The Worst Is Yet to Come

Posted on December 6, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

We finished the first season of Batman, and started the second…and holy jumping the shark, Batman. The two initial episodes with the Archer were by far the worst in the series.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what went wrong. There were a number of funny jokes — the Pow! and Bam! were replaced with “Poweth!” and “Bameth!” to reflect the Archer’s pseudo-Shakespearian diction, for example, and there’s a great line where Alfred is imitating Batman and Robin tells him to stick out his chest and be virile. But the episode as a whole just had no snap or joy; the actors seemed lost, wandering from campy bit of dialogue to campy bit of dialogue like tired, underpaid drones.

If I had to identify one thing that really undoes these episodes, I’d point to the villain. Art Carney, as the Archer, is pretty flat — again, the thees and thous are the main joke, but he doesn’t have anything like the manic goofball energy of Frank Gorshin as Riddler or Victor Buono as King Tut, nor Burgess Meredith’s bravado mugging.

More than that, though, the Archer is too effective. He’s got a pack of trick arrows (a la Green Arrow) and they all work really well; the first thing he does is to legit take out Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson from afar and steal their stuff. He goes on to mount a very reasonable plot involving robbing the Wayne foundation with the help of an inside man. Along the way, he turns the citizens of Gotham against Batman and Robin. He just comes across as a real, legitimate threat, with achievable, fairly well-conceived goals.

This throws everything out of whack. Most Bat villains are way more interested in goofiness for its own sake than in criminality; in subsequent episodes, Catwoman steals a catalog for reasons, or King Tut reanimates beatles trapped in amber to create a secret mind control formula and then has Chief O’Hara dance on a flagpole. The plot zigs and zags around the villain’s obsessions and neuroses, rather than around their actual efforts to steal something. That allows Batman and Robin to race from here to there more or less inefficiently and still save the day, because there wasn’t a whole lot of day to be saved anyway.

The show at its best is really a kind of masquerade; it’s a dress-up game, where everyone pretends that they’re good and/or evil; it’s a collaborative pantomime of bat nonsense. In the Archer, episode, though, the Archer doesn’t quite seem to be in on the joke; he actually wants the money. He’s bad according to genre conventions, rather than using the genre conventions to signal “bad” while wandering off to play with beetles or leave riddles scrawled on bat undies or what have you.

There were other problems too — the soundtrack, usually a delight, was weird and off, as just one example; the sets and backgrounds looked fake and clunky in a half-hearted way, rather than winningly, as with Tut’s preposterously ersatz crocodiles. But the show’s real incompetence is in making the Archer competent. Real villains are boring; they take the joy out of life.

Hating the Anonymous Haters

Posted on December 5, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This is one of those posts I wrote for another site, but then it didn’t work out. So here it is; slightly off-brand for HU, but so it goes.
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Anonymity makes the Internet ugly. This is common-sense online wisdom, and there’s research to back it up. A 2014 article by Arthur D. Santana examining newspaper comment threads found that “Non-anonymous commenters were nearly three times as likely to remain civil in their comments as those who were anonymous.” Non-anonymous forums significantly reduced abusive comments, or, as Santana put it, “there is a dramatic improvement in the level of civility in online conversations when anonymity is removed.” Anonymity makes people meaner; it creates less civil, more toxic communities.

This is the context in which Kathleen Hale’s recent article about an anonymous reviewer was published at The Guardian. Hale is a writer and the author of the novel No One Else Can Have You. Her article is about one of the novel’s critics, an anonymous online reviewer who went under the alias of Blythe Harris. Harris, Hale claims, was notorious among authors on the Goodreads book discussion website for her negativity and for abuse. Hale cites one instance in which Harris and her followers targeted a supposedly 14-year old reviewer, swamping her with abuse and profanity (whether the 14-year-old was really 14 is open to question.) Hale’s lengthy essay goes on to describe how Hale tracked Harris down and unmasked her.

Hale acknowledges that her obsession with Harris’ reviews and criticism wasn’t healthy; in the first sentence of the essay she characterizes herself as a “charmless lunatic.” But she also seems proud of her success as a “catfisher.” In online parlance, a “catfish” is someone who creates a fake identity online in order to deceive others, especially potential romantic partners. Harris, here, is the anonymous catfish — she’s a deceptive troll, and Hale reels her in and brings her down. Hale admits to being obsessive and pitiful, but the narrative presents her as a bit heroic too. She’s taking a stand for bullied authors and against the uncivil, anonymous hordes.

