World’s Best Cinecomic

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Julian Chambliss

The return of Arrow and The Flash from their midseason break continues the love-fest each program has enjoyed with fans. The CW’s dynamic duo (sorry) has sparked hopes of a DC cinematic universe by bridging the gap between diehard fans and casual viewers. Nothing illustrates this point more than this season’s semi-crossover event. Skillfully executed and action packed, each character visited the other’s show. Oliver Queen’s darker persona coming into contact with the “brighter” world inhabited by Barry Allen (and vice versa) reminded fans of World Best Comics #1 (Later World Finest Comics) that featured Batman and Superman in 1941. This comic hinted that Batman and Superman lived in the same world. Ironically, it was only the covers that placed the heroes together; they did not actually appear in the same story until 1952. Embellishing episodes that are already deeply informed by decades of stories and developed and produced by the same creative team, Arrow and The Flash deliver a better experience.

World Best Comics Vol. 1 #1 (March 1941)

The shared universe idea that developed from the 1940s onward grew more complex drawing in fans and accommodating new characters and worlds. Creators hope this legacy means fan engagement with these cinematic adaptations will impact engagement on other platforms. Yet, as recent research about the transmedia idea explains whatever the technological tools and industrial alignments shaping storytelling, these products cannot escape the sociocultural context informing the audience experience.[1] While Arrow and The Flash are satisfying action adventure serials, this season’s crossover also highlight the historical burden linked to the superhero genre.

DC Comics characters inform the popular imagination about the superhero. For years adaptations of DC characters have served as vehicles for generational discourses. Batman’s 1960s television series and Superman’s 1970s film highlight this tradition. The Batman television series leveraged the Pop Art Movement to create an “exaggerated cliché” that delighted children and amused adults.[2] At the same moment, Roy Lichtenstein blurred the boundary between high culture and commercialism using comic book panels in his images.[3] Derided at the time, his work, like TV series, resonated with the public reflecting societal tension with the postwar conformist message in America. By the time Richard Donner’s Superman graced the silver screen in 1978 the United States had been disabused of its global preeminence by failures abroad and domestic politics splintered by protests from the left and the right. Americans were uncertain and as Jimmy Carter famously explained, a crisis of confidence casted a “…growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives” and the “unity of purpose for our nation.”[4] Donner’s Superman offered an affirmation of American ideas. Not surprisingly, Carter lost his re-election campaign and adjusted for inflation Superman remains the highest gross adaptation of the Man of Steel on film.[5]

Showcase Vol 1. #4

The circumstances that shaped the pro-social mission in the original Superman and Batman reflected depression struggles and wartime triumphs. In a similar manner, the superhero comic book revival associated with Barry Allen’s debut as The Flash reflected the postwar experience. Created by Robert Kanigher, John Broome, and Carmine Infantino in 1956, Allen was the second Flash and sparked a superhero renaissance that re-imagined 1940s characters for the atomic age. Allen’s earnest commitment to family and community along with his civilian identity as a “police scientist” affirmed the moral standard established by The Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA). The CMAA’s regulatory arm, the Comic Code Authority worked to eliminate corrupting images and ideas critics linked to comic books. Famously articulated by Dr. Fredric Wertham, comic books became seen as central cause of juvenile delinquency in the early 1950s. The resulting hysteria led to Congressional hearings investigating comic publishers in 1954.[6] Recent work by Amy Kiste Nyberg does an excellent job of demonstrating how Wertham was as much a symptom as a cause of Americans’ suspicions. The confluence of Cold War tension, postwar affluence, and youth culture provided ample opportunities for parents to worry and children to rebel. Those kids endangered by comics would embrace the disruptive rhythm of rock ‘n’ roll music and go off to college and protest…everything.

