Broken Frontier

The absolute dregs of the current comic book crossover culture concludes, eight chapters too many, proving once and for all that Paul Dini is one very lost creator.

I’ll admit: I thought Messiah Complex over in the X-books was about the most f*&%ing retarded storyline to grace mainstream comics in a good long while.  I wasn’t, at the time, reading The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul.  Had I been doing so, I would’ve hailed MC as a triumph of the lost art of storytelling.

Mike Judge, the director of the much-ballyhooed Office Space, recently released his highly controversial second feature live action film, Idiocracy, a movie that posits (and accurately, I must say) that humanity in the far future, due to media inundation and corporate ownership and oversight of all entertainment and information resources, will become uniformly idiotic, unable to understand anything beyond sloganeering, empty statistics, and sensational, lurid diversions.  And if you doubt for a second what corporate movers and shakers think about the intelligence of their audience, look no further than Detective Comics #839.

And before we dive into that specific issue, let’s take a look at all the sheer idiocy that’s  come before: even after two lead-in annuals (Detectice Comics Annual #29, Robin Annual #7) plus an additional prelude issue (Batman#670), still, Ra’s al Ghul’s actual resurrection took place off-panel.  All of a sudden, there he is, his essence inside a body, a body that apparently is dying of radiation poisoning.  Whose body is it?  Why is it poisoned by radiation?  Never fully explained.  Next, we see multiple scenes of Ra’s touching his grandson, Damian, and ranting of his need for Damian’s body to house his essence.  However later, Ra’s transfers his essence into a monk’s body by touch alone.  Then the monk’s body begins to deteriorate, even though it obviously isn’t suffering from radiation poisoning.

Furthermore, there’s a different artistic representation of “dying-Ra’s” per issue, depending on the artist, beginning with Ra’s in mummy-like full-body rags and then later in his usual outfit, sans all rags, now with all signature facial hair, even though his body is “deteriorating”, even though it is in fact, so it seems, getting better.  Robin and Damian fight a lot, and I mean a lot.  Robin honestly through-and-through considers joining Ra’s side in order to resurrect his dead parents, his best friend, and his girlfriend, belying all character and story event of the recent past.  Then Robin and Nightwing fight.  A lot.

There’s an oil-tanker sporting a big fat leak more, but for brevity’s sake, let’s tackle only one: let’s say you want to have a crossover betwixt a line of books, to bring back a fan-favorite villain, a villain who now has major ties throughout said family of books, including his daughter, his grandson, and now the title lead as his son-in-law (after a fashion, thinking of “shotgun weddings”) and in sweet opposition, his greatest nemesis as well.  So what would you make the crossover about?  The villain and the title lead, right?  Plus the daughter and the son as close seconds.  What is this crossover about?

I sh*t you not: it’s about the foster son (Robin) fighting the actual son (Damian), a trio of lady assassins, a blind warrior of mysterious origins named, literally, “I Ching”, a heretofore unheard of and unseen caretaker of all of said fan-favorite villain’s everythings called The White Ghost, a temple in Nanda Parbat filled with nameless monks, and the father of fan-favorite villain, here named, literally, Sensei, a man supposedly more powerful and long-lived than Ra’s himself, even though he’s brought low in less than six pages by the title lead, due to a quirky built-in weakness.  Now if you were going to write a seven-part slam-bang “event” storyline about, primarily, two characters, a hero and a villain, why the mother &*$^ would you populate it with so many others?

Nevertheless, here we are at the end, the final chapter, Ra’s al Ghul present in soul yet not “resurrected” in any lasting sense.  We’ve seen almost nothing of him, nothing of Batman, nothing of the daughter, and as for the son, only that he fights Robin.  A lot.  But here in this very issue a new revelation is given, and I’d say SPOILERS! but really, who gives a flying fig newton: the White Ghost turns out to be Ra’s' son, albeit an albino freak and therefore “unworthy”, but regardless Ra’s can—gasp!—transfer his essence into him rather than Damien, a move he could have done at any point, but the Ghost was, of course, “unworthy”, even though, after the transference, Ra’s is wracked with anger at the sacrifice.  Even better, though Ra’s effortlessly forces a transference of his essence into a monk’s body in an earlier chapter, here the White Ghost struggles to push his essence into Ra’s' body in order for the transference to work, completely invalidating how the transference has operated up until this very moment.

So Morrison and Dini (with a little help from Milligan and Niceiza) rewrite Ra’s entire lineage and backstory, just so they can have an “out” at the end, and apparently so they can delay any actual confrontation between Ra’s and Batman until this final chapter’s final pages.  And here it is: Ra’s returns, and squares off with Batman.  Talia is so convinced that Batman and Co. are about to die by the hands of her weakened, just-resurrected father, because she, of course, has little faith in the Dark Knight’s capabilities, she knocks Damian unconscious and flees.  Four pages later Batman and Co., simply flailing away with their fists and feet, no special tactics or help otherwise, claim that Ra’s is “all but beaten”.  Then the monks of the temple momentarily become awash in the energy of a goddess and demand the struggle end and both Batman and Ra’s go their separate ways.  Ra’s, the villain, violently objects, but Batman, the hero, without missing a beat, states: “Out of our hands, Ra’s.  I suggest you do as the goddess suggests and leave.”  Because Batman would ever, and I mean effing ever be okay with Ra’s walking away unscathed and into parts unknown.

The art by Tony Daniel is atrocious, though Don Kramer steps in for the final few pages to rescue the book.  Daniel is not a terrible artist, but here he's rushed to the point where the story would have been a better read if given as pure prose.

I know that, once upon a time, Paul Dini was a well-liked writer.  I know he’s (or so they say) done some fine work on Batman: The Animated Series.  Seriously, I want him to go back to animation, and stay away from comic books until either he realizes where he’s gone wrong, or until DC editorial (who may, to be fair, be wholly to blame) switches hands.  Any which way, The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul can now be canonized as the singular worst, most ludicrous, most non-sensical crossover to ever take place across the Bat books to date.  There’ve been bad ones.  Many, many, many.  But never this bad.  Never ever ever.