I’m not really going to talk much about last week’s comics, as to be honest, I didn’t really pick up anything that floated my boat.

However I did pick up Grant Morrison’s latest issue of Batman, which has Bruce’s new girlfriend figuring out his secret identity.  I picked it up largely because online discussion seemed to indicate most people were taking the issue (specifically the reveal) as the lead in to Grant Morrison’s Batman RIP event.

While I’m intrigued, but not hugely hyped about Final Crisis, the interviews over the last few weeks regarding Batman RIP have really caught my interest.   I do like the Bat-franchise, but aside from Nightwing, I find the number of titles involved puts me off collecting them.

There’s not a lot of detail floating around at the moment as to what the story is actually about, but the hints seem to head towards Bruce retiring from his active role as Batman, with someone else taking on the cowl.

I’m really interested to see where this goes.   For a start, it seems to be following the “big event, contained to 1 franchise” mentality which served The Sinestro Corps War so well last year.  But I’m also interested in what form the plot will take.  Bruce being replaced as Batman has of course, been done before, with first Azrael and then Dick Grayson taking over the role during the Knightfall and Prodigal storylines (at least, in recent-ish years).   I can’t imagine we’d be facing a retread of those stories.

Of course, those stories separated Bruce from the crime fighting and Batman alter ego completely.  While Azrael was tearing up the town, Bruce was off having his own adventures during Knight Quest for example.   I wonder if Batman RIP will setup something Batman Beyond-ish with Bruce in more of a detective/support role to a new Batman on the streets?

At NYCC DC were teasing who might take over the role.  And that’s a good question in itself.    The three Robins are obvious candidates, but then I’d say Tim is currently too young to pull it off (not to mention he’s still fighting the idea of one day taking over from Bruce), Jason as a character is just poison at the moment, with DC not having a clue what to do with him.  Dick is possibly the most logical character, but they’re only just now starting to rebuild the Nightwing title.   Shunting Dick off into the Batman role would undo all that good work.

Maybe Grant could do some work on the Jason Todd character to make his taking over the role believable.  Or DC could take the hit on the Nightwing title.  Or maybe they could decide to sidestep the age issue and have Tim face his demons?

There’s Damien as well.  Bruce’s son with Talia, but to be honest, I don’t really know much about that character.

Either way, I’m increasingly intrigued by where this story could go.  So I think I’ll be picking up the titles to see what its about.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 22:05 and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.