Why is The Batman's Grave?

[CW: discussion of sexual coercion, fascism, and police brutality.]

All images used from The Batman's Grave, copyright DC Comics.

First released from 2019-20, The Batman's Grave is a hard comic to talk about, and it's entirely because of the context behind its publication. The 12-issue series was spearheaded by Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, a writer/artist duo known for kickstarting Wildstorm's The Authority. That book, with its lean, mean 12 issues of weird superheroes fighting global threats while nudge-nudge wink-wink commenting on the political ramifications of a superhero power fantasy was the harbinger of how most superhero comics are made today. Every work by the creators since then (especially Bryan Hitch, whose work with the ever-abysmal Mark Millar consists of The Authority's view of the world being taken to its most ghoulish, authoritarian extremes) has been chasing its success in some way. That The Batman's Grave was touted as Ellis and Hitch working together for the first time since then was, therefore, an easy sell for, well, anyone who likes modern cape comics.

That hype cycle was eventually overtaken, though, by a much darker form of attention. In June 2020, shortly before the end of The Batman's Grave's second act, Warren Ellis was accused of sexual coercion, of taking advantage of many, many young women and nonbinary people looking to break into comics. The sheer amount of people coming forward, coupled with the recurring tactics they testified to Ellis using, left very little doubt to the veracity of their statements. Ellis was summarily excised from the comics industry and, indeed, from nerd culture as a whole. His work as writer on Netflix's Castlevania ended at season 4 and Grave, his final work for a major comics publisher as of this writing, limped to the finish line.

It is this context that makes The Batman's Grave so exceedingly hard to talk about. If I weren't a nobody on Blogspot writing this in 2022, with the allegations and their immediate aftermath nearly two years in the rearview, the mere release of this essay would be insensitive at best, exploitative at worst. But that context also makes Grave a deeply disturbing work, more than just the rote redux of the Nolan/Bale Dark Knight films it would've been had it released without Ellis' despicable behavior coming to light. Instead, it's a troubling look at the work of shitty, nihilistic industry pros who have been taught that they can do whatever they want.

The Batman's Grave follows Batman as he unravels a web of domestic terrorists working to dismantle Gotham City's legal system piece by piece. Rather than use any more recognizable member's of Batman's rogues gallery, Ellis and Hitch (joined by occasional inker Kevin Nowlan and colorist Alex Sinclair) attempt to defamiliarize the setting by pitting batman against new takes on lower-deck villains like Flamingo and Doctor Death, with the main antagonist seemingly being a riff on the evil Batman Wrath (here given the name of his evil Robin Scorn because, uh, Scorn sounds cooler, I guess). There's no Batfam either--Bruce's only allies besides Alfred and Commissioner Gordon are flying combat drones jokingly named Bat-Hounds.

Yeah, Bat-Hound drones. We'll get to it.

The first cracks in this narrative's foundation come from Grave's portrayals of Bruce Wayne and Alfred. This Bruce is a fundamentally broken man, here given an ultra-empathy which allows him to truly put himself into the shoes of criminals and their victims and know them as deeply as he knows himself (yes, this is shamelessly stolen from Hugh Dancy's Will Graham in Hannibal). Alfred, meanwhile, is the story's Stock Warren Ellis Protagonist: a bitter, world-weary, ultra-competent ex-intelligence agent hopelessly addicted to drink and (implicitly) drugs whose main role is to snark at Bruce and call him a pussy for not being more lethal. They're meant to be a yin and yang, a balancing act, and we're supposed to laugh at Alfred's running commentary and antics. He uses the Tumbler's speakers to talk criminals down by leftistposting on main! He gets an extended bit where a serial killer breaks into Wayne Manor, so Alfred just shoots him a whole bunch!

Here's the rub: Grave's Batman is, like, a fascist. Not in the same way that terminally online weirdos always call Batman a fascist, either. He's straight fash here. He breaks up an anti-cop riot. When the warden of Arkham Asylum is killed, he takes the opportunity to dose all of the asylum's inmates with knockout gas so he won't have to deal with them. He all but admits at one point that he has no plan for his war on crime beyond "beat up criminals and then throw a little money at social programs." And, yeah, the Bat-Hound drones.

And this isn't one of those Chuck Dixon-ass "uwu he's doing the best he can in a broken system" situations, either. The Gotham police are also portrayed as hopelessly corrupt, often to Batman's benefit. Even Jim Gordon, often portrayed as the GCPD's One Good Cop, is the subject of a page-long joke(?) where he gives two detectives the go-ahead to merc a guy Batman was torturing and stage the crime scene. This Batman's a fascist, and the story is aware of it. When Alfred criticizes him as such throughout the story, we, having been taught to like Alfred the most, are expected to agree with that criticism.

But even though the story itself acknowledges Batman's behavior, it never condemns it, either. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't endorse him--as stated before, we're supposed to agree with Alfred's takes and be deeply disturbed by moments like the aforementioned GCPD crime scene staging--but we're never given a reasonable alternative to him. The central villain is your classic "dark mirror of Batman" bad guy, where instead of being a philanthropist his father was a prolific mob hitman who murder-suicided himself and his wife in a police shootout. Like Batman, his trauma's hardened him into a soldier, only instead of warring on criminals, Scorn wants to war on police. He could be a viable alternative to Batman, going after a system which we know is corrupt, but Ellis instead chooses to have Bruce talk about Scorn's dad's role as a union worker in the same breath that he exposits on the man's past as a paid serial killer. It's pure nihilism.

Not helping matters is Bryan Hitch's artwork. Hitch draws with the same refined approach, the same level of detail as he has since the early 2000s, and that's the problem. There's no sign of change, of innovation, in his work here. Even the book's many action scenes, clearly just there to let Hitch flex his skills as a capital-w Widescreen comics artist, feel flat and weightless, like action figures flailing at one another (letterer Richard Starkings' bizarre aversion to sound effects doesn't help). If I showed you a page of action from The Batman's Grave next to one from, say, Ultimates 2, it would be exceedingly difficult to tell how much time has passed between the two works were it not for Alex Sinclair's bland colors.

I don't say this to dunk on Hitch the same way I've been dunking on Ellis--Hitch is a jackass*, but not an actual sexpest like Ellis--I say it because the art undercuts The Batman's Grave's central flaw. This is a book by two men with nothing to prove, whose free reign to do whatever has left them fundamentally incurious people comfortable in a nihilistic embrace of the status quo. This was never meant to be the next Authority, it was meant to be a paycheck.

It's a comic made with the exact same mindset that has allowed people in the comics industry like Warren Ellis to get away with what they've done for so long.

*The article I've linked here is from Bleeding Cool, a shitty gossip magazine that has somehow dominated the comics journalism scene since its inception. It is terrible--I'm only linking it because it's the only source I could find that still has receipts.