As comic book publishers strove to keep this dynamic youth engaged, they continued to revamp their characters to reflect changing time. Green Arrow, created in 1941, was more “Batman-lite” than an iconic character until Neal Adams and Dennis “Denny” O’Neil re-designed him in 1969. Oliver Queen had been a rich man with a teenage sidekick who employed trick arrows and worked from secret headquarters called the Arrow Cave (with an Arrow Car of course). The “new” Green Arrow lost his fortune, discovered his ward was a drug addict, and in the classic series paired with Green Lantern travelled the country in the early 1970s confronting crimes rooted in “real world” concerns like racism and environmental damage.[7] The link to ‘relevance’ in superhero comics has never left Green Arrow, but arguably his frustration with authority has shifted in recent years from the ardent liberalism of the 1960s to a disillusioned libertarianism today.

In Arrow and The Flash this history informs the narrative world we see on the screen and shapes the shared universe they inhabit. Allen’s Flash and Queen’s Arrow approach their mission differently, a point made clear when each hero applies their methods in the other’s city. Allen retains the expectations and aspiration associated with postwar America, but slightly modernized. Despite the tragic circumstances he has faced, he is committed to making his world better. Arrow has taken Green Arrow’s social justice narrative and re-oriented it with a criminal justice lens. Like the country as a whole, his grievance with “the system” has grown at once more and less complex. He struggles with morally questionable actions in his past as he pursues a heroic future. Informed by contemporary culture, both adaptations are a prism on values inscribed in each character. As Arrow and The Flash continue to create a richer world, the evolution of their narrative legacy provides a roadmap of how the contemporary audience’s concerns about security and community contend with changing millennial realities. The popularity of the shows makes sense as a catharsis exercise. That the superheroes will triumph is not the question. Instead, how they win and remain heroic becomes the key. Queen’s Arrow doesn’t want to be a killer that relies on torture to protect those things he loves and Allen’s Flash doesn’t want to be so afraid he is unable to act. For all the fantastic excesses linked to superheroes, the broader questions they are in dialogue with matter to us all.
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[1] Carlos Scolari, Paolo Bertetti, and Matthew Freeman, Transmedia Archaeology: Storytelling in the Borderlines of Science Fiction, Comics and Pulp Magazines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), viii–viii, http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/transmedia-archaeology-carlos-scolari.

[2] Judy Stone, “Caped Crusader of Camp,” New York Times, January 9, 1966.

[3] Peter Sanderson, “Spiegelman Goes to College,” PublishersWeekly.com, April 23, 2007, http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/1-legacy/24-comic-book-reviews/article/14675-spiegelman-goes-to-college.html.

[4] “WGBH American Experience. Jimmy Carter | PBS,” American Experience, accessed December 26, 2014, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/.

[5] “Superman Moviesat the Box Office – Box Office Mojo,” accessed December 26, 2014, http://boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=superman.htm.

[6] “1954 Senate Subcommittee Hearings into Juvenile Delinquency (Comic Books),” accessed October 26, 2013, http://www.thecomicbooks.com/1954senatetranscripts.html.

[7] Jesse T. Moore, “The Education of Green Lantern: Culture and Ideology,” The Journal of American Culture 26, no. 2 (2003): 263–78.

Bruce Goes Camping

Posted on December 14, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

The Batman TV Show is known for its campiness, but it reaches an apotheosis of arch gay subtext in the episode with Liberace as the villainous pianist Chandell and his evil(ler) twin brother, the cigar-chomping, Harry — who essentially gives Liberace the opportunity to don butch drag.

I’ve mentioned before in this series that the Batman TV show tends to play shell games with objects of desire; the camera lingers on scantily clad lovelies, who then express visible/audible lust for the delectably paunchy Batman. That scrambling of hetero and homo (whatever the identity of the watcher) reaches its apotheosis in this episode, which features not the usual single villainness, but three, who improbably dress up in Scottish highlander garb (with mini-kilts) and/or Orientalist Balinese wisps of nothing. They undulate sensuously about the screen, and especially around Liberace, who undulates sensuously himself about a besotted Aunt Harriet. Chandell’s manly charms conceal and reveal his manly charms, just as Harry imitating Chandell reveals the truth of Liberace elaborately imitating himself — and someone else.

