Ah, the penultimate issue of “Batman Incorporated” #12 — ‘Fatherless,’ in which an enraged Batman takes the fight directly to the face of Leviathan for a climactic battle against the Heretic before finally meeting Talia in battle for the finale next issue. It was an emotional rampage, one packed to the brim with action unfolding as Morrison and Burnham brought to a close just about every aspect of the epic Batman saga Morrison had been weaving. It tied off loose ends, dangled a few notes in front of us and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that if anyone was right to tell this final story in Morrison’s Batworld, it was Chris Burnham.
Why? Well, David Henderson talked about it in his 9.8 earning review of the issue but it was like a dam broke:
From the epic, rain soaked opening pages of Batman and his colony of bats descending upon Gotham City to the quiet confrontation between Talia and Bruce that closes the issue, Burhman really nails the atmosphere of the issue. The battle between Batman and the Heretic is heavy and frantic, but filled with a passion that nicely compliments Morrison’s writing and shows Batman in a way we’ve never seen him before. Batman has always been defined by his rage as child having lost his parents, but Burhman and Morrison show him here as a parent who has lost his son. While Bruce may have mourned Damian in the other Bat-titles, here he is angry and wants revenge. Burnham shows that during the battle with the Heretic making the fight mean something beyond simply forcing a fight for the sake of it to build to a climax.
So today, as the second part of our Artist August feature on Burnham, we’re going to show you the opening sequence of the issue from thumbnails to final pages
First up, the thumbnails. They’re loose here, but already key shots are defined that stay through to the final inks.
Next come the inks from Burnham, as the page begins to take form. You can see that most survived from the thumbnails outside of a few tweaks, the camera being pulled back in a few instances and the splash page becoming even more dense with bats as Batman flies in via the shade of the hell he brings.
Then we add some colors from Nathan Fairbairn, a long-time collaborator of Burnham’s here. Fairbairn really brings out the atmosphere from Burnham’s inks; where the inks were rather concrete in the contrast of blacks to whites (not being literal here), Fairbairn brings out different and moody angles of Burnham’s already established work. The looming skyline becomes that much more menacing, the descent of the bats and the Bat Man that much more electric and terrifying.
And last but not least, some letters to top it all off.