The problem is that, reading the essay with just a little bit of skepticism, Hale doesn’t come off as the good guy in this interaction. She presents her “lunatic” behavior as funny, obsessive, quirky, and sad — “Over the course of an admittedly privileged life,” she says, “I consider my visit to [Bythe’s] as a sort of personal rock bottom.”

But what she doesn’t say is that, if you identify with Harris for a moment, the stalking behavior is terrifying. Hale uses her influence as an author to get Harris’ personal information, including her address and work phone. She shows up at her house. She calls her workplace multiple times. And then, she writes an article in an international venue in which she shames and vilifies the woman she has stalked. The Guardian says that some of the names in the piece were changed— but Blythe’s online name is not changed, and her real name appears to have been used as well (at the least, there is no clear statement that the name was changed.) Even just printing the name Blythe uses online is problematic; attacking someone in a mainstream forum can send angry readers swooping down on their social media accounts in droves. The article itself is effectively an extension of a campaign of harassment aimed at someone whose main sin was that she didn’t like Hale’s book and didn’t use her real name online.

Again, there is evidence that anonymity is associated with incivility and bad behavior. But anonymity doesn’t cause incivility, or, at least, it’s not the sole cause. Santana’s report noted that 30% of non-anonymous comments on the news stories they surveyed were uncivil. Anonymous users are responsible for a lot of abuse online, but by no means for all of it. Personally, some of the most memorably unpleasant interactions I’ve had on the Internet have been with people using their real names — in some cases, with established journalists.

More, there are some good reasons why a writer online might want to be anonymous. As Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “The decision in favor of anonymity may be motivated by fear of economic or official retaliation, by concern about social ostracism, or merely by a desire to preserve as much of one’s privacy as possible.” To provide just one example, there are incidents of teachers being fired for expressing controversial opinions online; any teacher, therefore, has good reason to hide his or her identity in online forums. For that matter, as author Bree Bridges commented on twitter ,” “Why would a reviewer EVER use a fake name?” implored the author currently stalking the hell out of one. “I can’t think of one reason.”” Hale’s article demonstrates exactly why a reviewer might want to use a pseudonym. If you can avoid it, you don’t want an obsessive stalker like Hale to know who you are or where you live.

Hale’s article raises the disturbing possibility that anonymity may lead to less civility — and that decrying anonymity may also lead to less civility. Some people, clearly, feel empowered by anonymity to hurl abuse and threats, as the ongoing death threats against women in the gaming industry demonstrate. But at the same time, the association of trolling with anonymity, and the use of terms like “catfishing” makes people like Hale (and apparently her editors at the Guardian) feel like they are entitled to stalk and shame people they disagree with online. Decrying anonymous trolling, and the association of anonymity with deception and bad actors, can be used to justify further harassment and abuse aimed at the supposed bullies.

Hale’s essay unleashed a firestorm of criticism from book writers and bloggers (some examples are here and here. A number of blogs organized a blackout on reviews of new releases in an effort to bring attention to the fear many reviewers feel that they might be targeted by authors. Hopefully Guardian Books and other publications are paying attention. Just because a writer is anonymous doesn’t mean that it’s okay to stalk, harass, and humiliate them. Even though anonymity is often used for incivility online, a pseudonym, in itself, doesn’t make you a legitimate target.

How Do Comics Represent Ferguson?

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Qiana Whitted

Public outrage over the killing of 18-year-old Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri continues to amass its own tragic iconography. Handprints transform the so-called universal sign of surrender into a stronghold of dissent: “Hands up, Don’t shoot.” Hashtag memorials shape the interconnectivity of social media into a pictorial chorus of text: #BlackLivesMatter #JusticeforMikeBrown #ShutItDown. I think about my own son at two years old and already curling his brown fingers into Spider-Man web shooters, and vainly I hope that the right counter-visual will fix what’s wrong, or at least begin to impair what Matthew Pratt Guterl, refers to as “the familiar grammar of racial sight, through which a wallet becomes a gun or a Harvard professor becomes a burglar.”