The Chandell episode is wonderful in part because it is the most explicit revelation/elaboration of the meaning of the show’s camp, and the one which connects the show’s irony and flamboyance most directly to drag and homosexual performance. Liberace’s presence is not just a camp display in itself; it infects everyone and everything around it; with Chandell nearby, Bruce and Dick rushing into a closet can’t help but have a double meaning. Then there’s the scene where Dick is sitting and sighing with a high school sweetie — and suddenly he gets a call from Batman, and instantly dumps ice cream in his girl’s lap so he can talk to his true love. A crime fighter has to make sacrifices, he sighs — but his eagerness to drop that desert suggests that maybe he’s protesting too much.

The message of the camping here isn’t just “Batman and Robin are gay!” Rather, it’s that heroism is a pantomime of masculinity, linked to and comparable to Liberace’s multiple pantomimes, and dependent on a deferred sensuality, in which the fetishization of women is rerouted into a fetishization of masculinity. Thus, the show suggests, it is Liberace, with his double identity, his capes, his colorful costumes, and his virtuoso mastery, who is the greatest superhero of them all.

Special Guest Villain: Racism

Posted on December 13, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

Vincent Price as Egghead is as good as any villain in the Adam West Bat-canon. Physically large, he looms ominously and awkwardly, while rolling every “eggs…actly” and “eggs..quisite” off his lips and past his moustache with an gigantically delicate delight. The preposterous plot lurches back and forth precariously, culminating in a delightful, messy egg battle in a barn. Bat-goodness all around.

Except, alas, for the racism.

Egghead’s plot involves gaining control over Gotham by subverting the city’s contract with the original Indian tribe, the Mohicans. Chief Screaming Chicken is the last of the Mohicans, and he is played by white actor Edward Everett Horton with mugging, unwittingly vicious contempt. Every Native American stereotype is blithely trotted out — Screaming Chicken performs silly rituals; he is thunderingly dumb (when given the chance to reorganize his contract and get more than nine raccoon pelts, he bargains gleefully for tens of dollars); he speaks in pidgin Tonto English; he is an anachronism, an amusing relic of a lost, irrelevant past, to which his quaint idiocy forever confines him.

A big part of the pleasure of the Adam West Batman is the way it presents the superhero as all powerful, ridiculous…and ultimately benign. Batman always wins, but he always wins while obeying traffic cops, driving below the speed limit, endorsing prison reform, and drinking wholesome milk. Batman’s power is super-niceness — and the show mocks the unrealism of that while enjoying the fantasy that the heroic daddy protecting us all is somehow also utterly harmless.

Chief Screaming Chicken, though undermines all that. Suddenly, Batman doesn’t seem so nice. It’s not nice for a millionaire like Bruce Wayne to enforce manifestly unfair contract terms in order to screw over someone who is obviously struggling (Chicken runs a roadside concession.) For that matter, it’s not nice to mock the descendents of the people whose forefathers you butchered and robbed, or to pretend that you bamboozled them through superior intellect rather than superior firepower, wielded with cold, ugly ruthlessness. Batman in this episode is not an avatar of niceness and decency. He’s a Bat-dick.

At one point in the show, Batman and Robin corner Egghead, who manages to escape by using a laughing gas egg. Batman and Robin start chortling and giggling uncontrollably.

Adam West’s performance quickly veers from over the top to maniacally unhinged; there’s something about the combination of his masked eyes and nose combined with his gaping, gasping mouth which is more disturbing than Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger ever managed to make the Joker. The good, wholesome daddy is gone; in his place is an unaccountable, unpredictable leer — not a grim avenger of the night, but a feverish white grin, which might do anything, and then laugh about it.

TV Superheroines of My Lovelorn Youth

Posted on December 9, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

It took almost a half century, but Fox and Warner Bros. finally put aside their film rivalry to co-release Batman: The Complete Television Series last month. It makes me want to drag my parents back together and sit them down on my living room couch to watch.

