grant morrison and frank miller

[Xak-Ell]

does it seem to anybody else that they both write for their own superman or batman universe. frank miller has his own dark knight universe as we all know, buti recently read action comics volume 1 from the new 52 and it feels a lot like a prequel to all star superman. from the golden age aspects of clark and the mad scientist lex luthor, i really feel like these guys write for their own universes

 

[DocHolliday]

Frank Miller has his "Goddamn Batman" and government lapdog Superman. Morrison has BatGod and silver-age throwback Superman. Neither seems to respect continuity all that much in favor of writing characters their own way. The only Miller story I ever liked, in regards to Batman or Superman, is Year One and that was mostly a Jim Gordon tale. I don't think Miller really "gets" either character. Overall, Morrison succeeds simply because he's a better writer than Miller. That's not to say Morrison is completely without fault though. IIRC, he interpreted the ending of Killing Joke as Batman killing the Joker...which is probably the worst analysis I've ever seen for that comic.

In any case, both are vastly inferior to Moore who understood how to write great stories with both these characters while staying on-model.

 

[Visceral]

morrison who?

and i am a superman fan

 

[shallbecomeabat]

That's not to say Morrison is completely without fault though. IIRC, he interpreted the ending of Killing Joke as Batman killing the Joker...which is probably the worst analysis I've ever seen for that comic.

In any case, both are vastly inferior to Moore who understood how to write great stories with both these characters while staying on-model.

Just because you don't like his interpretation doesn't mean that its wrong. In the Deluxe Edition of Killing Joke, Brian Bolland even hints at the fact that Batman breaks Jokers neck, so it cannot be that stupid to see it that way.

Morrison does everything Moore is doing, vastly superior. Flex Mentallo, Invisibles, Arkham Asylum, All Star Superman and his Batman run (at least before Inc.) outdo everything Moore has done, except maybe Watchmen and the first 20 issues Swamp Thing (in my mind All Star trumps Watchmen by a mile, but thats just me). And thats comparing him to 80s Moore. Current Moore gets trashed by the Filth and We3 alone.

 

[The Question]

IIRC, he interpreted the ending of Killing Joke as Batman killing the Joker...which is probably the worst analysis I've ever seen for that comic.

I think it's kind of awesome.

 

[Llama_Shepherd]

That's how I always saw it.

 

[hippie_hunter]

does it seem to anybody else that they both write for their own superman or batman universe. frank miller has his own dark knight universe as we all know, buti recently read action comics volume 1 from the new 52 and it feels a lot like a prequel to all star superman. from the golden age aspects of clark and the mad scientist lex luthor, i really feel like these guys write for their own universes

Morrison intentionally wrote his Action Comics run to feel like All-Star Superman in a lot of ways. What made Morrison's run problematic though is that unlike his Batman run in which other writers were kept in the loop, he completely kept the other Superman writers in the dark. Thus, they weren't able to acknowledge what Morrison was doing in Action Comics (which was being treated as the flagship title by DC). It threw the entire Superman line into complete chaos.

As for Miller. It's well known that his Batman stories (including Year One) take place in their own universe.

 

[DocHolliday]

Just because you don't like his interpretation doesn't mean that its wrong. In the Deluxe Edition of Killing Joke, Brian Bolland even hints at the fact that Batman breaks Jokers neck, so it cannot be that stupid to see it that way.

Although I don't altogether agree with his disdain for Morrison(I've enjoyed lots of his stuff) this guys explains why Morrison's Killing Joke theory is full of ****:

This latest dust-up seems to me to be simply the latest attempt of Morrison's to play gadfly to Moore, in this case by bringing Moore's "Killing Joke" down to the level Morrison himself would write it, had he had the idea first. In so doing, however, he reveals the extreme limits of his own interpretation of the characters and inability to think outside the current comic-book mindset.

