Review: Batman Incorporated #1
Today I managed to carve out a lunch break and take it next door to my comics shop. What did I find in my bag? Holy cow, only, like, everything good: Young Avengers, X-Factor, Batman: The Return, Zatanna, Knight & Squire, American Vampire, the third volume of The Complete Bloom County and even the last copy they had of Return of the Dapper Men.
But what else did they have, and what did I thus spend lunch reading with tremendous glee? Batman Incorporated and oh my heavens it was fun.
Is there anything more straight-up fun than Batman and Catwoman working side by side?
Answer: no.
Here's what Grant Morrison figured out: that the accumulating cruft of Bruce Wayne's progressing psychosis had gotten boring. I wasn't reading any Batman-related comic books because I like the Batman of, say, a Batman Beyond or Batman: The Animated Series or the like: a Batman who is insanely devoted to his mission, yes, but not one that's a straight-up jerk. Every time I had opened a random Batman comic - which was not often, so my sample size might be small - I was surprised to find a Batman who was either a borderline sociopath, which entirely missed the point of the myth, or a Batman who was verging on the pre-verbal in his sheer craziness. Bruce Wayne's is not a healthy psyche, we know that. The interesting story isn't the one that continues to repeat that point ad infinitum, it's the one in which he grows or changes in some way. We have had enough of his former sidekicks and colleagues point out that he's not exactly a bundle of warm fuzzies for it to have sunk in by now... and for it to have gotten a little old. Batman had been put through the emotional wringer seven gajillion ways; the only new territory left was to turn him back into a human being, and that is what Grant Morrison gets.
This comic gives us the breathing room we've needed in the excellent, timely, beautiful and perhaps just slightly overwrought tale of Bruce Wayne's return to the land of the living. He's back in the suit, he's running around trading banter with Catwoman, he's on a case where he gets to do the detective thing and sometimes he runs around with his shirt off. All is right with the world. (Seriously, it's like Lou Ferrigno got Ryan Reynolds pregnant: hot and creepy all at once.)
It's very clever - and a little amusing in a completely OK way - that this is the issue that launches a story about Bruce Wayne identifying other Batman around the world because almost none of it is about the hero Bruce Wayne wants to invite to be the Batman of Japan. Rather, it's almost entirely Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle getting back into the groove of patter and fights and anonymous henchmen in themed masks. That's totally OK, though! What am I ready for at this point? I'm ready for Batman being Batman, trading jabs and jibes and being able to identify the acid used to melt someone's face and hands clean off.
The art for this book is gorgeous, too, and the frame of Catwoman sticking her tongue out in concentration as she cracks a safe while singing a song - is that Jethro Tull? I can almost identify it, but not quite - made me sit there and grin, staring at the page, like a complete idiot.
The bottom line on this book is that it doesn't have a lot to say, necessarily - no great philosophical stone to push back up the mountain like so many of Grant Morrison's books - except that it is the culmination of many of those books. Grant Morrison teased out all the essentials of the Batman myth and then cast them in a new light by rearranging the game so that those attributes were now applied to new players - Dick Grayson as Batman, Damian Wayne as Robin, the Joker as at times the questionable ally and at times the openly villainous rival - and while he did that he put Bruce Wayne through the phoenix-like death and rebirth necessary to view the world with new, more human eyes. That's done now, and he's fulfilling the social contract between author and reader by restoring order and reassuring us that this really is about Batman again. Things are not the way they were but they are in a form we can anticipate and to some degree predict. True to the mystic concepts behind so much of his work, Morrison has modified the Batman story so that it is cyclical rather than repetitive; the difference is subtle but so very important. Heck, is it any coincidence that one of the first pages suggests the Hanged Man card of the Tarot? It's a card that has complex and sometimes competing interpretations but it often signifies someone letting go of some of their control-freak micromanagement of a situation, surrendering to fate, being reborn and otherwise accepting that without change there is only death. Honestly, I'm not sure I can think of an interpretation that doesn't apply to the reborn Bruce Wayne. Man! I love this stuff!
Seriously, I can't wait to see where this goes. Morrison clearly loves to mine Batman's history for wackiness that can be interestingly repurposed. We've had everything from Zur-En-Ahr to Knight & Squire and the "Batmen of All Nations" thing; I can't wait to see what he pulls out of the attic and presents to us next. There are reasons not to like the last, oh, four or five years of Batman comics, yes. I will readily acknowledge that. What I think is true regardless of one's subjective reaction to the content, however, is that this is an era of the Batman myth that will be talked about by comics fans for many, many years to come.
Klarion
Posted to Review on 18 November 2010
· Comments (2)
Other stuff like this: Batman, Bruce Wayne, Grant Morrison
Funny how everyone's picked up on the tonal shift in this book, but this was the only write-up I've read that praised it for what it does. Sweet job, Klarion.
Thanks! So, I take it other people are wishing it were grittier? I don't see how it could have gotten any grittier. I'm not sure the hardware store sells that grade of sandpaper.