Lights, Camera, Grant Morrison!

Book: The Black Casebook
Pen: Bill Finger and others
Pencil: Sheldon Moldoff and others

Grant Morrison is not for everyone. He is incredibly talented but tends to go off-kilter when you least expect it. His seven-year run on Batman was much awaited, acclaimed and yet, alienating. He took a series that was rooted in realism, for the most part, and then added a dose of surrealism. He brought in strange characters that seemed like Easter Eggs, but turned out to be major players. For anyone who was not sleeping in the DC Comics archives, it was extremely annoying to not know where the story was going. Then there is The Black Casebook.

This is usually cited as a good-to-read-but-not-essential book in the Morrison series. Mostly because the stories are terribly dated and also because it was not written by Morrison himself. How terribly wrong. As someone who finished all the TPBs and then read Casebook, I can promise you that your appreciation of Morrison will be so much diminished without sampling this book first.

Morrison decided to take a lot of bit players from forgotten Batman stories and put them in his magnum opus. I am not sure it completely worked, but the ambition is staggering. It is very similar to what Alan Moore would do, and there is no doubt that Morrison was influenced. But then not everyone is in Moore’s league.

These are 12 of the most forgettable, outlandish and downright silly stories from the 50s and 60s. But in every one of them is something – mostly a character, sometimes a reference – that Morrison would re-introduce. Running 10 or 12 pages each, the story is not very long, but for readers used to Miller and Morrison and Snyder, this is extremely difficult to read with a straight face.

We are introduced to John Mayhew and the Club of Heroes, Zur-En-Arrh, Bat-Mite, Chief Man-of-the-Bat and Little Raven, among others. Morrison’s introduction is probably the best thing you need before reading Casebook. Whether this will turn out to be gimmicks of a less-talented writer or a complete re-telling of the Batman mythos by a genius who takes the most uncommon risks is something for each of the readers to figure out. 

Exactly three years to the date since I announced that I would be reviewing all of Morrison’s TPBs, I finally get around to it! Operation Baldie? What was I thinking?