As some of you may know, the Batman that we know and love is coming to an end.
Grant Morrison’s current storyline Batman R.I.P. is mega-big, but even bigger is its coda of sorts ‘Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader’ written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Andy Kubert. The story is a kind of answer to Alan Moore and Curt Swan’s ‘Whatver Happened to the Man of Tomorrow’ story that signaled the end of one version of Superman and made the way for the latest modern version.
In an interview with MTV’s bizarre comic book sub-ste ‘Splashpage,’ Neil Gaiman laid out a few crumbs of information.
“What can I tell you about the Batman thing?” Gaiman mused. “It is a two-parter, it’s being written by me, it’s being drawn by Andy Kubert… I’ve seen the first thirteen pages so far, and the artwork is absolutely lovely, making me feel almost guilty for putting word balloons on it. And my favorite bit so far is the conversation between Selina Kyle and Joe Chill.”
Gaiman anticipates the issues will be out in February.
“It’s one of those things where they phoned me up and said, ‘This is what we’d like you to do,’” Gaiman started to say. “It wasn’t even ‘This is what we’d like you to do,’ it was, ‘This is what’s going to be happening with Batman. Would you like to write the last issue of Batman and the last issue of Detective Comics?’ And when they make an offer like that, you say yes.”
I honestly cannot predict where the current Batman R.I.P. story will end, but the addition of this final finale has me worried. When a story that promises to deliver needs another story to come in and finish the deal… that sounds like poor planning to me. More likely than not it is an attempt by DC Comics to draw in fans of Gaiman who typically don’t ‘get’ super hero comics and will flock to see the scribe take to the dark knight detective.
Will it work? Sure it will, but they will not be able to retain the added readers. As I learned when I finished reading ‘Batman Year One,’ hungry for more only to discover that the next issue of Batman ‘The New Adventures’ was an entirely different animal that did not appeal to me.
But we shall see in the new year what the surprise ending is and if it really makes any difference in the end.
