Every installment of Abandoned Love we will be examining comic book stories, plots and ideas that were abandoned by a later writer without retconnng away the previous story. Click here for an archive of all the previous editions of Abandoned Love. Feel free to e-mail me at bcronin@comicbookresources.com if you have any suggestions for future editions of this feature.
Today, we take a look at the changes Grant Morrison had to make in the classic graphic novel, Son of the Demon, to get Batman having a son to work in the then current DC continuity.
In 1987, Mike W. Barr and Jerry Bingham did a graphic novel called Son of the Demon. In it, Batman is fighting some bad guys in Gotham City when he is visited by Talia Al Ghul...
It turns out that the bad guys were serving some REALLY bad guy, so Batman agrees to help Talia hunt the guy down. It turns out that this guy also killed Talia's mother, so this is personal. Batman ends up agreeing to marry Talia to help solidify his partnership with Ra's Al Ghul in taking this even more dangerous guy down...
Forgo your control...your discipline...your condoms.
Because later on, we see that Talia is now pregnant!
The problem is that in battle, Batman is TOO protective of Talia, and she knows that that could mean the difference between winning and losing, so she fakes a miscarriage...
They stop the bad guy, but Talia then tells Batman that they're through. He's sad, but at the end, we see that Talia was lying about the miscarriage and gave the baby up to some nice people. She even included some jewelry Batman gave her....
Okay, so there's a baby out there. So how did this tie in when Grant Morrison wanted to do a storyline about Batman and Talia's son? Go to the next page to find out...
Morrison did not remember exactly how the story went in Son of Demon, but even if he had, the simple fact remained that a kid born at the time of Son of the Demon wouldn't be old enough to be of much use in a Batman and Son storyline, so Morrison changed it so that now this was a matter of cloning and artificial aging....
And that gave us Damian Wayne.
Is it a bit of a cheat? Sure, but it gave us Damian Wayne, and he's awesome!
It was even a bigger cheat in the New 52, when the timeline was reduced to, like, 5 years. So Batman and Talia got together, she made Damian and he grew to childhood in, what, a year?
The Morrison story, by the way, doesn't say that there isn't another natural baby out there somewhere. Maybe we can meet him some day when he's, like, six. Maybe he can be the next Batman Jones!!!
That's it for this installment! If anyone has a suggestion for Abandoned Love, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com