Of course, he reasons, Batman would kill the Joker here. The Joker did really bad stuff. Of course he would disregard Gordon's strict instruction to "Bring him in by the book. We have to show him our way works." Of course Gordon's way doesn't work, Morrison laughs. Of course Batman wouldn't pay any attention to such folderol. Tee-hee! And, of course, it helps that Morrison is playing to his audience, interviewer Kevin Smith, another kill-'em, torture-'em, bleed-'em, rape-'em, anything-for-a-laff modern writer. Smith is blown away. Jesus Christ! It's so obvious! Smith realizes, Moore wrote it... JUST THE WAY I WOULD HAVE IF I'D THOUGHT OF IT!!!

Except Moore did not write it the way they would have had the idea occured to them first. Moore wrote "The Killing Joke" with a basic idea that is extremely unpopular with modern audiences: The idea that the Joker is actually insane and in need of help.

Insane. As in: Not fully responsible for his actions. As in: Not capable of the outside perspective it would take to change or fully appreciate his actions. As in: actually should be locked up and given medical care in the (likely completely vain) hope that he can be restored to sanity.

Moore's Joker is brilliant, yes. Exceptionally so. Evil, without question. He does what he does out of malice and with extreme intent to cause suffering and death, but all of this exists because he shattered, lost his mind, and became radically different from who and what he was before. "But if he has intent, he's not insane." one might say, but the insane continue to act and seek out ways to bring about intended results. Those actions and goals, however, are irrational, like those of the Joker in Moore's story.

Moore proceeds under the assumption that the Batman and the doctors who've diagnosed the Joker as insane all these years actually knew what they were talking about. The courts system in Gotham, long a source of unbridled hilarity, consistently remands the Joker to Arkham and not Death Row because his condition is medically and psychologically classified as Insanity and the laws governing how the insane are to be treated are, gee, I dunno, maybe possibly correct? Not bloodthirsty enough by half, of course, but maybe actually correct. The Joker isn't a shrewd criminal mastermind fooling the good people of Gotham and our benighted hero by acting crazy. He's a shrewd criminal mastermind who is actually crazy. *

What he's after in this story seems very simple: To show Batman and the world that, crazy as he is, the rest of them are only one bad day away from being where and what he is. Batman had a bad day once, he correctly assumes. He's crazy too, the Joker believes, but he doesn't see it. Too humorless to get the joke.

Except Batman is not crazy. Nor is Gordon driven insane by the bad day the Joker's inflicted upon him. They represent on a nightly basis, sanity's resolution to insist upon justice and rationality, despite everything the Gotham underworld throws at them. They're not insane to pursue such a hopeless goal. They are sanity personified, even in the face of an ongoing apocalyptic attack on reason.

Which is why the Batman's attempts to reach the Joker through reason fail. The Joker doesn't hold with reason. Doesn't buy into it. Doesn't really see the point of it. If fact, he has his own viewpoint, Insanity, and is driven to convince others of the correctness of THAT perspective. And the Batman doesn't understand the Joker, either. He knows him. Can often predict his otherwise unpredictable behavior. He can out-think him, which the Joker finds incredible, given that no one else can. But Batman can not understand the Joker's insane drive towards an end that will find them killing one another...

...Until the end of this story, when the Joker tells a joke that explains, to the extent that jokes "explain" anything, why he cannot reach out and accept the help that the Batman is offering. It's not even the distrust that the joke describes. It's the insanity underneath it. That form of reaching a conclusion. The irrational rationale... What he says with that joke is essentially true, and answers Batman's question in a way that the Batman "gets."

And because it's true, and absurd, and succinct, it's funny. The Joker knows it's true. Maybe even tragic if it weren't so funny. He laughs. And Batman gets the joke as well. So they both laugh. It's a joke all about the both of them and they both share a moment when they are exactly on the same page with one another for the first time ever. They are falling into one another the joke is so apt.

Batman is most definitely not reaching for the Joker's throat. The reason the laughter stops is not a broken neck. It is because such a moment of shared insight is, by necessity, brief. The camera is moving away. The police cars are arriving, their headlights reflected in the pooling rain form a beam of light that appears to be in reference to the one mentioned in the joke. Time takes place between those panels. As the cars pull up, Batman and the Joker are left standing toe to toe, facing one another. The Joker is taken away. We don't see it, but we assume it's done as Gordon instructed. And the police cars are no longer there at the end. The beam of light is gone, leaving only spreading circles of rain droplets to form abstract designs. Indications of impact and consequence fill the panel and overlap, creating an abstract pattern. That moment when the two might have rationally saved one another, had rationality been an option, has come and gone, likely to never occur again.

Morrison has his head completely up his ass to think that a story that is all about sanity would end in the manner he so happily describes. Morrison, in fact, doesn't get the joke, but overlays one on top of those pictures that he would get. One he's capable of telling. A small, mean little bit of off-panel hoodoo, absent any sense of consequence, utterly unrelated to anything established earlier in the story where every character is evil (but the good guys get away with it!) and everyone behaves in tiny, selfish ways for their own benefit. Just like a Morrison story.

Moore's Batman believes in what Gordon believes. That's why they're the heroes. The Joker is taken away by the police. By the book. As Gordon ordered. It's his daughter the Joker maimed this time out. Batman defers entirely to his authority in the matter, and tries that one last time to get the mentally ill lunatic who cannot conceive of an existence without pain and death to step off the path towards destruction. He doesn't end up by exploding in a fiery, entirely justified rage over the perverse, horrific crimes commited upon his loved ones because in this story he is sane. You may say, "Oh, well, I'd kick the Joker's ass if I was him!" Well, we're not him. Batman and Gordon genuinely represent something better in "The Killing Joke" and they treat the Joker as someone who is truly lost inside a mentally ill state.

Moore himself has gone on record as describing "The Killing Joke" as one of his least successful stories. He doesn't like the violence he perpetrated upon Barbara Gordon. He no longer wants to view comic characters through the lens he used in this story. Most of all, the Batman and the Joker are nothing like real people and even an accurate assessment and summation of their eternal conflict fails to address anything of real substance. No representative of the sane view is anything like Batman, and no one is exactly crazy like the Joker. Why waste the paper to talk this way about them? Why not just let the adventure characters be adventure characters? What, ultimately, is served by this level of intense scrutiny and meanness towards comic book super-heroes? Moore largely seems to regret visiting deconstructionism upon the medium he once loved so much.

In some respects, while holding Batman in far higher regard than Smith, Morrison, or most detractors of this story, Moore "deconstructed" the conflict between him and his rogues almost beyond repair, by having Batman show reason and compassion in the face of such horrific, brutal lunacy. "Compassion? Who the ***** wants to read about THAT?" opponents jeer, "No,no,no, I just want to hate the Joker, thank you. And I want to think he's very, very cool, too. Give me that, and I'm happy... Oh, and I want a leg-breaking Batman who knows that insanity pleas are nothing but a dodge, bad guys are eeeeevil, real world issues have the depth and complexity of a dime, and just serves up the Bat-nunchuck and bladed Batarang beating these homicidal bastards so richly deserve..."

Of course Batman would break the Joker's neck! Of course he would! Why, Morrison can't imagine it taking place any other way! See, everyone? Moore writes just like Morrison. Exactly the same, Morrison demonstrates. And look at Moore, deriding these honest, hard-working, super-imaginative creators of today... I don't see what he gets all high and mighty about...

* "Well, you can't have both shrewd and crazy," you say? That's Moore's point in reflecting on this story as a lesser work. The Joker isn't like anyone who really exists. His insanity doesn't parallel any actual cases. Aside from being a compelling light-adventure character, what's the point of him? Let him be that. More than that, and he doesn't hold up so well...

 

[Tacit Ronin]

Sure. The difference being Morrison is thirty times the writer Miller is.

 

[The Question]

Spoiler

Although I don't altogether agree with his disdain for Morrison(I've enjoyed lots of his stuff) this guys explains why Morrison's Killing Joke theory is full of ****:

This latest dust-up seems to me to be simply the latest attempt of Morrison's to play gadfly to Moore, in this case by bringing Moore's "Killing Joke" down to the level Morrison himself would write it, had he had the idea first. In so doing, however, he reveals the extreme limits of his own interpretation of the characters and inability to think outside the current comic-book mindset.

