Review: Batman Incorporated Vol. 1: No More Teachers hardcover (DC Comics)

There are a couple DC team books in the time between Dark Crisis and Absolute Power that I hadn’t heard much good about (sometimes bad) and that were ultimately canceled. I planned to read them to stay current, but I wasn’t particularly looking forward to or had high hopes for them.

Ed Brisson’s Batman Incorporated Vol. 1: No More Teachers is therefore a pleasant surprise, collecting the Batman 2022 annual found elsewhere as well as the title’s first seven issues. What we have here still is really just a Ghost-Maker/Clownhunter title with international-themed Bat-people rounding out the background, but Brisson makes it gripping nonetheless. Previous Ghost-Maker and Clownhunter stories have been about temperamental vigilantes with a penchant for killing; here, we’ve got two temperamental vigilantes made even more temperamental as they try to adhere to a vow not to kill. Strong ties to another Bat-title enhance the book exponentially.

[Review contains spoilers]

When knife expert Tommy Tivane is killed in Incorporated’s first issue, the editor’s box sends the reader to James Tynion’s Batman #102 (collected in Batman Vol. 3: Ghost Stories) for the flashback to when a young Bruce Wayne approached Tivane for training. It takes far longer for the book to send the reader to Chip Zdarsky’s Batman: The Knight, but that’s really the crux of it; many of Ghost-Maker’s teachers being hunted in No More Teachers are figures introduced in that other book. Knight essentially grafted Ghost-Maker on to Batman’s established history, and if Teachers isn’t exactly a sequel, it’s awfully close.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

That’s a boon to a story that might otherwise feel slow to get started. Brisson never does much to differentiate the members of Batman Incorporated, to give us a good sense of their personalities or how they came to where they are, or even to expand on stumbles or mess-ups alluded to in the dialogue.¹ Much of that first chapter involves generic banter among the heroes such that it’s hard to get a good sense or become emotionally invested in them (some are perpetually in full face masks!). The arrival of Knight favorites like Avery and Skyspider helps things considerably until the plot really gets going in the second issue.

I thought the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it suggestion that some years back Ghost-Maker took an orphan as sidekick in direct response to the death of Jason Todd, to “improve upon Batman’s failures,” was an interesting one. Ghost-Maker is wonderfully hard to quantify, a character who claims to be physically incapable of empathy (beyond simple accusations that Batman is “emotionless”), but whom we’ve seen be reactive to injustice time and again. Ghost-Maker’s sidekick Phantom-One also “dies,” and we understand later Ghost-Maker didn’t try to save him because Ghost-Maker was saving innocents instead. It is not as though that’s “wrong” or even different than what we might expect from Batman; it’s just that a certain standoffishness from Ghost-Maker makes it all come off the wrong way.

As per the Ghost-Maker/Clownhunter collection, to our knowledge Ghost-Maker doesn’t have the same tragic “avenging the murder of a loved one” backstory that many Bat-figures have, and his cold single-mindedness predated when his family was bullied by gangsters. But he clearly feels to an obsessive degree this idea that the only solution for stopping a bad guy is killing them, and it’s a powerful speech that Brisson has Ghost-Maker give Nightwing, that blame for what villains imprisoned, not killed, do later is on the Bat-family’s head. When the Bat-villains do indeed kill again, it affects Ghost-Maker so strongly that this is among the few times we see Ghost-Maker take his mask off (with an ambiguous, if not outright menacing, “Hh”).

To my understanding of what a Batman Incorporated story is, the second one collected here, “This Little Piggy,” initially seems small, if not borderline stretching comic book believability. Batman apparently calls all seven members of Inc. to Gotham to track down Professor Pyg, something any other day we’d see Batman do entirely on his own. Pyg has captured and seems ready to burn to death the Riddler, something the audience knows won’t happen; further, Pyg threatens to murder a roomful of captured villains with a chainsaw, but later we find them wholly unscathed. There’s a disconnect here between the air of danger Brisson wants to create and what he can get away with in a shared universe, and I think some of that comes from what Brisson wants to do with this story overriding the story sense.

But, on the heels of “No More Teachers,” “This Little Piggy” is rather brilliant — a setup where Ghost-Maker believes he knows the answer to the mystery but holds back such to build his team’s morale solving it themselves, only for the team to succeed where Ghost-Maker would have actually failed. If I’m still not convinced there wasn’t a way to tell that story on a more Batman Inc. scale, the turnaround and comeuppance is great, and Clownhunter really shines in this one. Here again, Brisson subtly rewards knowledge of the greater DCU, this time using elements of Tom Taylor’s Nightwing, which makes it feel the all the more “real” and relevant than if Brisson had just made the elements up.

One volume in with Batman Incorporated Vol. 1: No More Teachers and I couldn’t yet tell you why this iteration of Batman Inc. didn’t last longer; one hopes the final volume is so good that I’m still wondering, and not the alternative. I’d certainly think the Batman Incorporated concept is good for serial miniseries, at least, but maybe Bat-fatigue is a real thing after all.

[Includes original covers]

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1. We’re perhaps supposed to re-read Batman Vol. 6: Abyss or Grant Morrison’s original Batman Inc. work, but really, who has that kind of time?  ↩︎

Rating 2.25