Talia al Ghul is a piece of...

[PowerPlay25]

I never saw much of an emotional attachment to Talia from Bruce. She was somewhere between a moment of weakness and a one night stand.

The only reason I bought into the love from Bruce's end was because he never put Talia in jail despite the NUMEROUS chances he's had to do so. He watched Selina get thrown in jail and then moved on (it was just after No Man's Land), while with Talia, who's participated in world shaking (and damaging events, even before Death and the Maidens) has never done a day of time. I'm convinced it's because of Bruce, Nightwing didn't try and throw her in jail during "Freefall" and why Superman let her run around Metropolis as Lexcorps CEO.

I don't think it's love anymore on Talia's end or at least not how it was. Tomasi (one of her better writers in recent years) said Talia is "in love and in hate" with Bruce Wayne. I think Bruce still hopes one day, Talia will turn a corner.

[JBatmanFan05]

Seeing all this talk about trying to work the story like a divorced family is just... ughhh...

Batman/Catwoman has more in common with that then Talia ever did.

Grant saw Talia as a love of a younger different Bruce, not unlike Bruce/Kathy Kane. In Grant's mind, Bruce started when he was 19 and so maybe Bruce was in his early 20s with Talia.

Bruce fell for this exotic Jezebel Jet type in Talia and stands up to her overprotective daddy Ra's and crazy superhero soap opera romance and DC Special Series #15 with with Ra's just pronouncing Bruce married to Talia in an unaccepted forced way and a later bedding and Bruce almost settling down with Talia thinking she's pregnant (Son of the Demon) but Talia feels Bruce will be killed being so overprotective so she claims a miscarriage (I think we have to assume she knew Bruce wouldn't leave his crimefighting ways to be Ra's heir). A long "divorce" ensues (i.e. repeated rejections and nonstarts by Bruce with Talia). Talia gets fed up with it, wishing Bruce had taken his heir to Al Ghul role for her and their son.

So I think Morrison was right and clever in seeing the pseudo skeleton of a "marriage" and child and "divorce" between Bruce and Talia.

[oasis1313]

I choose to see it as consensual, but Bruce is kinda of in stubborn denial of that and tries to attribute it to Talia's drugs/fertility stuff when that stuff was negligible in their consensual coupling. And deep down Bruce knows that.

It's not like Bruce is saving it for marriage. He had a semi-drunken one-night stand, fathered a kid, now he's blaming it on the woman. Boo hoo.

[Mia]

Morrison's direction with Talia was a tiny bit bold, but totally worth it (the super divorce, the woman scorned) and was well rooted and founded in her increased badness that ramped up starting in Batman Legacy/Bane of the Demon from the late 90s.

The harsh truth is that comic Talia didn't remain like how Denny wrote her initially, like how BTAS portrayed her. She killed more and more and sided with her father more and more to the point where she really had little case to assert she was not just like her father. And Morrison seized upon that and said: What if Bruce turning down the family trio was the last straw that really hardened her heart to full-on villainess?

Respectfully this is absolute non-sense. Pure rubbish. Until DATM Talia was her own woman who made her own decisions. She ran her fathers empire, she was the personally recruited by Lex Luthor to run his conglomerate. You need more than just an MBA to be able to do that. You guts, a keen strategic mind and a very, very strong sense of self. A woman like that does not put her life on hold for anyone or spend her time regretting the past.

Ra’s was never supposed to be a maniacal blood thirsty villain who just wanted to blow things up and kill people for the sake of it. He was an eco terrorist who thought that mankind was destroying the planet and he wanted to see the world ‘re-stored’ to it’s pristine state. And Talia agreed with him to an extent..then stories had her changing her mind. What made Talia such a great villain (until DATM)was that there were lines she would not cross. Or at least things she would not do if it would not achieve a greater good.

