Mescaline Dreams: Grant Morrison Explains His Batman Decisions

It is not a secret, if you peruse the Batman or Grant Morrison tags on this Web site, that we are not necessarily fans of Grant Morrison’s seven-year Batman story that has run through the primary Batman title, Final Crisis and, most recently, Batman Incorporated… although the recent death of Damian Wayne in Batman Incorporated #8 was satisfying in the way that hitting yourself in the head with a hammer is: it feels so damn good when you stop.

Part of why Morrison’s long-form story has never completely grabbed us is that, as a generation who grew to love comics into adulthood partially due to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One, we don’t have a lot of love or need for Batman stories from the 50s and 60s, when Batman was surrounded ridiculous leering villains who tied up the young boy who lived with Batman, not only giving the character a dull edge, but giving the jocks reasons to give us swirlies from junior high until our growth spurts occurred.

So Morrison’s embrace of the tropes of some of those early stories simply didn’t work for us, as we were unable to really understand why Morrison would bring up those old stories that got us so savagely beaten back in the early 80s. Morrison, however, has gone on record with his through process for including that entire weird and often campy history into his Batman story, in a podcast with Kevin Smith, that YouTube user swank has excerpted and paired with illustrations from the history of Batman. And while the story still leaves me lukewarm, it explains the logic behind the decisions Morrison made… and you can check the whole thing out after the jump.