Batman And Robin, Written by Grant Morrison, Issues 1-3: Art by Frank Quitely. Issues 4-5: Art by Philip Tan and Jonathan Glapion. Published by DC Comics. Ongoing series.
Batman is “dead”. So is Bruce Wayne. “Dead”. Not dead of course. Not dead in the sense of actually dead. He’s comic-book dead. Like Captain America, Superman, Phoenix, the second Robin and countless other heroes before him, Batman has “died”. In other words, we’re all sitting around waiting for DC to figure out how they’re going to bring him back without totally enraging their core audience. In the meantime, DC has launched BATMAN: REBORN, a branding effort providing a multi-faceted look into all things Bat. Two of the biggest titles to launch are Greg Rucka and JH Williams III’s take on Batwoman in Detective Comics and the Grant Morrison/Frank Quitely et al’s take on Batman. The new series—still in progress—is in true Morrison fashion a complex jumble of ideas and motifs, some of which work and some of which don’t.
Grant Morrison—one of DC’s star writers—is remarkably prolific and remarkably uneven. For every stroke of genius, there’s a giant mess that tries so hard to Blow Your Fucking Mind that it just kinda, well, blows. One recent triumph was Morrison and Quitely's All Star Superman. There, Morrison ditched his trademark grotesquerie, but kept his perversely mischievous streak. Realizing that Superman’s nigh-invulnerability makes him a difficult character to center an unboring story on, Morrison instead explored in surprisingly good-natured ways how he could narratively and emotionally push the Man of Steel. In the best issue of the series, Clark Kent interviews Lex Luthor in jail, who believes himself to be the beloved emperor of the correctional facility. Luthor is hilariously wrong about this, of course, and it’s up to Clark to save his life again and again without revealing that he’s doing so while Luthor heckles him. All Star Superman even showed Morrison’s rarely glimpsed sentimental streak, as one issue revolved around Superman coming back from the distant future in disguise to see his adopted father on the day of his death in the mid 20th century.
Batman and Robin has a similar bending-the-premise view of the Caped Crusader. Batman is now Dick Grayson (aka the first Robin aka Nightwing) and the late Bruce Wayne's ten year old son is the new Robin. Batman and Robin are thus both orphans yet again, both having suffered the deaths of their parents at an early age. The power dynamics of the duo remain anything but par-for-the-course. Robin is a hot head who is both smarter and probably tougher than Batman, whose only real upper hand on his young ward is that he’s more mature, better trained and more seasoned. His moral compass is also a bit more aligned to True North; Robin wants to beat the shit out of the world, Batman wants to save it.
The main plot of the series thus far involves the new Batman and Robin—who, it should be said, don’t seem to like each other very much—facing off against a rival team of vigilantes, The Red Hood and Scarlet, who gleefully murder criminals instead of arresting them. Readers of DC comics (and in particular, Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke) are familiar with The Red Hood as a nom de guerre for a series of criminals, but here the Hood’s mysterious wearer has reclaimed the blood-red visage for good, or at least for his particularly sanguinary version of it.
Now would perhaps be a good time to pause and mention the shocking violence of Morrison’s take on Batman. Several issues left me feeling physically ill by the time I was done reading them. There’s a lot of forced brain surgery either alluded to or shown. The Red Hood and Scarlet really like slitting people’s throats with shards of glass. People get lit on fire. There’s a whole plot line involving mind control through acid-covered visages that permanently disfigure their victims. And the threat of sexual violence towards women is never far off. It’s more than violent, it’s plain gross. Compelling in it’s own way, but still gross.
Less compelling is Morrison’s commentary on contemporary branding and trends in self-promotion and marketing. The Red Hood strives to be internet savvy, taking pictures of his victims on an iPhone, posting his kills to twitter, reading branding books and talking to Scarlet about their strategy to remain a forward looking personal mini-corporation of gun toting doom. He even has a catchphrase (Let The Punishment Fit The Crime!) and spends as much time crafting press releases as he does killing criminals.
