Batman Incorporated #4 Annotations

BATMAN INCORPORATED #4

The Kane Affair

DC Comics, April 2011, Color, 32pgs, $2.99

Written by GRANT MORRISON ; Art by CHRIS BURNHAM; Cover by J.H. WILLIAMS III; 1:25 Variant cover by YANICK PAQUETTE

Superstar writer Grant Morrison and artist Yanick Paquette have sent The Dark Knight on a trip to Japan and Argentina, but now Batman's taking a brief breather back in his home base of Gotham City for a team-up with Batwoman! And don't miss the first issue of BATWOMAN's new monthly series, on sale this month!

Commentary

As with the previous and subsequent issues, the solicitation text doesn't do a very good job of summarising the actual contents as Batman doesn't return to Gotham for a team with Batwoman (whose 'new monthly series', incidentally, is currently set to be released in September 2011), instead remaining in Argentina, locked in a duel to the death with Gaucho where we left him last issue. Both the current Batwoman, Kate Kane, and the original Batwoman, Kathy Kane, do play an important part in the issue however, filling in some of the gaps as the Doctor Dedalus/Spyral plot picks up pace.

Chris Burnham steps in for Yanick Paquette who returns next issue. Burnham does a fantastic job on both the present day action and the lengthy flashback scenes, ably abetted by the Benday Dots stylings of colourist Nathan Fairbairn. I didn't like Burnham's pages in Batman and Robin #16 at all (though I was, fortunately, significantly in the minority) but he totally wins me over with this issue, the cartoonish Quietly-isms coming across as welcome homage rather than pale imitation. Burnham's work on Batman Incoporated up to now leaves me in no doubt that the proposed closing twelve issue arc, Batman: Leviathan, is in the best possible hands.

Annotations

Cover - J.H. Williams III gives us a dynamic up-shot of the team-up we don't actually see in the issue itself, backed with what's presumably the Gotham City seal, though this particular version of it doesn't seem to have any provenance. 1635 was given as the date of the founding of Gotham in Alan Moore's Swamp Thing #53, whose potted history of the city has been revisited many times over Morrison's run.

Paquette gives us a more pedestrian but still dynamic face-off cover with a spectral Kathy Kane (deliberately coloured to suggest a link with the new Batwoman?) symbolically watching over the fisticuffs between Batman and El Gaucho.

Page 1 - Our first encounter with Doctor Dedalus in the present day after his flashback appearance last issue. He's named for the mythical Greek engineer Daedalus, meaning 'cunning worker', the architect of King Minos' Labyrinth on Crete, where his Queen's monstrous son the Minotaur was kept prisoner. Daedalus also built the wooden cow that the Queen, Pasiphae, used to mate with a glorious white bull sent to Minos by the god Poseidon, subsequently leading to the Minotaur's birth. Finally, he appears in the tale of Icarus, his son, who, using wings built by his father, flies too close to the sun and perishes when the wax holding his wings together melts. All the myths that feature Daedulus share a common theme of 'think of the long-term consequences, lest you do more harm than good'. The spelling of Daedalus as Dedalus is a nod to the character Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce's modernist novels Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses.

Daedalus' inescapable Labyrinth was conquered by the Greek hero Theseus, who had come to Crete to slay the Minotaur. Theseus unspooled a golden thread given to him by Ariadne, the King's daughter, as he entered the Labyrinth and following it to find the way out again. Ariadne is often associated with spiders, partly due to confusion with the similar sounding Arachne who was turned into a spider by the goddess Minerva, also from your Classical Greek myths, and partly due to her association with the web-like twine. I thought it was the name of the spider in Charlotte's Web, but the spider's name turns out to be... Charlotte. Strangely I'm far from the only person on the internet that has that inaccurate memory. Weird...

For the less classically minded amongst you, Christopher Nolan's Inception is largely built around a riff on Theseus and the Minotaur, with DiCaprio as Theseus and his crazy wife as the Minotaur, though in Nolan's film Ariadne both builds and helps the hero escape from the Labyrinth.

The Oroboro keychain we see here is the perfect accessory for the Oroboro ring Scopiana had last issue.

This is the first appearance for seemingly generic thug Johnny Valentine. The Marines Batwoman is talking about were en route to the Falklands to interrogate Dedalus, as we'll see next issue.

Kate Kane, the 'new' Batwoman, was, contrary to what Wikipedia says, probably created by Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III (along with a generous helping hand from an unused Alex Ross Batgirl redesign) and first appeared in 2006's 52 #6, co-written by Rucka, Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns and Mark Waid. She's already shown up in Morrison's run during the 'Blackest Knight' arc in Batman and Robin, though this is her first 'proper' meetng with Bruce as Batman. Her familial links, if any, to the original Batwoman, Kathy Kane, or indeed to Bruce Wayne's mother, aren't very clear at the moment.

