Timothy Burke's post on how characters who originated during a particular cultural moment in the first half of the Twentieth Century are incapable of escaping it is compelling:
Batman (and most other comic-book and pulp characters from the time of his original appearance) draws a lot of his basic storytelling and setting from a moment when middle-class and working-class Americans were enmeshed in a complex national encounter with crime, law enforcement, corruption and Prohibition: a helpless frustration that the state couldn’t control organized violence and illegal commerce combined with a thrill at the lurid spectacle of gangster criminality and in more than a few cases, direct participation in an illicit economy of leisure that exposed the ludicrousness of middle-class respectability. One of the commenters on the Varney article very incisively observes that the result is that the Batman character is forever trapped fighting “Italian-American gangsters in pinstripe suits and crazy circus folk.”
However, drawing on expertise I can't legitimately claim, I think it's wrong. "The Bat-Man" (as he was then called) first appeared in Detective Comics 27, published in May of 1939, six years after Prohibition had been repealed, but two years before military mobilization would help the American economy recover the losses of the Recession of 1937. The economic situation was bleak, but the violence associated with Prohibition had so abated that even Dick Tracy was being re-purposed to fight threats abroad. The pulp aesthetic still appealed to the popular imagination, but its villains had become more myth than menace, which is why I would argue the appeal of Bruce Wayne in 1939 had more to do with the "helpless frustration" created by the depressed economic climate. Wayne is, after all, introduced to the reader as that most pointless and contemptible of people:
He may be the dullest socialite ever, hanging out with Commissioner Gordon deep into the night, but he still represents the only upper-class figure commonly reviled by anyone with any political affiliation: the idle rich. Even the feigned ennui in these panels is designed to play upon a deep annoyance with people who have no cares and care about nothing:
Did the Bat-Man become a popular character because the largely middle-class children who read comics wanted to see a wealthy man beat up, down, and upon common criminals? Not really. I don't think we can underestimate the potential appeal of believing that the Paris Hiltons of the Great Depression secretly deserved the air they breathed. Roosevelt's popularity was due, in part, to the image of him as a patrician who cared. He could have weathered the Depression on the strength of his family's fortune, but he believed in social responsibility (or so the story went). The socialite-as-secret-hero narrative almost reads like a deliberate attempt to cure a literary-naturalist hangover: the robber barons and their idle children had been savaged for the better part of three decades, but with the Roosevelt's rise to national prominence, a new mode for what had become an archetypal villain became possible.
But something would have to motivate this rehabilitation, and in this case, that something was the scion of one set of villains being victimized by the figure of another: for these models to pass into history, they would have to be dispatched. So while Bruce Wayne's parents were shot by a gangster, we first learn of that in a brief flashback in Detective Comics 33, an issue in which the majority of the story concerns the Bat-Man destroying a laser-armed "Dirigible of Doom" that killed thousands of New Yorkers (i.e. one stock villain guns down another in order to cultivate narrative space for weaponized blimps). Five issues later, the Bat-Man acquires a Boy Wonder and begins his long descent into Adam West. The dark, brooding figure from the early issues would not return until Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams took over Detective Comics in January of 1970, so it seems strange to ascribe, as Timothy does, the 30 years of popularity enjoyed by the character's camp incarnation to "the lurid spectacle of gangster criminality."
In fact, the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne are, for long stretches, the only lurid spectacles associated with the character; but they are, I would argue, the enduring source of his appeal. Every time the franchise enters the doldrums, Thomas and Martha are dug up and shot down again, because their deaths are the Greek tragedy responsible for the character's malleability. Although we speak of the character in the singular, as Warren Ellis demonstrated via Planetary in 2000, doing so makes little sense. The only thing all these characters have in common is a pair of dead parents; other than that, each iteration is retrofitted to suit the particular needs of a particular historical context.
All of which is only to say that while the criminals he fights may still look like gangsters, they only do so superficially. As to Timothy's larger point:
So where is our contemporary Batman or Shadow or Doc Savage or Dick Tracy to counter Dennis Kozlowski, Kenneth Lay, or Joseph Cassano, our 21st Century Prunefaces and Jokers, a character born not from the trauma of a street crime mugging but of a family or town destroyed by unaccountable individuals and institutions? It’s time for a new cycle of mythmaking even as we continue to enjoy the recycling of old ones.I think someone really needs to start watching Leverage.
