Comic Books

Until yesterday I had never read an actual superhero comic book. But, like most people, I'm familiar with a lot of comic book heroes. I'm sure that if I rattled off a list of comic book heroes you or anyone else would recognize most if not all the names, even if they didn't know any of their stories. I don't know how long Superman has been in the mainstream consciousness (oh, the white-breadiest of all super heroes), or Batman or the Spider-Man. Hollywood, having made several ga-jillion movies of each of these characters has ensured that even if you don't care that Superman is faster than a speeding bullet, you know it anyway (I had to look up on wikipedia for the rest of the description of Superman, which goes "...more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound").  These many movies spawned cartoons to get the kids more involved, creating future audiences for superhero movies (as well as toys and the like), even if they had never touched the original source material and never will. 

When I was four, every afternoon at 4:30 I would watch Batman. Though it's been too long for me to remember much of my specific reaction to Batman, I enjoyed it enough to come back every week. My only piece of Batman merchandise was a thin plastic Batman kite, which I loved. It may have been lost over the freeway when the (actually very long) string broke, at which point I may have gotten another exactly like it. At four I'm not sure how much of the stories I understood, but I remember crying at the death of Clayface, and being excited whenever my favorite villain was around, the Riddler.

I recently started watching random episodes of Batman: The Animated Series, for the first time in 14-15 years. The voice actor for Batman has this wonderful blend of stately gravitas and gruffness, and the stories strike a good balance between seriousness and the camp element somehow endemic in Batman. As I watched for the only second time the scene of Clayface struggling to keep his form together, I was struck by how this seemed to evoke not nostalgia, but a comfortable familiarity that made the years between now and then disappear.

Yesterday I sheltered in the library, after having ridden my bike to the farmers' market in the warm late spring rain. I sat in what may become my usual spot in the Post 1900 Fiction Room, and to my surprise, turned to see a large shelf of comic books. The list of comic books I've read is short, but probably rather pithy in terms of what people consider to be great "graphic novels", with a few exceptions. Safe Area Goradze  and Palestine by Joe Sacco, Watchmen by Alan Moore, Sandman by Neil Gaiman, Blankets, Bone, most of Fables,  and all of the Flight anthologies. Needing, as always, some distraction from my discomfort I hesitantly picked up The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller.

Bruce Wayne is old and retired, but he is going mad as he watches his city go to hell via the local news. Thus he is driven to do what he has always done, which is put on a suit and serve beat downs while the ineffectual Gotham police nip at the leftovers. As I started reading I recognized immediately the attitude that is the spine of Watchmen. Maybe attitude is too nebulous. It's more a philosophy for approaching a superhero story, one whose central tenets are large doses of skepticism, verite, cynicism, and what everyone likes to call "grittiness", which mostly counts towards accentuating the dark sides of all the characters (which Watchmen takes to nauseating extremes). The first few pages show a morbid curiosity and disgust with the media, and the whole story is punctuated with talking heads on television screens that have pseudo-academic debates over the action. 

The Batman here is a clear antecedent to Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins and the Dark Knight. Miller's Batman is a man who's never been able to cope with his childhood trauma, thus driven to near psychotic lengths in search of some measure of justice. This has become what Batman is all about. For Miller this means Batman dishes out some absolutely brutal beatings, held back by a thin but iron clad rule to never kill.  As I'm no historian of comic books, I'm not sure if this counts as the first depiction of Batman in such a light.

I'm also unsure of how I feel about the trend. For me, Miller went too far. Too much paranoia and savagery, from the talking heads spouting psychoanalytic bullshit to the Mutants and their reign of terror, to Batman breaking all their faces. Everything began to swirl together into some nightmare in inked lines and washed-out colors. Having not quite dried out from the rain and being brought down lower and lower by each page I stopped about halfway through, stuffed it back on the shelf, and rode home.

That night Tati and I watched the episode where Mr. Freeze (Fries) is introduced. Batman, after struggling to apprehend Mr. Freeze, smashes his thermos of hot soup over Freeze's head, bringing him down. Later, he quips, "nothing beats a cold like chicken soup." While I appreciate depth to any character, I'll take calm, collected, punning (occasionally) animated Batman over the tortured kind.