There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles): Batman!

By Travis Hedge Coke

 on January 1, 2024

Patricia Highsmash
There Is Nothing Left to Say On The Invisibles
3.01
Batman!
by Travis Hedge Coke

In the 1980s, a story circulated at universities such as Columbia, of a young man who was picked up by a woman at a bar, allowing himself to be trussed like a turkey, naked on her bed, before an enormous Black man dressed as Batman burst forth from a closet and raped him.

Sometimes Batman was omitted from the story. Sometimes, that the rapist was Black. But, most often, both details flourished in the casually-racist retellings of a vibrant urban legend for, primarily, white men.

Batman is a slick, bright pow! across the pop of The Invisibles. At least two characters are consciously doing Batman in their daily lives, sets are influenced by the camp 1960s television series, and the Dionysian rich superhero in black, who is also constant panopticon threat to your privacy, tonally overlaps the series like a Venn diagram that is just a circle.

“If it wasn’t for bats, insects would take over the world.”
– Dialogue in The Invisibles derived from field recording of acid trip in New Mexico

The white male anxiety under gaze and gauzy pervades The Invisibles as it does Twentieth and Twenty-First anglophone societies. The macho posturing of rebel schoolboys in a world of matriarchs and injustice and parents having sex in their own homes and the boys having to know about it.

King Mob, as a lot of us, has Batman on the brain, seeing Batman motifs everywhere in his life, and consciously affecting the cool no-guns superhero with secret identity and dark edgy costume.

Like Batman, Mob takes on a child sidekick, in Jack Frost. Like Batman he wears masks, costumes with jagged bits and big thick gloves.

But, Mob cannot be Batman. For one, he needs his guns. King Mob needs to kill, or believes he does. King Mob is a kind of cosplayer who cannot quite get there to the real thing. The real thing is not even paper and ink, but idea. It is hard to be an idea.

As two Special Air Service members discuss, towards the end of The Invisibles, fictional bastards are the hardest to kill. They are speaking of James Bond, another touchstone for Mob’s crafted identity, and the conversation is the result of being secretly dosed with LSD by King Mob.

Grant Morrison’s lengthy run on monthly Batman stories, five years after The Invisibles, begins with an offer to take an acid trip.

“Am I suppose start crying and sobbing,” Mason says, tripping on the mesa, “about how my father didn’t love me enough now?”

King Mob assures Mason that he, Mason, is, “doing fine.” Mason then throws up. And, as they leave the Mesa at dawn, bat symbols flash in Mob’s sunglasses.

It is always a trip. Always a signal going up somewhere.

What does it mean, to try to be Batman? James Bond? No one wants to be all of it. Bond, the screw up, Bond the misogynist. Batman the bitter vocel who cannot quite trust women. The Batman who does not kill. These may not appeal. Some people would be less embarrassed to wear the cape or order their martini wrong than to give up the freedom to kill if they felt like it. Especially in fantasy.

When King Mob declares Mason Lang is Batman, he is not only praising (and appraising) Mason’s innate quality, a quality he worried Mason lacked, because Mob is, despite himself, a classist, and dislikes wealthy people even in the face of himself being a minor millionaire. Mob is passing onto Mason a Batman mantle he has worn, of his own electing, which probably no one but Mob is even aware exists. As Mob surrenders the King Mob name at the end of 1999, he surrenders his own internalized Batmanicity to Mason Lang.

Mason plays Bruce Wayne. Scenes in Volume Two of The Invisibles are set pieces dressed and coordinated to allow Mason to play Bruce Wayne. But, Bruce Wayne is not Batman. Bruce and Batman are public faces for someone who only rarely shows his intimate, personal face.

Playing Bruce Wayne is a way Mason can distance himself, just as playing Batman is a way King Mob can shield himself.

Batman does not use a gun. Bruce Lee does not use a gun. Mason Lang does not use a gun.

King Mob and Mason Lang are both probably-real people who are, in what we know, characters in Ragged Robin’s fanfiction. Ragged Robin introduced herself to their stories. It is through her storying that we understand their connection to and emulation of Batman and the Batman trappings. Mob’s cool car. His mask. Mason’s big small dining room and off-kilter Michael Keatonisms.

