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BATMAN INCORPORATED #8
Nightmares in Numberland
DC Comics, October 2011, Color, 32pgs, $2.99
Written by GRANT MORRISON ; Art by SCOTT CLARK; Cover by CHRIS BURNHAM; 1:25 Variant Cover by SCOTT CLARK
When 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?
Commentary
Commentary
And so, the final issue of Batman Incorporated. Originally solicited to run ten issues before DC's announcement of its line-wide reboot, the ninth and tenth issue will be combined into a one-shot entitled Batman: Leviathan Strikes, still unsolicited as of this issue's release but widely believed to be due for release in December 2011.
Though not intended as the final issue, Batman Incorporated #8 is perfectly servicable as a lead in to next year's Batman: Leviathan, containing as it does one of those great Morrison twists that no-one saw coming but seem pretty obvious in hindsight. In fairness to me and my fellow Batmannotators, the twist relies on a couple of nuggets of information that readers weren't aware of before this issue, but I'll get to that later in the annotations proper.
Morrison returns to the computer-generated well with another homage to Pepe Moreno's Batman: Digital Justice after the wonky art that accompanied Batman #663's 'The Clown At Midnight', finding a capable collaborator in Wildstorm alumnus Scott Clark. As is the usual routine with these things the preview art was received poorly, with many predicting the issue would be unreadable. Happily, I don't think that's the case here and Clark's computer modelling, while somewhat stiff and unusual in comparison to the hyper-stylised art prevalent in most of today's comics, does a good job not only relaying but complementing the story that Morrison is telling. Some folks are less enamoured however...
Annotations
Annotations
Cover - Chris Burnham delivers a heavily Tron-influenced wireframe cover - the body outline on the floor is a particularly nice touch - though it seems to have been comissioned before anyone had a good idea what the story was about beyond the 'locked room mystery' and virtual reality setting. Clark's computer-generated variant, while reflecting the style he employs inside, is a pretty stock image. I can't help but feel that Clark's cover is at least partly designed to recall the monstrously popular Batman: Arkham Asylum computer game, whose fans are, of course, many magnitudes greater in number than us comic-book readers these days.
Page 1 - 'Haptic' refers to the sense of touch, from the Greek haptikos, meaning "I fasten on to, I touch". Something of a giant step up from touch screens, haptic interfaces are designed to feedback so that the user 'feels' what is happening in the environment. As usual for Morrison, its technology that exists in a mostly theoretical state in the real world at the moment, but researchers at the University of Tokyo are working on applying haptic interfaces to holographic environments or projections, essentially aiming for what Bruce and company have already acheived here.
The blimp has been a common sight in Gotham City, even here in its virtual incarnation, since Batman: The Animated Series. Curiously, the advertising slogan, "Your news. Your way. Today." doesn't seem to refer to anything in either the DC Universe or the real one. Maybe Morrison is planning on dethroning Murdoch and his unholy bretheren after leaving Batman, and he's slipping the marketing slogans in here to make sure he secures the copyright.
The man at the window is Tanaka, a Japanese electronics billionaire and one of the potential investors in Waynetech's Internet 3.0. Despite his clear admiration for the concept, someone with less noble intentions and a giant axe to grind with Batman has got to him first...
"Virtual museums, department stores or schools." Of course we have all of that now with good old Internet 2.0 but the immersive experience Waynetech are offering is a whole different sport.
"The map and the territory are the same thing" A refutation of Polish philosopher, and founder of the General Semantics movement, Alfred Korzybski's quote, "The map is not the territory." Korzybski was acknowledged as an influence by, amongst many others, William Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson, and General Semantics centrel tenets, that we should become inwardly and outwardly quiet in order to percieve the world 'as-is' rather than as we perceive it through the limited filters of our nervous system and our languages, sound very Batman-esque.
The potential investors in panel four are, from left to right, the afformentioned Tanaka; Dr. Solomon, an asthmatic claustrophobe; the Chinese Chun Wei, who apparantly dabbles in a bit of anti-capitalist dystopian poetry ; Belle Bourgeois; Ari Zamaroff, a Russian billionaire and Mr. Velocet. None of them have appeared before and, unusually for Morrison, none of their names seem to be veiled references to some deeper hidden facet of the story. Velocet comes from Anthony Burgess' fictional Nadsat slang from A Clockwork Orange, and was adopted by moribund Britpop Johnny-Come-Lately's Campag Velocet in the late 90's. Campag Velocet's first album was called Bon Chic Bon Genre ('Good Style, Good Taste'), which I suppose you could link to the French Bourgeoisie if you were feeling that way out. Grasping at straws anyone?
Page 2 - Virtual Zombie terrorists, how de rigeur. The Worm Captain, making his debut here along with his cadaverous stooges, is a militarised computer virus. Given that Leviathan means 'writhing serpent', its not a huge jump from there to a worm.
