Batman Incorporated: An Image of a Culture in Decline PT 1
Batman Incorporated: An Image of a Culture in Decline
by Travis Hedge Coke
I. INTRODUCTORY
THE old culture of America is dead, or at its liveliest moribund. Sooner or later another will arise and Batman will persist, no matter how reduced his numbers or frightful his disasters. To reproduce the past, to live it again in the literal sense, is clearly out of all question; we cannot recreate or replay natural circumstances, and on these in the last resort the form of a culture depends. No two cultures, like no two readings or two lives have ever been or can ever be identical; what is dead or dying is eternally unique.
NEP Oil Canada, aka Liquified Petroleum Gas Canada, claims to operate from a Quebec bakery, using California phone numbers. Only one of a million scams ranging through the United States and outside it. If a scam is good enough, it cannot contain itself to the USA or withstand the urge to go there.
Batman, you know. Bruce Wayne, wealthy American male, driven in part by the traumatic murder (or panicked manslaughter) of his parents, dresses up like a bat and “fights crime.”
The comic called Batman Incorporated (more commonly, a la House of Dragons: Batman Inc) is composed of two volumes of comics (Batman Incorporated and Leviathan, both cover-titled Batman Incorporated), published as a myriad of volumes, in a variety of formats, which include an asynchronously-published set of one shots, series, maxiseries, inventory issues, two-issue stories, done-in-ones, subplots, c-plots, anthology shorts, variant covers, thematic tie-ins, relaunches, as if it were a wheel within a wheel.
Ezekiel’s wheel on fire caused him to fall on his face, as Batman will do by Inc’s denouement.
“Freezing breath on a window pane
Lying and waiting
A man in the dark in a picture frame”
- Vienna, an Ultravox song written by William Currie, Midge Ure, Chris Allen & Warren Cann
This is a comic about Bruce Wayne’s return to Gotham City as Batman, by which he will travel and traverse the world, in essence colonizing Earth as the title of the prelude, Planet Gotham.
The prelude is epilogue. From Bruce’s perspective, the first and the conclusive Batman, this is what Joseph Campbell qualifies as the Return section of his Hero’s Journey arc, a set of seventeen aspects which overlapping or rearranged make up the basics of traditional heroic quest stories. Not the beginning nor middle of the story, this is the winding down, the successful return home laden with prizes, goals achieved, and the final scares and sorting to be faced or done.
Just prior to Batman Inc, Bruce had made of Batman a story, a conclusive story, in which Batman is a new form of hunter, and this hunter baited and pursued the God of All Evil, this hunter shot the origin of gun violence and theft, the originator of murder and muggings and back alley orphaning and loss. And, he shot not to kill, only to educatively wound. Batman taught Evil a lesson.
This resulted in Bruce, the man, being trapped in a whirl of time periods, weaponized by the evil he fought, in the dual hopes of incubating in him that evil, itself, and filling him with the seed to destroy the world and all he loves; a story known as The Return of Bruce Wayne.
Planet Gotham, aka The Return, begins with a flashback to the rebirth of an old bat as it influences young, dying Bruce Wayne to live and to become a bat. In these scant pages, and much in implication, we have Bruce’s Call to Adventure in his years of training and the trauma of the murder of his parents, Bruce’s refusal in his in medias res suicidal ideation is the Refusal of the Call, and this “old bastard bat” is the Supernatural Aid which we will bring him to the Crossing of the First Threshold, which is his acceptance of archetrope influence and education, becoming Batman even before he has designed a costume or manufactured his first batarang.
These aspects of the Hero’s Journey should not be taken as a roadmap or the incremental bricks of a bridge. Some appear in some stories, while others do not. Some may be combined, as seen in Christopher Vogler’s reiteration of the scheme, or Maureen Murdock’s confrontation of the gender-politic of this set of aspects being shuffled to and fro as a heroic myth. Taken as a monomyth, which Campbell and others are definitely guilty of, at times, encouraging, is a dangerous oversimplification and a kind of colonialism of its own.
