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Apr 19, 2018

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1149: Detective Comics #629, May 1991

https://www.comics.org/issue/49624/

I'm in the process of rediscovering a couple of things. The first is Batman, about whom I've been somewhat disparaging over the last decade or so. I have similar feelings about Batman as those I have about Wolverine - there's just too much. Back when I had my comic store, I think there were about 10 monthly Bat-titles being published. At some point you hit a saturation point, I think. We have, as consumers, to be able to take in and assimilate information into our lives, but a constant stream of new information doesn't allow this process to occur. Even with stories, we need this. We need to be able to mull a story over in our heads before having it supplanted by a new one. I have found this to be exceedingly hard with Batman. I've only ever collected the title while Grant Morrison was running it, at a point when there weren't actually that many Bat-titles, and even then it was occasionally difficult to keep up.

The other rediscovery is of writer Peter Milligan. I was first exposed to his work in his short and wonderful follow-up to Morrison's Animal Man, and then I discovered the sheer brilliance that is his revamp of Shade, The Changing Man. I've never been disappointed by Milligan's work, though it hasn't captured me the same way many other writers have. I'm working to remedy that, and I thought I'd start with his Detective Comics run. As part of the "British Invasion" of the late 80s, he brings a very different narrative aesthetic to the Dark Knight. As with Gaiman, Moore, Morrison, Ennis, Ellis, Jenkins, all those guys, I'm fascinated by the reworking of the intrinsically-American myth by a literary mythic tradition that is vastly older. Today's story, "The Hungry Grass!" could easily have been a Hellboy story, interweaving Irish folk tales into the gritty urban fabric of Gotham City. He does five more issues in this run, and then bounces around the Bat-titles for a bit. I'm going to do my best to find his early stuff, and then start exploring later works and, perhaps, some of his early British output. Always exciting to start researching a new writer.

More to come...

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