From the Batcave: Batman Inc.

Morrison's Batman run ends with Batman Incorporated special where other creators tell some stories about these characters. Morrison starts and ends the book with Batman wondering if he should archive the project. He decides against it. So what happened with Batman Inc. after that? 

Jiro makes an appearance in Batman Eternal #9, but it didn't lead to anything. It also looked like Tynion wanted to include Talon into the team (Talon #14), but that series got wrapped up like two issues later and the idea of Talon joining Batman Inc. was dropped. There is also Batwing: Futures End #1 one-shot that focuses on Lucas Fox Batwing and his adventure with Batman Inc. It is not a bad one-shot, but it is just a one-shot.

And thats really it. Not much when you think about it? But I guess it makes sense considering that Snyder's Batman was hot new thing at the time so it probably made sense to spin things out of it instead. Things didn't really change till years later when DC had ran out of ideas during Infinite Frontier era and decided to bring Batman Inc. back.

It starts with Williamson's Batman run. First we get Abyss story arc (starts in Batman #118) that brings back Batman Inc. and explains that since Batman lost lots of money Luthor took over the funding. Few weird plot twists later Batman and Batman Inc. are on the same page again. This story arc annoyed me a lot due to inclusion of Baixi, Bat-man of China.

I really like Baixi (or at least how Yang wrote him) and got nothing against him joining Batman Inc. In fact I think there could be a cool story of him branching out and going international. But we don't get that, Williamson just retcons his membership as if he was always part of the team. He also gets redesigned and now looks like generic martial arts Batman clone. And obviously he doesn't get any focus and barely any lines. So what happened here? For absolutely no gain Williamson created continuity hole and dumbed down an interesting character. Not good stuff and definitely not worth checking out.

Williamson would use the team in his Shadow War crossover as well, somehow it was even worse. But I tried to be optimistic, Williamson's work was bad, but we were going to get new Batman Inc. series by Brisson and Timms on art. It started with Batman Annual and somehow it reached even lower lows.

Tynion, before Williamson, had rather successful Batman run that is most know for introducing bunch of new characters. Naturally DC figured that they should try pushing some of them, in our case Ghost-Maker, a new Batman Inc. leader, and Clownhunter, his new sidekick. As a result main goal of Batman Annual and Batman Inc. series was basically to show what an absolute badass Ghost-Maker is and how much potential Clownhunter has. Classic Batman Inc. members? They were there just to make others look good.

Same writer would later use one of new characters created here to write a Stormwatch story in Brave and the Bold anthology series. Naturally it had little to do with classic Stormwatch version or members and was about pushing new characters. I don't know what DC thinks it is doing here because such approach just makes me dislike these new characters instead of "getting them over". But hey, maybe other people like such stuff.

Anyway, new Batman Inc. improved a bit in the last story arc (#8-12) where each classic member got a villain to fight. Unfortunately it was a alternative takes on Joker and had stupid plot point about forcing characters to kill other characters. Is it weird, in-universe, that nobody has killed Joker yet? Yes, but it is not like you can really change the game here. So what happens is that we get writer trying to address a common criticism by... not really addressing it. So in the end we just get bad comics.

Not much positivity here. Batman Eternal #9 and Batwing: Futures End #1 are okay, but you shouldn't really track them down if you are not interested in the entire Batman Eternal or Batwing series. And well, surely next time we see the team it will be better than what Williamson and Brisson wrote.

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