Of course, he reasons, Batman would kill the Joker here. The Joker did really bad stuff. Of course he would disregard Gordon's strict instruction to "Bring him in by the book. We have to show him our way works." Of course Gordon's way doesn't work, Morrison laughs. Of course Batman wouldn't pay any attention to such folderol. Tee-hee! And, of course, it helps that Morrison is playing to his audience, interviewer Kevin Smith, another kill-'em, torture-'em, bleed-'em, rape-'em, anything-for-a-laff modern writer. Smith is blown away. Jesus Christ! It's so obvious! Smith realizes, Moore wrote it... JUST THE WAY I WOULD HAVE IF I'D THOUGHT OF IT!!!

Except Moore did not write it the way they would have had the idea occured to them first. Moore wrote "The Killing Joke" with a basic idea that is extremely unpopular with modern audiences: The idea that the Joker is actually insane and in need of help.

Insane. As in: Not fully responsible for his actions. As in: Not capable of the outside perspective it would take to change or fully appreciate his actions. As in: actually should be locked up and given medical care in the (likely completely vain) hope that he can be restored to sanity.

Moore's Joker is brilliant, yes. Exceptionally so. Evil, without question. He does what he does out of malice and with extreme intent to cause suffering and death, but all of this exists because he shattered, lost his mind, and became radically different from who and what he was before. "But if he has intent, he's not insane." one might say, but the insane continue to act and seek out ways to bring about intended results. Those actions and goals, however, are irrational, like those of the Joker in Moore's story.

Moore proceeds under the assumption that the Batman and the doctors who've diagnosed the Joker as insane all these years actually knew what they were talking about. The courts system in Gotham, long a source of unbridled hilarity, consistently remands the Joker to Arkham and not Death Row because his condition is medically and psychologically classified as Insanity and the laws governing how the insane are to be treated are, gee, I dunno, maybe possibly correct? Not bloodthirsty enough by half, of course, but maybe actually correct. The Joker isn't a shrewd criminal mastermind fooling the good people of Gotham and our benighted hero by acting crazy. He's a shrewd criminal mastermind who is actually crazy. *

What he's after in this story seems very simple: To show Batman and the world that, crazy as he is, the rest of them are only one bad day away from being where and what he is. Batman had a bad day once, he correctly assumes. He's crazy too, the Joker believes, but he doesn't see it. Too humorless to get the joke.

Except Batman is not crazy. Nor is Gordon driven insane by the bad day the Joker's inflicted upon him. They represent on a nightly basis, sanity's resolution to insist upon justice and rationality, despite everything the Gotham underworld throws at them. They're not insane to pursue such a hopeless goal. They are sanity personified, even in the face of an ongoing apocalyptic attack on reason.

Which is why the Batman's attempts to reach the Joker through reason fail. The Joker doesn't hold with reason. Doesn't buy into it. Doesn't really see the point of it. If fact, he has his own viewpoint, Insanity, and is driven to convince others of the correctness of THAT perspective. And the Batman doesn't understand the Joker, either. He knows him. Can often predict his otherwise unpredictable behavior. He can out-think him, which the Joker finds incredible, given that no one else can. But Batman can not understand the Joker's insane drive towards an end that will find them killing one another...

...Until the end of this story, when the Joker tells a joke that explains, to the extent that jokes "explain" anything, why he cannot reach out and accept the help that the Batman is offering. It's not even the distrust that the joke describes. It's the insanity underneath it. That form of reaching a conclusion. The irrational rationale... What he says with that joke is essentially true, and answers Batman's question in a way that the Batman "gets."

And because it's true, and absurd, and succinct, it's funny. The Joker knows it's true. Maybe even tragic if it weren't so funny. He laughs. And Batman gets the joke as well. So they both laugh. It's a joke all about the both of them and they both share a moment when they are exactly on the same page with one another for the first time ever. They are falling into one another the joke is so apt.