I also had the chance to consider how the call for racial justice registers through image when I toured the exhibit on “The Long March: Civil Rights in Cartoons and Comics” at OSU’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum last month. Among the stately commemoration of landmark firsts – including incredible pages of original art from Pogo, Wee Pals, and Green Lantern/Green Arrow – the corner of the room displaying the editorial cartoons seemed louder and more demanding in their effort to picture the raucous discord of the moment. We can learn a great deal from the way Pittsburgh Courier cartoonist Sam Milai uses the Junior Astronaut Helmet as a visual metonym for the aspirations of a middle-class African American family (below), only months after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon:

In another image, Bill Crawford speaks to fears over militant Black Nationalism in a cartoon that invokes the Ku Klu Klan to set the boundaries of acceptable (and respectable) protest in 1968:

So I’m interested in what editorial cartoons and other comics have to say about Ferguson. What images are deployed to convey the stakes of the debate, the challenge to people and institutions of power, and the costs of the status quo? Nationally-circulated examples can be found in features like Michael Cavna’s recent Comics Riffs column in the Washington Post on “15 of the Most Striking #Ferguson Cartoons so far…” while cartoonist Daryl Cagle is also maintaining an extensive archive on editorial comics about Ferguson on his website, The Cagle Post.

What surprises me when I browse through these cartoons, however, is how unsatisfying many of the images are, or rather how limited they appear to be in their imaginative scope. In the wake of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for Mike Brown’s murder, many of these editorials seem to recycle the familiar visual codes and contexts of justice denied. The irony of depicting Lady Justice, Uncle Sam, Martin Luther King, Jr., or President Obama with their hands up, unarmed, or being shot is frankly worn thin. (Though I admit to being fascinated by the current trend of depicting King as he appears in his national monument, which gives him the foreboding presence of an establishment figure or institution, rather than a fellow activist.)

Patrick Chappatte’s “Race in America” (above) is much more compelling. President Obama is depicted in the center of the sepia-colored cartoon silently watching the Ferguson protests on TV. I’m struck by juxtapositions here, beginning with the President’s quiet reflection in an empty room against the noise and chaos of the live feed. While the Oval Office seal and desk mark his distance from the populace, he is seated on the edge of the chair, close to the screen. And finally, the fact the President is a black man watching racial injustice play out before him brings the title of the cartoon into conversation with multiple registers of power and powerlessness. There is contemplation, sadness, or is that disappointment? I like the understated complexity of this piece.

Several of the comics adapt iconography commonly associated with the racism and state-sanctioned bigotry of the American South. Among these, I appreciated Matt Wuerker’s efforts to complicate the way we think about privilege by replicating the familiar “White” and “Colored” entrances of Jim Crow alongside a new door marked “Blue” with an escalator accessible only to law enforcement.

Particularly problematic, however, are the comics that lean on images of the Ku Klux Klan like a visual crutch to characterize the nature of the treatment Mike Brown and his family have received. What role does region play in such a national epidemic of injustice? When I raised this concern among friends, I was reminded of the Klan’s national reach, especially in Midwest states like Indiana in the earlier 20th century. St. Louis, in particular, seems to defy geographic labels and has been called “the most northern Southern city and the most western Eastern city.” Cartoons such as Milt Priggee’s “Ferguson hood” or Rainer Hachfeld’s “Ferguson 24/11” may therefore have a point in placing the Klan hood over Uncle Sam and Lady Justice to condemn white supremacist rule beyond the Mason-Dixon line. But I don’t think the same can be said for a cartoon like “Southern Justice” by Jeff Danzinger (below). He appears to draw a more direct line between racial violence in the South and the circumstances under which an unarmed black youth could be murdered in 2014 without repercussion. It is perhaps because the Klan iconography is so highly charged that the kind of analogy attempted in Danzinger’s piece (or in Bill Crawford’s earlier cartoon) can be too easily muddled.

Finally, I want to call attention to cartoonist Keith Knight who, along with Matt Bors, is producing some of the sharpest satire about race and police brutality today. (Many of their comics are collected at Daily Kos.) Knight’s work on Mike Brown so far includes “Blacker Friday”, “Sign of Progress?” and “White Riot.” He has been chronicling enough of these incidents that his comics about the shooting death of other black men such as Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner are specific to each case and yet, virtually interchangeable. The cartoon at the top of my post titled “Police Application” first appeared in 2011, while the comic below was published in 2003.

