I picked up Batman #686 this week and then promptly yanked the Dark Knight from my pull list altogether; I am so goddamned glad this whole mess is over. Between R.I.P. and Final Crisis, all Morrison achieved was to utterly obliterate any kind of artistic integrity in the non-Green Lantern DC titles, making last year's Marvel One More Day fiasco look relatively well-thought-out in comparison.

But, at the end, with "What Ever Happened to the Cape Crusader?", we're going out on a high note. Here's Neil Gaiman, pinch-hitting for the now certifiably bugfuck crazy Grant Morrison, to remind us how comics are meant to be written, and how they're meant to be read. "What Ever Happened" is posturpedic support for the Morrison-weary, a comfy training bra for raw and sensitive minds. It undoes nothing, retcons nothing, and yet it stands as such a stark "here is how it's meant to be done," with casual formalism, beautiful art, and genuine enthusiasm for the storytelling process, that it reads (rightfully so) like Here Is Writing, And Fuck The Rest Of You. And as such, is much-needed.

We gotta wait till March 18 for the second part, in Detective Comics where it belongs, rather than the main title. I'm rather excited about that, which is nice.

At the same time, the misbegotten Angel series both came to an end this week, and did not; I must admit that issue #16 last month did an appreciably good job with the climax of what had been a dozen issues or so of utter garbage, but issue #17 sorta queers the deal by being so clearly a This Book Made Money, So We're Keeping It Going. Lord, IDW has to work on their property management, or Joss Whedon has to work with Dark Horse exclusively, or something. What could have been a terrific 6-issue story got teased out into a 17-issue-with-two-spinoffs mess. Greed: it's a deadly sin for a reason.