Batman is most definitely not reaching for the Joker's throat. The reason the laughter stops is not a broken neck. It is because such a moment of shared insight is, by necessity, brief. The camera is moving away. The police cars are arriving, their headlights reflected in the pooling rain form a beam of light that appears to be in reference to the one mentioned in the joke. Time takes place between those panels. As the cars pull up, Batman and the Joker are left standing toe to toe, facing one another. The Joker is taken away. We don't see it, but we assume it's done as Gordon instructed. And the police cars are no longer there at the end. The beam of light is gone, leaving only spreading circles of rain droplets to form abstract designs. Indications of impact and consequence fill the panel and overlap, creating an abstract pattern. That moment when the two might have rationally saved one another, had rationality been an option, has come and gone, likely to never occur again.

Morrison has his head completely up his ass to think that a story that is all about sanity would end in the manner he so happily describes. Morrison, in fact, doesn't get the joke, but overlays one on top of those pictures that he would get. One he's capable of telling. A small, mean little bit of off-panel hoodoo, absent any sense of consequence, utterly unrelated to anything established earlier in the story where every character is evil (but the good guys get away with it!) and everyone behaves in tiny, selfish ways for their own benefit. Just like a Morrison story.

Moore's Batman believes in what Gordon believes. That's why they're the heroes. The Joker is taken away by the police. By the book. As Gordon ordered. It's his daughter the Joker maimed this time out. Batman defers entirely to his authority in the matter, and tries that one last time to get the mentally ill lunatic who cannot conceive of an existence without pain and death to step off the path towards destruction. He doesn't end up by exploding in a fiery, entirely justified rage over the perverse, horrific crimes commited upon his loved ones because in this story he is sane. You may say, "Oh, well, I'd kick the Joker's ass if I was him!" Well, we're not him. Batman and Gordon genuinely represent something better in "The Killing Joke" and they treat the Joker as someone who is truly lost inside a mentally ill state.

Moore himself has gone on record as describing "The Killing Joke" as one of his least successful stories. He doesn't like the violence he perpetrated upon Barbara Gordon. He no longer wants to view comic characters through the lens he used in this story. Most of all, the Batman and the Joker are nothing like real people and even an accurate assessment and summation of their eternal conflict fails to address anything of real substance. No representative of the sane view is anything like Batman, and no one is exactly crazy like the Joker. Why waste the paper to talk this way about them? Why not just let the adventure characters be adventure characters? What, ultimately, is served by this level of intense scrutiny and meanness towards comic book super-heroes? Moore largely seems to regret visiting deconstructionism upon the medium he once loved so much.

In some respects, while holding Batman in far higher regard than Smith, Morrison, or most detractors of this story, Moore "deconstructed" the conflict between him and his rogues almost beyond repair, by having Batman show reason and compassion in the face of such horrific, brutal lunacy. "Compassion? Who the ***** wants to read about THAT?" opponents jeer, "No,no,no, I just want to hate the Joker, thank you. And I want to think he's very, very cool, too. Give me that, and I'm happy... Oh, and I want a leg-breaking Batman who knows that insanity pleas are nothing but a dodge, bad guys are eeeeevil, real world issues have the depth and complexity of a dime, and just serves up the Bat-nunchuck and bladed Batarang beating these homicidal bastards so richly deserve..."

Of course Batman would break the Joker's neck! Of course he would! Why, Morrison can't imagine it taking place any other way! See, everyone? Moore writes just like Morrison. Exactly the same, Morrison demonstrates. And look at Moore, deriding these honest, hard-working, super-imaginative creators of today... I don't see what he gets all high and mighty about...

* "Well, you can't have both shrewd and crazy," you say? That's Moore's point in reflecting on this story as a lesser work. The Joker isn't like anyone who really exists. His insanity doesn't parallel any actual cases. Aside from being a compelling light-adventure character, what's the point of him? Let him be that. More than that, and he doesn't hold up so well...

Yeah, I'm gonna have to call ********. I mean, this:

"The reason the laughter stops is not a broken neck. It is because such a moment of shared insight is, by necessity, brief."

