BATMAN: THE RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE #6 Author: Chris Clow
November 14, 2010
OFFICIAL SYNOPSIS: With Bruce Wayne just steps away from returning to present day Gotham City, the timestream might have a few more surprises in store for The Dark Knight! Do not miss this issue, as it paves the way for the shocking future era of Batman!
He’s back.
After a roller coaster of a mind-job that most of Grant Morrison’s work has been, all of the craziness and all of the hardships that Bruce Wayne has endured come to a head in THE RETURN OF BRUCE WAYNE #6. Delivering on his promise of “Batman meets Kirby,” Morrison has given us an issue where the technology and celestial nature of the Fourth (Fifth?) World connects with the origin, mission, and execution of The Batman.
Entwined within a mess of time travel technology that Darkseid has managed to graft to Batman to turn him into a living weapon barreling back to the present, Tim Drake takes it upon himself to talk sense into Bruce and make him remember who he is, and how he can beat the trappings of Darkseid’s God-Bomb. In order to rid himself of the weapon destroying time, Batman has to clinically die. In death, to beat the weapon and save humanity and his own life, Bruce must realize the first truth in his life all over again: that the bat frightened him as a boy, and that that’s what he would become. In the two minutes of clinical death, as the Omega Radiation leaves his body in response to the one inexorable truth of Batman, Batman returns and lives again.
And we find out that the birth of the horror of Doctor Hurt is a direct result of Darkseid’s attempt to defeat Batman. Realizing that the last thread of Darkseid’s “hyper-adapter” lives in Hurt, Batman returns from the brink to put a stop to it once and for all.
Yes. What so many people have been waiting for reaches a beautiful, yet bad ass conclusion. Now the question of how Doctor Hurt enters into the whole “RIP/Final Crisis” equation Is answered. Now we know why Batman had to be sent away before he could claim an ultimate victory. He realizes these things and understands that although Batman was born into an unaided mission, he is never alone. Not in the DCU, and not in his own family. In pure Morrisonian fashion, Batman has burst back onto the scene in a paean declaring that Batman is a character that is unending, that is practically unstoppable, is brilliant, and is always ready and will never quit.
Lee Garbett returns after penciling BATMAN #682 and 683 to round out the Return of Bruce Wayne, and his style seems like an interesting fusion of Cameron Stewart and Chris Sprouse. He does the super heroic shapes and poses but manages to maintain a level of facial and expressionistic detail that’s pretty distinctive.
This entire story Morrison has been crafting since 2006 may have struck me as bitter in a few places, but after reading this issue, I am more confident in his respect and execution of Batman and can’t wait to see what comes next. What happened in this series is exactly what I thought would go down: Morrison took a hokey premise like Bruce Wayne being stuck in the caveman era and turned it into an epic about a human man that has a superhuman mind, an incorruptible will, and a never ending supply of fortitude. Batman came back from hell and is ready to take on the world, quite literally.
Bring it on.
GRADE: A
Longtime Batman/DCU fan and BOF'er Chris Clow is a student at Western Washington University
He reviews comics, covers conventions, and is a BOF podcast "Roundtabler."
He's also an employee at Bellingham, Washington's oldest and best comic book store, The Comics Place.
