Wait, what? — I recently re-read Grant Morrison’s seven-year run on Batman, from beginning to end, over a period of a couple weeks. It was a hell of an undertaking given how intricate Morrison’s writing is but I did it in service of an episode of Anthony Desiato’s podcast Flat Squirrel Tales: Beyond My Comic Shop.* I was a guest along with a fine gentleman named Mike Sangregorio, a Morrison maven and sometime comics journalist. We discussed all the titles that made up the epic from 2006 through 2013 and you can listen here or here. It was a really great talk but after we chewed a lot over, Mike had something of an epiphany regarding The Return of Bruce Wayne, perhaps Morrison’s most challenging and opaque arc within the span: Piecing all the clues together, Mike’s determined that Morrison remade Batman’s origin — by making Darkseid responsible for sending that bat through Bruce Wayne’s window as he pondered his future. Sound crazy? No, it sounds like Morrison — and Mike makes a great case below. — Dan: — By MIKE SANGREGORIO During our recording of Flat Squirrel Tales, we discussed Grant Morrison’s The Return of Bruce Wayne, a mini-series from the latter half of his seven-year Batman run. If you’ve never read it, then you may not be familiar with the way Morrison out-Morrisons himself during that particular story. It is a confusing, but rewarding arc, even if it does take a second (or third) read-through to process. For what my fellow panelists and I thought of it, give the episode a listen, but as the go-to Morrison fan of the Batriumverate, I began to rethink some of the more esoteric bits of his run — especially ROBW — to see if I could give a quicker, more satisfactory answer as to why his stories are worth reading more than once. One that particularly grabbed my attention was: What exactly was going on with Batman, Darkseid and the Omega Sanction? At the conclusion of the tangentially related story Final Crisis, Batman kills Darkseid by shooting his now-human form of Dan “Terrible” Turpin. Batman is then thrown through time where — as shown in The Return of Bruce Wayne — he has a series of adventures and, eventually, returns to the present seemingly none the worse for wear. Why was Darkseid’s trap not able to prevent Batman from returning and continuing his war on crime?...