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Review: Batman Incorporated #7

By | June 30th, 2011
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Written by Grant Morrison
Illustrated by Chris Burnham

Man-of-Bats and his protégé, Red Little Raven, continue to aid the Dark Knight in tracking down a shadowy, sophisticated killer. Will these two members of The Club of Heroes become the newest additions to BATMAN INCORPORATED? Or will they die before they can even be offered the chance?

Let’s head out west to see what the Lakota Batman himself, Man-of-Bats, is up to. Why is this important? Why is it even worth reading? How does this get us any closer to ‘Batman does stuff?’ Jeez, calm down, it’s after the jump.

Batman Incorporated has a pretty simple core concept: Batman, everywhere, all the time. Batmen, that is; Batmen and Batwomen, to get even more accurate about it. After five issues of somewhat leisurely globe-strolling, meeting the Batmen of Japan and Argentina, the sixth issue launched around the globe at warp speed. Europe. Asia. Africa. Batmen everywhere. Here, in issue seven, Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham dial back the pace and focus in on just one neo-Batman: Man-of-Bats (and his sidekick Little Raven), the Batman of the Lakota reservations. The Batmen of the world take after Bruce Wayne — often suave gentlemen of taste and refined electronic gizmos. Man-of-Bats is the other end of the spectrum: running a low-budget father-and-son crusade out of a crappy car and a shack, devoid of any trace of typical superhero glamour. Man-of-Bats is the bat most amongst men.

This different kind of Batman — the, shall we say, “endearingly kind of crap” vigilante model — is not just an effective counterpoint to the pervading sense of Orwellian oppression that might otherwise characterize a maneuver like Batman Inc., it’s also a reflection of the threat that Big Bat Brother has been created to fight. Leviathan, the uber-conspiracy that Batman Inc. is up against, is an entirely different kind of super-crime than we might expect. Leave it to Grant Morrison to sneak an almost grimly realistic note into the flashiest of comic ideas: as we saw last issue, Leviathan recruits and indoctrinates children, but here we’re shown the way that they infiltrate poor, neglected segments of the population (like the reservations). This is the direct opposite of Morrison’s last big Bat-threat, the Black Glove, who were a wealthy, influential, phenomenally corrupt ruling class. Real terrorist organizations aren’t going to go to Harvard to recruit, they’re going to go to the slums, and if they pitch it right and the people are angry enough, it’ll work (of course, this being a comic book, spearmint mind-control drugs are involved).

Chris Burnham is left to walk the tightrope separating the land and the sky here. Man-of-Bats’s story is one that requires a grounded touch, and yet Batman Inc. vs. Leviathan needs someone with imagination and style. Burnham is capable of both, even if I find myself needing a bit more time to warm to his style. I’ve seen some of his pre-Batman stuff here and there, and he’s definitely an artist who’s yet to fully realize his potential — but he gets closer and closer (even if it’s an increment measured in inches) with each newer piece I read. I find myself picking out what I presume are his influences as I read, but what strikes me the most is that he’s an artist who wouldn’t be out of place in 2000 AD — which only makes sense, considering that “Batman’s endearingly kind of crap counterpart in what one character calls ‘America’s third world'” is the sort of story that would fit better there than in what we’ve come to expect from the DC Universe.

Speaking of the DC Universe, it’s hard not to read this as a conscious expansion of that entity’s parameters. Like the Marvel 1993 Annuals (or any other “new characters! seriously!” initiative), this issue of Batman Incorporated — like most of the others — reads less like a comic book unto itself and more like a series bible for some new Bat-spinoff waiting in the wings. Batman is traveling the world, commissioning new Batmen wherever he goes and leaving them to it; Grant Morrison is doing the same thing, scattering these new characters and ideas left and right, seemingly to no end other than to see what other people do with them later. He’s a writer who takes great pride in that sort of thing, but it also keeps this from being a proper comic about Bruce Wayne — he’s very much a guest star in Man-of-Bats’s story, there to assure us that it all fits into the Leviathan mega-arc. Man-of-Bats and Little Raven stay in the spotlight throughout.

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What’s most fascinating about this issue isn’t the plot — Man-of-Bats and Little Raven go about their business until Batman ropes them into the Leviathan thing, with a fight against mind-controlled goons for good measure — but the way that Morrison constructs entire characters from stray moments and lines of dialogue. A more hackish writer would belabor the point of Man-of-Bats working in a hospital by day and feed us congealed blobs of internal monologue about why he does what he does. In Batman Incorporated #7, we’re shown, not told. An entire biography could be put together for Man-of-Bats from just 20 pages: an Iraq vet operating with the sanction of Batman, committed to his people even when it means going up against traditional authority (we’re shown a newspaper article of Man-of-Bats getting arrested for smashing up a liquor store as part of a protest), and driven to help whoever he can, even if it leaves him ignorant of his son’s dissatisfaction with the lifestyle. (Little Raven is, in and of himself, a neat twist on the typical sidekick figure: he’s doing this because Man-of-Bats is his dad, not because he particularly wants to or enjoys it. It’s a touch that renders him more human than any of Batman’s proteges.)

That storytelling approach is reflective of the entirety of Morrison’s Batman run thus far: a big picture hewn entirely from tiny details. (See also: Final Crisis, for an even more cosmic-myopic scale.) Reading the whole thing month to month, it’s easy to take these small points for what they are, especially when so many comic books offer them as filler space or dead air. (See also: this week’s issue of Wolverine: The Best There Is, where Emma Frost and the Beast discuss the X-Men’s penises for an entire page; I can almost guarantee that this will not affect the main plotline underway.) A molecule isn’t an end unto itself: it’s a building block of something bigger — another building block, and so on, and so on. Taking Batman Incorporated on its own terms means reading observantly, and yet the demands aren’t strenuous. Even then: read on its own, this is a great introduction to Man-of-Bats. Read as part of Batman Incorporated, it’s a worthy chapter in a series quickly gaining speed. Read as part of Morrison’s Batman run, it’s an interesting bend in the path now that we’re clear of the thorny Black Glove turf. Read as part of modern Batman continuity… and so on, and so on. Call it fractal storytelling. Now that’s Grant Morrison.

Final Verdict: 9.0 – Buy


Patrick Tobin

Patrick Tobin (American) is likely shaming his journalism professors from the University of Glasgow by writing about comic books. Luckily, he's also written about film for The Drouth and The Directory of World Cinema: Great Britain. He can be reached via e-mail right here.

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