Words in Pictures — Batman #680, #677 - Grant Morrison, Tony S. Daniel...

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Batman #680, #677 - Grant Morrison, Tony S. Daniel (DC Comics)

(I’ve broken my usual rules slightly and pulled these two snippets from two different issues of Batman RIP – they’re not even in the right order! – because they seem like two sides of the same conversation, the one I’ve been having on this blog over the last few posts.)

The idea of pattern recognition crops up in Morrison’s Batman over and over again. And each time, it’s reframed: as a necessary human skill, a talent that can make us super-human, an unhealthy way of forcing order onto an meaningless world.

As the world’s greatest detective, Bruce Wayne sees things as a rigid, predictable grid (like the one he’s facing down the Joker on in the top panel here). Wayne might be the hero, but it’s never quite as simple as order = good, chaos = evil.

Once again, Morrison makes a good argument for both sides. It's pretty hard to argue with the Joker’s brilliant one-liner: “No, Batman, that’s just Wikipedia”, especially when the story adopts that Batman ‘66 tendency to pluck out facets of reality seemingly at random and force them into an ill-fitting jigsaw of 'clues’. (Y'know: 'C… the sea… Deep Blue… Gotham Chess Park!’)

It was reading Morrison’s Batman (or possibly reading about it) that introduced me to the term 'apophenia’: “the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data”, to use Wikipedia’s definition. It is, in its most extreme form, a mental disorder. 

As someone who was just completing an English Literature degree when I first read these comics, it’s probably not too hard to see why the concept might resonate with me.

But, as Batman retorts to Jezebel Jet in our second panel, dozens of pages earlier: the world needs him to be that person. It’s his greatest super power, the thing which allows him to overcome the Joker and escape from elaborate death traps.

Even more than that, the same pattern recognition is at the heart of the story Morrison is telling. In particular, it’s present in the one element that I suspect his run will be remembered for: the way it brings together disparate parts of the Batman mythos, from weird '50s sci-fi through the camp of '66 to modern grit.

My concern is that this will be remembered as an exercise in continuity-wrangling, or a meta-fictional parlour game. And yeah, it is those things, but modern comics are hardly short of stories which play games with older stories.

But by linking to the themes being expressed through dialogue and story beats and art, Morrison turns this into something not just about Batman but about the reader. Not just about the way we read comics (and blog about them) but the way we understand the world.

Then again, perhaps I’m just seeing patterns in random data again. Did I mention I’m an English Literature graduate?

Batman RIP Batman Grant Morrison The Joker Apophenia Comics DC Comics

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