Colonel Jacob Kane, Batwoman's father and military field support, functions as our in-story Wikipedia, telling Batwoman all about the Ouroboros and letting us know where we are...

...Kane's Kollosal Karnival! Kathy Kane's (travelling?) carnival, originally a post-retirement gig after her stint as Batwoman, was first shown (and named as the unfortunately acronymed K.K.K.) in Bob Rozakis and Dick Ayers' Freedom Fighters #14 from 1978.

Page 2-3 - The first Batwoman, Kathy Kane, was introduced in 1956's Detective Comics #233. She was usually portrayed as a competent superheroine, but largely involved in the super-hero game primarily as a way to snag the Batman as a husband. After Julius Schwartz brought the 'New Look' to Batman in 1964, she was, along with Ace the Bat Hound, Bat Mite and stories involving Batman battling alien warlords, quietly consigned to the continuity dumpster, emerging only to be murdered off-panel by a brainwashed Bronze Tiger and the League of Assassins in 1979's Detective Comics #485, adding cheap gravitas to Denny O'Neil's ongoing saga of Ra's Al Ghul.

During Morrison's run on Batman, he's gradually re-introduced many of the more out-there, pre-Julius Schwartz concepts of the early mythos, most quietly ignored since the the fifties and early sixities. After being erased from existence by 1985's Crisis On Infiite Earths, Kathy Kane returned to mainstream DC continuity in 'Batman R.I.P.', appearing in a couple of flashbacks there and during 'Last Rites'

Nathan Fairbairn does an excellent job with the colouring in these flashback sequences, using Benday Dots to subtly send us back to four-colour comics of an era long gone.

Agent 33 is a pre-Gaucho Don Santiago Vargas.

Morrison, who has already done a lot of heavy lifting clarifying and reorganising Batman's family tree, recasts Kathy as the widow of Bruce Wayne's maternal uncle, Nathan Kane, a new piece of the Wayne-Kane family jigsaw.

Page 4 - Agent Zero, head of Spyral is, of course, also known as Doctor Dedalus. We first saw the familiar Spyral calling card last issue as The Knight was taken away from the incident at the lighthouse.

Kathy, mounting the Wall of Death on the day of her husband's funeral, is almost a living embodiment of the duende described last issue, embracing life to the fullest whilst always aware of the lingering presence and power of Death. Its easy to see why Batman and Gaucho fall so hard for her.

We last saw Batman's maternal grandparents Roderick and Martha Kane in The Return of Bruce Wayne #5, hiring a time-travelling amnesiac Batman to investigate his own mother's murder. Got to love these Grant Morrison comics... Roderick died at the end of that issue but Martha was still left standing. Her demise remains unrecorded.

Crest Hill is the affluent area on the outskirts of Gotham City where both the Kane family estate and Wayne Manor are located.

Page 5 - The reveal of Kathy's hitherto unknown maiden name, Webb, immediately hints at a link between Kathy and Dedalus, with his multitude of spider and web metaphors.

Kathy's pre-Batwoman back story, told here for the first time, recalls influential avant-garde film-maker Maya Deren, whose book and documentary film on Voodoo, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, has oft been cited by Morrison as a big influence on his work. Indeed, Morrison wrote an article about her, 'In Search of Maya Deren', in issue three of Rapid Eye magazine. Deren, like Kathy Kane, was a strong, fiercly independent woman whose short films ushered in a new age of American avant-garde cinema. She was married three times, to Gregory Bardacke, a socialist activist; Alexander Hackenschmied, a film maker and Teiji Ito, a jazz musician. Mirroring the Kathy-Bruce relationship, Ito was significantly younger than her when they began their relationship.

The titles of Kathy's "award-winning underground films" reference the Dedalus myth discussed earlier (Ariadne's Sewing Machine), Deren's seminal Meshes of the Afternoon (Plague Afternoon) and the shifting identities theme running throughout the story and this issue in particular (Mirrororrim, also, like Oroboro, palindromic). The book of poetry, Innana Unbound, recalls Shelley's play Prometheus Unbound and the titular Sumerian goddess of sexual love and war. Innana also brings to mind diarist and author of 'erotic literature' Anais Nin, another strong, creative woman.

"It was one last assignment, that was all", along with her comment to Agent 33 about "another intelligence agency" on page three, suggests that there may be another, as yet unrevealed element to Kathy's backstory, involving covert espionage work at some point in her past.

