Batman Incorporated v2 #7 Annotations
BATMAN INCORPORATED v2 #7
Belly of the Whale
DC Comics, March 2013, Color, 32pgs, $2.99
Written by GRANT MORRISON ; Art by CHRIS BURNHAM; Cover by CHRIS BURNHAM; 1:25 Variant Cover by TONY DANIEL
• The fight to reclaim Gotham City begins!
• Batman, Inc., takes the offensive against Talia and Leviathan!
• It’s Damian vs. Heretic — and if Damian loses, the city dies!
Commentary
The Tarot. That's what it's all about. These last chapters in Morrison's seven year Bat-saga are a Tarot reading. But for who? And how do we read it?
Last issue's Tower imagery (and there was a lot of it) got me thinking. And it got Keith Jones thinking, which is always good. Keith kindly sent me a list of how all of the issues so far correspond to one of the Major Arcana of the Tarot. They break down as follows -
#1 - The Star
#2 - The High Priestess
#3 - The Hanged Man
#4 - Death (less sure about this one...)
#5 - The Devil
#6 - The Tower
That's great, I hear you saying, what a neat fit. Then we get to this issue and I don't know what card it corresponds to... My best guess, given this issue's Oroboros antics, is The World. Or possibly The Chariot. Any advance on that?
Let me know if you're an expert Tarot practiotioner, or if you've got any other theories, comments or corrections. On with the annotations-show...
Annotations
Cover - A really strong image from Burnham - I especially like the girl lighting the Molotov cocktail at bottom right, Cheif Man of Bats' mask is on one of the poles but he doesn't appear inside. More's the pity.
A real piece of work by Tony Daniel on the variant. I know lots of folks didn't like Daniel's art way back when he was Morrison's regular collaborator, but I think he's done some really great stuff - the 'Missing Chapter of R.I.P.' two-parter from Batman #701-702 was particularly strong I thought. I nearly love this cover - Daniel's Heretic is really ominous, with the moon behind him (drawing a parallel between The Heretic's eye-injury last issue and the Osiris myth perhaps? Reaching, moi?) - but the too-fussy gargoyle Batman's lies prostrate on sort of over-complicates the whole thing, especially without any other background detail in the piece.
Page 1 - Picking up directly from last issues' cliffhanger, Batman is saved from certain death and spirited away by one of Talia's Ninja Man-Bats. I'm a sucker for panels broken up like this to show contnuous motion. As usual, good work Burnham.
Comissioner Gordon and Detective Harvey Bullock are there on the ground in amongst the rubble and smashed up Bat-robots.
Wingman (Jason Todd), Red Robin and Nightwing all looking somewhat stunned in the last panel there.
Page 2 - According to Batman: No Man's Land Secret Files #1 Batcave East is located beneath an abandoned WayneCorp oil refinery. Its one of a number of back-up Batcaves scattered throughout Gotham - as well as the main Batcave underneath Wayne Manor, Batman and his pals maintain the Central Batcave beneath Robinson Park; Batcave South inside a shipping yard boiler room on Paris Island; Batman South-Central inside a prototype subway station sealed since the late nineteenth century; Northwest Batcave, located in a sub-basement beneath Arkham Asylum; and the Bat-Bunker - used by Dick and Damian during their brief tenure as Batman and Robin - situated beneath the Wayne Foundation building.
Of course it's the ever-dilligent Tim that picks up Bruce's tracking signal...
The paramedics are moving Outsiders Halo, Freight Train (on two gurneys - nice touch) and presumably Looker into the the ambulances following the carnage last issue. It looks like Batwing, Gaucho and The Hood escaped relatively unscathed.
Commisioner Gordon enjoying a crafty fag (or cigarette if you prefer) in the last panel there. Despite featuring in an American Heart Association ad following his smoking-induced heart attack in Batman #459 (cannily summarised in the GCD synopsis for the story - "Comissioner Gordon has a heart attack.") by the 90's team supreme Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle, Gordon's been back on the demon weed since James Robinson's 'Face the Face' arc which immediately preceded Morrison's run.