Knight never takes his eye off the “familiar grammar of racial sight” and the disservice that this way of seeing does to our nation. In the comic called “41 Shots,” the way he places the famous Tootsie Pop commercial against the relentless visual BLAM of every bullet fired into Amadou Diallo’s body grows more chilling with each panel. Likewise, the hand in the parody of the “Police Application” cartoon is faced with what should be an easy question, but instead makes a devastating choice in refusing to see the humanity of people with black skin. Knight has turned all of these cartoons into a traveling exhibit – “They Shoot Black People, Don’t They?” – to call attention to the need to hold state and local law enforcement accountable, as he explains in this strip. He begins by saying, “every time I do a cartoon about police brutality, I hope and pray that it’ll be the last one I’m compelled to draw…”

So do I.

You Are Where You Are: Jason Aaron’s Settings

Posted on December 3, 2014 by Tom Syverson

“It is folly to believe that you can bring the psychology of an individual successfully to life without putting him very firmly in a social setting.”

-Tom Wolfe

A few months ago, writer Linn Ullman (daughter of director Ingmar Berman and actress Liv Ullman) talked to The Atlantic about her understanding of setting in narrative approach. Inspired by the short stories of Alice Munro, Ullman said:

Those precious few settings where something happened are where meaning resides—they contain the story, they are the story. Yes, I think that, to Alice Munro, story is place—the two are that deeply connected. You do not have a story of a life without an actual place. You can’t separate one from the other.

Reading that interview, I was struck by how applicable this is to comic book storytelling. One of the major strengths of the comic book medium is its unique capacity for placing readers squarely within a specific setting, a characteristic that feeds directly off the primacy of the medium’s visual dimension.

Unlike film or books, static page layouts allow a reader of graphic fiction to dwell equally on minutia and panorama, to experience the past alongside the present. With other forms of fiction, we’re always looking at or thinking about one thing at a time; temporally, we’re constantly caught up in the “now” of the narrative.

But graphic fiction generally has no “now” per se; rather, a typical comic book page viewed holistically is a representation of a certain big picture, i.e. an expression composed with a certain temporal simultaneity and visual dexterity between high and low abstractions of detail.

There are few comic book writers today that demonstrate this with greater aplomb than Jason Aaron.

In the past several years Aaron has emerged to be one of the most successful scribes of the comics world, due in large part to his “one for you, one for them” approach to the business. Like other prominent Marvel writers such as Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction, Aaron is able to balance his spandex work with personally meaningful projects.

After garnering an Eisner nomination in 2007 for his Vietnam graphic novel The Other Side, Aaron pitched Scalped to DC/Vertigo. Initially conceived of as a Scalphunter reboot, Scalped quickly blossomed into an epic, beautiful Western-Noir saga about one community’s struggle with economics, circumstance, family, racial identity, morality, violence, spirituality, authority, and just about everything in between.

The most striking thing one feels opening an issue of Scalped is the immediacy of its setting. Aaron’s story takes place on the Prairie Rose Indian Reservation, located in the dusty, desolate plains of South Dakota. With enormous help from the book’s remarkable artistic staff, including detailed pencils from R.M Guera and warm sepia tones from talented colorists like Giulia Brusco, Scalped teems with human life like no other comic I’ve seen before.

A great example of this is issue #10, which serves as a heartbreaking and poetic ode to ethnic ambivalence. “My Ambitionz Az a Ridah” focuses on Dino, a young and disaffected fuckup who’s grown weary of his crummy rez lifestyle. Like all teenagers everywhere, he longs for escape and fetishizes the idea that he is somehow different, and thus truly alone, in his environment.

Dino fantasizes about leaving as he slogs through a typical day, and his narration eventually takes the form of a laundry list of precious details about his home.

“No more living in the ass-end of nowhere in a tiny little piece a’ shit house with mice in the attic and black mold on the walls. And eight other people sharin’ the space. No more livin’ without cable TV. Without cell phones. Without the internet. No more jigglin’ the rabbit ears for my fat-ass uncle so he can sit on the couch and watch westerns all day.”

The issue is a masterful depiction of how interdependent personal depression is with social deprivation; external misfortunes are directed inwardly as self-hatred, and again redirected outward as rage against one’s community.

But the clever hook of the issue is how Dino’s resentment eventually transforms into a kind of guilty affection for reservation life. Given the opportunity to leave for good, Dino decides to stay. He sees that abandoning the things he hates about his life would mean abandoning the things he loves too. It’s as if for a moment he comes to understand, however vaguely, what Erik Erikson emphasized as the inter-penetrability of character and culture:

“For we deal with a process ‘located’ in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture, a process which established, in fact, the identity of those two identities.”