Lew Moxon, according to his first appearance in Detective Comics #235, 'The First Batman!', was the man who hired Joe Chill to murder Bruce Wayne's parents when the elder Wayne handed Moxon over to the police after treating him under duress for a gunshot wound, the same story that introduced Thomas Wayne's proto-Batman costume worn in Morrison's run by Dr. Simon Hurt, beginning in 'R.I.P.'

Page 6 - ...And we're back in the present day where we left off at the end of last issue, inside the Casa D'Oro with Batman and El Gaucho caught in the midst of a diabolical deathtrap set by El Sombrero and Scorpiana. The Kathy Kane connection rears its head here too.

Page 7 - El Sombrero's "I shall become a monster of villainy..." speech echoes the words Bruce Wayne uttered after his totemic encounter that inspired him to become Batman, "I shall become a bat..", already referenced many times in the run up to this point.

The 'Damrung' security camera is a shout out (probably by artist Chris Burnham) to Morrison's Final Crisis #1, where the Human Flame filmed the Martian Manhunter's death on a camera phone manufactured by them. Its named for the German Dammerung, meaning twilight, a good fit for Final Crisis' apocalyptic tone. Burnham also slipped it into the sequence where Batman tries to find where Alfred is being held captive in Batman and Robin #16

"A young man named Agent-33 delivered Mrs. Kane to her rendezvous with the Reaper.". Prior to this story, Kathy was believed murdered by agents of the Sensei (as mentioned by Batman on the following page), a random murder seemingly designed just to piss Batman off, in 1979's Detective Comics #485. Dennis O'Neill, writer of that story and longtime Bat head-honcho, essentially killed her because he didn't like the character rather than to serve any sort of narrative purpose.

Page 8 - These are the chalk outlines of the three Marines sent to interrogate Dedalus at his lighthouse prison on the Falkland Islands and murdered en-route by Johnny Valentine. We'll find out a little more about them next issue.

The Braille letters O.R.B., like the Casa D'Oro and Sombrero's subsequent comment, "B for the Hebrew letter Beth, meaning a house" are all oblique clues to Dedalus' secret weapon Oroboros.

Page 9 - Who is Johnny Valentine speaking to here? Scorpiana?

The flaming eyeball on the front of the ghost train recalls Morrison's evil Walt Disney meets Big Brother, Mickey Eye from the Seaguy mini-series'.

The woman in the Batwoman costume is kidnapped and brainwashed Olympic gymnast, trained to hold her own against Batwoman by Scorpiana, as revealed in issue five. This first panel of her beckoning Kate Kane further into the ghost train is a masterful piece of work by Chris Burnham.

Page 10 - On the wall behind the sewing machine, the Bat logos Kathy has pinned to her wall are, from top to bottom, the logo on Batman's costume from the first Tim Burton movie, the Bat logo from the '66 TV series and the Bat logo from Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

"DCU and CBA Present Winner" on the theatre marquee refers to a charity auction, held some months before this issue was published, organised by the UK's Comic Book Alliance organisation. The prize was to appear in this issue and be saved by Batman. The winner was Aldrin Stoja, who paid £1,127 for the privilege.

Page 11-12 - The sequence running over page eleven and the top half of page twelve is a retelling of Batwoman's first appearance in 1956's Detective Comics #233, with some small changes to the scenario and dialogue "Nobody can wear a Batman costume in Gotham but me!" was, in the original, a reference to an actual Gotham City law (!) that no-one is permitted to steal Batman's schtick.

The bottom panel of page twelve is also a retelling of a scene from the same issue, though rejigged a little so as not to offend our twenty first century eyes with its dismissive sexism.

Page 13 - 'Briggs' is from 1957's Batman #105, 'The Challenge of Batwoman', an amnesiac criminal mistaken by Batwoman to be Batman in a typically convoluted Silver Age secret identity farce. We also saw this kiss as the Lump was probing Batman's memories in the first part of 'Last Rites' from Batman #682.

The scene that follows with Robin and Ace the Bat-Hound (!) is a new but perfectly logical addition to the story, as Robin demonstrates his frustration at being squeezed out of the Dynamic Duo after Batwoman's appearance. There's a little meta-textual irony here as well, as the whole purpose of Batwoman's introduction was to diffuse the homosexual undertones of Bruce and Dick's relationship in light of Dr Frederick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent book that led to both Congressional hearings on the influence of comic-books on juvenile deliquency and the founding of the Comics Code.

Dick Grayson, who grew up in the circus, linked Mr Toad and the Circus of the Strange to Professor Pyg's carnival hideout in the first arc of Batman and Robin precisely by spotting their use of traditional circus slang.

The 'bogus Batgirl' Dick refers to is Betty (or Bette) Kane, originally Bat-Girl with a hyphen. She was Kathy's neice and occassional sidekick, and is currently also sidekick to the new Batwoman, though her appearances in other titles and Morrison's 'it all happened' approach don't necessarily match up all that well in her case.