Page 3 - The bio-facility in Yemen that we first saw in Batman: The Return, which also introduced Traktir and Spidra, the last surviving members of the 'Super Collective'. They were last seen in Mtamba fighting alongside Batwing in Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes!.
The circumstances of The Heretic's birth are strongly reminiscent of elements of Joseph Campbell's heroic monomyth, outlined in his book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. The belly of the whale represents "the final separation from the hero's known world and self. By entering this stage, the [hero] shows willingness to undergo a metamorphosis." Much of what we see of the origin of The Heritic this issue shows Talia deliberately shaping "who he is and how he came to be" through symbolism - mythologizing him as she 'raises' him.
Page 4 - Traktir and Spidra joining in with the Burt Ward fist-punching in panel 5; now established Batman Incorporated shorthand after it's multiple appearances under Chris Burnham's watch.
Page 5 - Aw, poor Beryl...
Nightwing offers a shoulder to cry on as the Bat-robots carry out The Knight's corpse, Crisis on Infinite Earths #7-style. Killing off The Knight seems a drastic move on Morrison's part - Cyril's been something of a pet-character going right back to his JLA run - though it's certainly been effective in upping the stakes of this final act.
The 'new guy' is presumably the Leviathan-agent beat cop, recently transferred from Keystone City, who we briefly saw in issue three. Notice the school bus in the background...
Page 6 - Chris Burnham takes his first crack at the classic Batcave since Batman and Robin v1 #16. Two of the three iconic trophies - the T-Rex robot and the giant penny - are present and correct, along with a couple of Batman '66 style bat-poles. Over there at far right is Damian's ever-expanding menagerie - currently comprising Bat Cow, Titus the Bat Hound and new addition Alfred the Cat.
Damian's been a vegetarian since his ill-fated slaughterhouse visit in Inc. v2 #1. His disgust at having to feed chicken to the cat in the last panel is priceless. Damian's antagonism toward Jason was made clear back in issue five.
Page 7 - Miss Hutchinson is Beryl Hutchinson, Squire to the recently-deceased Knight.
The scratches on Damian's arm - a result of his taming Alfred - are another nice detail from Burnham.
Page 8 - The secret origin of The Heretic. Just like the Wingman reveal, the solution to the mystery was fairly straightforward - The Heretic was the Damian clone we saw growing in the final pages of Batman and Robin #12. Chris Burnham closely matches Andy Clarke's birthing-machine from that issue here.
Born fully grown from the belly of a whale, The Heretic bit through his own umbilical cord. Talia has manufactured his 'upbringing' to be loaded with self-mythologizing symbolism.
That looks like Traktir on the left of panel 4, though he could just as well be generic superhuman cattle fodder; another sacrifice to The Heritic in the gladitorial arena.
This last panel's Islamic imagery has proven somewhat controversial, calling to mind the '72 virgins' myth often invoked to explain he motivations of suicide bombers. Bobsy over at the Mindless Ones wrote an amazing piece that touched on some of the more... troubling aspects of the way the Incorporated conflict has been staged thus far - whiter-than-white rich kid heroes that embody the capitalist West versus heinous Muslim/Islamic/vaguely-Middle Eastern villains that use the poor and downtrodden as cannon-fodder. While I love what Bobsy's written, I vehemently disagree with the follow up comments that frame this as the start of Morrison's descent into some sort of batshit-crazy Frank Miller racism-spiral from which he'll never recover. As I mentioned in the annotations for issue three, I've high hopes that Morrison can resolve this conflict with something a little more ideologically sound than Chris Nolan could manage with The Dark Knight Rises.
Page 9 - The first of three fill-in pages by Jason Masters - his credits prior to this issue are pretty thin on the ground, but he did some work on the Red movie tie-in comics and recently finished an arc of the new digital-first Legends of the Dark Knight series with Great Pacific's Joe Harris. Masters does a great job here - on the first read-through I didn't even realise there was a fill-in - and his attention to detail is a good match for Burnham's.
