Grant Morrison's favorite Batman story storytime.
So Grant Morrison wrote Batman for a long long time.
What was Morrison's fave Batman story of all time?
The Dark Knight Returns? Nope. He liked it. He enjoyed Dark Knight Strikes Again as well (said it was fun like Miller was on coke the whole time while his wife just figured out photoshop for colors).
Killing Joke? Of course not, he's enemies with Moore. (actually he likes Killing Joke, and loves the ending, convinced Moore tried to write Batman killing Joker).
Grant Morrison's favorite Batman story, as he told Kevin Smith on the Fatman on Batman podcast, is Detective Comics # 385, "Die Small -- Die Big". Written by Robert Kanigher, and pencilled by Bob Brown. Cover art by Neal Adams.
So sit back, enjoy, try to find reasons why Morrison would state this is his fave Batman story ever.
Cheers
Grant Morrison's favorite Batman story storytime
what an ending.
that's it folks.
a lil bit about the author, robert kanigher.
he created sgt rock with joe qubert, edited all those old war books, like haunted tank, scripted the first silver age comic, the barry allen flash (which morrison cites as a major influence) and also edited wonder woman for a long time after masterson left (which morrison hates)
spent 5 decades in the biz
apparently he could be a pain to work with though:
Among fellow comic creators, Kanigher was as well-known for his unstable personality and violent temper as he was for his brilliance as a writer, and collaborators such as Gene Colan and John Romita, Sr. have commented on the difficulty of working with him.[28] Romita recounted:
>I worked on a series with Kanigher - he wrote two series for me in the romance dept. One about an airline stewardess, and one about a nurse. He used to compliment me whenever he'd see me in the bullpen. "Like the stuff... like the stuff..." That was about the amount of conversation we had. Then one day we were in the elevator together, and he said, "Like the stuff." I, like an innocent fool... I used to do some adjustments to his pages. If he had a heavy-copy panel, I might take a balloon from one panel and put it in the next. Just because I was distributing space. I was so stupid and naive, I said to him, "It doesn't bother you, does it, that I sometimes switch some of the panels around and move some of the balloons from one panel to another?" He started to chew me out in the elevator! "Who the hell do you think you are, changing my stuff? Where do you come off changing my stuff? You don't know anything about this business!"
As for Bob Brown, the penciler, he pretty much worked at everything DC related at one point or another from the 50s to 70s as well as a lot of marvel stuff, including introducing Bullseye.
His series collaborator, writer Tony Isabella, said "was very much underappreciated" by comic-book fans,[15] In addition, comics historian Mark Evanier recounted that by this point, Brown
>found his work regarded as "old-fashioned". It wasn't so much that Brown couldn't take a more modern approach to his work as that he just plain didn't understand what that meant. Editors kept showing him the work of new artists, he told me. They'd say, "This is what we want now," but Brown couldn't grasp just what it was he was supposed to learn from the examples, which often struck him as displaying weak anatomy, poor perspective and other fundamental errors. It was almost like they were telling him that, "Kids relate to crude artwork," and he knew it wasn't that.[16]
That's a genuinely mid Batman story. I couldn't care less for Herbert as a character. Best it showed was Batman's kindness. But then again, Morrison always had bad taste.
Thanks for sharing tho OP. It was interesting.
>and loves the ending, convinced Moore tried to write Batman killing Joker
This has been a popular interpretation since 1988 and I'm tired of Morrisonfags crediting him with the idea. Moore isn't going to directly say that's how the story ends, because then it ceases to be open-ended (which he did confirm was the intention). Given the title "Killing Joke", what Batman tells the Joker imposter about one of them killing the other, and Moore's love of parallelism, anyone with two brain cells should be able to figure out Batman kills Joker at the end.
Who did first come up with it? As in, who first public ally said it? Is that known?