And Then We Were Many

Batman #667-668, by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III

Spoiler warning.

It's easy to recoil at the story this could have been--and perhaps, by all logic and prevailing comics industry patterns, should have been.  A comic in which a writer unearths a bunch of forgotten DC Comics characters only to kill them off in a carnival of blood?  In which those forgotten heroes have aged along with the trends of comics history, the better to contrast their dark modern personas with their innocent origins?  In which "darkness" itself is hardened from a stylistic preference to an almost ontological presence, the font of all evil?  In which fat men eat chicken?

Maybe we don't get enough of that last one, but all the rest have been trotted out so many times over the past decade that they're practically the DC house style.  The return of the Club of Heroes (a.k.a. the Batmen of Many Nations) should be a disaster, but it helps when the writer is Grant Morrison and the artist is J.H. Williams III.  Their playfulness, their knack for note-perfect impersonations, and their willingness to embrace all those eras that apparently embarrass everybody else at DC dispel any fears that the story has a chip on its shoulder, even though it's about a bunch of has-beens and never-weres who have chips on their shoulders.

The comic is so eager to recreate different moments in comics history while also advancing them into the present that it never falls into simple nostalgia, ridicule, or self-loathing.  In the story's most delicious touch, the evil menace is just as gloriously retro as the Batmen of Many Nations.  The murder plot harkens back not so much to Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None as it does to the old Avengers episode inspired by the same, and Steve Flanagan has already suggested that Williams' visuals of the Black Glove (the villain so ominous that most of his appearances are as panel borders!) recall the movie titles of the great Saul Bass.  Even the dangling feet of one unfortunate hero suggest Bass' angular, late-modernist compositions:

Death by hanging has never looked so stylish!

Morrison does occasionally succumb to the shortcuts of industry critique.  He sets up the Wingman as the obnoxious one, the Batman who's fallen the farthest into grim and gritty excess (drawn as a Gibbons character, no less!) and who has the temerity to doubt his fellow heroes, including the big guy with his name on the cover.  He's the one we're supposed to hate and so he's the best red herring candidate for the Black Glove, at least until he makes his ignominious exit.  (Although we never saw his face under that helmet, and we don't see much of one after it comes off, so who's to say if he's really gone...?)  The best current suspect, the Dark Ranger, has also succumbed to modern trends towards violence and cynicism, while the hero who's gone through an Arkham Asylum-like ordeal of trial and purification seems to be one of the noblest of the good guys.

But the story is surprisingly, and welcomely, non-judgmental about all these failed Batmen, recognizing that every one of them reflects a part of his history.  Our trip to The Island of Mister Mayhew is an excursion into the downside of all Batman's many personas--not just the grim avenger (Dark Ranger, Wingman) and the stifling mentor (Man-of-Bats) and the guilt-ridden son (Knight) and the megafranchise sellout (Legionary), but also the jet-set playboy that Morrison's earlier issues tried, however intermittently, to resuscitate.  As Jog wrote (and when was the last time one of my Morrison posts did not include some variation on "as Jog wrote"?) a few weeks ago,

If Morrison's run on this book seems to be about Batman trying to wipe away the past and move forward, only to be constantly haunted by stuff from years ago that he can't quite get rid of, these last few issues come off a lot like a dark version of what Morrison's doing with DC's other big icon on All Star Superman: pitting him against visions of himself.

If Jonathan Mayhew has some dirty secret to hide--and judging by that movie poster in #667, it may be the biggest secret in this storyline, hiding right out there in plain sight--then Morrison is also pitting Batman against visions of what Bruce Wayne could have been, a bored billionaire gone to seed without any life-defining mission.

The failed Batmen of Many Nations, on the other hand, are not there to battle Batman, or even to magnify him.  Morrison writes them to humanize him.  They remind us of a period when Batman was the grinning patriarch of a family of franchise knock-offs that spanned the globe, and they give Morrison a handy set of excuses to show us a modern-day Batman who's capable of working with other heroes, training sidekicks on the job, even handing out compliments and gently chiding his partner for a crack about the "League of Losers."  Batman is always respectful of his colleagues, never disdainful (an impulse that gets shunted off onto Wingman, of course), and he welcomes the Club of Heroes back into his story through cooperation rather than conflict.  The multiple reflections help to expand the character's valences back out beyond the reductive, sociopathic  interpretation of recent years.  Morrison is well on his way to dislodging the stick that Frank Miller shoved up Batman's ass twenty years ago--and that his own JLA did its part to wedge in there.

Much of the success is due to J.H. Williams III, whose playful spirit keeps the story from stumbling into all the smirking pitfalls it opens up.  He's absolutely the perfect artist for this story, blending different periods in comics history (and inventing new additions to that history) as seamlessly as Seven Soldiers #1 did the styles of his fellow artists. Most impressive of all, the pastiche never feels forced--while certain characters might jump off the page with Howard Chaykin's manic lines or Dave Gibbons' more measured ones, the pages as a whole never look like collages.  (Whether this is because Williams designs such unified pages or because he knows exactly when to stop the homage and assimilate the characters into his own style, it's difficult to say.)  Between this and the sense of tangible, apocalyptic evil exuded by the Black Glove, the Club of Heroes storyline feels like a nice little Seven Soldiers reunion project, even if the scope is necessarily smaller.

The only false step so far is the Benday-dotted flashback that opens the second issue.  It's a trick that we've seen too many times over the past decade's worth of self-referential comics, and Williams is far, far too adept an artist to need it.  His character designs and his ingenious variations in line weight and shading can already connote any artist or period he sets his mind to.  I don't know who decided to use the Benday dots, but they're like placing a chainsaw in the hands of a surgeon.

Otherwise, this is a highly entertaining storyline that overcomes all odds, except the ones that say a comic by Grant Morrison and J.H. Williams III is probably going to be pretty damn good.  Finally, Morrison's Batman run has come into its own.

Comments

[Jason Tondro]

I've been watching for the return of your blog because your reviews of books I would not otherwise read turn me on to some great reading.

Do you remember talking with me about Matt Pustz's Liberal Superhero essay in Boston? Well, I'm finally doing something about it. I want you in my Brain Trust for it. What do you say?

Jason

[Marc]

I'd be happy to do it, of course.

I wasn't planning for the blog to make its return so early, but Morrison and Williams keep pulling me back in...

[ATOM HOTEP]

I swear to god some of the depictions of Wingman in Batman 668 look more than a little like Paul Pope's Batman. Also, of course it's supposed to evoke Morrison's-own Quitely-designed Owlman.

I have no idea what the hell this is supposed to contribute, but I thought it was interesting, nonetheless.

[Marc]

Huh--I can see both of those, especially the Owlman (which gritties up Wingman even further). But that thin little linework is pure Gibbo.