In this issue and throughout Scalped, we don’t see conflict occurring within a particular setting, but rather that setting is the conflict insofar as character and culture form a dialectical relationship. When the series concluded in 2012, Aaron told Wired:

The selling point of the book was always the setting. Plot-wise, there’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about Scalped. It starts off as something we’ve seen plenty of times before…the twist was always the setting: a modern-day Native American reservation. Given that, the reservation always had to be a character in the book.

So for Aaron, setting isn’t just about placing characters in a context in which they can bump up against each other. Rather, it’s about creating a place that is itself a character, one that interacts with other characters and undergoes its own meaningful story arc.

Aaron’s newest title Southern Bastards also demonstrates this emphasis on setting. Like Scalped, the title has its protagonist returning to his hometown after a long and very deliberate absence. Both stories feature characters in the process of rediscovering a now-alien environment that nonetheless forms the unconscious basis of their personality, however much their conscious ego wants to deny it. The trick to communicating this sophisticated treatment of setting is in the details.

Consider the first page of the first issue. We’re shown a small grass clearing at the threshold between an interstate highway and the woods that line it. Around the perimeter we see crooked signs for several different Christian churches; Freewill Church of God in Christ is three miles away on Water Tower Road, and Bible Belt Baptist Church boasts the slogan “HELL: ONE WAY IN AND NO WAY OUT. WELCOME.” In the center of it all is a mangy dog taking a spiteful shit on the ground.

This tells you nearly everything you need to know about Craw County, Alabama.

As the series progresses, Aaron continues to paint Craw County as a mosaic of very specific details: every small business seems to be owned by a man named Coach Boss; a rib joint waitress named Shawna offers sweet tea and fried pie; a redneck goon has tattoos that combine Confederate and Satanist imagery; a dead father’s club is symbolic of lost phallic potency; and references to football are everywhere.

This is similar to what Tom Wolfe has said about the way he wrote about New York City.

“I realized instinctively that if I were going to write vignettes of contemporary life, which is what I was doing constantly for New York, I wanted all the sounds, the looks, the feel of whatever place I was writing about to be in this vignette. Brand names, tastes in clothes and furniture, manners, the way people treat children, servants, or their superiors, are important clues to an individual’s expectations.”

Likewise, Aaron wisely declines to merely talk about Craw County. Rather, he and artist Jason Latour are committed to showing us Craw County, slowly, through a series of tiny revelations.

At the heart of both Scalped and Southern Bastards is the way in which individuals position themselves with respect to their originology. Resentment for where we come from is rooted in a gnawing discomfort with who we come to be. Aaron’s characters see the past as exerting a kind of gravitational force over them. It follows them around and makes demands in the form of guilt. This is as true of their towns as it is of their parents –in Scalped it’s Dash’s mother and in Southern Bastards it’s Earl’s father, both figures giving body to the invisible landscape of repressed unconscious. It is our origin that always threatens to swallow us back up, particularly when, like Dash and Earl, we’ve spent so many years trying to get away from it. To appreciate this level of characterization, it’s essential we be put in meaningful touch with setting.

All of this is to say, if you haven’t checked out Jason Aaron’s work, in particular his non-superhero stuff, you really need to. Setting is important in all forms of fiction, but I hope with the above I’ve at least begun to point out how comics accomplish this like no other form can.

As serious fans of the comic book medium, it’s important that we pay attention to the things that comics can do that other forms of storytelling cannot. Today, it’s more important than ever to recognize that comic book storytelling is far more than mere Hollywood blockbuster precursor –it’s an essential and unique medium in its own right.

ARRRGH!

Posted on December 2, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

How is it I can look at the poster for the recent Somali pirate film Fishing Without Nets and register “Jolly Roger,” even though the two crossed guns look almost nothing like a pirate flag?

Superhero emblems are the same, altering every line and curve of their evolving designs, while somehow remaining recognizable:

I remember how confused I was the first time I saw the crew of Captain Blood hoist their flag and it wasn’t the standard skull-and-crossbones but instead a jawless skull and two crossed but living arms with a sword in each fist. Sure, it’s close, but imagine if Joe Shuster did Superman’s “S” in calligraphy. Or Batman swapped his chest emblem for a diagram of an actual bat.