In one scene, in the desert, in New Mexico, a very young Robin’s coveralls front changes shape to something like the pentagon which holds Superman’s S.

But, her name is not Superman. It is Robin.

Robin of the 2010s, in the 1990s, watching her 1980s childhood self and trying to match a picture of a cloud to a precise outline in the sky, fails to notice the clothes of her child-self altering panel to panel. Not only do we miss many continuity flubs, our minds tell us we cannot miss as many as we do.

In DC Comics and adaptations, there are multiple superheroes called, Robin, and it is sometimes difficult, sometimes impossible, to be sure which is which in which stories. The Robin identity can overrule individuality they may have when they take off the mask or the colors.

The Invisibles’ Robin is published by DC Comics, but she is not that kind of Robin.

Mason Lang takes a young Robin under his wing and they do a “Lolita thing,” for a ritual, as he indoctrinates her into a superhuman world of agents and crews. Batman and Robin.

In the 1990s, a time-traveling Robin engages in a sexual relationship with her field leader, King Mob, he of Batman on the brain. Batman and Robin.

People can hate the “Batman and Robin are gay” thing, because it is dodgy, ethically unsound, or reductive. But, fantasies with any frisson are reductive and unsound. That is where the energy comes in.

Et tu, Dolores.

The ultimate mary sue, Robin is both a semi-naive character within a narrative based in reality and she knows enough to have the real lay of the land. She runs circles around characters she manipulates and characterizes, including Mob, including Mason, but she is also, in-story and as a fanfic author and not the author, dependent on their actions, their characterization of things.

“You know that all you have to do is to start the plastic substance of the Universe flowing into the thought-moulds your picture-desire provides.”
– Not dialogue in The Invisibles derived from field recording of acid trip in New Mexico

Robin, as created by Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson, is the Batman fan allowed – encouraged – to go on Batman adventures, to step toe to toe alongside the Batman, to solve with Batman the problems only Batman can solve.

Batman, who Grant Morrison would have call himself, “the King of Hell,” in another comic, has responsibility and needs to wrap himself in darkness. Robin, though, Robin can feather a nest with free action, with the salamander and the lion, with the flames of freely-burning passion, not the stifled, responsible smoke of a tamped down fire for fuel but a free burn. Robin gets to live more than Batman and looser than Batman. To barrel in, as early Robin so often did, racing towards criminals to throw himself head-first at them, while Batman at least throws his fist out first or a foot.

King Mob, Mason Lang, and Robin are all overachievers. Showoffs. They all hold their last cards close to their chest but only because they really want to share them. They want someone else to recognize the hiding. To get the reference. To appreciate and see what they are doing.

*******

NEXT: Aged Out?

And previously…

1. Prologue/Series Bible
2. Chapter One: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 1)
3. Chapter Two: I Was a Librarian’s Assistant (Pt. 2)
4. Chapter Three: Robin Roundabout
5. Chapter Four: How Did Helga Get in Here?
6. Chapter Five: Boy Our Embarrassment
7. Chapter Six: Once I Was a Little Light
8. Chapter Seven: Sacrificial Greed
9. Chapter Eight: Dreams Like This
10. Chapter Nine: Whose to Tell
11. Chapter Ten: The Dead Weight
12. Chapter Eleven: Non-Causal Time
13. Chapter Twelve: The Fanfic of the Book of the Movie
14. INTERSTITIAL – 3.0: Back and Forth and Back Again

Nothing in There is Nothing Left to Say (On The Invisibles) is guaranteed factually correct, in part or in toto, nor aroused or recommended as ethically or metaphysically sound, and the same is true of the following recommendations we hope will nonetheless be illuminating to you, our most discriminating audience.

Detective #26. Morrison, Grant. Chris Burnham. Nathan Fairbairn. Collected in Detective Comics #1027. 2020. DC Comics.

How to Become a Werewolf. Morrison, Grant. Collected in Bombs Away Batman. 1983.

Urban Legends: Bloody Mary. Directed by Mary Lambert. 2005. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.