[Fearful Symmetry]
- Check out Deep Space Transmission's reading of the N52 Batman Inc issues having Tarot correspondence.
- Batman nabbed by the Man-Bats! Robins are too late!
- For all the preparation Batman made, everything still played into Talia's grand design.
- Jason sent to Bat-Cave East, Tim goes to track Bruce down, Dick stays with Gordon.
- Whale carcass in Yemen, birthplace of Heretic.
- Traktir & Spidra fend off Leviathan Ninja Man-Bats coming to erase evidence. Last Stand of the Super-Collectiv!
- Poor Beryl; she was the one who saved Cyril's life and brought him back from addiction.
- Damian immediately throws away the Third Ghost of Batman/666 future prophecy, claiming the Heretic is the real enemy. He gives us the recap from B&R #12 + The Return.
- I like that Alfred used the phrase 'Second Chances' which is a seminal Jason Todd story.
- So Hood was a mole for Spyral this whole time? Makes sense how he survived Matron shooting him back in Leviathan Strikes. The dialogue is almost verbatim to what was said to him.
- Talia gets a new Oroboro trigger with the Brunnian Ring. This can supposedly activate the ring of meta-bombs placed by Otto Netz and almost set off before Damian killed him.
- Nice figurine of Kali the Destroyer, bad mommy persona of Talia.
- I love how on top of things Tim is, he's always been the smartest of the bunch.
- Ellie! We last saw her in V1 #6 as a receptionist, before that in #701, and even before that in #664.
- Chessboard/Checkerboard! Red Queen, Black Knight! Red & Black! Life & Death! Love & War!
- So from #3 on, everything that Bruce has delt with was precision planned to make sure he can only escape the safe exactly when Talia wants. Psychotically brilliant. And it's all been one night I think?
- Lovely moment between Alfred and Damian.
- Gordon finally pops a cap in the Leviathan plant cop! Not sure how Dick got overpowered.
- Damian's ability to impersonate voices has always been an element of his character since #657.
- Dick's about to get merc'd!
- Hood brings Jason to The Headmistress! It has to be Kathy Webb right?
- Tim goes into the fray at Wayne Tower!
- And Damian flies off in the jet suit from The Return!
- "What would you do without me, Grayson?"
- Batman has lock picks in his esophagus!
- Another homage to the bat & the window via Damian.
- Dick + Damian's moment together is without a doubt one of the greatest pages in all of Batman history. Damian becoming Robin is the epitome of Batman Impossible, the unimaginable becoming manifest. Bruce Wayne in the Alley. Dick Grayson beside the candle. Jason Todd & the Pit. Tim Drake & the plea. And now the child of the Devil, with all the odds against him, goes to sacrifice himself for the mission.
- Ellie nabs the Oroboro Trigger.
- The standoff: built up since The Return. The Beast & the Boy Wonder.
- The Heretic's attempt to break Damian, Knightfall-style, in panel 6 evidently don't work because of the robot spine Talia gave to Damian in Batman and Robin #7.
- Could Damian have won? Even without the interference of the Leviathan foot soldiers, we'll never know.
- Batman breaks free, but it's too late. He's always too late.
- Even when Damian dies, and I don't know if people have noticed, but the sword that kills him belongs to the very first known ancestor of the Waynes, it was used in Batman: Shadow of the Bat, in the 90s, so what we went back to, there's a suit of armor in the case, and it's Bruce Wayne's earliest ancestor's. That's who kills the boy, and so there's a lot of you know, you see him smashed against the Wayne "W" and the foyer of the Wayne tower and so it's kind of very much about how these things play out over generations and how repetitive patterns play out of destructive patterns and it really never ends.
- Talia sheds Kali/Tiamat/Gorgon for a moment, a second to remember her former self before scorn, before the archetype.
- Here Lies Damian Wayne. Robin RIP.
- Funeral of Damian.
- Heretic has his own bat-armor underneath the oriental veneer.
- Bruce's speech parallels Morrison on the Batman title: a brief but exciting and explosive reinvigoration of the Batman story, now come to an end. Like Damian, Morrison carved his own path against the grain of what other writers had done with the character.
- The Knight's adventure alongside his dad against Spring Heeled Jack hasn't been chronicled anywhere and is most likely another detail drawn from Morrison's unpublished The Knight & Squire mini-series pitch.
- Beryl is the new Knight, joining up with Dark Ranger back in the Batman Inc fray. Vengeance!
- The primordial Lazarus Pit from the Blackest Knight arc in B&R could be used to resurrect Cyril...
- Bruce sends Alfred on a 'vacation' for letting Damian leave the cave. Part of me doesn't think it's vindictive; instead motivated by the fact that Bruce knows he must embrace part of him he thought long dead. He must nix the first truth of Batman, and become the creature of the night, the black winged prowler, the Bat-Man.
