Batman: Time and the Batman Hardcover
Batman Time and the Batman
"Time is pliable," writer Grant Morrison reminds us again and again in the aptly-named Batman Time and the Batman. To that end, what you thought was your life, even the people you make mad along the way, could all be one big revenge scheme set by someone in the future just to mess with you. It's an idea Geoff Johns floated by way of Barry Allen in Flash: Rebirth, and it's what Morrison suggested for Batman in The Return of Bruce Wayne, and crystallizes here.
And yet, it's hard to put my finger on just why Time and the Batman was necessary at all. If not the second of a three-part trilogy (which it might be, between Return and Batman & Robin: Batman Must Die, though it certainly doesn't advertise itself as the middle volume of such), then Time and the Batman seems an effort in over-explaining. Maybe that's necessary; maybe the market's had so much complicated Morrison material of late that a little hand-holding is in order ("Understand that much," Morrison's Batman repeats at one point, and "You're learning ... You're all learning," at another).
Or maybe this is another exercise in time being pliable -- it's hard to know what the original connection was meant to be between Morrison's Final Crisis and Batman RIP, if at all, and Time and the Batman's bridging of these two books may be as much about explanation as it is patching "the hole in things," Time and the Batman's phrase for the secrets and coincidences in life that just don't, or weren't ever meant to, fit.
Info:
- DC Comics
- Trade Paperback
Review By Collected Editions