I wouldn't have put quite so fine a point on it, but, yeah, pretty much. Presumably Bruce is doing a lot of that in the background while Dick is calmly getting on with the Science and determining to his satisfaction, if not the old man's, that it's all on the up - weird and unnervingly prosaic, but genuine.

If I were DC and I had a year's worth of issues to fill, sure, spinning the Death of the Joker out into a long shaggy-dog story about Bruce's inability to accept that anything's ever that simple might be the way to go, but I'm not, and in any case the Joker's exit isn't really the point of this exercise; it's just the starting point for what is important, which is Harley's reinvention of herself in his (merciful) absence.

Besides, like Mark Hamill, I'm tired of the Joker. When Geoff retroactively killed him off in such a by-the-way manner in Bad Bank Caper, I was delighted. It's just the sort of punch line he would have appreciated - a flat and unglamorous revocation of script immunity at the least opportune moment. No wonder he laughed all the way to the sidewalk.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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