Zombie Apocalypse: Batman Incorporated #5 Review

Editor’s Note: Babylon falls! The spoilers you defended are meaningless!

Back in 2007. Batman #666 kind of came out of nowhere, clearly a result of Grant Morrison realizing he was writing a issue numbered “666”, rubbing his hands together and cackling gleefully around a mouthful of peyote.

Batman #666 introduced Damian Wayne as Batman, having taken over the mantle after some unexplained thing happened to Bruce Wayne fifteen years in the future. Damian is a gun-toting, trenchcoat-wearing lethal version of Batman, who has sold his soul to the devil and must battle a demon for the future of Gotham City… and none of that description, by the way, is an Issac Hayes style euphemism to make Damian sound tough; these are things that actually happened. Imagine listening to the Theme From Shaft and feeling the slowly-dawning horror when you realize that John Shaft actually fucked his mother. And apparently did it badly. Yeah. Welcome to shoot-first, sell-your-soul-to-Satan-even-sooner Batman.

The whole issue was kind of a goof, and as a gimmick issue, the whole thing kind of came and went without further comment in the story arc. But due to the asskicking nature of Damian as Batman, the issue has become a fan favorite (not my favorite, but your mileage may vary), and I don’t think a San Diego Comic-Con that had Morrison in attendance has gone by without some fan asking when we would see Damian’s Batman again. To which Morrison would reply: “Schoor toor ach Damian fchoor ich dloor Mescaline schaar ploor Scotland.” Dude has one hell of an accent is all I’m saying, but I digress.

Well, their wait is over. Batman Incorporated #5 is Morrison’s version of The Dark Knight Returns for Damian’s version of Batman, It is the imaginary final battle for that version of Batman, featuring his final conflict against his most dangerous antagonist with the fate of Gotham City hanging in the balance. However, unlike Frank Miller’s classic, Morrison accomplishes it in less than 20 pages (appropriate for a character who showed up for about 20 pages more than five years ago), and considering it tells the story of an apocryphal version of Batman who exists purely thanks to a vagary of issue numbering, it is surprisingly effective.

The issue opens with Batman telling Robin that he can never become Batman; Damian’s mother, Talia al Ghul, has put into motion a plan where Robin takes the mantle, and eventually, everything goes to hell. Morrison then flashes forward to Damian as Trenchcoat Batman and, sure enough: everything has gone to hell. Gotham is under siege by a biological agent that turns people into what amounts to Joker Zombies, of the 28 Days Later fast variety. Batman, Barbara Gordon and the other survivors are holed up in a fortified Arkham Asylum – along with the inmates – struggling to find a cure before they are overrun by Joker Zombies, or before the President of The United States decides the situation is hopeless and sterilizes Gotham with nukes. But there is some hope – Damian has found and retrieved an infant from Gotham proper who is showing no symptoms of the Joker virus… but hope is a relative concept when you’ve sold your soul to the devil and your top molecular biologist is an ape in a ringmaster suit.

This issue is surprisingly dark. Like, dark-for-a-Batman-story dark. If you come to this issue flush with the good feelings of the happy ending from The Dark Knight Rises, or even the relatively ambiguous feelings from the “well, at least Batman got out alive even though everyone hates him” ending of The Dark Knight, you are going to be in for a rude, sharp shock.

The only light at the end of this tunnel is that this is an imaginary story, something that can only happen if someday Damian becomes Batman. Because there is no escape from the doom in this story. In short: Batman loses. Completely. He doesn’t stop the plague. The baby isn’t the hope for the cure that Damian hoped, and I wouldn’t even get too attached to the tyke if you’re the kind of person who normally likes seeing their babies alive. In just a few short pages, Batman loses, his allies turn on him, and his adversary wins. Gotham City falls, and not in that nifty, benign, “Bane can haz martial law nao, kthx?” kinda way. Everything goes completely and utterly to shit…

…and it is awesome. Not just in the stark wallop of watching Batman, who never loses, lose everything, but in learning through the course of the imaginary story exactly why it happened. Let’s just say that we’ve spent two issues in five or so years seeing Damian as Batman, and hearing that Batman has sold his soul to the devil… but the implications here raise some sickening questions as to exactly what that has really meant all this time. Morrison gives us the subtle implication that we never really knew what we thought we knew, and because of that, there wasn’t a hope in hell of Damian defeating his antagonist. As much as I dislike Damian as a character, when it dawned on me what Morrison might be saying, it was almost heartbreaking, because there was never going to be a chance that Damian could win. Not to that guy.

On top of the truly excellent story, the entire thing feels like a subtle rebuke to all those convention fans who muttered, “Damian as Batman? With guns’n shit? That was cool.” Because Morrison makes it clear here that any circumstances that would make Damian into that version of Batman would be simply catastrophic. For Damian to become that dark a version of his father would mean, by nature, that Bruce Wayne has fallen, and that he has fallen badly. And that the circumstances behind that fall would mean that Gotham City, if not the world, has become so dark and dangerous that no Batman would be able to save it. In short: Morrison tells us here that, if Damian were to become that version of Batman, things have become so hopeless that it’s not anything we’d really want to see. Morrison basically invalidates the concept of Damian’s Batman that so many thought was so cool, and frankly, that takes some balls.

Chris Burnham’s art is reasonably solid here, although he has never been my favorite artist. In Batman Incorporated #5, his style continues to be strongly reminiscent of Frank Quitely, with a billion detail lines, rounded heads and softly rounded body parts. And his facial expressions continue to be problematic; there’s a panel of young Damian on page one where it looks like he’s eaten a handful of sour balls in the middle of a prostate exam, and another of older Damian petting a cat so gleefully that it seems the cat offered him a blowjob. But his storytelling is generally easy to follow, and his panels are free of the “lookit me, Ma!” gimmickry of fucking with page layout to make things look cool at the expense of storytelling that he has sometimes fallen prey to in the past. While it’s not to my taste, Burnham’s art is effective here…. and he draws a dead baby like nobody’s business.

I have been pretty vocal that I have never been all that big a fan of Morrison’s run on Batman, and his most recent issues of Batman Incorporated really haven’t been an exception. But in this one issue, he delivers an extremely powerful story – albeit an imaginary one that isn’t part of real continuity – that delivers a theoretical “final” Batman story as tragic as The Dark Knight Returns was triumphant. The story is oppressive, it is dark, and it is hopeless… but it is good. And if you think you can stomach it, it is worth a read.