Page 4 - Its a good job Bruce told everyone not to remove their headsets at the bottom of the previous page, giving the Worm Captain just enough time to do a Freddy Kreuger and let everyone know that he's changed the rules and what happens to them here could spell certain doom back in the 'real' world.
The ethereal Bat-signal filling the night sky in the last panel is a nice touch I missed on my first reading.
Page 5 - Enter the Batman Incorporated anti-virus software. We last saw Barbara Gordon aka Oracle in these pages in Batman Incorporated #6, though Bruce gave her a brief outline of her mission here and a glimpse at her Batgirl avatar (incidentally, Scott Clark goes with his own, superor I think, design over David Finch's original) in the Batman: The Return one-shot., Its a shame that DC have back-pedalled and made Barbara Batgirl again as of September's relaunch, as this issue shows what could have been a compelling new status quo for the character, destined never to be followed up on now. This version of the virtual Barbara (she's co-billed with Batman as Oracle above the title - she's never referred to as Batgirl in the story) mirror's Oracles virtual 'head', even more so since Chris Burnham gave it Bat-ears. Her Bat-Cycle, Batgirl's preffered mode of transport since her debut in the sixties, is heavily indebted to the updated light cycle designs from Tron: Legacy.
Page 6 - Scott Clark does a good job with the computer art here, managing the difficult job of staging the action scenes so as to look spectacular rather than stilted. Comics Alliance's Chris Sims vehemently disagrees but, as they say, one man's meat is another man's freedom fighter. Or something. The ones-and-zeroes as the zombie soldiers' blood is a nice touch.
The Bruce Wayne avatar zones out as Batman tries his two controllers at once trick...
Page 7 - Virtual Batman surges out of the floor, variant action figure-ready. I don't think any of the strings-of-numbers-and-letters talk actually correspond to anything in real life, given I think Morrison's a bit of a techno primitive. I'm sure someone who knows more about it than me will correct me if I'm wrong...
Zombie Economics is a pop-economics book written by John Quiggin, decrying the idea that we should return to the market-led economic policies of the nineteen eighties and nineties in the wake of the recent financial crisis, as they have essentially been proven dead wrong.
The curious not-quite-a-haiku poetic lilt of the Worm Captain is explained (?) as stemming from Chun Wei's unpublished poetry, suggesting there may be more to Wei than this issue implies.
"Oracle: Copy". Though I can heartily agree that the virtual reality craze of the early nineties, typified by the Lawnmower Man movie, needed sufficient space to die a lonely, bitter death, I think Morrison makes a good case for now being the time to re-evaluate it. His take on Oracle here is, I think, fantastic and as I said earlier, its a real shame that its been decided by the higher-ups that this is going to be her only appearance.
Page 8 - That the Worms are spouting Wei's cast off, anti-capitalist (he is a communist after all) sloganeering is... peculiar, and I hope its followed up on as, taken in isolation, it doesn't make very much sense.
As Bats takes control of the Bruce Wayne avatar, Batman makes a slip up. That Oracle fulfills the Batman role here, totally in control and ready for every eventuality, is a nice touch after so long has been spent on establishing just how amazing Batman is in the real world.
The power-up in the floor is a very video-game-y touch. Why wouldn't they put power-ups in the floor? Is one a self-propelled mushroom that makes him grow to twice his normal size?
Page 9 - "Ghost in the Box" brings to mind both the Hyper-Adapter (which the virus' mutation engine bears more than a passing resemblance to) and Ancestor Box from The Return of Bruce Wayne, and the figurative Deus Ex Machina, the God in the Machine, as per Oracle's involvement in this issue, with an answer and solution for every problem that rears its head, and, less charitably, as a hand-waving solution to the Tanaka problem that really doesn't explain itself well at all.
As above, its refreshing that Bats is at least a little out of his comfort zone in the virtual Gotham.
Oracle does at least as good a job as I could of explaining what the Zombie virus is and how it got there. For anyone who's not clear on it, basically the zombie virus entered the system as something quite innocuous along with one of the investors, before 'mutating' into the virus proper. Whatever mutated the virus should still be on the 'person' of the investor avatar that brought it into the virtual world - hence the Agatha Christie-esque 'locked room mystery' of the pre-release hype.
The 'Finishing School for Evil' that Oracle mentions was originally due to appear in the following issue, along with the Stephanie Brown Batgirl. We should now see it in the Leviathan Strikes one-shot.
"And mazes. Webs. Nets." Linking it all back to Dedalus, spinning his web around the world.
Page 10 - Most of the graffiti is impossible to read, but you can just make out 'Leviathan Rises' in the top left.
The walls rise up and start to close in on our protagonists. And spikes emerge just to up the ante. We're back in Batman '66 territory.
With all this talk of sinners and vengeful angels, you could be forgiven for thinking this Leviathan thing might just have a Doctor Hurt angle to it after all.