I had no idea why they were laughing the first time we watched the show together. It seemed like a pretty serious situation to me: Batman facing down that dastardly cowboy villain “Shame.” They were sitting with me on the couch in the den, enjoying the apparently hilarious subtleties of Adam West’s superheroic performance. If I can trust the episode guide I skimmed online, this is February 1968. Which puts me a little under the age of two. So maybe we were watching a rerun?

Whatever my extremely prepubescent age, I’m sure I had zero idea what Eartha Kit was doing in that slinky Catwoman costume. Nowadays I squirm just hearing the late Ms. Kit’s “Santa Baby” rasping from my favorite Christmas mix. I assume Julie Newmar’s Catwoman was equally incomprehensible. No smoldering voice, but the same cartoon-tight faux leather.

I don’t know when a kid’s sexuality kicks in (“When did you first suspect your might be straight?”), but I must have had a thing for good girls early on. Because Batgirl I noticed. Yvonne Craig in costume still produces an impressive Google search.

I sat through an entire episode of That Girl waiting for Marlo Thomas to open that secret compartment in her apartment wall and motorcycle out of the alley with her cape fluttering (I swore my mother had said the show was Bat Girl). But when Ms. Craig appeared on Star Trek as a green-skinned seductress who lap dances for Spock and lures Kirk onto a dimly lit bed, nothing in me recognized her. Apparently my pre-pre-adolescent id didn’t go for scantily clad She-Hulk types.

“Spidey,” PBS’ mute Spider-Man mutation, premiered on The Electric Company when I was seven. I was too busy blinking at my first full TV crush to take notice of him. I’m relieved to report no nostalgic reactions to The Electric Company cast portraits I just scrolled through. I can’t even figure out which actress arrested my attention. Rita Moreno is my best guess. According to her online bio though, she would have been around forty at the time. I’m even more surprised looking back at the shows advertising slogan:

“We’re going to turn you on!”

This may also be the year I started first grade, the year of my first crush on a non-TV entity. Her name was Marisa Moesta. Not quite as snappy as Lois Lane, but I understood the allure of comic book alliteration from an early age. I can’t picture Ms. Moesta, just the pink poodle key ring she gave me after I’d given her my own trinket of affection—what I can’t remember. But I carried her poodle in my utility belt for years. Though not, thankfully, to the Batcave of my current home.

Wonder Woman premiered next, with Lynda Carter “In your satin tights / Fighting for your rights.” I had less interest in her underoos than my own. Ditto for Isis. Even I knew they’d only made her up to give the Shazam! Hour‘s Captain Marvel a girlfriend.

My wife remembers Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, a female spin on the old Batman and Robin gag. I must have been too lazy to stand up and channel surf. Which is just as well since Dyna looks like she might have been my type. Those brunette ponytails. Electra’s Farah Fawcett curls still horrify.

I’m sure I was continuing to miss subtleties, but my parents weren’t beside me on the couch anymore. When I set my smiley face alarm for cartoons one Saturday morning (Batman and Robin had recently guest starred on Scooby-Do), my mother was sleeping on the fold-out mattress in the den. I don’t know when they told my sister and me they were divorcing, but it was on that couch, the TV off for a change.

When Batgirl and Robin showed up on a 30-second public-service announcement, it was some other guy in the Batman costume. Adam West was gone, desperate to escape his Caped Crusader’s shadow, a mission he would never complete. If Batman hadn’t been cancelled back in 1968, ABC would have broken up the Dynamic Duo anyway. Robin was to be replaced by Yvonne Craig’s more popular Batgirl. But bad ratings killed them all.

Congress had passed the Federal Equal Pay Act a decade earlier, but employers were still ignoring it. I don’t know if that included the University of Pittsburgh. After moving out, my mother got a job as an assistant in one of their research labs. My sister and I helped her feed rats on weekends. It couldn’t have been much above minimum wage. I doubt Batman: The Complete Television Series includes the PSA, but I remember every second:

Batman and Robin are tied to a warehouse pillar.

