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DOCTOR STRANGE

Art by FRAZIER IRVING

Selection of Frazier Irving’s work on Batman and Robin Must Die

#Frazier Irving #batman and Robin must die #grant morrison #joker #damien Wayne #bruce wayne #professor pyg #dick Grayson #he was a good choice for this chapter/section #Stewart does a good standard comic look but lacks the grotesque elements #that quitely and Irving pull out #which is so vital for these stories #body horror #gore

Do you have any thoughts or extrapolations on the superhero influences and references in Annihilator? Particularly what he has to say regarding Batman vs. Superman by proxy of Nomax vs. Makro. The bat-like shape of the Dis station, Ray’s agent literally comparing Nomax to Batman as a franchise header, Makro’s caped silhouette and introductory scene include a cry of “look! Up in the sky!” Grant wasn’t quite subtle. What do you make of it?

everythingsucksbutthatsokay said: Continuation of my Annihilator question, I also found it interesting how Grant fused super heroic and villainous archetypes. Nomax is at once the tragic, righteous, genius champion of the shadows, and the maniacal, masterminding, performance artist mass murderer. Meanwhile, Makro is both the shining, indestructible paragon of justice from another world, and the unstoppable alien killing machine. In a way, it’s Superdoom vs. The Batman Who Laughs.

The Batman influence is all over Annihilator as a continuation and extrapolation of a lot of the ideas of Morrison’s work on the Bat-epic: death, decadence, black holes and black masses, wealth, pop, madness, the devil and the demon child and the king of crime, irrevocable losses, and the power of and damage wrought by parents. It even has a bright junior companion and a pair of cops tied into a Batman ‘66-style human knot. But this isn’t Batman, it’s burrowing back deeper through those roots into crime noir and gothic horror - expressed here through the template of the gentleman thief - using the main language of such in comics, with his great opponent in the unstoppable, rigid lawman using the archetypal language of Superman in turn. It’s Morrison doing more Batman than Batman, the iconography and basic storytelling mechanics filtered entirely through Morrison’s own interests into their attempt at the most primal distillation of the archetype.

As such, more even than Superdoomsday - though that’s also a fair comparison - the Super-figure of Morrison’s called to attention here is Klaus, their attempt at doing with the archetype Superman represents what Nomax does with Batman and his kin. By the same token while Klaus isn’t a Superman riff it’s goes into shared ideas of solar cycles, great lost loves familial and romantic, warring nobly on behalf of the dispossessed against kings and corporations, winter fortresses full of wonders, miraculous science-magic, animal companions, cosmic adventures, imaginations’ triumph against the impossible, forgiveness and kindness repaid, and the promise that in the darkest night there’s someone looking out for you. Klaus is the Good Dad to Nomax’s cosmic deadbeat bastard absentee father who’ll invite himself in, raid your fridge, and make demands while his presence in your life is literally killing you. And like Nomax he’s going back deeper than his immediate predecessor (though unlike Annihilator Klaus is still very much a superhero story), into shared cultural myth and folklore and the image of the liberating warrior-champion, but again, it speaks the language. He even has a Batman to Jet Makro’s Superman - if Makro is Superman perverted through a Bat-lens into the monstrous enforcer of the state who will regardless never truly be accepted by it, Grandfather Frost is Batman in Superman’s eyes as the unflappable old friend who always comes through from his cavernous lair with perfect timing and impossible inventions to save the day and inspires his children to their own greatness. Each is another layer to the purification of the ideas each book represents, showing how those archetypes bend each others’ constituent elements placed through that filter.

#Annihilator #Batman #Superman #Klaus #Grant Morrison #Frazier Irving #Dan Mora #Opinion