News of the day: Batman: Arkham Asylum, currently under development for the PC, X-Box 360 and the PS3. The screenshots look nifty, the gameplay details are encouraging, but what increases the chances of this being really good is the fact that Paul Dini is scripting it. Dini, along with Messrs Bruce Timm, Alan Burnett and Eric Radomski, is responsible the single-greatest screen adaptation of the character – the nineties’ show Batman: The Animated Series, and he’s also a fairly competent comicbook writer, having tackled Batman in the ongoing Detective Comics , and also on standalone books like Batman: War on Crime.( But wait, Dini wrote Countdown too, right? Goddamn, the game is going to suck.)

Grant Morrison is the current writer on the ongoing Batman title, and a couple of nights ago, I caught up with the latest issues. So far, Morrison has brought startling developments to the character – his first four-issue arc ‘Batman and Son’ gave us ninja man-bats, a new love interest ( called Jezebel Jett) and a son. Old-timers will remember a graphic novel called ‘Son of the Demon’, which was published in the late 80’s, drawn by Jerry Bingham and written by Mike W Barr. It had Batman teaming up with Ra’s Al Ghul, overcoming his hesitation in courting Ra’s daughter Talia, who always held a candle for him, and well…doing it with her. I read this story in ‘The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told’, a compendium that was one of my life-altering relics, because it introduced me to the Joker, the Monk, Calendar Man, Neal Adams, Dick Sprang, Alan Brennert, Earth-2, Man-Bat and taught me the Spanish word for Batman ( “El Hombre Murcielago”, hooo-ah!). The page where Batman and Talia go for it is indelibly etched in my brain, the way things-you-see-at-age-eleven ought to be. Too bad somebody at the library, where I read this book in the first place, tore off the page after a couple of months. And no, it wasn’t me. ( I just flicked the book, much later)

So anyway, ‘Son of the Demon’ was apparently a more well-written story than ‘The Killing Joke’ – does not really matter now, does it? – but what came out of it, after the fight scene with the bad guy Qayin and Batman’s stony-faced farewell from Ra’s and Talia, is Bat-baby, the child that Talia had claimed she miscarried. At the end, the child is adopted by an anonymous couple, Batman goes on with his life, and Dennis O’Neil, the Bat-editor-in-chief declared the story out of continuity. That is, it never happened, it was a hoax, a grand trick played on thirteen-year-old minds by evil DC writers, an imaginary story, as they all are.

Morrison chose to bring the story back into it-was-all-true-dom, with minor modifications. Damian Wayne is the newest addition to the stable of Bat-children that infest Bruce Wayne and his dual identity, and the boy has not quite a chip as much as a gigantic wooden plank on his shoulder – not so strange as he has been brought up by the League of Assassins. On his first night at Wayne manor, the boy beheads a (albeit minor) Gotham rogue called the Spook, and subjects Alfred and Robin to humiliating bouts of child abuse. The four-issue arc sets into motion a number of sub-plots, including one decidedly odd plot-line about Three Batman Ghosts, which is tackled by Morrisson one by one, in the issues to come.

Issues 659-662 were fill-in issues by the team of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake, and while I have been a fan of these creators in my younger days ( loved the Shazam miniseries they did, and their Spectre run hit a lot of highs, too), I safely skipped over these issues, which featured a storyline called Grotesk. When one has had a dose of the Morrison Mojo, it’s hard to settle for anything less, meh.

Batman 663 is the famous ( or notorious, depending on which fan you ask) all-prose issue, where Morrison merges hallucinatory stream-of-consciousness writing with John Van Fleet’s experimental panels. The story “The Clown At Midnight” is one of the Joker and his minions, and is narrated in a florid, demented style that rips your brains apart. Van Fleet’s art usually works for me, but here, they look like video-game screenshots.

Issues 664-666 continues the Three Ghosts of Batman subplot that was laid down in the first storyline. Hubba hubba, things seem to be getting better in Morrison’s Bat-verse. Bruce’s dalliance with Jezebel Jett continues, and at the same time, there is trouble in Gotham, with a Bane-like character preying on hookers. And we learn of the Black Casebook, a diary that recounts all the unexplained phenomona Batman has encountered so far in his career. Flying saucers, ghosts, vampires and the like. It was while I took this in that I got an inkling of what Morrison is trying to do with his run. If I am not wrong, he is trying to bring EVERY single non-Elseworlds Batman story ever told under the “It-actually-happened-here’s-the-explanation” umbrella. That means the Black Casebook refers to the silly period in Batman’s career in the 50’s and 60’s when writers were experimenting with making him a sci-fi hero, pitting him against aliens and robots. One of the earliest Batman stories, that of the Monk( this featured in the “Greatest Batman Stories” collection), was about vampires and werewolves. I cannot imagine you would understand the kind of chill I get when I see Joe Chill ( sorry, couldn’t help that) making a reappearance in the pages of Batman, or in seeing Bat-mite pop up in a cameo that’s furthest one can get from camp.