Morrison’s peek into the twitterverse is almost hilariously mishandled. Not only does it provide an opportunity for Morrison to lapse into the kind of jargon-filled horseshit that represents his writing at its weakest (“you give the brand that genuine nu-freak chic” is one particularly cringe-worthy line), but his satire of branding for the MySpace Generation has the same whiff of Old Man that marked Star Trek’s use of Beastie Boys’ Sabotage. Given that Morrison is normally known for what Eddie Izzard would call Tecbno Joy!, it’s surprising that he now has the Izzard-dubbed Techno Fear! Morrison's position as one of the biggest writers at one of the biggest comic book corporations, combined with the fact that the internet has made it far easier for his competitors to reach his audience makes the depiction of The Red Hood and Scarlet feels like a cheap shot delivered to young up-and-comers in general, whom Morrison depicts as soulless fame-seekers more concerned with Oedipal revenge issues than their actual missions. Morrison wants to condescend to young, marketing-savvy upstarts in the same way that newspapers turn up their nose at the blogosphere. Call it the anxiety of the influencer.
It also needs to be said that there is a general failure in superhero comics (and with Batman as a comic/film franchise) to grapple with the relative stability of American society over the past few decades. One criminal in Batman and Robin, announcing his plans to deploy a new drug that’s so potent it’s “viral” (see what I mean by techno fear?) discusses how civilization is "shaking itself apart". This seems, like many superhero comics that take place in urban environments, rooted in a 1970s New York Mythos that’s no longer true, and hasn’t been for some time. Americans' inaccurate assumptions to the contrary, crime is very low in the United States and has been for some time. Our nation has weathered massive change in both positive and negative ways over the thirty years since Talking Heads sang Psycho Killer, and remained stable for better and for worse.
Gotham, however, is still falling apart in the pages of comic books. While this lends credence to The Red Hood’s claim that Batman and Robin haven’t really accomplished much over their careers, Gotham’s never-changing urban chaos is getting a bit boring. Perhaps Batman could address in an interesting side-long parable way that Americans tolerated a stolen election, the eroding of their freedoms, a looting of their financial system and an illegal war with barely a peep. We’ve outsourced our instability to other countries in much the same way our government has outsourced many of its core functions to expensive and unaccountable corporations, much like Wayne Enterprises, itself a defense contractor last time I checked.
That being said, Batman and Robin has a lot to recommend it. The story is compelling, the character development rich and the thematic content dense. Most enjoyable is the way the motif of Faces keeps popping up throughout the series. Superheros, of course, cover theirs with masks. The aforementioned grotesque doll army is converted to mind slaves through gaining new ones. Scarlet’s life is forever changed by hers. There’s a killer who eats people’s (see what I mean by gross?). Multiple people are murdered by having pillows forced over theirs. A disfigured one appears in close up during a police interrogation scene at a hospital. And what, after all, is branding but the Public ____ of an organization?
Equally fun is Morrison bending the hoary Evil Twin convention— exemplified by the doubles of Superman/Bizarro and Spider-Man/Venom pairings— and making the Evil Twin a competing hero. This allows Morrison to look into the problems of Harsh Justice as The Red Hood’s blood-soaked anti-crime crusade causes an escalation that begs the question what are we actually willing to do to stamp out crime? And what are the consequences of doing so? These questions have been asked in superhero comics for decades (and of course received extensive probing in the film The Dark Knight). Morrison’s examination is hardly going to close the book on the subject, but his particular take on it is smart and gripping. Batman gets in one of the best one-liners on this subject in this month’s issue that I won’t spoil.
It is also impossible to deny Batman and Robin’s power as a reading experience. The violence is off-putting because of the combined force of Quitely (and, in later issues, Philip Tan)’s penciling and Morrison’s refusal to let us look away from it. Morrison is proving himself a true master of pacing and plot. Given how messy the thematic content of the series can be, it’s remarkable how tightly controlled the actual story telling is. The plot of the first three issues neatly folds into an elegant set up for The Red Hood’s entrance, and it’s clear that Morrison is arming a few time bombs that will detonate later in the series. Meanwhile, the accompanying artwork marries clarity, kineticism and sophistication. The use of light is beautiful, and Philip Tan’s deployment of diagonally-oriented bodies breaking out of conventional upright, square panels is deliciously disorienting during action sequences. While parts of Batman and Robin are troubling, the whole is dark, compulsively readable fun.
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