The notion that she decided to turn on Bruce/Batman (like a silly woman who can’t live without her man) doesn’t make sense given the fact that she walked away twice from him in Batman 617 and in the Batman Evolution story. So now we are supposed to believe that she’s turned into some angry ex-wife whose sole purpose in life is to get back at her ex? Really?
I will concede that it was actually Rucka who made Talia into an insipid idiot--mostly to showcase his new pet character- and other authors just played with it. (The notion that Nyssa is able to walk up to Talia, who has mostly been portrayed as a haughty ice queen, and befriends her just laughable. I guess by all rights I should be friends with Invanka Trump or Marissa Meyer.)

But Morrison just seemed to take it up to a whole new level of ridiculousness. Where Talia was more of a caricature of a night time soap opera villainess. In fact he did virtually the exact same thing to Emma Frost in the X-Men, turning her from a complex woman who knew how play dirty (when necessary) in a harsh world. To a soap opera vamp/ overgrown mean high school girl who chases after married men.
I am under the impression that Grant Morrison either doesn’t like strong and powerful women or he just doesn’t know how to write them.

I liked Morrison’s early writing of Batman/Bruce Wayne. He was one of the few writers who got the fact that Batman/Bruce is a renaissance man and a strategic genius. But I just became disillusioned with his stories as they went on. Especially after the introduction of Damian, the un disciplined 10 year old who can do everything.

A lot of the poor portrayal of Talia (like many complex characters in comic books) is down to bad and shoddy writing. Batman is supposed to be a cold rational genius. But most writers just write him as an angry thug.

[Agent Z]

Respectfully this is absolute non-sense. Pure rubbish. Until DATM Talia was her own woman who made her own decisions. She ran her fathers empire, she was the personally recruited by Lex Luthor to run his conglomerate. You need more than just an MBA to be able to do that. You guts, a keen strategic mind and a very, very strong sense of self. A woman like that does not put her life on hold for anyone or spend her time regretting the past.

Ra’s was never supposed to be a maniacal blood thirsty villain who just wanted to blow things up and kill people for the sake of it. He was an eco terrorist who thought that mankind was destroying the planet and he wanted to see the world ‘re-stored’ to it’s pristine state. And Talia agreed with him to an extent..then stories had her changing her mind. What made Talia such a great villain (until DATM)was that there were lines she would not cross. Or at least things she would not do if it would not achieve a greater good.

The notion that she decided to turn on Bruce/Batman (like a silly woman who can’t live without her man) doesn’t make sense given the fact that she walked away twice from him in Batman 617 and in the Batman Evolution story. So now we are supposed to believe that she’s turned into some angry ex-wife whose sole purpose in life is to get back at her ex? Really?
I will concede that it was actually Rucka who made Talia into an insipid idiot--mostly to showcase his new pet character- and other authors just played with it. (The notion that Nyssa is able to walk up to Talia, who has mostly been portrayed as a haughty ice queen, and befriends her just laughable. I guess by all rights I should be friends with Invanka Trump or Marissa Meyer.)

But Morrison just seemed to take it up to a whole new level of ridiculousness. Where Talia was more of a caricature of a night time soap opera villainess. In fact he did virtually the exact same thing to Emma Frost in the X-Men, turning her from a complex woman who knew how play dirty (when necessary) in a harsh world. To a soap opera vamp/ overgrown mean high school girl who chases after married men.
I am under the impression that Grant Morrison either doesn’t like strong and powerful women or he just doesn’t know how to write them.

I liked Morrison’s early writing of Batman/Bruce Wayne. He was one of the few writers who got the fact that Batman/Bruce is a renaissance man and a strategic genius. But I just became disillusioned with his stories as they went on. Especially after the introduction of Damian, the un disciplined 10 year old who can do everything.

A lot of the poor portrayal of Talia (like many complex characters in comic books) is down to bad and shoddy writing. Batman is supposed to be a cold rational genius. But most writers just write him as an angry thug.

What pet character was Rucka trying to showcase?

[SicariiDC]

What pet character was Rucka trying to showcase?

Nyssa, right?

[williamtheday]

Don Knotts said it: "You're a terrible mother!"

[RubberLotus]

Honestly, I've never gotten why Talia was ever considered a serious love interest for Batman in the first place, beyond "Denny O'Neil said so and he was head honcho of the Batman books for a good decade or so".