Sounds like someone trying to rationalize away something they don't like, not a genuinely logical argument. The abrupt stop of the laughter doesn't imply a brief, personal moment, it implies that something very abruptly stopped it. Especially when he does on to say that the police showing up, arresting The Joker, and leaving happened in all of two panels, and that's why the light shows up and then suddenly turns off. It sounds like a rationalization from someone who doesn't like the idea of Batman killing The Joker and not actually a strong grounded argument that said reading doesn't hold water.

My big problem with this analysis is that:

1) It seems to be coming from someone who just straight up hates Grant Morrison. Seriously, this guy takes every opportunity to say that Morrison is a ****** writer with ****tier morals and never actually gives reasons for it.

2) It fails to acknowledge the possibility that the reading of The Killing Joke as a story that humanizes and empathizes with The Joker and the reading of the ending that has Batman killing The Joker aren't mutually exclusive. Batman killing The Joker at the end doesn't negate the idea that this story ultimately casts The Joker in a pitiable light, it just means that the story doesn't have a happy ending.

In fact, he kind of alludes to why the two readings go hand in hand:

"That moment when the two might have rationally saved one another, had rationality been an option, has come and gone, likely to never occur again."

You know what emphasizes that really well? Batman killing The Joker.

On top of all that there's the fact that the story is called "The Killing Joke" and unless Batman kills The Joker at the end, no one actually dies in the story.

At the end he goes on to make a huge strawman argument which, again, denies the possibility that a sympathetic portrayal of The Joker and Batman killing him aren't mutually exclusive:

"Compassion? Who the ***** wants to read about THAT?" opponents jeer, "No,no,no, I just want to hate the Joker, thank you. And I want to think he's very, very cool, too. Give me that, and I'm happy... Oh, and I want a leg-breaking Batman who knows that insanity pleas are nothing but a dodge, bad guys are eeeeevil, real world issues have the depth and complexity of a dime, and just serves up the Bat-nunchuck and bladed Batarang beating these homicidal bastards so richly deserve..."

Yeah, no one is making that argument. At least, not very many people. People don't like the notion of Batman killing The Joker because they like the bloodsport, they like it because it brings home the tragedy of the story.

Batman killing The Joker is a perfectly valid interpretation of the story, and one that I think is pretty cool. Batman not killing The Joker is also completely valid and pretty cool in it's own right. If people have a problem with the former for whatever reason, that's fine, but saying that it's completely invalid, that people who like it are completely full of ****, and using such weak arguments to do so is just petty and mean.

 

[ChrisBaleBatman]

To be fair, it's hard to blame anyone for not respecting continuity when DC doesn't.

At some point, if you got a story to tell and you wanna tell it your way, I can see how following a convoluted continuity could drive someone mad.

 

[The Question]

To be fair, it's hard to blame anyone for not respecting continuity when DC doesn't.

At some point, if you got a story to tell and you wanna tell it your way, I can see how following a convoluted continuity could drive someone mad.

Continuity really isn't sacred to me. I mean, I like it, and completely throwing it out the window kind of bugs me because, like I said, I like it. But I don't mind it being ignored from time to time. You can always say a story is out of continuity and leave it at that.

 

[Mario_Galaxy]

^It's pretty hard to stay consistent with 70+ year old characters, who have no definite conclusions story-wise in sight.

 

[CrimsonMist]

I think it's pretty silly to compare Miller and Morrison. They have totally different writing styles and write totally different kinds of stories. It's like comparing Micky Spillane to J.R.R. Tolkien. It's pointless.

But what I like about both of them is how they do kind of disregard continuity to a certain point to tell interesting and fresh stories, unlike the glorified fan fiction of Geoff Johns.

As for the Alan Moore comparison to Morrison, it's also a little different. Moore took what you could do with a superhero book and made it literary by taking the traditions further. Morrison took what you could do with a superhero book, broke traditions in half and went crazy with it. Kind of.

But despite the stuff I've read by Morrison, nothing he's written touches the brilliance of Miracleman, Supreme, 1963, Swamp Thing and Watchmen.