Batman R.I.P. won’t die

I picked up Batman #701 today. It’s part 1 of the Lost R.I.P. story, which maybe is going to explain the holes in R.I.P. (what was the ultimate betrayal after all?) or maybe it’ll just be another story.

But what it very clearly is is yet another continuation of the Batman R.I.P. story. I remember finishing Batman #681, the final chapter of Batman R.I.P., only to learn that the actual conclusion to Batman R.I.P. was in Final Crisis #6. But that didn’t really make any sense, because last we saw Batman, he was in an exploding helicopter, then roaming around at the beginning of the continuity-detached Final Crisis solving mysteries, and then here he is all of a sudden in FC #6 pointing a god gun at Darkseid. To that, as a planned, supposedly sequential series of events penned by the same writer, I said “Huh?”

So then there was that two-part series where Grant Morrison went back and explained how Batman got in the clutches of the organized workers of the Evil Factory. It was a nice story and all, but as far as filling the holes between how Batman went from helicopter to Orion-killer hunting, it really did no good. It filled in the wrong part of the story, though it did at least lay some important groundwork.

But now, starting with Batman #701, Grant Morrison is finally telling the post-helicopter story, that really everyone should have been demanding a year and a half ago. I’m actually quite excited about it, as I really love how things are being pieced together in Batman and Robin and The Return of Bruce Wayne (not so much Final Crisis), but it’s just so weird to me how this story is being told. I have no idea if this is going to answer questions and fill in gaps or just tell more out-of-sequence details in the form of semi-interesting story. Maybe the mystery will be solved in another two-issue storyline drawn by Tony Daniel fourteen months down the road. Maybe it’ll never happen.

I don’t even think I’m necessarily complaining about this. I just can’t believe this storyline is still going on, so ridiculously out of sequence! I mean can you imagine someone pitching this to a reader? “You’ll get all the exciting parts up front, but they won’t actually make sense, because the trudging exposition is going to come a few pieces at a time over the next year or two, completely detached from everything else that’s going on around it in the other Bat-books. It’ll be great!”