I'm So Confused....

All righty, comics fans (not that there are any of you among my readers save the husband), can someone please explain to me just what the hell happened in Batman 678? Was that neurotic little Robin with the scruffy hair scarfing down fast food then being chased by escapees from some third-rate European circus in the first few pages, or was that 'wing Thing? But that was 'wing Thing foaming at the mouth and all strapped in for a good long stay at the funny farm on page 26, yes? And what's with the grungy flannel, Batdude? Is "Zur-en-arrh" some kind of code for "Seattle of the 1990s"?

I totally get it that ever since that misogynist Frank Miller did his little Bat books, portraying Bats as a little south of insane is, like, de rigueur. And I totally get that Grant Morrison is trying to tie everything he's ever done in the Bat books (and probably ever friggin' DC comic he's written) in with a crapload of Silver Age silliness or whatever. But, for the love of comics, people, when you write something so disjointed and esoteric that only the "real fans" (i.e., you and your overinflated ego) can even minorly grasp what's going on, it royally pisses the rest of us off. Too many damn times comics fans shell out good money each month to buy the next installment of some ongoing story in hopes that ooh! maybe this latest issues things'll start making sense. But too often of late, we buy the story, wait through all those months of seemingly random crap happening and nothing ever makes sense. Rereading the whole story once it's published doesn't even help.

And it really doesn't help when you can't tell who's who from the art. Every male member of the frickin' Bat family, including that little puke Damian, all frickin' look alike. For the love of the FSM, give us just a small break!

Oh my achin' cranium!

As the husband said, "If this all ties in with some issue from the 50s, I'm just...."

I don't recall how he finished that statement, but he's got a point. While it's all good and fun that some of these comics have been going on for ages and ages, does every major story have to pay tribute to the glorious past--even when that past was goofy crap? Are there really that many comics readers out there who give a rat's patoot about the things happening in today's comics being related to what happened when they were reading 'em as kids?

Perhaps the husband should have finished his statement by saying, "...going to start my own comics publishing house that publishes titles that maintain continuity but don't hit the reset button every two or three years, don't bring blown-to-smithereens characters back from the dead [I'm looking at you, Jason Todd and ::shudder:: Spoiler, ye of the Even Numbered Robins Society] and don't have trumped up 'crises' every two or three years that promise to radically shift the paradigms of characters and readers but are only thinly disguised ploys for readers to fork over more money."

And, yeah, bully for me for continuing to fork over more money when I damn well know better. But, dammit, I have to know how this all ends!