Live Forever: Batman Incorporated #13 Review

Editor’s Note: I don’t know if Batman’s dead or not. All I know is this. Parts of the city out there, it’s like Spoiler Year all over again.

Grant Morrison has been working on his Batman story since 2006. During that time, DC has gone through a Final Crisis and a full reboot, Batman has died and been reborn after traveling through history, had a son and lost him (despite a couple of stories predicting his future as Trenchcoat Gunslinger Batman), and I have been infuriated at least as often, if not more often, as I have been delighted by what Morrison has done with the character in the past seven years.

Seriously: for every awesome speculative story about a future Batman presiding over the end of Gotham City, there is Batman with a handgun shooting Darkseid. For each interesting revival of obscure Silver Age ephemera, there is a Joker story that is mostly text with the occasional odd computer-generated image (seriously, Grant: if I wanted to read a giant block of text, I’d read this Web site). And for every moment where Damian does something awesome, there are about 700 moments where Damian speaks, breathes and / or exists. I was not a fan of Damian, I guess is what I’m saying.

But Morrison’s Batman story is over now, completed in this week’s Batman Incorporated #13, where Batman finally has his last showdown with Talia al Ghul (who started this all by dumping that little rugrat Damian on Batman’s doorstep back in the first place), with the fate of Gotham and six other cities hanging in the balance. And in the issue, Morrison tries to have things a lot of ways, simultaneously tearing down and destroying Batman and Bruce Wayne while asserting that that could never happen, and pointing out the ridiculousness of the idea of Batman while also calling it timeless and classic.

All of which should be a filthy Goddamned mess, and in certain ways it is, as Morrison makes a couple of choices here that directly contradict other things that he did earlier in his run. However, there is no denying two things: while I don’t always enjoy or agree with his story choices, there is no question that Morrison is an excellent writer… and if you’ve been following his career since Animal Man, you know he can write one hell of a final issue when he wants to.

And while Batman Incorporated #13 might not be the best wrapup to an epic storyline I’ve ever read, it is, in fact, one hell of an interesting statement on Batman himself.

We flash forward to Bruce Wayne in custody, clearly having been savagely beaten and subsequently arrested for terrorism and crimes against the United States, being interrogated by Jim Gordon. Gordon tells Bruce / us that Batman has not been seen in days and is believed dead, and that even the Bat Signal has been rendered as forbidden to display in public as the swastika. The discussion flashes us back to the battle with Leviathan, with the Batman Family fighting the rank and file in the streets, while Batman swordfights Talia herself in the Batcave. Talia poisons Batman, because obscure poisons and Talia go together like, well, obscure poison and every other Batman villain when Jason arrives and trades the detonator to Talia’s Oroboro megabomb for the antidote. She gives Batman the antidote and triggers the bomb, only to discover that the Bat Family has pulled a fast one, and as she rages about her upcoming retribution, she is… shall we say, neutralized. As we return to the interrogation, Gordon tells Wayne that some unknown party has arranged for all charges to be dropped, and tells Bruce that “it’s like Zero Year” out in the streets, and that Gotham needs Batman more than ever…

Even though the issue wraps up the Leviathan storyline in a reasonably satisfying way, Batman Incorporated #13 is less a final wrapup to Morrison’s epic story than his final statement on the character of Batman himself… and part of that statement is that the simple idea of Batman in the modern world is kinda ridiculous. Which is a hell of a thing to tell a bunch of comic book readers who have spent thousands of dollars on Batman comic books over the past 38 years… but it doesn’t mean Morrison is completely wrong. He shows and tells us a whole bunch of ways that Batman either wouldn’t work at all, or how he would be completely ineffectual in the real modern world. Morrison gives us Batman arrested as a terrorist. He has Talia tell us that, while Batman is grappling with maniacs and psychopaths in alleyways, criminals like her are able to make billions working under the radar and exert untold control over not only a single city, but over the entire world. When Batman strikes a classic pose and shouts a classic Batman speech that Talia will never take Gotham City while he has anything to say about it, Morrison has Talia sneer and point out that she could buy his business and leave him resourceless.

