Batman Incorporated #8

People are going to complain, people are going to jeer, but I liked this issue. It really encapsulates one of the things that I like best about Grant’s writing: He doesn’t spoon feed things to you. This issue contains so many moments that unless you’re reading carefully AND thinking about what you’re reading then you’ll miss a lot. For those who don’t believe me, go back to the issue and look for the answers to these two questions: 1) How does Oracle deduce who the villain is? 2) Exactly why do they win the game at the end? These things are not explained to you the way most comic book writers would present them. You don’t have to be a genius to understand what’s going on but you do have to be paying attention and thinking unlike most comic plots that lay everything out for you. Grant gives you all the tools to understand why what happened just happened, but he lets your mind fill in the blanks. That’s what makes his writing an intellectual experience even when it’s just about a 3-D online adventure.

I liked the way he forecasts where technology is heading with this issue. Obviously he’s not the first to suggest that one day we’ll interact with computers in complete digital environments. However, he does a great job of exploring the possible psychological implications of your mind and a computer interacting with each other so intimately. Grant also plays with the very real danger of theft through computer virus. How many average people have been robbed and hood winked by the Internet as it is now? Just wait and see how much worse that gets in a decade. As computers and the Internet become more and more a part of our daily lives then its continents open themselves up for crime and evil. That’s where Batman comes in. Grant is saying that Batman’s future (and the future of comics) lies directly with the Internet just like the rest of us.

Honestly, I’m not a big fan of poser artwork and if there’s anything that impeded my enjoyment of this issue it was that. The computer-generated art is still a bit too stiff for my tastes and it’s hard to give faces and characters the same personality as the hand-drawn figures. I did enjoy the light effects, though. I’ll also admit that the art made this issue properly disorienting. It would be insanely confusing to the senses to be trapped in a digital world that is constantly shifting under a virus attack. That’s what was happening and the art fit and communicated that perfectly. So, while I’m still not sold on poser art for comics, I think that in this instance it worked. Batman, Inc. is still my favorite monthly and, for those who think this was its swan song, it’s not finished yet. There’s still the oversized issue with Batgirl coming this fall and a whole new volume in 2012. Don’t read this like a finale’ because there’s still more on the horizon.