Batman Incorporated: An Image of a Culture in Decline Pt 4

IV. THE SIEGE OF VIENNA

by Travis Hedge Coke

IN the shadow of the Hanged Man, the Leviathan members stand breaking a frame of the Leviathan yantra, reduced to red components, feet in material wealth and head in enlightenment. Leviathan members triggered to close our eyes in a state of the end of to the end of increasing disparity until the monied, empowered elite are the Earth? To realize our collective body is the next wealth and head symbol of Planet Gotham, six hundred years or more of an imperial symbol of increase. We are always in stress response keeping are few monuments. are few monuments.

“Unless we close our eyes, we are always deceived.”
- Pelléas and Mélisande, Maurice Maeterlinck

Take your emergency breather.

Bilocation reflection refraction goat chase. Electric fire synthesis while Gotham is chasing goats. The elements of the Leviathan banner will always incur a paranoid reading in the Batman Palace which will always be and not-be, and be and not-be the Father’s House or Father’s Head.

The Hanged Man brands the world. Talia’s breaths create anxiousness as exposure to dynastic Water, Air, and Land. No politic, no matter how strong, can break a banner or the Internet. This we must leave for entertainment, and therein the power of Batman and a headspace like a Batman Palace.

Being an adult sometimes means running out of breath. Or, hyperventilating.

A monopoly on goats’ births’ monopoly on goats’ births. The maiden machine, kali yantra, always has began. And, the imperial palace of one hundred years of projecting for children a foreignness to Naziism, a distance, from German Nazi of 1941 to Argentine German Nazi of 1978 to “but they are not real  Nazis” of 2024. They keep our feet in a material world, in which the material is artificial intelligence and disinformation boiling away our seas and murdering whales.

This story concerns Batman… yet Batman does not appear in it. For it is not a story about Batman. Rather, it is a story of people… ordinary people who, regardless of government, like life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – and are willing to fight for it: These are the people you shall read about. A people of tomorrow… For, it is a story of… this year.

Inasmuch as you are going along with me in that Gotham City is the United States, and that the United States is colonizing the world, go with me so far as to say that to be adult is to consider potentially incomplete data as best we can, and – importantly – to keep up!

Incorporated has few opportunities to demonstrate Bruce Wayne making a public fool of himself to keep people from guessing who he really is (and, per Dennis O’Neil’s novel, Helltown, as a way to burn off stress), instead having Batman laughing in front of a keyboard creating internet disinformation up to and including Batman skinning Bruce Wayne and wearing him like a Halloween one-off.

The comic does, however, manage to portray Bruce in one scene in such a way that others see the fool they expect to see: While giving a demonstration of Internet 3.0, an immersive audio-visual-textural virtual reality, Bruce Wayne and his potential investors and spokespeople are attacked by the Worm Captain and the Grinder of Souls (joining death/serpent imagery, mouth/spider/tentacle motifs with movie hijacker/modern piracy drag) and Bruce must play both Bruce Wayne and Batman avatars in order for Batman to join Oracle as Batgirl in this digital world.

While a good illustration of Bruce/Batman’s difficult in distinguishing these parts of himself in normative life, here, with the additional layer of video game play and haptic disorientation, he finds he cannot act as both at once, and the Bruce avatar, chaos all around, everyone running for escape, freezes and just stands there like your friend who has not figures out the controls yet.

This is a technology, an avenue which Bruce Wayne wants to have a monopoly on. A new way, and a new Earth, one written and controlled and policed and healed by bat-people, and Batman can only play one move at a time.

The tantric magick techniques of refraction, internalization, breathwork and bilocation are within Batman’s range of expertise, most like, but he is not good at them. Oracle, unlike Batman who says over and again he does not like or play games (which Talia, in particular, sees as hypocrisy), plays video games, and her familiarity with this now-common form, can play upwards of three avatars at once with excellent results and no loss of coordination or orientation.