Page 11 - The manifestation of the mutation engine is very similar to the form Darksied's Hyper Adapter took in The Return of Bruce Wayne #2. It also bears a resemblance to another of Morrison's villainous creations, Solaris, the Anti-Sun from DC One Million and All-Star Superman.
"Die, Batman! Die!" is the motto of the Batman Revenge Squad from 1968's World's Finest #175, 'The Superman-Batman Revenge Squads'. That would be way too tenuous a reference - and too generic a piece of dialogue - to infer a reference, except for the fact that Morrison has drawn on this issue pretty heavily before during his JLA run. The evil 'hard light' Justice League and their skull emblems from the opening chapters of 'Rock of Ages' were inspired by the outfits the Revenge Squad are sporting in this very issue.
I gather from trawling the interwebs that there may also be some sort of reference to the Arkham Asylum game there, though as somone who literally just finished Halo two nights ago after 10 years of playing it, I'm hardly what you would call on the ball with the video game stuff.
Page 12 - That's a pretty cool rescue right there. I assume Bats 'dying' in the virtual world didn't affect him in the real world because the virus is keyed in to Bruce Wayne?
Page 13 - "High Stakes!", again with the shades of Doctor Hurt, specifically the first Black Glove appearance in the 'Club of Heroes' arc.
Page 14 - The virus turns Belle Bourgoise's avatar into a dog and Velocet... falls in love with it?
Page 15 - There's definitely something weird going on with Chun Wei. There's a scene very similar to this in Keith Giffen's The Authority: The Lost Year, from a story by Morrison, where the characters spend two pages mocking the idea that they're trapped in the universe that previously fuelled their spaceship... Its a long story and I'm not sure how its relevant here, but suffice to say that this also seems a largely pointless exchange. And isn't it always those ones that turn out to be important?
Wei is apparently turned into a baby here (?) but he's fine by the following page.
Page 16 - 'Digital Justice' - the grandaddy of all computer generated Batman comics, Pepe Moreno's 1990 graphic novel is set in a dystopian future where a computer virus patterned after the Joker has infected the Net, an idea given lip service by Morrison in both Batman #666 and #700, where both Damian as Batman 666 and Batman One Million tangle with a similar threat.
"Stay focused on the hole in the window. The hole's not there yet but it will be." Another call back to Hurt, the 'hole in things'
"Judgement in Hell City 666" recalls Damian's trials and tribulations as recounted in Batman #666
Page 17 - "Boss Level!" Shades of Scott Pilgrim
"All your files are mine" Come on Grant, you could have gone for "All your files are belong to us."
"Play for your lives or lose everything", very Black Glove-esque
Page 18 -"Wherever the standard of the Bat rises it will be torn down". That's pretty much exactly what Leviathan-sponsored bad egg Red Rippa had to say last issue.
Oracle, the God in the Machine. Deus Ex Machina. I can't help but feel the ending of this issue will play into how the whole Leviathan affair ends.
Page 19 - Though she was a Congresswoman in the comics for a time, thanks to the Batman TV show, Barbra Gordon is still best remembered as a librarian.
Jezebel Jet, Batman's love interest for a good portion of Morrison's run, was revealed as a master criminal and member of the Black Glove in the closing chapters of 'Batman R.I.P.'. She was apparently killed off-panel in Batman #681 when Talia sent a flock of Ninja Man-Bats to attack her private jet.
The first time we, the readers, encountered Leviathan (or at least his operations) wasn't in Mtamba but at the Silo X facility in Yemen in Batman: The Return, and the next time we saw him/her/it was in space at the end of issue five. Mtamba wasn't seen until the closing pages of issue five, and not named until issue six. And the country that Jezebel Jet 'ran' wasn't named in any of her appearances as far as I can remember. That's my excuse for not guessing her involvement anyway, and I'm sticking to it.
I read this page as implying that Jezebel Jet is Leviathan, the hideously burned corpse-like leader of the organisation with the same name. Lots of people on line still trying to guess who Leviathan is though, even after they've read this issue, so maybe that's just me. I hope the idea that Leviathan is somehow tied into Jezebel Jet and Mtamba isn't totally ruined by Judd Winick's forthcoming Batman-of-Africa Batwing comic, which one imagines is probably set there.
Page 20 - Sounds like Dr Solomon's ailments were all in his head anyway. This Internet 3.0 really is marvellous isn't it?
It would have been good if this last page, the only part of the issue to take place outside of Internet 3.0, could have gone back to good old fashioned pen and ink. You can't win 'em all though.
Love the teaser for The School of Night. Scott Clark gives it a kind of super-Suspiria vibe that hadn't occured to me reading the solicits.
And that's it. Farewell Batman Incorporated, its been emotional. Come back next time for a double dose of annotations as Leviathan Strikes! See you then!
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