Batman, though, specifically Bruce Wayne as Batman, is a colonialist, as much as David Brin, real live author who believes the Hero’s Journey and the Star Wars franchise peddle an “elitist, anti-democratic agenda,” compared to the franchise founded by the speech writer for a corrupt police regime, Star Trek, is a colonialist. Which, is a lot.
"The cabrioling of the pure white Lipizzaners is, by all our standards, the absolute of uselessness.”
- Edward Crankshaw
Bruce/Batman are crafting, specifically, and whittling their own life, with precision, into a story.
In the current day, Batman saves and loses lives at a birthday party, ten twenty-four hours later he and Robin find new bodies, and thirty hours after they enter, intentionally, the belly of a (dead) whale used to incubate new life.
Belly of the Whale being the common name for the next aspect of the first section of that Hero’s Journey, but also a real, physical, biological and material thing in which the Batman stands. Death and rebirth. Metamorphosis. The final stage of separation from the known world called self into End of Evangelion the fourth Perinatal Matrix.
This is a comic of self-discovery. And, a discovery of what is not self.
Intentional or not, the opening maneuvers of both volumes of Batman Incorporated are inculcated with ritualistic practices and initiatory events. The jump from a high place reflecting leaps of faith and the sigil-charging bungee jump from Grant Morrison’s own life. Submergences, emergences, and long treks through mazes, caves, animal stomachs, basements, tenement buildings and the like. The nightmare fight or flight of assaulting animal masks and sexually provocative bestiary.
The reason white Americans, for example, will use, “spirit animal” or “manitou” instead of, “archetrope,” is that white America, perhaps the truest America in this semi-pejorative and marketing sense, is reflexively colonial. It prefers to colonize, where it can, to misappropriate, rather than to share or coexist.
Similar to how a cover portrays Batman set to a rising sun imperialist Japanese flag, instead of its contemporary (invoking old wars, which America loves to re-fight), the first nation whose government Batman comes in conflict with, in this mission to fight crime, is the United States. True in his origin stories and true in the comics we are looking at, those of Batman Incorporated, as Batman and Catwoman steal a metamaterial gem created by European-immigrant and mad scientist Thaddeus Sivana before agents of the United States government can procure it.
“Your respiration is faster and shallower. You seem unnaturally focused on this whole presentation.”
- Barbara Gordon in Batman: The Return, written by Grant Morrison, penciled by David Finch
In an attempt to take his superhero brand, the bat brand, worldwide, Bruce Wayne has to fight Uncle Sam’s boys and keep power out of their hands. Ultimately, an American product, after traipsing the globe, Batman and his crisis will return to America, because he and his enemies will want him there.
The ever-eternally frightful, certified picturesque alien claim is circumstantial to countries with a will or a clear line of intent to the property, doing what ages have leased to the far dying but quickening empires like the United States or the Wayne fortune with their “everybody is equal” identitarian Western big set of balls can-do self-victimization. American police and politicians can be purchased or rented. American property is a presumption and more can always be claimed, taken, stolen, bought; finagled.
Bruce Wayne with European roots and Jewish erasure, Revolutionary War bonafides and surviving No Man’s Land earthquakes and unforeseen disasters. Does not America look to superheroes and rich celebrities, check with Bruce Wayne or his stocks to show where, from here, we go? A dead growing police culture has for generations proselytized barbary as can-as-can Americans invade elsewhere and themselves.
Ho! The dead for dead embalms sense that his is not enough. What is more American than the self-making rich white man especially if he is not “lily white” or truly self-made, potentially queer, a little bit swish, et cetera? The jet set European with an American birth certificate.
Most American wars are European wars, but after Europe has (tried) to move on. What else is the United States but colonial project. A colonial ethnostate doing its best to disguise itself from those grounds while reasserting those grounds when beneficial.
Who does Bruce Wayne invade first? America. Who does Bruce Wayne police first? America. Who does Bruce Wayne proselytize to, bargain with, claim space from and seek to convert?
The Bruce America Wayne Foundation of Victims and Batman Incorporated.
How European of him. And, yet, Europe, itself, like the United States, is what?
