R.I.P. Off

I’ve never really been a fan of Grant Morrison. Despite his status as an A-list creator, I can’t think of a single project of his outside of New X-Men that I’ve really enjoyed. Morrison’s Batman is particularly bad. Well, at least his first arc was, because that’s as long as I could stand to read it.

So naturally I had no plans to read Batman R.I.P. I know DC’s not going to kill off Batman, so right off the bat the story seems a little pointless. And with Final Crisis starting up right at the same time, I don’t need another major storyline to waste my money on. Plus, seeing as how the story is contained within Morrison’s Batman run, it’ll be easily avoidable.

Or so I thought.

Up until last week, I had no idea how major a crossover Batman R.I.P was going to be. Not only is it taking up six issues worth of Batman, but the crossover is spilling over into five issues of Detective Comics, four issues of Nightwing, and two issues of Robin. Those are three Batman family titles that I enjoy on a monthly basis. Now, thanks to Batman R.I.P., I probably won’t.

The worst part is that Nightwing just got good again. After the craptacular runs of Bruce Jones and Marv Wolfman, Peter Tomasi has finally turned the book into something worth reading. There’s nothing quite like a mega-crossover to bring momentum to a screeching halt. Just look at what “The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul” did to Detective Comics.

Paul Dini’s Detective Comics is a series that really only works when it’s done-in-one stories. It’s kind of like a TV show in that respect (Dini + Batman + TV…someone should look into that). Dini’s latest two-parter was just so-so, and his issues of TRORAG weren’t any better than the rest of the crossover, which is to say they pretty much sucked. Dini was at his best when he had an underlying subplot that rab throughout several seemingly unrelated stories. And let’s face it…Dini just doesn’t do crossovers well.

As for Robin, that title has been consistently great since I started picking it up One Year Later. Not even a creative shake-up lead to any substantial change in quality. The only hiccup was the two issues of Robin that were part of TRORAG.

Noticing a pattern here?

The last crossover made three good comics suck. There’s no need for R.I.P to crossover into Nightwing, Detective Comics and Robin. If Grant Morrison wants to tell his story, that’s fine. But when DC decides his story is more important than Tomasi’s Dini’s or Chuck Dixon’s, I’ve got a problem.

And for the record, yes, I did pick up the first issue of Baman R.I.P yesterday. But that’s just because we needed a Book of Doom this week and I didn’t want to read Guardians of the Galaxy.