Reading Comics #115 "The Dark Knight Falls - The End of Grant Morrison's Batman"

This post about the end of Grant Morrison's Batman, or more specifically his second run on Batman Incorporated, is months behind the fact mostly for one reason:

I didn't like how it ended.

In case you haven't read or heard about that, Batman Incorporated #13 basically ends on a cliffhanger, the return of Ra's al Ghul.  A cliffhanger, really?  After seven years?  So that was basically my reaction.  I was disappointed.  Here was the conclusion of a great comics run within an iconic character and arguably the best writer of this generation.  And it wasn't really a conclusion at all.

Or so it seemed.

Morrison had warned readers that they probably wouldn't be happy, that they wouldn't be pleased with the conclusion he ultimately reached about Batman.  And I guess I just failed to understand what he meant.  Part of the problem was Chris Burnham's art.  Burnham was on the title since its relaunch in the wake of the New 52.  It was immediately evocative of Frank Miller's work from The Dark Knight Returns, just as Greg Capullo has been in Scott Snyder's Batman.  But whereas Capullo took the challenge seriously, Burnham's always looked like a parody.  Great on Damian.  Not so much Batman.

But maybe that was the point.

Morrison's conclusion, as I'm now interpreting it, may have been very pointedly the opposite of Miller's Dark Knight Returns philosophy.  Miller envisioned Batman as an eternal warrior, impossible to defeat, even if the enemy is old age and retirement.  His is an ultimately triumphal story for the character, trumping even Superman himself.  Morrison seems to have said something differently entirely.

To reach Ra's al Ghul, to reach his return, Morrison used every other key member of the family, who at this point were as close to a family as they ever got.  Batman the father, Damian the son, Talia the mother.  Batman and Talia finally duel, with Damian caught quite literally in the cross-hairs, as exemplified in the best issue of the series, Batman Incorporated #8, the latest Death of Robin event.  The war doesn't end until the series does, however.

And what the was the ultimate shape of this war?  Batman creates the eponymous league of allies to combat Talia's Leviathan, its equal and opposite.  And the orouboros finally eats its own tail.  Batman's grand crusade becomes cyclical, even with a brand-new version of the "I shall become a bat!" epiphany.  The allies cancel each other out.  The would-be lovers reach their end at last, the dance concludes.  Batman does not win.

Batman doesn't win???  Batman doesn't win.

Let me say it again.  Batman doesn't win.  That's not at all what Miller prophesied.  Morrison came up in the comics scene in the midst of Batman's biggest creative boom.  There was Miller, Morrison himself (the psychological masterpiece Arkham Asylum), and Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, with Morrison recently chiming in on the theory that Batman actually kills Joker at the end of it.  Is he right about that?  It doesn't matter.  But it opens the door wide about what he really sees as the conclusion of the Batman story.

He doesn't see it ending ideally.  He doesn't see the Dark Knight rising.  He sees Batman fall.  This whole epic run has been The Dark Knight Falls all along.

He said he'd put all the toys back in the toy box.  The Incorporated allies are pretty much gone.  Damian is dead.  Talia is defeated.  And other writers continue Batman's never-ending quest for vengeance against crime.

But he's already indicated how he sees it will end.  The only way it can end.  Whether he's an old man or in his prime, Batman doesn't win.  And so he defeats his ultimate foe in the epic of all epics, and another villain just rises up to fill in the hole again.

This whole thing reminds me of the few issues he did after the fact following "R.I.P.," the last time we thought Morrison had concluded his Batman epic.  In Batman #s 701 and 702, he explains the missing pieces, the hole in things, between the events of "R.I.P." and Final Crisis, where Batman "dies."  They may be the finest issues he ever wrote in his Batman run.

Part of me is hoping he does something similar as a coda to Batman Incorporated, make his reasoning plain, explain the whole master plan.  It's not likely.  The one trademark of all Grant Morrison's stories is that he never spells them out.

Did I interpret it right?  At any rate, I'm feeling far better about that ending now than a few months ago.  Even if it doesn't paint Batman in the most flattering light.  But then, maybe that was the point.  Maybe Morrison was seeking to end the hero worship for a character who can be just as easily interpreted as a deviant and positively deranged as the ideal superhero who can overcome every obstacle.  He did that in Morrison's epic and still lost.  Maybe the cliffhanger itself is the message.  Or maybe it was no cliffhanger at all.

We've gotten a lot of good from this run.  We got Paul Cornell's Knight and Squire.  We got Andy Kubert's Damian.  We got Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason's Batman and Robin.  And more.  And hopefully more.  And perhaps the definitive Batman story yet.

All of this is to say, thank you Grant Morrison.