- Media perception of the War: Leviathan claims it all has to do with Wayne's financing of Batman, hence the occupation of Wayne Tower. Their ultimatum to Gotham, ban the sigil of Batman Inc or the city falls. Of course, politicians are stupid and fail to recognize that the city is falling anyways.
- "Is Gotham City the beginning of the end for the American Empire?" Morrison has been pressed on the politics of Batman Incorporated in interviews recently and highlighted in his responses that he sees it all as window dressing to the conflict between Talia and Bruce - grown adults hiding behind ideologies rather than addressing their (very) personal issues. Talia isn't especially interested in toppling the 'American Empire', she's externalizing her rage against Bruce into a crusade against everything he stands for. And he in turn does the same - organizing an international army of crime-fighters to pit against her. As Morrison has said, this is a story about bad parents and what happens when they lose sight of the small things that matter the most, like the well-being of their children - and not about proposing solutions to the world's political quandaries.
- Gang reconvenes at Bat-Cave East. They have the Oroboro trigger and know that the meta-bombs are around the world in every location Batman visited during V1.
- They can track Jason because he pissed himself?
- Is the Headmistress & Spyral involved with Leviathan? Are they a third party? Why were the Skull-Girls + Son of Pyg acting as agents? Has Hood been working for the enemy this entire time?
[Batman Forever]
Batman Incorporated (Vol 2) #10 - "Gotham's Most Wanted"
- Michael Lane! We last saw him in this run as Bat-Devil in the RIP finale. He subsequently became the newest version of Azrael to repent from his sins.
- The prophecies he's reciting are clearly interlinked with the 666 future; the Joker's judgement of laughing death, the Dragon being Damian, his brother being the Heretic, the state of the masked set ablaze...
- We did see the horned star back in #674 when we got Lane's origin.
- Lane apparently accepts the fact that he'll become Bat-Devil in #666 but will try to do good up until then.
- Drawings of 666 Damian, cover of Batman in Bethlehem in his visions...
- "Laying near death in the cave" reminds us of the N52's slight alterations of ROBW and how Bruce got the visions.
- Though there's very likely an element of Morrison not wanting to tread on any New 52 toes by avoiding references to Bruce's time jaunt in The Return of Bruce Wayne, framing the references in deliberately vague mysto-Jungian language ("I lay near death in a cave and I saw the end of the world at the hands of my son") gives Batman's words a doom-laden weight they might otherwise have lacked. It's almost as if the events of Final Crisis and Return... have dissolved into myth themselves; half-recalled dream memories rather than concrete events.
- I love this line: We're all your sons, Batman. Any one of us could end the world. Or save it.
- Batman preps to do battle with the Beast, the Heretic, and nabs the Suit of Sorrows.
- Ra's and chess! Imprisoned back in V2 #2, he trolls Talia with vague oversights she has apparently made.
- Rook (Heretic) takes Pawn (Damian), but Knight (Bruce) takes Queen (Talia)!
- Batman is banned from Gotham! Public enemy like the old days!
- Photonic crystal meta-material from Sivana's lab finally working!
- A new Bat-Exo-Skeleton!
- Talia has the coward foot-soldiers put to death for shooting at Damian during his duel with Heretic.
- Batman must surrender at 11:00! An hour before midnight...
- Contaminated gas, energy sources of Gotham sabotaged, Gotham falls and Oroboro emerges as the substitute. New Al Ghul empire. As Gotham falls, so falls the whole world...
- Dick is right; Batman's at his most powerful when the odds are against him.
- Jason's been bugged by Talia since she brought him back in Under The Red Hood.
- So Headmistress and Spyral and the Skull-Girls are not with Leviathan. but then why were they back during School of Night? Was it all a ruse?
- Batman uses Kirk Langstrom to make a Man-Bat cure...
- Heretic is a child, the full circle of the 'Batman is a little boy playing dress up'.
- Talia removes agency in an attempt to control, something she lacked with Damian, with Bruce.
- Slouched in the chair, like in Year One, Bruce must become something beyond Batman, something that can beat the perversion of everything he's built.
- Readying for his final assault on Wayne Tower he weaponizes the bats with Man-Bat antidote while injecting himself with Langstrom's original transformative serum.
- A storm of bats! The Bat-Man cometh!
- Epic to end the Moz-Bats age!
- Bats-laced with anti-venom aerosol.
- We finally see the photonic crystal in action: invisible Batman!
- Batman's diatribe towards Heretic has to come from some part of self-criticism, the self-awareness of the supposed absurdity of his crusade.
- So Hood claims that Batman Inc was only allowed to occur because Spyral wanted it to, using it as some sort of psy-op against Leviathan. I'm assuming that's why they worked with them during V1 #4 and School of Night, to further gather intelligence.