The run concludes in the future. Say what? Morrison does a time-hop with the storyline, jumping an undisclosed number of years in the future. Issue 666 has heavy Biblical undertones, and in the future as laid down in this issue, Damian Wayne is now the Batman, having renounced the assassin’s doctrine and adopting his father’s crusade in a world that seems to be spiralling towards Armageddon. There’s tragedy underwrit throughout this single issue, as we get hints of what really happened to Batman and his legacy, and the end-game is the showdown between Damian and the Third Ghost of Batman, in which we meet the Dark Knight’s greatest ally. Amazing, amazing story!

With Batman 667-669, Morrison teams up with artist extraordinaire JH Williams 3. Minor digression: JHW3 might just be the greatest artist working in comics today. Don’t take my word for it, go check out this series called Promethea. Only this guy could have rendered Alan Moore’s treatise on magic in the nuanced, hypnotic meld of storytelling and eye-popping beauty. He brings a design-sense to his work that borders on maniacal, with panel transitions and page layouts that leave you gasping for breath. In this storyline, ‘The Island of Doctor Mayhew’, Batman and Robin fly to a Carribean island and rub shoulders with a campy bunch of heroes from around the world, who call themselves the “Batmen of All Nations”. This is where my theory gains further ground, because you see, the Batmen of All Nations appeared in a 1950’s story, and Morrison used some of the characters ( the British heroes Knight and Squire) in his JLA and JLA: Classified run. The story becomes a murder mystery involving an organisation called ‘The Black Glove’, as one by one, the characters are murdered, and Batman has to find out the killer before it’s too late. This run is my favourite of Morrison’s chapter so far, and while I thought it was a throwaway arc, subsequent issues reveal it as being far from that.

The next couple of issues veers into editorial-mandate territory, as we find ourselves in the middle of a storyline called ‘The Resurrection of Ra’s Al Ghul’. Yes, Ra’s had died in a book called ‘Batman: Death and the Maidens’, and apparently, editors found it necessary for him to come back from the dead. The story arc is one of those Bat-title crossovers that piss me off a great deal, and they usually feature a lot of Bat-proteges running around trying to save each other from certain death. ( Ha, ‘certain death!’ is a nice name for a band) This one’s not much different. A lot of things happen, everybody lands up at Nanda Parbat, which is a favourite Bat-hangout, and Zombie Ra’s appears. I was too pissed off to take all of it in, partly because I had read it a couple of months ago and didn’t like it then, and I didn’t think I would like it now. And I was right, I didn’t.

Once Resurrection ends, the main storyline kicks in, called ‘Batman RIP’. It’s still going on, and I imagine it’s going to be really freaking good, from the two issues I read. All of Morrison’s stories so far have set up the Batman RIP storyline and apparently it will have grave ramifications in the hero’s life. I am looking forward to reading this series at one go, so I gave up after those two issues. And believe it or not, the central conceit of RIP is that its events are based around a 60’s single-issue story called ‘Robin Dies At Dawn’, also featured in “The Greatest Batman Stories”. Zur En Arrh! Commisioner Vane! Simon Hurt! Possibly you would enjoy RIP without knowing about all these references, but face it, it’s time to brush up on DC lore, if you want to enjoy Morrison’s Batman in the months to come. I am a happy man, because I had given up on reading a good Batman comic in the last couple of years and now Morrison is imbuing him with a fresh perspective and motivations. Neil Gaiman apparently will write a 2-issue Batman story after RIP, called ‘Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader”. Bring it on, DC! Earn my respect and money, goddamnit.

One of the good things about having a Music World right next door to my office is that after a particularly satisfying lunch, I can enter the store and browse through cheesy new DVD releases while the album du jour plays in the background. Most of the time, there’s nothing too imaginative playing – the most popular tracks from the latest Hindi/Telugu album releases, but it does me good to hear a track here and there that I wouldn’t have come across normally. I heard Pokiri‘s ‘Dola Dola’ the first time this way, and recently, the ‘Lambi Judai’ song from Jannat. Today was a pleasant surprise, because the minute I laid foot inside, a female chorus singing “Joy on sunshine, Joy on blue skies” started on the speakers. It’s been ages since I heard Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and AR Rahman’s ‘Gurus of Peace’, and I am almost embarassed to say I got goosepimples when the alaap began.

