Batman #681

A lot of people are going to come out the woodwork and scoff at this final issue of the arc as evidence of how truly terrible the story. Unanswered questions. Demonstrated most keenly by the "ambiguity" of the helicopter explosion. There's no body, and it seems like a cheap ploy.

But the truth is it is not ambiguous at all. Batman's narration in his "final entry" in the black casebook seems to make it clear that he does indeed survive the helicopter crash. Its kind of subtle in the way that Grant likes weave a story so that both the words and the pictures tell different parts of the narrative. Rather than the word simply just reinforcing the pictures or vice versa. I dig that.

In short, R.I.P., and morrisons run at large, is a conceptual story and when it was co-opted to serve as a comic book "event" there was bound to be friction as far as audience expectations. Oh well. It was a solid story.