Link: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2010/10/06/dc-announces-batman-europa-six-years-ago/

With the launch of Batman Inc, it has reminded me of one of my all time biggest comic book gripes. One of the things that has always bugged me about ongoing superhero comic books (especially the big two) is their need to shake things up every now and then with some kind of world/european tour. You can look it in two ways:

1) It's an interesting way to take a character out of their usual environment, mix things up and show some lip service to fans around the world.

or the way I usually look at it:

2) When you run out of ideas for a character, send them on holiday so they can meet generic stereotypical foreigners and return after a year having achieved nothing and with the status quo resumed.

Follow up:

It's at this point in a comic book's run that I normally jump off. I left Daredevil for the first time in years when Ed Brubaker decided to send him on a European tour looking for Foggy's non-existant murderer in the story Devil takes a Ride. Such a let down after the awesomeness of Daredevil in prison, I mean it's Daredevil but he's in prison, what's not to love?!

If it hadn't have been for Chris Claremont's involvement I never would have even looked at X-treme X-Men. Foolishly I jumped right in, not realising that this would be a pointless world tour with even more pointless 'new' character introductions, Lifeguard, Slipstream, I'm looking at you, where are you now eh?

Of course this trend is not always a bad thing, in fact some comics have gained legendary status based on their international roots. J. M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen's Justice League International, is to this day my favourite interation of the Justic League in comic book form, special dispensation is needed for the mighty animated Justice League Unlimited. Sure it didn't start off with the International/Europe tag and (lets be honest) it wasn't really all that international, it just had some foreigners in the team but it was genius and hilarious. JLI is the perfect example of working with what you've got and making it work. DeMatteis and Giffen were not allowed to use the big guys, Supes, Wonder Woman, Hal Jordan etc so instead they used a whole host of 'other, less well known' characters to hilarious effect. So it seems in the right hands, going international can work but what if you don't want to go a different direction and still tell a serious, character driven story?

If we go back to Chris Claremont, when Uncanny X-Men relaunched with the all-new, all-different tagline the idea was to give the book a more international flavour with charcaters from around the world; the African goddess Storm, the Canadian Wolverine, the German acrobat Nightcrawler, the return of the Irish Banshee, the Russian Colossus, the Apache Indian Thunderbird and the Japanese Sunfire. Thses new X-Men were assembled to look for the now lost original X-Men (with the exception of team leader Cyclops) and they didn't return to the mansion or even the USA for a good year. This was the start of the X-Men as we recognise them now, Claremont manages to take a team of pretty much unknowns, call them the X-Men, take them around the world and turn them into one of the most popular comic book franchises in history. So what the hell happened with X-treme Chris? Okay I need to get over that one.

So we've seen the good, the bad and the downright ugly but which will Batman Inc turn out to be? On the face of it, it's everything I hate about comic book world tours, it's seperate to the main series, it's all about introducing (mostly) pointless new charcaters and it will no doubt explore more racial stereotypes than a session down the pub with Nick Griffen. However in Grant Morrison I trust, I've read the first issue and I enjoyed it. I will continue to buy this book but so help me Grant if you go all X-treme on me you're gonna have one pissed off welshman looking to give you a slap.

Tell me what you think of Comic Book World Tours either in the comments below or by tweeting @sidekickcast.