I was probably seven at the time and so didn’t know the Captain was Errol Flynn in his breakout role. I didn’t know the 1935 film was a remake of the 1924 Captain Blood. Fans grumbled about Andrew Garfield replacing Tobey Maguire’s too-recent Spider-Man, or Sony rebooting Fantastic Four after a mere decade. But that’s been standard Hollywood practice since the teens. When Flynn traded in his pirate hat for Robin Hood tights, they were still warm from Douglass Fairbanks who’d torn them off Robert Grazer who’d yanked them from Percy Stow.

Hollywood is a roving pirate ship. They plundered Captain Blood from Rafael Sabatini’s 1922 novel. A decade had passed and swashbucklers were back with the box office booty Treasure Island shoveled in. They dug Blood up for name recognition—always safer to parrot than invent. Russell Thorndike jumped aboard too. He conscripted his own 1915 Scarecrow (vicar by day, masked smuggler by night) and sent him sailing into his piratical backstory. Doctor Syn on the High Seas floated five more book sequels, plus a 1937 film and a Disney mini-series I somehow never saw.

I also haven’t seen Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips yet, but the inspired-by-real-events tale of low sea piracy adds to my bewilderment at the genre. I blinked in disbelief as my family and I rolled through Disney World’s Pirates of the Caribbean, where jolly animatronic pirates endlessly chase buxom animatronic women in acts of slapstick rape. If we can romanticize 17th century pirates into heroic outlaws, will 23^rd century Hollywood do the same for terrorists?

Any yet that Jolly Roger—probably a corruption of the French “joli rouge,” a warning that your attackers will kill you whether surrender or not—is a symbol of fun. I used to wave it as I sat in the stands of Three Rivers Stadium cheering the Pittsburgh Pirates.

It doesn’t help that the KKK’s Black Legion added skulls and bones to their robes as they terrorized the port of Detroit in the mid-30s.

They wanted to be superheroes, same as any vigilante. Herman Landon’s 1921 gentleman thief dubbed himself the Benevolent Picaroon (that’s Spanish for pirate), and Charles W. Tyler’s Blue Jean Billy Race launched her modern pirate career in 1918, both harbored in Street and Smith’s Detective Story Magazine. Even Batman demanded a turn on the high seas. Chuck Dixon and Enrique Alcatena rebooted him as Captain Leatherwing in a 1994 Elseworlds. The pairing seems playfully discordant, but Wayne and Blood were already the same character type. Ask them to fill out the following questionnaire:

1. Do you have a penis?

2. Is it white?

3. Are you highly respected?

4. Ever been horribly wronged?

5. What’s your catchy alias?

6. How comfortable are you working outside the law?

7. Got a nifty disguise?

8. What’s your signature emblem?

9. Can you supervise one or more loyal sidekicks?

10. Are you really all about the greater good?

11. Do you love thwarting that pesky government official always bugging you?

12. Are you into girls?

If that list isn’t familiar, it should be. It’s the original superhero formula:

A (1) white (2) man of (3) high status is (4) wronged and so assumes an (5) alias as a (6) noble criminal with a (7) disguise and (8) emblem, and, with one or more (9) assistants, fights for the (10) greater good while thwarting a (11) law enforcement antagonist and courting a (12) female love interest.

Batman answers yes to all twelve plot points—if you count Commissioner Gordon, who Bruce was clearly hoodwinking in his first episode. Bruce’s forgotten fiancé, Julie, vanished along with writer Gardner Fox, but she was there in 1939 too. The rest is easy: Mr. Wayne is very wealthy and very white, was terribly wronged with the murder of his parents, goes vigilant in a bat-emblazoned leotard, while dodging police bullets and warring on criminals. Oh, and he picks up an underage sidekick and overage butler too.

Batman didn’t invent the formula. He plundered it from an ocean of predecessors. Lots of rich, pissed-off white guys like to play dress-up, while stomping on bad guys, flicking off the government, and man-handling the ladies. Look at Captain Blood. That’s just the name a noble physician assumes after he’s unjustly convicted of treason and sold into slavery. He has a crew of not-quite-as-noble escaped convicts for assistants as he flaps his Jolly Roger like a cape. That naval commander in Jamaica is always hounding him, but the commander’s daughter is smitten anyway. And of course when the citizens of Port Royal are left undefended, it’s Blood who rushes to their rescue.