In the pre New 52 DC Universe, Jason Todd, killed by The Joker while still serving as Robin, was brought back to life when Superboy Prime punched reality so hard that he magically returned from the dead (...), then, destitute and suffering from amnesia but back in the land of the living, he hooked up with Talia Al Ghul, who dunked him in a Lazarus Pit to restore him back to his old self. The New 52 seems to have (wisely) removed the ludicrous Superboy element from this sorry tale - it's heavily implied in Red Hood and The Outlaws #0 that it was Talia who brought Jason back to life using the Lazarus Pit. How much of this Morrison will touch on in what remains of Incorporated I don't know, but I suspect it will be very litle...
The Hood stands revealed as a traitor, as telgraphed by his first appearance in Incorporated back in v1 #5. Spyral was the international spy agency headed up by Otto Netz, the villainous Doctor Dedalus, referenced in volume one. I really have no idea where this Spyral/Hood/Kathy Kane plot thread is going, or how it's going to be resolved given Kathy's uncertain status as Batwoman in the New 52 continuity - hopefully, as with The Outsiders, that'll all go out of the window and we'll just get the story 'as was'.
Page 10 - Speaking of Otto Netz, finally we get to see his mysterious Oroboro device - a source of limitless free energy or the trigger to a bomb that will throttle the world? Both?
The lid of the box has a Borromean ring design, as seen in Batman Incorporated: Leviathan Strikes!
That'a statue of Kali behind Talia, standing over the body of her consort Lord Shiva. Anyone have any ideas on those bird ornaments?
The Heretic's still nursing his wounded eye from last issue - Whale's bellies, 'injury to eye'-motifs... This guy's a walking dictionary of symbolism!
Page 12 -"Grip 'em Ups" is a reference to Dave Anthony and Greg Behrendt's comedy podcast Walking the Room.
Page 13 - Mindless mobs of bloodthirsty kids are a surprisingly common trope in Morrison's work of the last few years - think the Dark Side Club in Final Crisis, the 'lost children who banded together to form one single creature greater than the sum of it's parts' from Klarion the Witch Boy (also called Leviathan) and the blood-spattered little devils frrm Inc. v1 #6.
Page 14 - We first saw Ellie waaay back in Batman #664, where Batman rescued her from Branca, the hepped-up-on-Venom Second Ghost, and offered her a job at Waynetech to get her off the streets. She also made a cameo in Batman Incorporated v1 #6, a scene set, like this one, in the lobby of Wayne Tower.
Jason Masters on art again for these next two pages - the inverted umbrella in panel one and the security guard standing on his tiptoes on the following page are both great little details that match up really well with what Burnham's been doing with the book since he came on board.
Page 15 - The giant quarter, the airplane hanging from the ceiling, and the deep sea diving/astronaut suits are all elements of the 'Wayne-Cave' that Chris Burnham introduced in the afforementioned Batman Incorporated v1 #6. The Sherman tank is a new addition.
Page 16 - The return of the red and black chessboard motif from R.I.P., prompting some wild speculation on the internet about the return of Doctor Hurt, the Joker or even the Batman of Zur-En-Arrh.
Locked in a safe, chained up and about to be thrown into a swimming pool. Grant Morrison - Repurposing the Adam West years for high drama since 2006.
Page 18 - As Talia mock-pleads with Bruce to be his favourite nemesis, Damian reminds us that she's always been leagues apart from the proto-typical Gotham hood - her taste for crime is international and her thirst for revenge as a lover spurned truly diabolical.
Damian's growing (and begrudging) respect for Dick and his relationship with Alfred have been amongst the most endearing features of Morrison's extended run. Damian's journey from (very) angry (very) young man to a boy fit to wear the Robin costume has been a lot of fun to read...
Page 19 -The cop Gordon's shooting is presumably an agent of Leviathan.
"<A-chmm> "Wayne, Bruce", "Priority Access."" - great stuff. Damian first demonstrated his uncanny talent for imitating voices in Batman #658.
Again with the Burt Ward fist-punching.
We first saw the jet-suits in Morrison and David Finch's Batman: The Return, but neither Bruce nor Damian have used them between that issue and this.
Page 20 -Has The Hood brought Jason to Kathy Kane or Talia? How can Nightwing and Comissioner Gordon fight off a mindless mob of murderous children? Does that blood-spattered Robin patch spell certain death for Damian Wayne???
Join us next month, same Bat-Time, same Bat-Channel...
