Published: Sunday, December 7, 2008

Bruce Wayne goes darkly into the night

It’s been a long, strange Bat-trip, which nobody knows better than writer Grant Morrison.

The Scottish scribe has been writing “Batman” off and on since the fall of 2006, and all of his stories came together in October in the final issue of the mega-story “Batman R.I.P.” I won’t spoil the ending, but take it as a given that now and for the foreseeable future, Bruce Wayne won’t be wearing any Bat-suits.

What will happen next is important for the character, but just as important is what has come before. The past is prologue, as they say, and Morrison considers every Caped Crusader story going back to 1939 true in its own way.

“ ‘Batman R.I.P.’ incorporates the sum total of the experiences that made him the character we’re familiar with today. Of course, he’s had too many adventures to reasonably fit into one man’s life, but many of them have covered the same ground and can be considered en masse.

“I divided various decades into the years of a roughly 35-ish Batman’s life and found that the whole story considered as a 70-year-long publishing arc has all the highs and lows of someone’s real-life story, with appropriate emotional markers along the way. The whole obsessive backstory with the three Robins is amazing to consider just on its own.

“Seen this way, Batman’s entire life becomes a crazed plunge downward into increasingly more difficult, bleaker scenarios. He’s really had a hell of a time, and most of that within the last 20 years. There are so many different strands to follow when you take the approach that it all happened.”

“All” meaning every story, no matter how goofy, weird or laughable. Morrison has incorporated absurd science-fiction Bat-stories from the 1950s, ridiculous Bat-spinoffs such as Batwoman and Bat-Mite, even a throwaway bit about a temporary police commissioner from 1947 (“Detective” No. 121).

Most significant, though, are the many stories of Batman’s brain on drugs. Morrison continues:

“In ‘Batman’ numbers 682-683, for instance, you’ll see some interesting theories about Batman’s regular and repetitive contact with chemicals of various kinds – poisons, hallucinogens, sedatives and stimulants – which has been a recurring feature of his adventures since the very first published exploit, ‘The Case of the Chemical Syndicate’ ” in “Detective” No. 27, 1939.

“That’s an aspect of the overall mythos I didn’t think had been examined a great deal, so I staked the territory for myself and used it to help build and deepen Batman’s character and to explain certain anomalies in plots or behavior.”

And at the end, we’ll see why Bruce Wayne is Batman – just as he stops being Batman.

“Everything else plays directly into Bruce’s state of mind,” Morrison said. “As the conclusion to R.I.P. demonstrates, however, Bruce Wayne’s mind is a thing of tempered steel. . . . I think it’s important to show just how differently someone with Batman’s training might think. His way of framing the world is so unusual, as we’ll see, that it’s almost a disease or a superpower.”

Which we actually won’t see for a while, as other writers take on the Bat-books:

• December shows Commissioner Gordon coping without a Batman in “Last Days of Gotham” by Denny O’Neil.

• January pits Hush vs. Catwoman as part of the “Faces of Evil” crossover by Paul Dini.

• Neil Gaiman writes the two-part “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?” in February, playing off Alan Moore’s famous “Whatever Happened to the Man of

Tomorrow?” from 1986.

• Then the Bat-books will feature the hunt for a replacement Batman in a long-running story called “Battle for the Cowl” by diverse hands.

After that, the return of Morrison – and perhaps the Caped Crusader?

“I’m taking a few months off during the ‘Battle for the Cowl’ storyline to recharge my batteries,” he said, “but I’ll be coming back to ‘Batman’ next year with a very big announcement. I’ve already written the first of the post-R.I.P. issues as a kind of ‘pilot’ to get myself into the mindset.

“Coming up, as you know, there will be big changes to the Batman family of books, and I think we’re about to enter an era of real freshness and innovation, but other than that . . . my lips are sealed.”

Morrison says he has plotted Bat-stories through 2010. Given what he’s already done to the Dark Knight, it appears Batman’s long, strange trip has just begun.