- Batman Inc is now a weapon for the Headmistress, who is 100% Kathy Webb.
- One of the greatest pages in Batman history: "Sons are born to die in war."
- Heretic is a reflection of not only Damian, but Bruce himself. Truly the little boy trapped behind the Bat-Behemoth DKR visage.
- Talia says there are dozens more Damian clones waiting to be born...
- Talia calls herself Wire Mommy! Does that mean she worked with Otto Netz to make Prof Pyg? Or was it just another archetype suggested to Netz?
- Red Queen! Mother of Skeletons!
- The Big Picture unfolds! The grand design! Batman Inc goes to disarm the Oroboro ring around the world, while Bruce deals with Talia.
- Wayne Tower is detonated!
- Mirroring Chris Burnham's first page for the run back in B&R #16, Talia descends into the cave to do battle with her Bat-Beau.
- And she's got her own variant on the Thomas Wayne/Simon Hurt First Batman Costume!
- Bruce and Jim Gordon at the end, at the beginning.
- Follow-up to the first page of V2 #1.
- Pass off the war to Gordon as Bruce being entangled with Talia, and the reason behind Batman Inc being their falling out over their son.
- Talia says Leviathan, like the idea of Batman, is made of vague and empty promises. It's all a smokescreen to veil the emotional engine. Like she said in V2 #2, she already has everything, everything except a family. This whole thing is all bullshit, a ploy to ruin Bruce. She's so beyond Bruce, the Devil's Daughter, the femme fatale of femme fatales, of course she sees terrorism and filicide as just a game.
- Gordon and Leslie Thompkins with Bruce as a child, so I'm guessing to keep in with Year One you can have Gordon go to Chicago at some point?
- The war against Talia is the ultimate test of Batman, the farthest he will ever have to descend into the Forever Pit. Even worse than RIP. She (and Selina and Kathy by some extent) is a woman made for an idea like Batman, but Bruce being part of that equation is where the exploitation and weakness comes.
- Lone-Eye Lincoln! Wonderful set of pages with Batman Inc taking down the agents of Leviathan.
- It all comes back to red and black, life and death, the bat and the window, the holes and the blood.
- The Hole in Things, the deaths of Thomas and Martha. The well that devours love. That spews heartbreak.
- I'm sorry I couldn't love you the way you wanted me to. Batman is Bruce is Batman, and they weren't enough. So she becomes his war, the thing he's devoted to.
- But Batman lies to her: You're too big for me to fight.
- This is Batman. The guy who beat the God of Evil. The guy who beat Time. Who beat the Devil. Who beat Death!
- Jason comes just in time. Notice how Dick saves him in RIP, Tim saves him in ROBW, Damian saves him in Inc V1, and now Jason at the end.
- So the Oroboro ring around the world would destroy the cities, purge their fuel, and the subsequent explosion would release the Oroboro meta-material to substitute. Leviathan will own it all after that.
- And it is a trick! Otto Netz's Oroboro was always Fool's Gold, always bullshit. Sivana's crystal was the real deal.
- You'll never have Gotham City: this is Batman, who walks with Superman and Wonder Woman. This is Batman, the New God of the Fifth World. Even at the point of absolute ruination, the enemy will blink for a second, and that's all he needs to beat them. Batman. Never. Stops.
- Talia condemns him to be pinned to the colorful madmen of his rogues gallery (sort of true), but Kathy Webb returns to put her in the ground.
- It was all the secret war of two women who loved Batman, the weakness of Bruce; Martha, the Pearls, the Wire Mommy.
- Kathy planned the whole thing, most likely when she heard her pops getting busted out from the Falklands by Talia.
- She leaves him with the last gaze of the Gorgon; she's the only one who ever broke his heart, who ever really left him besides Martha. To him, she doesn't exist anymore.
- Bruce says Batman is dead. That it's over.
- Kathy clears the investigation. Bruce is free.
- Bruce looks into the Hole In Things, the ultimate trauma, the Forever Pit that has governed his entire history, and sees nothing. Black. Oblivion. Heartbreak. Despair.
- But in that ruin, in all that Nil, there is enough to build forever. There is always a chance to move forward. To rise out of the well.
- Alfred's back, the graves of Talia and Damian have been unearthed.
- Batman is never over. Because he will always be needed. There will always be a world to save.
- EPILOGUE: Ra's is out of the Jungfrau prison, taking control of Talia's seaside base we saw in Batman #665 and B&R #12 IIRC.
- Lord Death Man has been captured and his blood is being harvested to make new Lazarus Pits. That was his secret upgrade mentioned way back in the beginning of this run.
- Ra's vows revenge with Talia's nursery of Damian clones as his weapons!
- Batman is Forever. The Snake eats its own tail. His progeny mass produced. Like the constant monthly publication of the title.
- It never ends. It probably never will.
