Posts tagged with “majorexcellent”

This seems to me to be the right time to have a nice little chat about Batman.  He’s dead, you know.  Oh, you didn’t?  Well maybe you haven’t kept up on your Batman and Detective, his two monthlies.  Oh you have, have you?  Well maybe you hadn’t heard because his death, a once-in-a-lifetime event they tell me, didn’t happen in Batman or Detective.  It didn’t happen in Robin or Nightwing.  It didn’t happen in ANY of the Batman-related books in fact.  No, to see this monumental event, one would have to pick up a copy of Final Crisis #6. 

Now I’m not a big DC fan.  I only read one of their core titles–Batman–and have since I can remember, really.  In fact I’ve read EVERY issue of Batman and Detective Comics.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of 1400 issues, give or take, and I’ve had a subscription or had a pull list since I was in middle school.  When Grant Morrison took over the book in 2006 at #665, I was optimistic.  I liked Invisibles and a few of his other mainstream runs.  Then he started making some big changes.  And I was less optimistic.  His run has been a slow downward spiral, in my mind, really destroying everything good that was left out of this character. 

I guess what I want to say is that this is my personal last straw.  I kept reading manufactured “event” through manufactured “event,”  through Jason coming back and through Damian and everything that followed that.  But I just can’t keep reading this drivel.  The Batman I grew up with — the World’s Greatest Detective — died for me for good when Morrison and DiDio put the gun in his hand and pulled the trigger.   I know I’m being over dramatic and a little pissy, but this is bigger for people like me that really love comics than for most readers, and it kills me that the guys at DC are this oblivious to how big of an impact they’re really making to more than a few of us.  So after 20 years of readership, DC, make mine Marvel.  Exclusively.

Oh, and since I wrote this when I should have been drawing this week’s Major Excellent, here’s a cartoon that describes my feelings.