Batman Incorporated #6 Annotations

Page 4 - A trimmed down version of the Alex Ross Batmobile armoured suit from Kingdom Come that's appeared a few places since then, most recently in The Brave and The Bold cartoon. Are these robots? Bruce Wayne has four giant Batman robots as personal bodyguards. I wonder if Denny O'Neil can even get through an issue of this stuff.

Page 5 - Gotham has another corrupt Mayor, as usual, after the last crooked one was taken out in the Batman and Robin Must Die arc. Who keeps electing these guys? Sebastian Hady first appeared in Tony Daniel's Batman #693 and has appeared in pretty much all of the Bat titles since then. After reading about him on the interweb I think that might have been him in Batman and Robin, though his attendance at that particular criminal Mardi Gras seems to have gone unpunished.

The body being pecked apart by seagulls is Comics Alliance's Chris Sims. Well done Chris! You made it into a Batman comic... as a decomposed corpse...

Its nice to see that Bruce still takes time out from his globe trotting jaunts to solve a few mysteries for his buddies. I partiularly like that he's given Comissioner Gordon a 'secret' badge under his lapel. Is Morrison trying to start some sort of geek fashion thing off here?

Chris Burnham, as with all the artists Morrison's worked with over the last few months of two Batmen, does an excellent job of distinguishing between the smiling Dick and the scowling Bruce.

Page 7 - The first of the three segues that annoyed arch Batmannnotator David Uzumeri. Whatever Bruce just told Tim, we're not going to be party to it for a while yet.

Its nice to see Tim Drake getting a bit of face time here, he's been well under the radar in Morrison's run as a whole, though every time he appears I'd like to see him more. Not enough to buy his comic mind, but a bit more regular like.

The Outsiders, from left to right; Looker, Metamorpho, Freight Train, Katana and Halo. Formed way back in 1983's Brave and the Bold #200 by Batman as he felt the JLA weren't proactive enough, they were originally a buch of non-team players lumped together in a team book. Created in the wake of the massive sucess of the New Teen Titans and Chris Claremont's X-Men, and never escaping their long shadow, the Outsiders bargain basement soap opera antics have resulted in no less than five cancelled ongoing series' over the last twenty five years, the most recent coming just this month.

Using them as an international, undercover branch of Batman's operation has been done a couple of times before; once under Judd Winick's widely lambasted tenure with Dick Grayson at their head and again by Pete Tomasi during his short spell on the book. Tomasi even had them operating for Batman against an international super terror organisation that only Batman knew about. This was immediately after R.I.P. though, so the contact man at Wayne Manor was a beret sporting Alfred. Fetching.

Perennial cannon fodder, three of the five Outsiders shown here have died at least once before. Given Bruce's comment to Dick and Damian later in the issue I've got my money on at least one of them to be killed (again) in the forthcoming war agianst Leviathan. Morrison already has a history of killing Metamorpho, or rather rendering him inert, as he did in JLA #1 from 1997.

Page 8 - The Buddhist Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara has ten thousand eyes, one each in his his ten thousand hands, possibly tying Leviathan in with the Ten Eyed Men from Nanda Parbat. Avalokiteshvara's name is most often translated from Sanskrit as either Observer of the Sounds of the World or Contemplator of Self-Mastery. That last one seems like a good fit for Bruce Wayne, might he have some mysterious unknown relationship to Leviathan?

Batman debriefs the US agents of Batman Inc. before heading out on his international jaunt. On the computer screen in the centre of the room is the 'virtual face' of Oracle and on the far right is the Huntress, both currently appearing in the Birds of Prey series.

Mtamba is a city in Tanzania, not a country in itself as having a 'new president' would imply, or at least it is here in the real world. The similarly named Matamba was an independent African kingdom but is has been part of Angola since the late nineteenth century.

David Zavimbi is Batwing, the Batman of Africa who we first met in #5 and whom we'll see again later this issue. His name was revealed on Comics Alliance website a few days after the issue was published.

Batwing's costume is a modified version of the flying suits seen in development at Waynetech in Batman Incorporated #1, though his name and overall look are a homage to "The Batman Nobody Knows" from Batman #250, where Bruce Wayne takes a group of underpriveledged kids camping and they talk about what they think Batman is really like. The token black kid of the group re-imagines Batman as a sort of Blaxploitation Superman, "Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Shaft and Super-Fly all rolled into one!", with a jet pack and wings.

"The Batman Nobody Knows" was reprinted in The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told graphic novel.

I really hope Batwing's secret identity doesn't come from this documented 'Advanced Fee Fraud' email you might have received yourself -

"I hope my email meets you well. I am in need of your assistance. My name is Capt. David Savimbi, I was formerly working in the Engineering military unit in Luanda Angola, and I have about US$55,000,000.00(FIFTY FIVE MILLION UNITED STATES DOLLARS) with GOLD that I have secured in Ghana which I want to move out of the Africa. I need a good partner someone I can trust. It is real GOLD and legal money.

But I need your presence in Ghana in west of Africa so that we can sign a formal agreement before we commence the sending process to a bank of your choice. The most important thing is that can I trust you?

Once the funds/GOLD get to you, you take your 50% out and keep our own 50%. If you are interested I will furnish you with more details so that you can make arrangment to come to Africa and meet with me.

But the whole process is simple and we must keep a low profile at all times.

Waiting for your urgent response.

Regards,

Capt. David Savimbi"

Really Grant? Wow... I guess all the consternation about only one Batman for Africa being racist wasn't enough...

The second 'we all know but you don't know' segue of the issue..

Page 9 - The 'Dick is always eating/drinking' theme appears again as Bruce hits the Comic Book Resources message boards.

Page 10 - The conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories. "Yeah, but that's what they want you to think...".

Alex DeLarge is the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange. His comment about 'Victims Inc.' is a reference to a charity Bruce Wayne set up in 1969's Batman #217, a watershed issue by Frank Robbins that saw Dick Grayson leave Gotham for Hudson University, effectively ending the original Batman and Robin partnership after thirty years. If that wasn't enough, this issue also had Bruce Wayne leaving Wayne Manor to go live in the Penthouse at the Wayne Foundation building, where he would stay until 1983's Batman #389. Batman #217 was reprinted in Morrison's obscure Batmanalia Bible Batman: From the Thirties to the Seventies, along with a whole host of other stories referenced during his run.

Page 11 - Any guesses for who's not going to survive? Everybody knows that Dan Didio hates Dick Grayson. and his death has already been kinda sorta 'foretold' in Batman #666. Maybe Damian himself; with Morrison moving on in the next couple of years maybe he wants to take his Robin with him. Definitely at least one of, if not all of, The Outsiders though.

Page 12 - Though Alfred has, in past continuity, been a World war II veteran surely that can't be the case now?! If not WWII then maybe The Falklands? Bit of jungle warfare in Malaysia in the fifties or sixties maybe?

And again. Don't mess with Alfred. He'll mess you up.

Batman Incorporated's French representative, Nightrunner makes his debut in the series after being recruited in this year's Batman and Detective annuals, a two parter by David Hine, Kyle Higgins and Augustin Padilla.