Bilocation is tough. Ask Teen Talk Barbie when every news outlet remembered her for a puff piece on Mattel’s 2010 release of Computer Engineer Barbie (who was beset with her own infantilization and creator-biases when Barbie is unable to program on her own and must rely on men to do that part for her).

The kind of excited, shallow breathing Batman is doing at the beginning of Incorporated may be a sign of stress, but it can also, by doing it intentionally or incidentally, incur a feeling of emergency. The response to anxiety and stress can create, even in its absence, anxiousness and stress.

Bilocation requires a surrender.

Batman can work to live by the ten good acts, the ten precepts of Buddhism, not one at a time, but all together and constant. “Do not kill.” “Do not steal.” “Do not defame.” “Do not hold onto mistaken ideas.” “Do not engage in sexual misconduct.”

Talia chooses (and slightly alters) the classical Ten Oxherding Pictures, an ancient comics narrative of ten stages in enlightenment via the journey of an cattle herder to catch a loose ox who goes up a mountain.

Time is an illusion, and enlightenment rarely comes in stages of measurable growth, but in unplannable rushes. The Ten Oxherding Pictures’ narrative cannot be acted out as a ritual with the end results being those of the comic.

And, remember, the Kuòān Shīyuǎn version of the accompanying text or spoken element include the necessity of, “the whip and the rope,” a goad and tether, as we will find again in the sixth part of this essay, Vienna Waits for You.

Information can come causally. Knowing is. Which, is another way in which refraction is hard.

In Incorporated, Talia deliberately sets out a baited version of the Ten Oxherding Pictures for Batman to follow the ox of her devision and the mountains of her design, but an irony remains that we, and when he thinks on it, Batman, can never know when the ox-following began and whether the pictures illustrate the stages in their moment or if they are ahead or behind the chase.

Take a breather. Steady your breath.

“The siddha, Batman.”
- Dr Tzin-Tzin, Naljorpa, in David Reed & Romeo Tanhall’s “If There Were No Batman… I Would Have to Invent Him!”

Adulthood, like childhood, is always about keeping pace, being just ahead, or catching up, and rarely knowing which for sure is now.

Principally, Talia has been manipulating and stringing along Batman in Incorporated all the way through Volume One, and in Volume Two, Leviathan, she has begun conflating goats and bulls and engineering encounters with both, from Goatboy at the beef slaughterhouse to Bully, a riff on the Jimmy Hughes’ character, Bully Beef of the Bully Beef and Chips strip.

One of Talia’s “demon star” branded cows is rescued by Robin and Batman and named, Bat-Cow.

Talia reframing the ox-chase as a goat-chase, and saying it is because the goat as so many angles to consider and the etymology of Gotham is, “Goat Home,” can be taken at face, or taken as a bluff, a riddle or a dare in itself.

As Batman moves through a building to rescue hostages and locate Talia, he is greeted by an illustration of In Search of the Bull, in which the herdsman loses his ox and goes to strange territory in search.

Walks right up to it, not knowing that behind him, at the Monarch Theatre wherein he once saw a film with his parents just before they were murdered, Talia has made her base. He walks right in without knowing his surroundings, on a mission he (believes he) has set himself.

He walks right into a homeless shelter emblazoned with the name St Malphas, for the demon who builds towers and homes and throws homes and towers at his enemies, and will deceive whomever attempts to bargain with him. A building he owns and an operation he funds, both, clearly, in ignorance of what they are.

The Discovery of the Footprints greets Batman by signaling a stairwell he is to ascend, Perceiving the Bull on the floor beside the stairwell, drawing his sight down, and not up towards oncoming and aiming assassins.

What makes ritual is repetition, and Batman has been through the steps of the Bull comic and Incorporated before. In David Reed’s Batman comics of the 1970s, Batman encountered disorientation rooms., scientists reduced to distracted mental illness, a need for meditation, elaborate dances of “Western” versus “Eastern” motifs and the mockery of the great white explorer.

Ernie Chan’s disorientation is much akin and much different than Chris Burnham’s, but they both put Batman through paces.