Page 14-15 - That's Betty on the back of the bike with Kathy. The space-monster hallucination is an updated retelling of 1963's 'Prisoner of Three Worlds' from Batman #153, with this particular scene also referenced in Batman #682. Burnham makes it considerably scarier than the original thanks to his Euro sci-fi stylings. David Uzumeri made an excellent spot that the El Eternauta-homage spaceman is wearing an Oroboros symbol on the front of his suit suggesting, like Dr Hurt before him, Dedalus' influence over Batman's formative years may be far greater than we've been led to believe so far. Chris Burnham confirmed in his Mindless Ones nterview that this panel detail was directly from Morrison's script and not an 'easter egg' added by Burnham.

More spider references ("Otto Netz, the Spinner of Snares") as Agent Zero, aka Dedalus, briefs Kathy from an office straight out of Jim Steranko's nightmares. All of the scenes in which Doctor Dedalus appears through issue six go to great pains to not show any detail of his face. A deliberate move to stop the reader from identifying him?

It seems Dedalus' plottings against Batman stretch back a long time, though his pseudo-blackmailing Kathy with the revelation that she's his daughter seems some pretty weak sauce. Really, what would it matter to Batman if Dedalus did tell him? Its not like Kathy knew, or is an unrepentant Nazi master criminal herself...

Page 16-17 - Batman's 'alarming atavistic transformation' came in 1964's Batman #162 'The Batman Creature', where Batman is sent a few notches down the evolutionary ladder and transformed into an ape. This issue saw the last appearance of Kathy Kane as a 'current' member of the Bat Family. The Batman title moved into the Julius Schwartz-edited 'New Era' with #164, adding the yellow oval around the Bat symbol, a dynamic new artist in Carmine Infantino and losing almost all of the extended Bat-family the book had featured up until that period. All of Kathy's appearances beyond this issue, were, as the story hints here, post Batwoman's retirement, though Morrison's elegant in-story reasoning is all new, in the 'real' comics she just disappeared with no explanation for the following ten plus years.

Revisiting the Tango del Meurte we saw Batman and Scorpiana dance last issue, has led some to posit that Scorpiana is in fact Kathy Kane. That seems pretty unlikely given that its heavily hinted she was El Gaucho's lover as well as Bruce's and yet neither recognize Scorpiana as looking anything like her.

Burnham totally nails it for the umpteenth time this issue with the panel of Kathy walking out of Bruce's life dissolving into sketchy pencils, and then into nothing.

Page 18 - "Johnny Valentine plays for the winning team now!" More of Morrison's fantastic villainous sloganeering, as heavily featured courtesy of Lord Death Man in the first two issues of Batman Incorporated

More Labyrinth/Ariadne references from Colonel Kane, "Military Intel's a thread in the dark through this fog...".

'Meta' is a long-standing DC pseudo-science term meaning 'super-powered'; so 'Advanced Meta-Materials' essentially means super-powered stuff.

We'll meet The Hood, a character whose sole prior appearance was in three 1990's Shadow of the Bat issues, next issue. Its interesting that Kane's research into Oroboros should turn up a file on him though.

Page 19 - Presumably Batwoman recognizes the fake Kathy Kane as she's an Olympic gymnast, and not some other reason relating to the ongoing plots. Why Batwoman is 're-opening the Kathy Kane murder case' after chasing a hitman into the site of her former carnival and then fighting someone dressed in her outfit is a bit of a mystery. None of it really stacks up as any sort of 'evidence' that Kathy's death wasn't what it seemed in the first place. Though the chances of that being the case are pretty slim...

Page 20 - Presumably the three countries Sombrero is talking about are Great Britain, Argentina and the United States, and the war they'll be plunged into is something to do with what's happening in the Falklands.

Its not very clear what Batman does here to 'beat' El Sombrero's trap, though I suppose after Morrison has spent the last six years minutely detailing how amazing Bruce Wayne is we should probably just accept that he does and move on.

Page 21 - Snow, in literary symbolism, symbolizes death and rebirth, its coming an ominous portent for Batman's arrival next issue. We've yet to learn the significance of Dedalus' Cloak of Smoke.

The Maestro Sombrero is referring to is presumably Dedalus, who shares Sombrero's vision to elevate the design and execution of the deathtrap to the High Art. The white noise filling the monitors that Batman has disabled is also called... snow.

"Most days it does not snow on cue." Echoing the first panel of the first page of this issue, Dedalus 'demonstrates' that he does indeed control the weather.

Its good to see the Batman '66 style cliffhanger 'narration' again, one of my favourite stylistic flourishes featured in Batman Incorporated.

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