NARRATOR: A ticking bomb means trouble for Batman and Robin.

Batgirl swings through a window.

ROBIN: Holy breaking and entering, it’s Batgirl!

BATMAN: Quick, Batgirl, untie us before it’s too late.

BATGIRL: It’s already too late. I’ve worked for you for a long time, and I’m paid less than Robin.

Robin sneers.

BATGIRL: Same job, same employer means same pay for men and women.

BATMAN: No time for jokes, Batgirl.

BATGIRL: It’s no joke. It’s the Federal Equal Pay law.

ROBIN: Holy act of Congress!

Batgirl moves the minute hand forward on the ticking bomb.

BATGIRL (voice over): If you’re not getting equal pay, then contact the Wage and Hour Division, U.S. Department of Labor.

At least Yvonne Craig and Robin actor Burt Ward were paid the same for the commercial: $0. The PSA started airing in 1973, when Craig was thirty-six. My mother was thirty-four. Craig’s final appearance as Batgirl also marked the end of her acting career. When she couldn’t get parts, she moved on to producing and then real estate.

Lynda Carter held on to her magic lasso for four seasons, but it didn’t matter. The joke was over. The Incredible Hulk was the new, angsty breed of superhero. No camp, no gratuitous display of women in swimsuits and bodystockings, just the brooding Bill Bixby wandering away alone once a week. By the time The Greatest American Hero premiered, I’d already turned off the TV.

A Whiff of Bat-Wake Should Arouse Her

Posted on December 7, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

The 60s Batman TV show is full of gas. Joker gas, Penguin gas; Bat gas — heroes and villains alike are constantly being knocked unconscious with colorful whiffs of floating fragrance. Guns show up occasionally, but they’re largely useless — knocked from hands instantly or (in the memorable Ma Parker episode with Shelly Winters as the bad guy) the villains aim is so bad that firearms are irrelevant. The real danger is from gas — whether its sneezing powder, a black cloud to hide an escape, or that trusty, never failing knockout draft.

So why gas? I think it may serve a similar function to Wonder Woman’s lasso in the original Marston/Peter comics. Marston used bondage as a way to have conflict without violence. Similarly, the gas allows people to be rendered quietly inert without resorting to bullets or any kind of conflict that will leave a mark. There are fights between Batman and the villains, it’s true — complete with goofy bang! kerpow! special effects. But there’s a difference between seeing the superheroes battle the villains in a goofy choreographed slapstick-fest, and watching the Penguin pistol-whip some inoffensive receptionist. Gas is colorful, flamboyant, and (as depicted here, anyway) gentle. It lets the villains be villainous while still being funny.

Wonder Woman, of course, used bondage not just because it was non-violent, but because it was sexy — violence was deliberately replaced by sexuality. Batman’s gas isn’t as directly erotic — but there’s still a whiff of something there, maybe. Batman using the bat-gas to knock out the Bookworm’s moll, for example, and render her helpless, seems to have some overtones — which are both denied and highlighted when Batman insists that Gordon accompany him and the moll ot the Batcave in order to avoid the appearance of impropriety. The gas also seems like it’s a variation on, or related to, the various mind-control potions and nostrums and techniques that float through the series — the Penguin brainwashes Alfred, Tut (thinks he) brainwashes the Batman, Catwoman flips Robin’s moral code. This kind of domination again suggests Marston’s series, with its games of top/bottom and eroticized command. For that matter, Batman and Robin are tied up an awful lot in the show — not as much as Wonder Woman, certainly, but enough to raise those painted-on Bat eyebrows.

The Batman writers weren’t ideologically committed to substituting sex for violence in the way that Marston was. But the combination of a desire to avoid too much bloodshed and the need for conflict pushes them towards some of the same solutions Marston developed — with some of the same results. The TV show looked for ways to pantomime violence — and when violence is turned into a patomime, you end up hinting at BDSM, whether intentionally or otherwise.

The Bookworm’s girl (Francine York) in bondage.

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.

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.

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a pundit in every panopticon

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