Batman and Robin 4: Revenge of the Red Hood

"Who are these people?" Dick Grayson asks rhetorically, after having seen too much of the Red Hood and Scarlet.  He's echoing one of the catchphrases of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the prototypical buddy film. Damian, his new "buddy", doesn't have the answer, and we have just half of it. While Dick is asking only about the new pair of costumed vigilantes, he could be asking it of a much larger cast. Most all of them have some shade of red associated with them. While red is in, black and white is out: This is the first issue of the series that hasn't featured dominoes in some way.


At this point, Grant Morrison has left such a rich heritage of signs and symbols behind him that they keep popping up everywhere: Maybe it's a coincidence, but Lightning Bug's suit has a glowing yellow outline on the front which strongly resembles the one that Mister Miracle used in Final Crisis to protect himself against the Anti Life Equation. It doesn't protect him from his own life ending, however. The Red Hood and Scarlet are out to kill criminals, to "wipe the vomit off the face of Gotham once and for all." Lightning Bug gets wiped away in this issue. And isn't killing lightning bugs tempting for any nasty child?


The Red Hood is forward thinking. He sounds like the CEO of a Web 2.0 company: "cool, modern, edgy, the next level, hotter, in tune with changing times". Scarlet records their vengeance with an iPhone and posts it real-time to Twitter. Killing the past: His victim's would-be victim has a parrot that is killed for repeating Fred Flintstone's "stone age" line "Yabba dabba doo". Old cartoons are dead, long live the new. But for everything that plugs him in to 2009, he also hearkens back to 1667, leaving a calling card that paraphrases Milton's Paradise Lost:


What if the breath that kindl'd those grim fires
Awak'd should blow them into sevenfold rage
And plunge us in the Flames? or from above
Should intermitted vengeance Arme again
His red right hand to plague us?


Red Hood's card reads: "Vengeance arms against his red right hand", and it maps to the original (Belial, one of the fallen, is speaking and refers to the red right hand of God) by making the Red Hood into a vengeful God lashing out at evil. This is the useful interpretation of the card, but you might find yourself cheering the Red Hood on to the sounds of Nick Cave.


There's clearly a mystery regarding the Red Hood's identity, and while I think the evidence (especially Grant Morrison's direct hints in interviews) comes down hard in favor of Jason Todd, the last person to wear that costume, the Joker is also AWOL and was lightly homaged in Batman and Robin's first arc with The Killing Joke's circus being Professor Pyg's home base. The Joker was the original Red Hood in Detective #168 (1951), and again in The Killing Joke, but nothing about this Red Hood reminds us of any previous incarnation of the Joker, and as Morrison said that the villain of the second arc was a character he hadn't handled before, it's hard to support the Joker as a suspect. Not to mention the fact that the Red Hood doesn't laugh. However, he's one of the few characters known to call himself crazy and Red Hood says that his story is "the revenge of one crazy man in a mask on another crazy man in a mask" and he then utters his only iota of humor: "Heh."


Long before Dick finds out who these people are, he has one of those canonical introductions that detectives so often experience at parties early in the mystery, an author of mysteries, no less, who sees the world quite literally through rouge-colored lenses, like the villain is known to. Oberon Sexton, a man whose wife was killed the same night his face was scarred, a distinction shared by the Joker in The Killing Joke's putative flashback. His last novel was about corn dollies, which sort of look like Red Hood. 


We see Red Hood place red lenses (night vision) over Sasha's eyes and she sees him in green in reverse angle (and perhaps sees the dim outlines of his face). Soon thereafter, Dick uses very similar looking lenses and also sees his stake-out prey in green. These duos are not so unalike? Maybe. When Dick gives Damian some costume advice "a hood can become a blindfold", we have to wonder if Dick believes that the Red Hood's dome is his blindfold. Maybe it detaches him to be the sort of dark hero that Batman's not going to tolerate?


But we can see why the heroes might need to get up to date with the Web: In the gathering of criminals, Santo preaches to Penguin that the "new model of crime is grass roots, viral". And then all the players suddenly rush onto stage at once: The dark duo lash into the gathering of villains, bringing Batman and Robin into a confrontation with the Red Hood and Scarlet (remember, she has a score to settle with Damian, from last issue when he failed to save her). And the Red Hood comes charging at Dick with guns drawn just as Dick asks, in Philip Tan's rendering almost poignantly, "Jason?"


In the larger structure of this 12-part run, the Devil themes are brought up in a new way thanks to Milton's classic. Subtly, another of the villains of Batman #666 surfaces with the off-camera Flamingo who looks weak when Damian casually smashes him with a batarang in the future, but in the present, you have to have a grim appreciation for a villain who is called "the eater of faces". Nothing is so much an eater of faces as a mask, though, and in this issue, everyone had one, leaving a couple of those faces hidden even from us. If that is Jason Todd behind the Red Hood, he's doing what he did in Judd Winick's Under the Hood, but he's definitely doing it in a new way. And the inconclusive battle between the first and the second Robin that started in Battle For The Cowl is on again. Who more aptly than Jason Todd would start getting revenge on Dick Grayson's Batman by getting himself his own sidekick to show how in his own violent way the dynamic duo should be done right?

Batman and Robin: Arcs #2 and #3

Do you like puzzles? If you follow the adventures of the world's greatest detective, then you probably do.

A story I read a long time ago (in Reader's Digest, of all places) said that a woman was walking down the hallway of her all-female dorm after taking a shower and suddenly realized that a man heading the other way was going to see her naked, and her towel was too small to cover her body. So she covered -- her face. Clever strategy to avoid being exposed. At least in one sense.

I think creators often do much the same thing in interviews, covering part of the mystery of their upcoming stories while giving away clues that don't say too much. But they "move the towel", so to speak, from one interview to another, and if you compare interviews from months apart you sometimes get to match the face with the body. So to speak.

