Okay, so this is where I post long, rambling messes about comic books now.

I apologize profusely to you if you don't want to read one of those. Having recently left the Howling Curmudgeons for reasons both personal and not, I find myself wanting to talk about comic books again. This kind of perversity of spirit is nothing new to me, of course. And yet I will indulge it, because if I don't, then I'm not writing anything and that gets tedious after a while. Not for you, of course, but for me.

The character of Batman is one I've long had my problems with. It's no secret I prefer the Man of Steel and his gloriously exploding mythos to Batman's cramped vengeance narrative, confined within an imposed moral limitation that doesn't make sense for the character. To my mind, Batman is most interesting when he's strangling acromegalic freaks with the bat-gyro or terrifying the entire population of New York with a big grin on his face, and less interesting when he waxes morose about his ceaseless war on crime. To be frank, I am not a big fan of a Batman who engages in long soliloquies because they can all too easily border on the overwrought. And quite honestly, the idea that Batman hates guns seems to me to be an imposition of the period in the 40's and 50's when comics werre camping up and dodging Wertham's criticisms. Frankly, Batman's not a superhero at all, he's a pulp hero, a brother to the Shadow or the Spider with a touch of Doc Savage's omni-capable Renaissance Man nature thrown in.

This is not to say I don't love campy Batman at times. The legions of international Batmen? The idea that Batman signs up for a military experiment to test the effects of long-term space travel and hallucinates that Robin dies on an alien planet? Alfred writing Batman fanfiction in his diary? I can get behind any and all of this. My problem isn't with Batman at his most four color, but rather Batman when presented as a grim vigilante crimestopper, equal parts Sherlock Holmes and Steve Costigan, who does battle with semi-immortals who want to wipe out most of the human race and demented psychotics who dress up as clowns. Quite frankly, almost all such interpretations seem at once too eager to embrace what they see as sufficient 'grit' and too unwilling to jettison those artifacts of a specific age in the publication of comic books. Very rarely does a writer hearken back to the Batman who deliberately causes the henchmen of an enemy to fight each other to the death or has a silver bullet kit in his belt to help him shoot werewolves if it becomes necessary. The idea that Batman hates guns and won't kill are the most determined and yet most detrimental to the very idea of a grim avenger. Quite frankly, Batman should kill.

Of course, if Batman killed his enemies, the Joker would be floating face down in the harbor by now. The pulps got around this sort of thing by various means... killing the villain only to have him miraculously return later to bedevil the hero (something that the comics brought along like grandma's baggage) and also, a constant flood of new villains. Solomon Kane, who often strikes the reader as a Batman in Puritan garb, would kill his opponents secure in the knowledge that there was always a new evildoer over the horizon for him to smite. Of course, Solomon Kane also only appears in a handful of stories - Batman has been in continuous publication for over six decades. After a while, it's just easier for the Riddler to show up again. There have been new villains continously created of course, and some have endured while others have not, but in general Batman's unwillingness to kill (in the context of his non-campy, street avenger persona) really just serves to allow a revolving door of Penguin appearances and allows the Joker to keep popping up without regard to how homicidal he has become.

Basically I seem to be saying that I will accept a fully four color, superheroic Batman even if it descends into camp, with high tech gadgets and time travel and a closet full of purple and lime green costumes, and I am happy with a Batman who duels with gorillas in a vampire's castle in the Carpathians and who likes scaring the shit out of people, but for some reason the amalgam of the two is fraught with peril for me as a reader. I can take either extreme happily, but when elements of one linger or overlap onto the other, I'm less eager to see what develops. There's no real critical conclusion to this chain of thoughts, I guess, just surprise to find myself arriving here.

Comments

[Orrin]

Hey, it seems that we agree on Batman after all!

[Orrin]

Okay, so I have a question, and if anyone has the answer I'm sure it's you. Given that we've established that Batman didn't always dislike guns and wasn't always unwilling to kill, where did these things come from? And if they came from a Comics Code cleanup initiative, how did they enter so thoroughly into his canon as they currently are?