#30 Who Wears the Tights in this Relationship?: Selfhood and Identity in Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin

A confession before I begin: I never really liked Batman.  (I know, he’s crushed.)  I always found him, like Superman, too perfect to root for.  Like, oh, great, your superpower is tons of money, awesome.  So thrilled for you.  Somehow, to my childmind, being bitten by a radioactive spider seemed infinitely more possible than inheriting an untold fortune.  There was nothing to cheer for in Batman, to me, and so he didn’t hold my interest.

That said, as much as I dislike Batman, I totally love Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely — they have a partnership that works incredibly well, whether in the disturbing and distressing We3, the confusing but exciting JLA: Earth 2, or my recent favourite, their successful attempt to breathe new and more interesting life into Superman in All-Star Superman.  So when tasked with writing about Batman for this Graphixia round, there was really one one place to go: Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin series, with the first three issues illustrated by Frank Quitely.

I had to do a fair amount of background reading to get up to speed, though, since I’d been away from the Caped Crusader — movies featuring Christian Bale’s stupid BatVoice excluded — for quite some time.  Batman and Robin appears after Morrison’s Batman: RIP and Battle for the Black Cowl runs, and after the DC world event Final Crisis. At this point in the narrative, Batman is dead.  Well, okay, really he’s “dead,” but the important thing is that he isn’t around fighting crime anymore.  To fill the vacuum, there has been a fair amount of shuffling of the BatDeck — which opens up a space for this series to be a fantastic metacommentary on the idea of the superhero as more role than man.  (Which nicely continues on from the most recent episode of The More Trivial the Better, coming to an iPod near you soon.)

See, Gotham needs Batman.  The city can’t function without him. Good old Commissioner Gordon can’t keep up and the criminals are riding roughshod over the city.  So they need Batman.  Or, more to the point, they need a Batman, which is where things get a little interesting.

Richard “Dick” Grayson was once Robin, but he got too old for the role and eventually branched out on his own as Nightwing.  He remained connected to the BatFamily, though, and supported Tim Drake’s desire to be the new Robin.  (In between, Jason Todd was Robin — but he got murdered and then was alive again but turned out to be crazy evil, so nevermind.  He’s back as a villain in this series.)  After Batman’s death (“death”), Tim Drake is convinced that Batman is alive and takes off, now as Red Robin, to track him down.  Damian Wayne, Batman’s son — I know, I know, more backstory I’m not getting into — takes on the role of Robin, and Nightwing becomes Batman.

So. Dick Grayson -> Robin -> Nightwing -> Batman.  Jason Todd -> Robin -> Red Hood -> Evil.  Tim Drake -> Robin -> Red Robin.  Damian Wayne -> Robin.  Everyone on the same page?

It’s made real for us here just how important the uniform is and, by extension, how unimportant the individual is.  The resident of each suit is transient; so long as the role is filled, Gotham is protected.

It doesn’t feel that way to Dick Grayson, though.  He’s distressed by the sense that the police don’t take him seriously and by his difficulties controlling Damian/Robin.  Dick/Batman feels out of place, and while the suit conveys strength and protection to the residents of Gotham, it evokes only feelings of fraud in the wearer in this case.  Dick/Batman is nearly paralyzed by his desire to uphold the values Bruce Wayne’s Batman stood for, which allows this series to offer a space to ask what role the role itself plays — how much flexibility can there ever be in what Batman is?  And what about Robin?  And Dick/Batman is so convinced that he cannot fill these shoes that he attempts to resurrect Bruce/Batman, and instead finds himself nearly killed by a BatReplica Zombie in a Batman-on-Zombie-Batman-and-also-BatGirl disorienting juggernaut bout.

As Gordon says, this new Batman is “different, maybe… but familiar.”

This question of role and flexibility is brought into focus through the contrast with Damian/Robin.  Damian’s grandfather is Ra’s al Ghul, a Batman universe villain, and he represents a struggle between good and evil.  But with Damian, the good is imposed by Bruce Wayne — his last (“last”) wish is for Damian to not kill anyone — and the desire to harm and destroy is difficult to ignore.  We see in issue 3, for example, that Damian eschews protecting and helping the victims of a villain in favour of pursuing the villain for vengeance.  Can you be Robin if you’re secretly evil?  But Damian, by following his father to Wayne Manor, has made a move to directly reject his mother’s side of the family and the evil in that lineage.  He is left not quite sure where he fits, especially should his sojourn as Robin not work out.

In issues two and three, we see the metaphorical issue of identity and selfhood emerge ever more clearly with the return of the villain Professor Pyg, whose horror and villainy of choice is to replace a living victim’s face with a doll mask, thus rendering him/her “perfect” in Pyg’s eyes and erasing any selfhood or identity, at the same time installing a kind of zombiefying mind-control; while Batman and Robin are struggling to fill their new roles and understand their new identities, they must hunt down a villain who specializes in the destruction of identity.  Deep, right?

And then we are given another villain, Flamingo, interested only in skinning and eating the faces of his victims.  And another villain whose face is on fire, and when people rush to help them, he burns them too.  Faces are under assault in this series, standing in as representations of the trouble with identity inherent to the superhero role swap.

One way Morrison has played with identity in this version of Batman is by reversing the personalities of Batman and Robin.  Where previous Robins provided the comic relief to Bruce Wayne’s intensity as Batman, Dick/Batman here is the comic one, undercutting the (occasionally frightening) intensity of Damian/Robin.  This flip is indicative the discomfort both men feel in their new roles: Dick never wanted to replace Batman and so shies away from adopting his personality; Damian, conversely, wanted to take over his father’s legacy on his own and resents the sidekick role (going so far as to try and change the team moniker to Robin and Batman).

Morrison gives the vigilante Red Hood — Jason Todd, former Robin — awareness of Batman’s existence as more brand and image than reality; he tells us Batman is “a brand, a logo, an idea gone past its sell-by date.  We’re the competition.  We’re making him obsolete, like the iPod killed the Walkman.”  Todd studies marketing strategy and stages a viral media assault (complete with webcams) against Batman to demonstrate that the role is only what it is defined as by society — something Dick Grayson is painfully aware of.  And Todd, we realize, does all of this because he couldn’t take on the black cowl himself: he could never replace Batman as much as he may have wished it.  So he is stuck battling for an identity of his own.

Faced with the return of the “dead” Batman, Dick/Batman and Damian/Robin are forced to renegotiate identities once again. This time, it’s easier for Dick, who can return to his role as Nightwing.  Damian, conversely, wonders if he will be allowed to remain Robin once his father, and presumably Tim, return.  Ultimately, it is here where Damian finds some common ground with Dick — they both find that they need a role, a costume, or a cape to wrap themselves in and shape who they are. Without that, neither man is fully whole.

But what happens when you have too many heros and not enough capes?