Blood and Batman served aboard the 1930s Mystery Men, an overflowing ship of masked do-gooders captained by the Shadow with his pirate flag of a laugh, the original MWAHAHAHA. The 20s roared with a dozen more, all high scorers on the 12-point pirate scale. The 1914 Gray Seal is only missing Bruce’s murdered parents. The equally motiveless Zorro scores another eleven. Go back another decade and the Scarlet Pimpernel is righting the wrongs of the French Revolution, while Spring-Heeled Jack carves his “S” on his enemies’ foreheads. Personally, I prefer signature letters on the hero’s unitard.

There’s just one ingredient missing: Superpowers. Bruce is very down-to-earth in the godlike company of Superman. Blood and his shipmates are all flesh-and-blood too. But Superman is just an extension of question nine. He absorbs his assistants, giving himself the strength of countless men. A superhero a one-man man-o-war. The Hulk’s high status comes in the form of Dr. Banner’s intelligence, but otherwise he’s a formula white guy wronged by a gamma bomb and the Cold War that detonated it. With the help of his teen confidante, Rick Jones, he eludes the U.S. military while dating the General’s daughter and committing violent acts of do-goodery. If he had an “H”-emblazon cape, he’d score a twelve.

Spider-Man wronged himself but loses a point for unrespectable nerdiness. Convert status to mutant giftedness, and you have an armada of X-Men. Even the convention-sinking Alan Moore is onboard with his wonder woman Promethea. Sure, her assistants are dead versions of herself, and her pesky law enforcement officer is Christianity, but she’s an eleven, which goes to twelve if you count her male incarnation.

Captain Blood’s formula flag is still sailing.

Superman and Atticus Finch

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Donovan Grant

This scene from Superman vol.2 #81 takes place near the end of the “Reign of the Supermen” storyline, which was the final third of the “Death and Return of Superman” saga from 1993. In it, the real Superman has returned and convinces Lois Lane of his identity by quoting the last thing he said to her before rushing off to his death at the hands of the villain Doomsday. First, though, he references his favorite film. While this serves as a piece of trivia for the character, it also reaffirms the intrinsic nature of Superman, and what he values most as a “Champion of the Oppressed”.

Superman’s status as a defender of the little people was immediately established in his first appearance in Actions Comics #1. The opening scene has Superman using his extraordinary powers to save a woman wrongly convicted of murder, and to put the real killer behind bars.

At every moment of opposition, Superman refuses to let anything stand in his way and barrels through the likes of an armed butler and steel doors in order to set things right, spouting one-liners like “It was your idea!” after meeting the butler’s dare to knock down a steel wall.

This adventure, the first of three in the title’s premiere issue, serves as the perfect debut for the Siegel and Shuster Superman. Righter of wrongs, defender of democracy, this Superman fought everything from drunk drivers to the Ku Klux Klan to Adolf Hitler himself, in one form or another. It’s interesting to me that the very first superhero, the one whom all others would take inspiration from, was in his origins almost totally divorced from the confines of the superhero genre as it’s come to be known. Bring up a costumed crime fighter to an average person who doesn’t read comics, and they’ll imagine someone in a goofy suit with powers stopping a bank robber with an equally goofy suit and powers, with a silly name to go along with it. Hardly ever does a comic hero’s adventures address social injustice, and when they do it’s always presented ostentatiously. In this context, Superman’s roots as a fighter for social justice have been obscured, though not lost entirely.

One story that focused on Superman pursuing social justice is the best episode of the 1996 Superman animated series. “The Late Mr. Kent”. In this story, Clark Kent is presumed dead after a car bomb goes off while he’s in the process of clearing a wrongly convicted man days before his execution.

While this episode is rightly lauded for its taut direction, film noir atmosphere and insight into the mind of Clark Kent as opposed to Superman (to reference an age-old debate), one thing that never gets brought up is the racial themes that are implicitly addressed. The man, Earnest Walker, is a low-level thief who has been on death row for five years for murdering a woman and is now scheduled for the gas chamber. He claims to the interviewing reporter, Clark Kent, that he’s never hurt anyone in his life, and found the victim’s necklace outside his door and fenced it, concluding that he was framed. Right away Clark senses a calm heartbeat and figures he’s telling the truth. When Clark begins to investigate, everyone from the police detective to Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen maintain Walker’s guilt. Later when Clark researches Walker’s alibi of eating pizza at home, he learns that this went uninspected by his public defender.