AR Rahman’s Vande Mataram was released on August 15 1997, on India’s fiftieth year of independence. The promos that ran through July and August on Doordarshan tantalized mercilessly – they mostly consisted of famous Indian personalities ( I remember MS Subbalakshmi and Pandit Jasraj being two of them) talking about freedom and what it means to them with a distinctive drum-beat in the background, and then the drum would get louder while the tricolour would unfurl slowly across the screen. The spots used to run in the middle of the Hindi Samachar, if I remember correctly, and whenever I heard the drum-beat, I would run to the TV room, dropping whatever it is I was doing at the moment. The only authentic bit of pre-release news about the album was based on short snippets in some other programme ( was The World This Week still running at that time? Or was it Vinod Dua’s show that followed it?). It was supposed to have a Rahman/Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan duet, with the former having travelled to Pakistan to record with the maestro, who was ill at the time. Sting was supposed to guest-star, nevermind I did not really know then who Sting was. Sivamani had great things to say about it. Hype, in those innocent, pre-internet days

The night of August 14th, I was praying fervently to all the gods I knew – please don’t let there be a powercut! AR Rahman was going to perform a live show ( this was obviously before all the World Tours began) at India Gate! Vande Mataram was finally out! The Man came onstage in blue jeans and a white shirt, and Sivamani, along with a HUGE contingnent of drummers went into an introductory performance that slowly led into THAT beat, the one we had been hearing on the promos. I had this small tape recorder positioned near the TV speaker, of course. (and the dang thing recorded it all pretty well, let me tell you.) Then Rahman sang The Song. And it was good. Then he sang a song that began “Aye Mere Vatan Ke Log”, that I did not like too much. The later part of it is a little hazy in my mind, I don’t remember what else he sang that night.

August 15th came and went. The ULFA had declared Independence Day as an Assam bandh – they still do, by the way, with most people staying at home that day and the state on high alert the week leading to it – and there was no chance a music shop would be open. I must have heard that tinny recording god-knows how many times. I remember playing it over the phone to friends who did not watch the programme on TV. The day could not go slower! The next day in college, I played the recording before class ( yes, I was an obsessed little bastard even then) and then moment second period was over, I ran to Bharali Brothers nearby, a place I normally loathed because the old man behind the counter treated us students badly, and enquired if the album was in. It was. Sixty rupees was pushing my pocket money for the month, but I paid up. I bunked the rest of the classes and headed home. In the bus, took my own sweet time to read the liner notes. Ok, so Dominic Miller was the guitarist who had played with Sting, and was playing on the album. The liner pictures were superb, the painting on the cover was by Thotha Tharrani, a name I remembered as the person who had designed the sets for Mani Ratnam films like Bombay. “Aye Mere Vatan Ke Log” wasn’t even there on the album. Eight years later, I found out that the song was “Masoom” and it was released on the US version of the album, with another song called “Musafir”, which was a reworked version of ‘Ottagatha Kathikko’, one of Rahman’s earlier songs from the film Gentleman. (Yes, I have the US version of the album too).

I got home and switched on the music deck ( after remembering to clean the tape-head, hoo ah!), and put it on, feeling slightly light-headed. What The Frag?? ‘Maa Tujhe Salaam’ did not begin with the drum-beat. Well, whatever. ‘Vande Mataram’, the actual Bankim Chandra song played next. Blissful beginning, and a kick-ass guitar riff, though I did get a little cheesed off at the saxophone solo at the end. And then it started – ‘Gurus of Peace’. Angelic female voices. A chorus in English! Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. And AR Rahman singing along. If on earth there was a time of bliss, it was this etc. August 16th, 1997 was a truly memorable day for me.

And that night, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan died.

In retrospect, perhaps I enjoyed the album, especially ‘Gurus of Peace’ a lot because I hadn’t still heard a song called ‘Poralae’, from a 1994 Tamil movie Karuthamma, music by AR Rahman, from which the composer had liberally reused the melody for his duet with Nusrat. Karuthamma being one of those rare Tamil albums that did not make it to music stores in Assam. When I bought the Karuthamma album (Mount Road, Chennai, January 2003) and heard it that night in an IIT hostel room while swatting mosquitoes away, it took Herculean resolve to not jump up and run screaming down the corridor (out of…I dunno…excitement? Familiarity? Surprise?) on hearing a familiar tune was coated with a different aural layer.

