Batman Incorporated v2 #5 Annotations

Page 3 - The machine-gun fire and wholesale slaughter of the zombified-Gothamites are pretty clear pointers that, like Jean Paul Valley's AzBats way back in the 90's, Damian's not your grandpa's Batman.The pull-back reveals that we're in Damian's Batcave in the penthouse of the Wayne Enterprises building. The burning effigies of Bruce, Damian and Dick were first seen on page 9 of Batman #666, and Burnham matches Andy Kubert's poses closely here.

Page 4-5 - 'The World in flames' = Gotham City here. Arkham Asylum has a history of drastically different exterior designs and locations within Gotham. Though it's been destroyed and rebuilt in-story a number of times, its as much a long-standing tradition for Bat-artists to put their own spin on the exterior of Arkham Asylum as it is with the Batmobile, something Morrison addressed explicitly way back in his Animal Man run. The ornate Arkham gates that feature on the cover and in the last panel are seemingly the institutions one immutable feature

Looking back over Morrison's run, the only previous exterior shots of Arkham I could find were silhouettes in the Tony Daniel-drawn 'Batman R.I.P.', like Burnham's complete with clock-tower and waterfront location, Maybe the asylum has gotten a lot more 'on-model' since the rip-roaring success of the video game named after it.

The title 'Asylum' mirrors the original 666 story 'Bethlehem', in reference to the Bethlehem Hospital in London, a notorious insane asylum - Europe's first and oldest - from whose name we derive the word 'Bedlam'.

Police Comissioner Barbara Gordon, daughter of Jim Gordon and current Batgirl. Barbara was long confined to a wheelchair after the Joker shot her in Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's Killing Joke, and thanks to John Ostrander and Kim Yale eventually carved out a second succesful superhero career as Oracle, star of the long-running Birds of Prey series. She recently got better with the advent of DC's New 52 initiative and resumed the Batgirl identity. Batman #666 went to great lengths to establish that Gordon and Damian don't enjoy the comfy relationship that Bruce and Jim did.

Page 6-7 - Damian's "->tt<-" is of course his spin on dad's "-Hh-"

As usual, pulse-pounding action scenes from Burnham and Morrison here. Great stuff.

Page 8 - Smoking in comics? Its been a while... This must be a future dystopia.

Alfred the cat first appeared alongside Damian-Bats in Batman #666.

"What do you know about dying? Nothing can kill you." Back in Batman #666 Damian revealed that he'd made a deal with the Devil on the day that Batman died - Gotham's survival in return for his soul. He demonstrated his supernatural resilience when Comissioner Gordon and the Gotham P.D. riddled him with bullets at the end of that issue and he emerged unscathed.

Page 9 - "...a cargo cult reconstruction of how things used to be." All the elements are in place - Batman, Gordon, Gotham, Arkham, even The Joker, but twisted into a distorted echo of what they used to be. Cargo cult recreations - in effect a reduction of something to the purely symbolic, entirely removed from it's original context or meaning - also cropped up in Final Crisis, where Darkseid described the Miracle Machne as a "Cargo cult Motherbox".

Shades of Romero's Night/Dawn/Day of the Dead and current zombie apocalypse torch-bearer The Walking Dead - holed-up in a repurposed municipal facility, surrounded on all sides by encroaching death. Morrison and Burnham get a lot of mileage out of classic zombie story tropes over the next few pages. I wonder if any of it was re-purposed form Morrison's un-used World War Z pitch from a few years back?

"Some higher power is aligned against me... And it always has been." Damian's right of course, but the juxtaposition with the Jokerized zombie seems to imply that the 'higher power' Damian is referring too might be The Joker himself. Of course we'll see different later in the story,

Page 10 - The old 'President's dilemma' - to nuke a city in a seemingly inescapable disaster spiral or leave it to our heroes to save the day at the last minute against insurmountable odds - featured heavily in this years' comic-book blockbusters The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises. As we'll see later in the issue, given who their top man is it's clear that this group advising the President is the new inner circle of the Black Glove.

"The Sphynx knows what to do Batman" Another fleeting glimpse of one of Damian's rogues gallery; Morrison is a master at suggesting an interesting character with the barest of information and letting the reader's imagination fill in the gaps (see the Mindless Ones' Rogues Review for Joker 666 for a previous example from this very Elseworld). Incidentally, Le Sphinx has long been the name given to The Riddler in French translations of Batman comics.

"Open the doors, dark destroyer", no Knight or Detective for Damian

Jackanapes, an intelligent gorilla dressed as a clown, appeared in both previous 'Batman 666' stories. Love what Burnham's done here with his prison cell - the contrast between his fully-stocked molecular biology lab and the cat food tins and fetid sheets. The cigar is also an excellent flourish.

Page 11 - Jackanapes is refering to this quote from the Bible's Book of Revelation - "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death". It's a good job that Gotham's laughing itself to death, otherwise internet pedants would be all over Jackanapes for that Revelations/Revelation thing.

Jackanapes, like Grodd in Morrison's JLA Classified arc, is a man-eater. I spent ages scouring Batman comics looking for a previous scene detailing Jackanapes hunger for human flesh, only to eventually find the one I was thinking of in this fanfic Batman 666 script. Though Amypoodle's (excellent) take on Damian-Bats has since been contradicted in places by the comics that followed Batman #666, given Batman Incorporated's current status in the New 52 I think we can all agree that's not a problem. It's a fascinating and skilfully written story and well worth a read. With a bit of searching you should be able to find all ten scripts on the Mindless Ones site.

More Biblical references, this time to the Fall of Babylon. There's evidently some discussion amongst Biblical scholars as to whether the Fall of Babylon as described in the Bible is recounting a historic event or a prophecy of the future. This arises because the catastrophic description of it's sudden collapse in the Old Testament is seemingly at odds with what history tells us actually happened.

Damian already had an antidote in Batman #700. The chronology between the two issues seems to be a bit wonky.

Brr... Damian bringing a seemingly unaffected child into the 'safe zone' who's actually a carrier for the virus is reminiscent of Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's 2007 film 28 Weeks Later.