll come back later in Morrison’s run.