Also, FDR's polio/wheelchair thing was the perfect cover for a super athletic crimefighter.
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Monday, 08 February 2010 at 11:41 AM
I think Neil Gaiman plays with Batman-as-multiplicity in a compelling way in Whatever Happened to the Dark Knight, where the murder of his parents enacts a range of irreconcilable stories, each being shown to Batman himself. "That never happened," he says while he's still missing the point.
As the kids say, SPOILER: Near the end of the novel, he's told "The only reward for being the Batman is you get to be the Batman." He dies, and is reborn, his slate blank except for the key event of his parents' murder shaping his adulthood. Nothing is fixed except two people gunned down in an alley and a mask which can hold innumerable meanings.
All of which is, I think, at least a partial explanation for why Batman's rogues gallery is so widely known: Batman is the cipher which allows them to exist.
...or something like that. I'll confess I haven't wrangled all of the implications here.
Posted by: Evil Bender | Monday, 08 February 2010 at 04:35 PM
Adam Roberts:
I would SO read that comic. Signs the Social Security Act by day, uppercuts Nazis by night!
Posted by: StevenAttewell | Monday, 08 February 2010 at 06:29 PM
Somehow, Adam neglected to link to this. Not sure how that happened. That said, I don't have the time to dig them up now, but there are, in fact, comics involving FDR personally waging his own WWII ... but as they were drawn before his polio became common knowledge, he's not in a chair yet. (Sorry, Steven.)
Evil Bender, this has convinced me I need to re-read Whatever Happened, because I don't remember that and can't imagine Gaiman would treat Wayne like that. It makes no sense (he says, clearly so invested in his own/Warren Ellis' theory about what makes the Batman the Batman that he can't imagine anyone thinking differently).
Posted by: SEK | Monday, 08 February 2010 at 08:47 PM
My reading of Gaiman's take may be off. I think the strongest case I can make for my reading is the (SPOILER again) version of Batman's death in which Alfred has been hiring friends to play villains in order to help Bruce Wayne out of his depression. I was shocked to see Gaiman play Batman as so ridiculous, but it makes sense under the interpretation that Batman holds all--or at least many--possible meanings, and those around him may change, but he'll still be the guy dressed up like a flying rodent.
Please let me know your take when you give Whatever Happened another look. I teach various Batman texts at least once a year, and I'd love to know what you make of it, and why I am (in app probability) delusional.
Posted by: Evil Bender | Monday, 08 February 2010 at 09:47 PM
I actually just re-read it at your spurring, and now I'm not sure what to think. My initial impression was that Gaiman was being annoying, because toying with Sandman fans on the occasion of Batman's demise was just wrong, wrong, wrong ... and that's still there: Martha Wayne sounds like Death, right down to the rhythm of her speech, but that's probably not intentional on Gaiman's part. He probably can't not write dead characters consoling other dead characters without it seeming like "The Sound of Her Wings" at this point. That annoyance has abated a bit, though, but now it's being replaced with another: I also remember this exchange between Clark Kent and Batman in The Wake:
Because guess what, Batman, you just did again! Only this time, after you died! I like what he's done by reducing the character to what Ellis already had back in 2000, but I just don't know what to make of it. It seems too easy, i.e. too obviously a prelude to a ret-con, and while Grant Morrison loves nothing more than a few more Earths to cycle through the next continuum-wide crossover, I can't help but think that at this point the Morrison-esque meta-meta-narrative cheapens the story for everyone who's not one of Douglas Wolk's "super-readers."
But I think I may just be annoyed again. Let me take the evening to digest and return to this after class tomorrow.
Posted by: SEK | Monday, 08 February 2010 at 10:09 PM
Good post, man.
(I should leave comments more often. Why not just say things are good when they're good? It cheers people up.)
Posted by: jholbo | Monday, 15 February 2010 at 02:07 AM
Thanks, John! (I don't think comments like this one have the same cockle-warming effect, though.)
Posted by: SEK | Monday, 15 February 2010 at 05:26 PM