I pity the people of the future who won’t have been able to experience Grant Morrison’s Batman run on an issue by issue basis as it was actually coming out. In the future people will be able to just look up the answers to the mystery online, or else they’ll hear about the ending via word-of-mouth before they have a chance to read it. This has seriously been the most fun I’ve had reading monthly comics ever. It’s so much fun doing detective work and looking for clues to the mystery. In a world where most comics cost $3 and take, at most, 10 minutes to read (a cost of about $20 an hour), I’ve studied and poured over each issue of this series for multiple hours, all told–off and on over the last several months–trying to figure this mystery out. Of course, sometimes I feel as though I’ve been taken to the absolute depths of madness by this, on the one hand. On the other hand, in a sense, my experience has been about finding joy, because the hints are there and finding them and putting them together is very rewarding.

If you want some potentially huge spoilers about what I think went on in this issue, and who I think the person calling himself “Honor Jackson” really is, then go to the following forum page, because I posted my theories there under the name “magwomp”: http://dcboards.warnerbros.com/web/thread.jspa?threadID=2000157734&tstart=0&start=60

What more can I say about this without spoiling anything? (1) I’m not the biggest fan of Tony Daniel, but I actually think his style fits this story quite well, better than Andy Kubert’s would. So I’m glad he’s on the book and seems able to handle a monthly schedule. (Imagine if the last issue or two of “R.I.P.” got delayed for months on end. That’d be brutal.) (2) No one who has the internet should complain too awful much about Grant Morrison referencing obscure material, because you’ve got the internet and you can easily look all this stuff up. You don’t even need to download the old issues (although you could…), because the relevant bits are being talked about and explained all over the place. You can look up what happened with “Zur-En-Arrh” in Batman #113, for instance. Sure, complain about the technique of reusing old stories, maybe, but the time it takes to complain about not understanding something is basically equivalent to the time it takes to look things up on wikipedia.

I wish this issue showed maybe a page more of Bruce Wayne having a hard time being a bum. There, I said something negative. I wish we had a page of Bruce looking down and out before he was immediately picked up and rescued by Jo–I mean by “Honor Jackson”.