Morrison makes it clear that Talia has only chosen to take the identity of Leviathan and used the methods of a standard Batman rogue because her twisted love for Batman motivated her to do so almost as a gift, to give him something familiar to battle before killing him. In fact, she states that her orders to her army to stop in the event of her defeat are the only way Batman can win, and were only given out of her perverse sense of honor. And the overall effect is to give the reader the message that, in the face of real terrorism and real high-level financial criminals and real law enforcement scrutiny, a guy in a bat suit punching criminals would be completely ineffectual in even maintaining a status quo, let alone actually making the world a better place.

And the overall effect of that message works on a couple of levels. First of all, it is a comment on the idea of Batman that is really disturbing for fans. It forced me to think about why I have followed this character for a significant portion of my life… but what most impressed me was how this viewpoint also increased the stakes of this story itself. We have seen Batman in danger with all odds against him a million times – we see it in four different Batman comics books per month, these days – but we have never seen the odds against his entire existence before. Morrison here gives us a situation not only where Batman might not win, but one where logic dictates he cannot win, and in fact, could never win. And it raises the tension far more than you would think, but Morrison also follows the conceit to its final conclusion: if you have a terrorist who will only stop if she is killed, and a hero who will not kill, that hero cannot win… and by making a third party intervene to finally resolve the situation, Morrison shakes the concept of Batman itself.

But Morrison is not here to bury Batman, but to praise him. And he does this by, after spending an entire issue pointing out that Batman could never exist effectively in the modern world, in a single page at the end of the story before the epilogue. It is a five-panel page, with each panel giving us an image of classic Batman action – Batman investigating a macabre corpse, criminals tied to a lamppost with a Bat-signalled note, Batman leaping in shadows in a classic action pose – with a simple message to the reader delivered from Gordon’s point of view. And I won’t spoil the page completely, but the effect of this single page after seeing Batman deconstructed to the point where we are convinced the character could never work is to remind us that the reason we love Batman is because Batman is awesome. As the world has changed, writers have changed Batman to meet it. And by explicitly referencing Scott Snyder’s and Greg Capullo’s current Zero Year story line updating Batman’s origin story, Morrison reminds us Batman will always be made to fit into the modern world, and that there will always be stories about a Dark Knight tracking and defeating macabre criminals, and no matter how much anyone tries to point out that the character doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t matter. Because there will always be writers who find cool and interesting things to do with the character. Because Batman will always be awesome.

And Burnham’s art really helps to sell the overall experience. His stuff is still not my favorite style of art, and I still think he tries too hard to mimic Frank Quitely’s kinda puffy, overblown style, but his general choices match the story points extremely well. Through the bulk of the story, where Morrison is telling us that the idea of Batman is not realistic, Burnham chooses to almost always depict Batman naturally. There are almost no shadowed images with flowing cape and bat-shapes here, instead, Batman is well-lit, beat on, and very obviously just a bug guy in a spandex suit. There is no archetype in action here, just a guy getting his ass kicked, which matches Morrison’s message… right until the final page, where we get a truly cool big panel of Batman leaping from shadow: just a bat shape with outstretched hands and a visible snarl from the darkness. And in the epilogue, Burnham gives us a big, overblown, standard mad scientist’s lair, with Ras al Ghul smiling his standard mad smile, all of which signals to the reader that we are back in the world of kickass Batman stories against insane master criminals. Again, while I’m not the biggest fan of Burnham’s style, what he does here is an unmistakably solid job in matching the art to the story. It’s good stuff.

I’ve been pretty vocal over the years that I haven’t been the biggest fan of a lot of Morrison’s run of Batman stories, but I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed more of his post-New 52 Batman Incorporated stories than I haven’t. And whether you’ve enjoyed his Batman stuff or not, Batman Incorporated #13 is one hell of a creator’s final statement on the character of Batman. I’d recommend it even if you haven’t been following Batman Incorporated, because you don’t really need to know the background to enjoy the story. All you need to know is that Batman is fighting one of his greatest villains, and by the end, you will remember why Batman kicks ass.