Clark finds Walker’s alibi on the Pizza Delivery company’s record disk and drives to the governor’s mansion, at which point his car explodes. With a witness seeing his car fly into the ocean, the dilemma of exposing his identity to save Walker’s life comes into play. After flying by his adoptive parents’ home and secretly attending his own funeral as Superman, Clark decides to explain the situation to the governor, secret identity be damned.

Of course that doesn’t happen, and the revelation of who’s behind the conspiracy soon arrives. At the end of the episode however, Superman is too late to stop the governor from attending Walker’s execution, so he bursts through the chamber and sucks the gas out into the sky where it disperses. The attending crowd is initially horrified at Superman’s sudden act of random destruction.

This takes the Siegel and Shuster story one step further, proving Superman wrong when he said that only the governor could save the condemned woman. This Superman doesn’t loudly boast threats or crack jokes at his opponent’s expense. He maintains a quiet resolve. Earlier in the episode he admits to himself that he wanted the exoneration of Walker to be a victory for Clark Kent and not Superman, yet he came to his decision to reveal his identity on his own.

In this, Superman is Atticus Finch in animated form. Nowhere do we see any sort of vaudeville comedy act with the Clark Kent persona differentiating the Superman persona. Like Miss Maudie says of Atticus, Superman is the “same in his house as he is on the streets”. The same quiet dignity that is often ascribed to Atticus can be found in Clark’s patient inquiries to Detective Bowman and the Pizza worker. He seeks justice to the best of his ability, first through his job as a reporter, then as Superman with the knowledge that his double life will come to an end should he further pursue Walker’s freedom. Whereas Atticus at his best failed to win Tom Robinson his freedom and ultimately save his life, Superman at his best brought the slain woman’s killer to justice and cleared Walker’s name.

Ultimately the episode ends with nowhere near as substantial a statement on race as To Kill a Mockingbird did. As I said before, virtually no one has commented online or on the series DVDs about the fairly visible comment on wrongful arrests and executions. To have it addressed in a Superman cartoon couldn’t have been a complete accident however. Although I highly doubt it was done as a roundabout way to tie in to the reference of Superman’s favorite film in the comics at the time, the social justice angle of the episode is too explicit to ignore. While the character would see a return to his roots as a “Champion of the Oppressed” in the pages of Action Comics vol.2 written by Grant Morrison, I like the more measured approach taken here. It feels more resonant and important to have Superman saving wrongly convicted black guys rather than kicking rich businessmen into street lamps. It teaches us, however obliquely, to oppose racial bias and always try to help the less fortunate. It’s a way to have us learn from Superman’s example, in the same way that Atticus Finch had us, and Superman, learn from his example.

Quick, Robin! To the Bat Serial!

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

The Adam West Batman TV series is always fairly self-referential, but it goes above and beyond in its meta-metaness in the episodes Death in Slow Motion/The Riddler’s False Notion. The episodes are built around the Riddler’s convoluted, incoherent, but nonetheless fiendish plot to film Batman and Robin in a silent movie.

The main motive here is obviously to give the insanely (in various senses) talented Frank Gorshin a chance to do a dead on Charlie Chaplin imitation. But beyond that, the episodes are one long homage to the show’s own constant homages. The height of this is the obligatory Bat cliffhanger, a trope cribbed from the silent melodramas, which here is deliberately parodied with a trope from the silent melodramas, as Robin is strapped to a conveyor belt and threatened with a circular saw as the Riddler (with fake mustache) laughs maniacally. Batman rescues the Boy Wonder — only to discover that it’s not Robin on that belt, but a dummy. The fake imitation of a fake imitation of a fake trope has been faked. Holy curses, holy foiled, holy again.

In part it seems like Batman comic book fans have been wary of the show precisely because it situates superhero comics not in the relatively sober tradition of gritty pulp noir, but in the (often comic) tradition of serial melodrama. Yet, as this episode is well aware, that melodramatic tradition is in some ways actually more high-brow, or more accepted as high-brow, than those supposedly more validating pulp sources. The Riddler’s manic re-enactment of the mechanisms of slapstick — from pies in the face to free-for-all brawls — is a deliberate effort to show the links between venerated old comedy and new Bat-comedy. Our heroes having a giant book dropped on their heads — that’s “art”, and what’s more art than art in quotes? Batman and Robin perform in the last silent film ever made; an ersatz masterpiece of ersatzness, precious for its imitation genius, its great hijacked tradition of lack of verisimilitude.

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