1987
Written by Mike Barr
Art by Jerry Bingham
Published by DC Comics
Grant Morrison, having recently taken over writing duties for DC Comics mainstay Batman comic, brought this twenty year old comic out of a dusty past and claimed it as his starting point. Son of the Demon was a low-selling graphic novel, originally published in magazine size in the early days of what's called "trade paperbacks," the style now popular among people standing around in Barnes & Noble, waiting for the rain to stop. The short book has been republished in the last month, to capitalize on interest in what had been a forgotten piece of Batman history: this is, after all, the comic where Bruce Wayne gets a woman pregnant and assists an arch-villain of his in killing people.
One can imagine why the story is ignored.
Morrison has a lot of clout though, and although the back-door negotiations aren't a matter of public record, one imagines it probably was along the lines of "I'm a really popular writer and Batman is going to sell more copies because i'm writing it. You should let me do whatever i want." (The response was, obviously, yes.) Still, just because Morrison has an interest in Son doesn't necessarily change the fact that the comic is neither A) that good, or B) inoffensive. Without delving into the fannish sort of complaints regarding Batman's clear complicity in murder, Son of the Demon stands as one of the dumber examples of what happens when writers try to hard to "mature" a super-hero comic. Throwing Bruce Wayne into bed with a lunatic multiple times is one thing; believing that Batman would have unprotected sex with said-lunatic is another. He's Batman--if anybody wouldn't be having an unplanned pregnancy, it's him. The portions of the comic that follow the pregnancy contain even more ridiculous behavior, including the aforementioned murders, only to climax with a faked miscarriage (which consists of the mother saying "I lost the baby.") She, of course, didn't, as the epilogue shows. Morrison has decided to return the story to the canon, and is currently writing some rip-roaring great comics featuring little Damian (yes, Batman has a son named Damian.)
One wonders if he could've just made up better source material--but if you've always wanted to see what an immoral, bored and way-too-emotional version of Batman might look like, cheap copies of Son of the Demon are available now.
But wait. You forgot to tell the good people about the mystery of the man who is murdered in the beginning of this story. And that is what brings Batman and Ra's al Ghul together in the first place, to defeat a common, "bad guy." And how that part doesn't even concluded satisfyingly. Which seemed even more reason to sweep all this under the rug in the first place.
Do you think Morrison has some grand plan with all this and that's why he dug it out? Does he really want this to become canon for the Batman world?
Posted by: Bad Andy | 2006.10.03 at 00:34