I have been reading all of the public information on Grant Morrison's plans for Batman and Robin and found a lot of pieces of information that fit together -- or nearly so. He is quite forthright that the first year will consist of four arcs of about three issues each (in one place, he says that there were 13 issues plotted, so maybe one arc is longer, or maybe the 12 issues are followed by 1).

A lot of the details of what is to come are out there to be pieced together. In general terms, we can say what the set up is likely to be for the remaining issue of the first arc, plus the second and third arcs.

The fourth arc sounds like it will be extremely important, and full of connections to things we've seen in the past. To keep this post manageable, I will discuss the next eight issues of Batman and Robin and defer the analysis of the fourth arc for another post. It's well off in the future, anyway.

We have most of the first arc in our hands already: Dick and Damian are contending with the Circus of the Strange of Professor Pyg, and also with one another. We know that this will conclude in the next issue. It may work the Joker into the art, if not the story. (The circus carefully matches the one from Alan Moore's memorable The Killing Joke. Morrison also said that he would like to see Frank Quitely's rendition of the Joker, and Quitely is going on hiatus for the next six issues, although he'll be back later.) We know that Batman and Robin #3 will have a lot of interesting loose ends to tie up: Batman has to get his Robin back while confronting the dangerous psychotic Professor Pyg.

But there's more. A number of telling phrases tie the first arc to the second. Morrison says that the story has "a"bigger mystery, involving a character called the Domino Killer." Given that we've see dominoes already (one found on a dead man, or toad), this Domino Killer is behind the scenes. The solicit for #3 refers to a "mysterious red-hooded vigilante". Now watch the puzzle pieces fit together:

The second preview panel seen on the last page of #1 shows a man in a red hood. So does the art accompanying the solicit for #4, which states that "the Red Hood and his sidekick Scarlet" are "Gotham City's vicious new 'protectors'".

In an interview, Morrison says that the main villain of the second arc is "a character I've wanted to work with for a long time and I think we've come up with a cool new take on his M.O."

In an entirely different interview, Morrison says of his upcoming run "we’ll being seeing Jason Todd in a different role than we’ve seen him before. But it’s a continuation of the Battle for the Cowl story..." Note that Jason Todd did not appear in Morrison's earlier work on Batman, except in extremely brief mentions. So he is a character that Morrison has not worked with before, matching the earlier quotation.

Any questions? Clearly all of these pieces fit together if the second arc is about Jason Todd taking up the role of the Red Hood (which he already did during Under The Hood) and is a vigilante killing criminals, and who already did so by killing Toad in #2, off-camera. Given the modest amount that we already know about the third and fourth arcs of Batman and Robin, it's highly likely -- but I can't say certain -- that these pieces will fit together.

Another tidbit: dominoes as a clue? Toad's suitcase that he collected after a drug deal was full of them. But he asked, in circus slang for money ("dinari", a word which reminds me personally of the Book of Revelation 6:6, which uses the word "denarius" for money; and Revelation was referenced in Batman #666. Hmmm.). Translation: He thought the briefcase was full of money and the dominoes were a double-cross. By the same vigilante who left the domino in his hand before killing him in #2. Is the significance possibly that the vigilante used to wear a domino mask? Former Robin, hint hint? Or that he's calling out the current Batman for belonging in a domino mask? Robins everywhere here.

All of these clues do point to one thing, but that said, the same thing could be revealed in one panel and it still leaves us with 2.95 issues worth of unspoiled mystery as the second arc pits Dick Grayson against Jason Todd.

The third arc also has clues pointing to the involvement of a spotlight "guest" character from the Batman Family, so upfront they maybe aren't clues. The third preview panel on the last page of #1 shows the new version of Batwoman, and Morrison has said "I want to do a Batman/Batwoman team-up. That’s something I’ve been wanting for a long time." Looks like he's going to get what he wants. But the action in that preview panel is hard to interpret. It seems like Dick and Kathy are fighting, but then heroes often fight for a page before teaming up. It's just the way they are. A ghostly Batman (Bruce leaps to mind as a suspect) is watching. It's also interesting that Morrison has said "Greg [Rucka]'s doing Batwoman over in Detective Comics, and her story doesn't really touch on what we're doing here." I'll believe my eyes, though -- maybe the Detective story doesn't touch on this third arc, but she sure the heck is going to be in it.

Dick and Batwoman have some history: They fought side by side in 52, with Dick in his Nightwing identity. But there's also the ambiguous history of the original Batwoman with the same secret identity of Kathy Kane (but a different Kathy Kane!). The original (first seen in Detective #233) was a circus performer (like Dick) who later became wealthy (as, though a different means, did Dick). Note also that in Batman #682, Morrison uses a flashback to show us young Dick reflecting on his heartbroken mentor's situation, "I was a circus kid. I knew about Katy Kane, but what was I supposed to say to Bruce?" Given the old history, this line may mean that he knew Katy Kane personally (and know something less than good about her character), not just that he knows circus people in general. Anyway, this is all so pregnant with possibility as the new Batwoman and Dick meet, and maybe the old Batwoman is somehow reconciled with the new one. At the very least, if two superheroes had the same hero name and real name and one other person knows both of them, you'd expect him to at least mention it.

So it appears that Jason Todd and Kathy Kane (at least one of her) will provide the guest-star focus for the next two story arcs in Morrison's bat-saga. There will be much more to say (or speculate) about the fourth arc, because it is likely going to bring back two characters who each have a tremendous past to live up to: Doctor Hurt, the villain of Batman RIP (and depending upon how you look at it, the main villain of all time), and one other character who has been known to impact Batman stories over the years -- Bruce Wayne.

Original interviews:

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