Written by Grant Morrison
Illustrated by Scott ClarkWhen Waynetech’s launch of Interworld is plagued by a series of “virtual murders,” Batman teams up with Oracle to hunt down the culprit in a simulated environment that’s slowly collapsing into post-apocalyptic zombie-haunted chaos. A computer-generated Batman adventure that brings Dark Knight justice to a wild new frontier, to face a new and virulent menace. In a world of numbers, does everything have a price?
Blah blah Batman blah blah Grant Morrison blah blah 3D blah blah excellent blah blah prologue paragraph actual review after the blah.
So it ends — sort of. Batman Incorporated #8 is the “last issue” of Batman Incorporated, which only means anything until you recall that there’s a Batman/Batgirl one-shot coming sometime in the fall or winter, and then a whole year of what may well be Batman Incorporated: Re-Incorporated starting sometime next year. This isn’t an ending so much as a brief interruption of service, and yet as an ending, it works. Reviewing other issues of Batman Inc., I noted the pseudo-fractal nature of the storytelling, so of course it carries the gravity of a finale, even when it’s not. Hasty rewrite or happy accident, it’s all the same when dealing with the final product.
You’re reading this on a computer. If you’re not, then someone printed this off for you and gave it to you, or you printed it off yourself, both of which are kind of weird. So presumably you’re staring at a screen right now, interacting with me in the sense that I’m choosing to write this at you and you’re choosing to read it. But by the time you read this, I’ll have already written it; the mask of text hides the fact that you’re communicating with the past — holding a seance to speak with the ghost of my thoughts on a comic book. We are, appropriately enough, playing phone tag. But just imagine if you could have these interactions with more than just words. Imagine an immersive Google Street view where your feet feel the pavement below you, where breeze blows and the manholes actually stink. That’s Internet 3.0, according to Grant Morrison and Bruce Wayne, two forward-thinking individuals of note.
The secret shame of this issue is that it offers an idea whose scope is almost impossible to follow up on within 20 pages. Morrison’s Batman is undoubtedly a control freak — the Batman Can Beat Anyone If Prepared meme, largely incubated in Morrison’s JLA stories, hinges on Batman being unwilling to relinquish an ounce of faith toward chaos. Interworld is the sort of thing Bruce Wayne, traumatized boy soldier that he is, must have been coveting for years. A world that the Batman can manipulate, as easily as Superman bends steel or Flash ignores laws of physics — and there’s no shame in it, either, because he built this thing. This is the sort of thing that could offer insight into Batman’s psychological problems like few other scenarios could: what happens when the ultimate control freak achieves ultimate control? Another time, though, because this issue is about punching and sleuthing.
Well — more punching than sleuthing, truth be told. The idea of Wayne and Interworld’s investors being menaced by computer viruses and malware during their grand tour of the new paradigm is a clever enough spin on things, and it carries us through to the end nimbly. Still, this is a Bat-actioner dressed up in future-shock. If anything, it reminds me of John Wagner’s Judge Dredd, or Pat Mills’s Flesh — fantastic sci-fi ideas being thrown up, out, and around, mostly to keep things lively between Dredd’s arrests or various t-rex attacks. Grant Morrison can do that stuff in his sleep.
More interesting: Scott Clark’s artwork. Scott Clark started as one of the hired guns Image brought in when they formed studios; if memory serves, he was the first guy to illustrate StormWatch. He popped up a few years ago on some Psylocke thing, and his style had gotten a lot… sharper, sacrificing Image-era extremity or a sort of sanded-down, harder-edged Bad Girl style. Here, he’s veered entirely toward another path, working with 3D models. Now, a lot of artists work with 3D modeling — Mike Deodato seems to get a lot of mileage out of them these days, as does Brandon Peterson — but here Clark uses the models as ends to themselves. The gimmick — because let’s face it, in the context of this story, yes, it is a gimmick — works much better than John Van Fleet’s 3D pictures for Morrison’s semi-infamous prose Joker story a few years back, largely because Clark keeps the atmosphere and bleached-out unreality of Interworld consistent and fairly believable. (Check out Bruce Wayne’s stiff ‘loading dut-dut-dut’ pose as he tries to balance controlling both the Wayne and Batman avatars.)
Like I said before, it’s not a finale, but it is a finale. It pushes past the extant limitations of Batman as a whole — that is, his presence in the physical world, and all of his adventures taking place in that “real” imaginary structure. We’re also given a hell of a cliffhanger to push it all that much closer to the “real” end (as if anything ever does here). As a last rush of air from this leg of the Morrison Bat-epic, it’s a fleeting but profound moment: Batman just conquered the fucking Internet. Your move, creeps.
Final Verdict: 8 / Onward and upward, Bat-believers
