High Ideas: Batman Incorporated #10 Review

Editor’s Note: Criminals are a cowardly, spoilered lot…

On my initial readthrough of Batman Incorporated #10, I was fully prepared to lower the boom on writer Grant Morrison. Here’s why.

Did you ever get really drunk or high and have an epiphany? One of those moments where, seriously under the influence of something, you realize something that is so seemingly obvious that you can’t believe nobody else ever came up with the idea, yet so seemingly transcendant and perfect that you firmly and totally believe, in your stupor, that your idea will change things deep down at their core? So you stumble around and you find a piece of paper and a pen and you write it down… and then you wake up in the morning, praying for relief and wondering if you should consider shaving your tongue, and you find the piece of paper… and it says something like “pizza beer.” Or maybe “Dorito-flavored rolling papers.” And you look at that piece of paper, and you think, “Yeah, that’s a pretty obvious idea… but it’s also really kind of obviously stupid,” and you chuck the piece of paper and you lurch into the sunlight, looking for greasy food.

In a bunch of ways, Batman Incorporated #10 lives and dies by that kind of late-night, shitfaced, obvious idea that never survives the harsh light of day… except Morrison missed that part where you sober up and realize that the whole concept is a little on-the-nose and kinda dumb.

Yeah, I was ready to do that. And on a lot of levels, I still am: the final reveal on the last page (not like it’s much of a reveal, given the book’s WTF gatefold cover that gives up the ghost before page one) simply stinks of a guy ripped to the tits on absinthe and psilocybin screeching, “Wait a second, wait a second and hear me out… what if Batman… actually was a bat? Stop laughing and gimme that one-hitter…” But with that said, there’s some decent imagery here, a tease that some characters we saw months ago might come back into play in an unexpected way, and a tease that Talia might be facing some trouble on all fronts.

But that ending really should’ve been held until someone sobered up, man.

Leviathan continues to put pressure on Gotham, with moves like disabling the city’s police cars and demanding that they outlaw Batman and Batman Incorporated. Gotham, being a city with no experience dealing with major criminal conspiracies, terrorist threats or widespread panic, bends over and blows up the Bat-Signal. Boston could totally beat Gotham up and steal its lunch money, but I digress. Anyway, Batman, who apparently also hasn’t faced Gotham in a panic under a deadline of mayhem and disorder (*cough* *cough* *The Cult* *Court of The Owls* *War Games* *No Man’s Land* *Every Joker story written since 1989*), sees that he is facing an antagonist with trained minions, a dastardly plan and a personal grudge against him (*cough* *cough* *Every Batman story ever*)… and chucks his normal M. O. to hunt down magical armor, untested exoskeletons and experimental drugs… despite the fact that when Batman faced Talia in Son of The Demon, he was able to subdue her using only his penis. Anyhoo, in the meantime, Nightwing, Red Robin, Knight and Ranger are hunting down The Headmistress (from the Batman: Leviathan one-shot) only to find she might not be the enemy she seems to be…

…and then there’s that ending.

Let’s start off with the good in this issue, and despite my heavy layering of snark, there is some good stuff here. The opening with Azrael quoting a version of Nostradamus that includes talk of “[judgment by] the Great Joker,” and the hero’s “brother [who] becomes bright red,” followed by Ras Al Ghul playing chess with himself and having the dark knight take the red king, was a nifty little bit of parallelism. And I dug the concept – a fairly obvious one, when you think about it, but not one that I would necessarily throw out on a sober morning – that the Al Ghuls would plant bugs on Jason Todd before they put his body into the Lazarus Pit. And I am interested in seeing how The Headmistress, who as I recall from Batman Leviathan from a year ago was a pretty bad-seeming person, plays into the final battle. So there are some things to like in this issue.

But hoo boy, it has some problems. Such as the Gotham P. D., under the leadership of Jim Gordon, suddenly turning on Batman to the point of putting up “Batman: Wanted” posters on walls almost bigger than Shep Fairey’s “Andre The Giant Has A Posse” paintings. Now, I will grant that my reading of the Gotham P. D. and public officials folding like Danny Bonaduce at the Celebrity World Series of Poker is somewhat colored by living in Boston, who two weeks ago responded to a mad bomber on the loose by saying, “Okay, free day off thanks to the lockdown! We’ll drink and watch the news while you cops taser that fuckstick,” but it is also colored by years and years of reading Batman comics. Comics where the Gotham cops have seen Batman restore order after earthquakes and gang wars and cults and Joker Fish. So to see everyone turn on Batman to save their own skins? It feels a little… well, it feels a little pussy, frankly. It’s an unearned capitulation, and I had a hard time believing it.

And then there’s that ending. Which is so on-the-nose and clearly a case of Grant Morrison taking the wrong sentence literally that it deserves a facepalm:

Look: I can live with the idea of Batman using an untested exoskeleton (I saw it in The Dark Knight Returns), and I can live with the idea of Batman using magical armor to protect himself, particularly when it comes from the guy that took over as Batman when his spine was busted by a marketing gimmick – I mean, Bane. Hell, I can even live with the idea of Batman using Kirk Langstron’s Man-Bat formula to give himself an extra edge in a terrible battle. But what I can’t live with is the use of that formula, combined with Frank Miller’s “Father, I shall become a bat,” words and a tribute to David Mazzucchelli’s visuals from the same scene, to turn the concept of Batman using the formula as some kind of destiny. It feels like Morrison being clever for its own sake, and further, it makes the other weapons that he uses feel like a dodge to obfuscate the fact that he’s being twee clever with the Man-Bat formula to make “I shall become a bat” literal. Not to beat a dead horse, but this really feels like a plot point that a bunch of drunken college undergrads came up with over a game of Shadowrun. It is a fanboy, “You know what would be cool?” moment, and it simply doesn’t work.

For the umpteenth time, Chris Burnham’s art looks like Frank Quitely’s. Everything looks puffy and soft (including the six of 20 pages done by Jason Masters and Andrei Bressan, which generally look close enough to Burnham’s I needed to check the credits page to remember that Burnham didn’t do the whole book), with a bunch of fine-detail lines to accentuate the puffy and soft bits. There are some good images here – some panels of Batman swinging in shadow and hanging off the side of buildings are pretty impressive, and that panel of Batman in partial costume and armor, slumped in a chair like Bruce Wayne in Batman: Year One was a decent homage – but whether or not you like this art will, as always, come down to how much you like Quitely’s.

There is some good stuff in Batman Incorporated #10, but it is all surrounded by the assumption that Gotham, faced with a terrorist, would go to pieces so fast that Metropolis would be hit by the shrapnel, and that we should consider Batman using a performance enhancing drug as an epic, prophecy-fulfilling moment. The problem is that, to me, both of those assumptions are simply wrong. And that wrongness colored my perception of the rest of the issue. There is some good stuff in this book, but not enough to overcome its weaknesses.

It’s okay… but whether or not you think its good will hinge on how excited you get about Batman really becoming a bat. And if that does excite you, well, you’re probably high, in which case you should just look at the cover where that give up the ending, and save yourself the three bucks for another pinner.