Catching the Bull is “a test of touch” as Batman presses the image and collapses a wall to reveal fake hostages, dress dummies with portrait faces and ticking clocks around their necks.

Taming the Bull is a low table with three cups of hot tea, only one containing an antidote to the poison he breathed in after catching. It is Batman who is here being tamed, being made to perform and submit. A bat-bull for a goat-woman.

Riding the Bull is Batman holding on for dear life, physically and emotionally.

The Bull Transcended appears to be Talia changing the goals, changing the quest which Batman believes he is on, the mission he thinks he set for himself.

Both Bull and Self Transcended? Batman is arguing with another dummy, another mannequin, and he is given a new choice that is no choice. He can only see this emblem, this part of Talia’s Leviathan banner, and move on.

“The river flows tranquilly on and the flowers are red.” Reaching the Source. Regret. Things have gone too far. The world and any selves or anything have gone too far.

Batman, in parody of the bat whom flew through the window of his father’s study and inspired his life, is tossed by his youngest son, the Fatherless, through a window pane bearing Return to Society.

“Barefooted and naked of breast,
I mingle with the people of the world.
My clothes are ragged and dust-laden,
and I am ever blissful.
I use no magic to extend my life;
Now, before me, the dead trees
become alive.”
- The Ten Bulls Pictures, Kuòān Shīyuǎn

Always be chasing goats. You never know when you ought to have started or ceased.

Bilocation requires a surrender of that sense of a core real person

Batman has the most difficult time being told, “No.” The manchild anticipates to be indulged.

Is it maturity for the United States to accept and foster Nazi scientists? For Japan to apologia ad nauseam for their war crimes of the middle Twentieth Century? For the kind of Nazi recruitment which Talia al Ghul does or the criminal employment or recidivist befriending which Batman believes in? Or, is it realpolitik?

The main lobby of the Wayne building, testament to Father with bat-ear motif on the top, atop which Bruce once lived and after him, in his work clothes, his eldest son, his brother Dick Grayson, contains a celebration of men’s progress in exploration and his ancestor’s sword from the Crusades. After that sword is used by one of his sons to murder another, Batman, Bruce, dons Crusader armor and dehumanizes himself even as he arms his avatars, the bats, with an antagonist to the very transformation he has put himself under.

Him not Me. Me not Them.

Batman never wanted to hurt people. He was created to fight crime.

Bruce, though, Bruce is a secret under-us, and the under-us can sometimes want to hurt regardless of higher ideals. Keeping Batman ideal is an un-ideal circumstance which begs hypocrisy whether we ought to fight against it or not.

Batman-inspired Hood is a government agent and nationalist despite being a leftist.

El Gaucho, with whom the Hood has a friendly-racist banter, feels a national identity.

Oracle can be Batgirl and Oracle and she can also be three or four Batgirls if she needs.

Island people versus inland people. “Coastal elites” and flyover heroes.

Talia brands cattle for slaughter into fast-food the way that Batman tries to brand the Earth. Talia tries to claim Gotham the way Batman says it is his city. In the end of the story, both Talia and Bruce Wayne have realized they are not the “King of Hell” or the “Red Queen” as they claim (Bruce in Grant Morrison’s earlier Gothic, with Klaus Janson, Talia in Incorporated).

Birth is exposure to the elements and disorientation follows. Many of us freeze, and sometimes we never stop.

The Wayne family have owned Gotham, in some form, for generations before Bruce Wayne was born, before Batman claimed the city as his. The pleasant taste of the holy spirit gift bestowing itself is the symbol is the Palace we have covered before. The same by-gods-will-girls. Imperial Palace while un-imperialist people. The end as kali yantra and the symbol of Gotham City as a lapel pin from an impulse buy jar at the bodega. “Nazi scary foreign.” Child doing nazi salute for the next of increasing Planet Gotham might.

The first issue of one volume of Batman Incorporated halos Batman with the Rising Sun flag. The penciler did not draw that. If the Leviathan banner is the next Gadsden or Rising Sun flag, like moments, like monuments, it will proceed to null.