Batsuit up: The Dark Knight goes 'Incorporated'

Cover art for the comic book Batman vs. Robinwritten by Grant Morrison.

Batman and Robin take on the Joker.

Since Scottish writer Grant Morrison took over guiding Batman and his consortium of Gotham City characters five years ago, he's given the Dark Knight a son, killed and replaced him for a while, had him travel through time and now has him recruiting Batmen all over the world.

And before his run is over, Morrison is promising an epic of Shakespeareanproportions.

You would think that would all make one, well, a little bit batty. But Morrison has kept from turning completely nocturnal.

"I've got a Batman lifestyle in that I live in a big house surrounded by bats. I tend to work from the afternoon into the evening and go to bed at a reasonable time, surprisingly. I like to do some working out and running. I used to do this Batman workout that I did at the start of it, but it got really exhausting," Morrison says, laughing.

After spearheading the creative teams of both Batman and the recent Batman and Robin series, now Morrison is the writer ofBatman Incorporated. The first issue featured Batman and sometimes main squeeze, sometimes villain Catwoman visiting Japan to find and train a Batman for the country — part of Bruce Wayne's master plan to take his Batman franchise global.

(Morrison now regrets not planning for the Caped Crusader to visit his homeland. "It'd be a great Batman story where you actually see him in Scotland swinging down with the top half of his Batman suit and wearing a kilt on the bottom," he quips.)

In popular culture, we've seen Batman have pals — such as in the campy Adam West TV series of the 1960s — and be more of a loner, most recently in Christopher Nolan's dark and gritty films starring Christian Bale. But for his defining take, Morrison went back even further.

"The most exciting thing for me has just been reading all those old Batman comics and discovering how great they are," he says. "A lot of them are dismissed: 'It's old comics, who cares?' But you read these things and there's just some brilliant stuff that was done in the '40s and '50s."

There have been many Batman writers since Bob Kaneoriginally hatched the character in 1939, but it's Morrison's love of the character that makes him "the prime mover" now, according to DC Comics editor in chief Bob Harras.

"You can see it in almost every page he writes," Harras says. "You see the evolution and where he's been going for several years now, and that vision is integral to what's going on with Batman today."

Morrison admits that he didn't plan to stick around as long as he has. While planning his departure a couple of years ago, he started to enjoy the dynamic between the righteous Dick Grayson, the former Robin who took over Wayne's cape and cowl when he seemingly "died" (he was actually sent careening back in time), and the cold and calculating new Robin, Wayne's son Damian, in Batman and Robin.

"It revitalized the whole thing" for him, Morrison says. "So I went back and I was reading early parts of the run and I noticed there's a lot of plot points I didn't really pick up on and develop. A lot of the stuff that starts happening now wasn't really planned."

Giving him a seemingly unstoppable and demonic foe in Doctor Hurt (who Morrison eventually revealed as "this gibbering idiot with a very comic-booky origin") was only a small part of what Morrison put Batman through, though. Murdering him, having him fight through several eras of time and giving him a son (via an old assassin girlfriend/villainess) all led to him acknowledging how important his associates are and how they could help in his new international war on crime.

"Someone else may have taken a different road, but for me that was the way of bringing Batman to that point," Morrison says. "Batman survives thanks to his friends and the people who care about him and the people who are actually willing to get behind this guy's insane mission."

Morrison admits that as a writer, he's become emotionally invested in the character in the past five years, similar to the way he connected with the Man of Steel in his All-Star Superman series.

"The great thing about Batman is that he's a problem solver," Morrison says. "When I was doing the X-Men and putting them through the emotional turmoil of a typical X-Men soap opera, I found it quite emotionally draining. But with Batman, the guy's the best there is. I want him to survive.

"I'm hoping that it has some kind of psychological resonance. Batman has feelings that most of us have felt one time or another in our lives. Maybe not for the same reasons, but we've all felt alone, we've all felt frightened, we've all felt under pressure. It's all those things, and to see Batman feeling it on our behalf allows him to solve the problem on our behalf."

All these stories he's told so far, though, are the build-up for his ultimate Batman story, "a real big tragedy" he's planning for the second year of Batman Incorporated.

"I want to do Batman like Othello," Morrison says with a laugh. "I don't mean as beautifully written, but in terms of a proper tragedy about watching someone and seeing things going wrong. It's not going to be who people think it is, I hope, but that's the plan."

Morrison is also plotting his own exit strategy in about two years. He thinks that by then he'll be able to bring everything he wants to say to a close. He has other creator-owned ideas Morrison wants to take a stab at, as well as reinvention concepts for Wonder Woman and The Flash a la All-Star Superman.

At the same time, he realizes he's said all this before. "I've made a run on Batman for five years, and that's probably the longest run on anything. It's enough," Morrison says. "But with Batman, it's hard to say you wouldn't do it again."