Having a dastardly villain decide to go after a hero with a diabolical plan to dismantle their life and their mind, leaving them crushed and broken, too pathetic to kill, or, if you do kill them, check the body, isn't even new to Batman, let alone to superheroes in general. You're nobody until your life has been dismantled by a cackling and/or calculating mastermind leaving you to crawl back from the wreckage to inflict justice and revenge having learned a few valuable lessons about, if nothing else, the demands of narrative to repeatedly inflict punishment and destruction on long-running characters just to shake things up and keep things interesting.

Even so, Batman RIP isn't the Caped Crusader's first spin on this merry-go-round, but it's Morrison, so as the Black Glove tear our hero down, triggering post-hypnotic commands implanted years before by Dr Hurt to cause a mental breakdown in Bruce Wayne's mind, it turns out that Batman, who plans for everything, planned for something like this, and it's actually pretty extraordinary.

The action and the ideas flow fast, there's a new version of the Joker, born in the last Morrison collection, it's tricky and tricksy and plays games with narrative and character is dense with allusion to stuff in and out of continuity - specifically the Black casebook, full of Batman adventures too crazy for regular continuity. As a Batman reader I'm fairly casual, but I didn't have too much difficulty keeping up, though maybe it helps that I'm familiar with Morrison.

The last two parts of this are great, but set off from the rest and disjointed in terms of the overall flow. Feels like there's a beginning and an ending missing. I get the impression that with multiple Batman titles and Final Crisis all going on things get very muddled. Hopefully somewhere in the next couple of collections it'll get glued on properly.