I suppose I'm biased, but I've always regarded the al-Ghuls as one of the few rogues objectively more evil than the Joker, if only in sheer scale and destructive potential. If he's in an extra-assholish mood the Joker might kill a few dozen. Ra's slaughtered an entire fucking city as an opening act and just got worse from there, and Talia, as mentioned, is the kind of person who orders her personal bodyguards to suicide like you or me tossing away a tissue.

[InformationGeek]

I haven't read much of Talia outside of Morrison's take on the character and the recent stuff Gleason did over in Robin: Son of Batman, so I can't really speak to much about her portrayal if its right or wrong. However, just focusing on what I've seen her in those two runs:

Morrison's Take: She left absolutely no impact on me. She's just boring and occasionally rather stupid for all her boasting. She's not compelling and when she died, I just didn't care. Though frankly everything post Batman and Robin Must Die fell flat for me being rather uninteresting, poorly drawn, or at times, too mean-spirited to be enjoyable. No meta or THEMES could salvage that train wreck. She wasn't even as good as Dr. Hurt, who I really only remember for his bland plans rather than this personality.

Gleason's Take: I found her interesting here, being more of a character than a plot device/mouthpiece for the writer. I liked that he seemed to try build up this bond between Talia and Damian, as small as it was. Shame the run didn't go on long enough to see what Gleason could do with the character.

[PowerPlay25]

I also really liked Gleason's take on the character. She still has her imperial manner but is also allowed dimension. I also thought Tomasi's Talia was really good and true to character during his Nightwing tenure. She was raised to see the world as "hers" and everyone else are just tolerated interlopers. They don't sugar coat her, she is still very much a villain but it's amazing the difference in texture between what writers like Gleason, Tomasi, Simone and Waid do with her compared to the tripe Morrison wrote.

[EliLaur]

Nah. I never saw Talia as an innocent either. BUT, you actually referenced one of the times she was not playing the role of a villain at all. Talia did not take over Luthor's empire for some "nefarious scheme". She saw that Luthor's company was a "house of global exploitation" and rightfully sought to put an end to that. She agreed to become CEO when he came to her in order to "stop the danger Luthor's company presents" and expose Luthor's (and LexCorp's) crimes. I do not see what is so villainous about that...
IMG_8314.jpg
Whilst I do agree with her being one of Batman's rogues, it is simply incorrect - once you look at all of the character's appearances - to claim that Talia - who often played the role of an anti-heroine - would always be there as a villain.

[dietrich]

Got to say I love Talia . I find such a fun and interesting character. Sadly DC seems to be on a mission to drag her as much as possible and some fans refuse to be objective and impartial when it comes to the character. Guess them's the breaks when shippers about.

I like her the most in Batman Inc and in RSOB. I hate her being a pinning love interest [leave that crap to Selina and other such characters]. Love her as a bad mutha who will bring Bruce to his knees in her quest to rule the world.

[Jim Kelly]

Y'know, Talia was introduced before her father, Ra's al Ghul. That's why she's just Talia, no family name, because she was a bit of a mystery at first. And it wasn't clear if she was one of the good guys or one of the bad guys. Then we found out that her father was Ra's al Ghul and he was the head of the League of Assassins. But Talia was often at odds with her father. So she was an ambiguous character, sometimes helping Batman and sometimes going against him. A lot like Catwoman and really more of an anti-hero than a villain. Or that's how she was supposed to be.

[Mataza]

Gotta say, I never saw Talia as some kind of 'innocent'. I always remember her as a villain in one form or another. Up to and including taking over Luthor's empire for some kind of nefarious scheme...

Batman is just a bit hypocritical when it comes to the hot ladies. Talia and Catwoman both seem to get away with a LOT more then the rest of his rogues do....

And ivy and Harley. He treats them better than his sons. Especially recently. I blame it on Snyder and king tho, they write a Batman that comes off as extremely thirsty.

[Korath]

Well, I didn't expect such heated discussions surrounding Talia.

Now, I wonder what people think of her in The Silencer...