Later, much later, in 2001 to be precise, I am on an auto from Hanamkonda to my college in Kazipet. My friend, recently relocated to Hyderabad and visiting Warangal to pick up some certificates, and I are talking music. He asks me, “Which Rahman album is your favourite?”. It takes me about thirty seconds to say “Vande Mataram”. And of course, on my next birthday, I get a CD of the same album from him, as a gift. This was the time when CD prices had not normalized yet, and it made me feel really giddy, owning my first Rahman CD.

Darwyn Cooke, whose work on DC’s The New Frontier is a high point of retro-superheroics in the last couple of years, is working on four graphic novels adapting Richard Stark’s Parker novels. I have talked about the Parker novels before, and it’s exciting to look out for how Cooke’s hardboiled-yet-cartoony style will interpret the character. Of course, the man has already proved he can take on noir, he’s the one with the balls to take on Eisner’s Spirit series. Can’t bloody wait.

Holy Terror, Batman!, the Batman-meets-Osama ( and does unspeakably hideous things to him) yarn that Mr Frank Miller has been working on for the past couple of years will apparently no longer feature Batman. I can’t imagine why! Actually, I think I can. Miller has consistently pushed the boundaries of Batman the character. All the Batman stories he has done till date, with the exception of Year One has featured a vaguely (and in some cases outrightly) psychotic version of Batman, a crusty, loud, sweaty, muscular alpha-male who is not afraid to render a world of hurt to criminal scum. The Batman of the Millerverse, nowadays more commonly referred to as “The Goddamn Batman” is hardly as noble as the public impression of the character makes him out to be. Combine that with Miller’s slightly-misguided world-view, and it’s not very surprising why the status-quo-loving DC would be nervous about the final product – after all, this was the company that censored multiple comics under its umbrella when 9/11 happened, because they featured exploding buildings and mass deaths. Anyways, Miller apparently has a character of his own in the book – “an idea for a new series”, he says. I hope it does not take too much time to go over every panel and redraw Batman.

Speaking of Miller, I reread The Dark Knight Returns recently, after the second viewing of the movie. It’s amazing how much information the man crams into this book. The cut-scenes, the TV-show footage that provides a commentary on the proceedings, the abundance of multiple first-person narrations – there’s an insane rhythm to the writing and the dialogues that is Core Miller, and one that has been diluted ( and a wee bit corrupted) over the years. Has anyone found it difficult to take in all of that information while reading the book the first time? I had a friend complain about the excess panels per page, the information overload, I think I need to buy Absolute Dark Knight and see how that makes a difference.

A Thousand Good Things About Comics. God, I love lists like these.

After a very, very long time, I made my way to a second-hand bookshop this Saturday. There was an open quiz held that afternoon at the Hari Hara Kala Bhavan, commemorating the first anniversary of the Hyderabad Quiz Club, and Arul and I, after having sat through the preliminaries, thought about hitting the bookshop nearest the auditorium. Which was the relatively-new place adjacent to Sangeet Theatre. On the way, I remembered that the theatre was no more ( it is being renovated into a multiplex), would the bookstore still be there? Unfounded fears, because the place was open. And pretty dark, because of the scheduled power-cuts in the area in the evening. Nevertheless, we valiantly scoured through the piles. And I discovered a Cornelia Funke book I had been looking for ( The Thief Lord, 50 Rs) and a rock-and-roll novel I had heard of – Powder, by Kevin Sampson. Saw a three-volume Michael Moorcock collection that had Behold The Man and two other novels ( Breakfast in the Ruins and The Final Programme). Didn’t pick it up because I already had the first book, and right now I am supposed to be on a book-buying sabbatical. No, really.

The Find of the Day came when we approached the billing counter. There is was – Eiji Yoshikawa’s Musashi, a 970-page behemoth commonly called “the Gone with the Wind of Japan”. It’s the story of swordsman Miyamoto Musashi, and I had been eyeing it on Amazon for quite sometime, trying to prioritize it with the other items on The Wish-list. This is the book on which the Samurai trilogy by Hiroshi Inagaki is based, as is the manga series Vagabond. I am glad I didn’t spend 23$ on it – 100 Rs is a better sum any given day. Finding the book even made up for the fact that we missed the finals of the quiz by one star ( 27 and 8 stars made it, while we got 27 and 7 stars.)

Have you seen the brilliant packaging of the Taare Zameen Par DVD? Three discs, one DVD with the feature accompanied by the director’s commentary, the other with deleted scenes and a panel discussion about disabled children, and the third a CD of the background score. The package contains two colour prints of artist Samir Mondal’s paintings for the movie, the two that form part of the film’s climax. Also comes with a flip-book ( featuring Ishaan Avasthi’s famous hand-waving sad kid drawings), a pen, and a notebook. This is the kind of dedicated DVD release that makes me want to plunk down maximum retail price and wipe tears of joy at the lavish care the film-maker has showered on something of his creation. The price for this chunk of awesomeness is 499 Rs, believe it or not.

Much of my time is being taken over by the first season of Arrested Development. There is also the first sixteen-but-one Berserk manga volumes ( which was a gift from someone spacial) that I am reading from time to time. Lots of BT and DJ Shadow on the headphones. Half-way through two fantasy books, Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart and Diana Wynne-Jones’s Chrestomanci Chronicles volume 2. The Chronicles of Chrestomanci is this fantastic multiple-book cycle dealing with parallel worlds, magic and cats. I finished volume 1 – which has Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, the first two books – in a single sitting.Christopher Chant was written later but is the prequel to Charmed Life, and Ms Wynne-Jones makes it full of delicious revelations and foreshadowings which made me grin like a maniac all day. Taking it slow on volume 2, I have a bunch of other unread Wynne-Jones which will be up next. I am on the lookout for The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a send-off on fantasy clichés written by her in the form of a travel guide, I think I need to increase my second-hand-bookstore-visiting frequency.

Spider-man 3 is possibly the worst movie ( never mind the adjective) I’ve seen in recent times. A movie that I caught for the first time on HBO last night, and I was glad about two things – one, the fact that I did not spend any money on theater tickets or DVDs to watch this unredeemable pile of schlock, and two, there were ads littering the screentime. The ads helped lessen the effect, heck, they might have actually deadened the pain enough for me. Sure, there is eye-candy and dollops of webswinging and skyscraper-crunching action. I swear I wanted to kick Tobey Maguire in the face everytime he took off his mask and started off on one of his wide-eyed “acting” fits. By the time he metamorphoses into aggressive Peter Darker who walks and moves like a caffeine-infused, ADD-version of John Travolta, I would have gladly stopped the kicking and picked up a power-drill or a chainsaw. Or am I getting this all wrong and the morons behind this enterprise filmmakers were trying to say that if you are a nerd in school, cool superpowers, a hot girlfriend and an alien symbiote pumping testosterone into your body will never make you cool – you will become a Super-Nerd. Speaking of nerds, a message to the CGI animators: basic high school science says sand plus water no equal mud.

Some of the worst scenes that stick to my mind – (get it off, auuuuugh, get it off my brain!)

Venom and Sandman hooking up together like a blind-date-gone-awry – “hey, random-guy-in-green-t-shirt, you like Spiders?” “No, black-spiderlike-man, I hate them.” “Great, I hate them too, let’s team up.” “Sure!”.
Aunt May pimping off her engagement ring to her nephew. Just ask the cheapskate to buy a new one, already!
An escape convict is chased across a forest and lands in a gigantic bowl. A science experiment in progress. In the middle of nowhere. AT MIDNIGHT. “Hey doctor, the weight on the sand module is different.” “Ah, don’t worry, it’s probably just a bird.” Do you really want to hear a rant about the weight difference between a bird and a man?
An extended scene involving J Jonah Jameson, pills, Betty Brant and a buzzer that was Johnny Lever-meets-Kader Khan.

And I think there’s this epic conspiracy among those who make superhero films, to get a bunch of kids acting in random scenes saying “whoa!”, “cool!” and assorted saccharine-loaded noises. What kind of twisted mind thinks up situations like these?If it were India, I would think it were the star secretaries who were jostling each other to have their kids doing cute stuff.

And the lines, GOOD GOD, the Almighty Lines. “I like being bad”, Eddie Brock-as-Venom intones, sliding along a wall. Oooooooo, malevolent evil! “I have nothing left”, says the granite-faced Sandman, an obvious graduate of Hemant Birje’s WAH! ( Woody and Ham, for those who came in late) school of acting. Ooooooo, emotions. “You ok?”, Spider-man to Mary Jane, after she has been kidnapped by his evil twin and left hanging atop a skyscraper in a taxi. A taxi supported by webs generated from said twin’s sticky bodily fluids, after she’s been waiting for her perennially-late boyfriend to show up and rescue her, and is nearly crushed by concrete blocks before plummetting down aforementioned skyscraper while screaming at Bruce Dickinson levels. There’s something to be said here about words failing me, but apparently they failed the screenplay writer ( Alvin Sargent, I believe) too. Aunt May mouthed some pithy lines about good and forgiveness, Mary Jane was as irritating a girlfriend could ever get and well, I am done talking about the movie.

The verdict?

I am sticking to torture porn from now on.