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“Seven actors have played Batman on the big screen, and if you can name all seven without reading any further, your youth has been wasted.”
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“ The villain was the Wizard, a kind of anti-Batman in an executioner’s hood and cape who could have been interesting if they’d paid enough money for anything interesting to happen in the script. But they hadn’t, it didn’t, and he wasn’t.”
“I had to get deeper into the magical experiments, too. I’d read about the cross-dressing berdache tradition of shamanism, and decided I could do a glossy, chaos magic, nineties version of that as a way of shaking out my identity and becoming my own complete opposite. A few fetish-wear catalogues later, and I’d assembled a shiny disguise kit that put Jimmy Olsen’s to shame. The clothes and makeup allowed me to transform into a female alter ego I now created to stand in for me during the darker magical operations I was undertaking. I was entering some very bizarre areas of consciousness and found that the “girl” was smarter and more courageous and could more easily negotiate with and feed off predatory “demonic” entities. At least that was my personal justification for some epically odd behaviour. If it helps, consider demons to be “bad” states of mind, crippling neuroses or fears. Dressed in black vinyl with six-inch heels, showgirl makeup, and a blond wig, I began to traffic freely with angelic forces, Voudon loa, Enochian Kings and Seniors, the scum of Geotia and the Tunnels of Set, Lovecraftian entities, and other fictional characters and aliens. I performed rituals of all kinds to see if they worked, and they delivered every time. As mad as it sounds, and it sounds a bit mental even to me these days, all of this was done with the rigor and precision of scientific experiment.
I think my overall impression of this is that, while appreciating Alan Moore’s contributions to stretching the limits of a superhero... Morrison decides that the response of superheroes to the tragedy of life should be, in the end, an optimistic one. I like this approach a lot, because it’s very hopeful, in a way that their contemporaries are not.
If anyone’s interested in their work: I would highly recommend reading The Coyote Gospel first, a quick (4-5 pages long) part of their contribution to the Animal Man series.
In terms of other good introductions: All-Star Superman, I’ve heard, is excellent (won an Eisner, etc.), and I’m personally going to be reading their run of Flex Mentallo, Man of Muscle Mystery next week, if I have time :>