Of the many amazing comic-book creators that have died in the past few months, Alan Grant deserves a special mention in this blog. As I’ve written before, his energetic, darkly comedic surrealism is as close as it gets to my ideal of cool Batman comics – hell, more than any other writer, Grant has shaped my taste and passion when it comes to this type of stories and, ultimately, he’s responsible for the very existence of Gotham Calling.
Today, I won’t share a panel from one of Alan Grant’s greatest works (which, as far as I’m concerned, can be found in his awesome Detective Comics run from the late 1980s or, admittedly, in the pages of 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine). Instead, here is a scene that encapsulates many of Grant’s defining motifs: drugs, social consciousness, bizarre humor, creepy horror, and the will to weave big themes into unapologetically committed genre narratives:
