Grant Morrison’s run on Batman and his approach to the character have revolved around a central, radical conceit: he has assumed that every story published about Batman is, for lack of a better word, “true.” This neatly cleaves away the most unpleasant and alienating obsession of genre comics: what is and is not continuity, what did and did not happen, what is and is not real.
As I explained this to a friend, she rightly made fun. “How can anything about Batman be true?” asked she, once again reminding me that I am of low ways.
The problem, summarized thusly: Batman has been published continuously for sixty-nine years, spanning nearly the full history of superhero comics. The character has witnessed countless transformations in creative approaches and an endless succession of writers and artists. Presuming that Batman has an existence beyond being a thin, two-dimensional fictional construct, the dissonance between the various approaches, and their creators, has become more apparent than any aspect of the character itself.
In the beginning, Batman was rough heeled and pulpy, shooting guns at toughs and smacking wet ones on his molls. Soon he picked up a youthful sidekick and began chillin’ like a respectable gent, a single dad who brought sonny-boy out to fight crime. This was followed by a long spell of increasingly weird stories: Batman eating radioactive spaghetti. Batman wearing a Zebra costume. Batman going to Planet X. Things were reigned in. The TV show hit. The sidekick went to college and Batman got a penthouse and became a swinging bachelor. And then, at last, the 1980s turned Batman hella grim & had him rolling down amongst the gore and the blood. Pretty much every supporting character died or was hideously maimed. Until Morrison’s run, this is where matters have stood. The character has been written as utterly insane and unappealing for more than twenty years.
Other fictional constructs have been allowed growth; even Sherlock Holmes became a cokehead. But the nature of Batman– a commercial commodity owned by corporate interests– demands that the character never change. In seventy years of publishing, Batman has not aged one perceptible day– the character is trapped in a perpetual stasis. How, then, does one reconcile ultra-grim, bone crushing 1990s Batman with the super-happy 1950s Batman who took Robin for bike rides in the very merry month of May?
Morrison’s approach, detailed in this interview, presumes retroactively that Batman has been allowed growth and change. In this reading, the different reboots of creative approach roughly equate to different phases in the character’s life– deducing a history in the existing text. To wit:
When I started this story, my first idea was, “What if all the Batman adventures from the 1930s until now were all part of one guy’s life, and he’s really gone through all this stuff, and it’s happened over the space of, say, 15 years, potentially?” To make it all work and still keep Batman at his peak, I settled on him being about 35 right now, so let’s say he’s been Batman since he was 19 or 20 years old.
…
Those were the days, when Batman and Robin on a riverbed was enough to sell millions of copies. Those stories represent the time in Batman’s life when he was first being influenced by Robin. I imagine that Batman – the 20-year-old Batman of Year One and the Golden Age stories, who’s given himself this mission - is working his issues out, but he’s still very grim and angry and lacks responsibility.
And then he meets this little poor kid, a carnival kid, a trapeze artist. And I figure that as soon as he met Robin, it changed his life, because suddenly he had someone to talk to. Bruce Wayne was emotionally frozen when his parents were killed, so he really needed Robin. He never got to have a pal like this when he was young because he was grieving. And where Bruce was a fairly sheltered rich kid, Dick Grayson is a rough-and-tumble street-smart circus boy so Batman learns a lot from the kid.
And I can kind of imagine Robin introducing all this cool stuff to the Batcave, the submarines and dinosaurs, all these crazy kid elements, and maybe even convincing Batman to wear a lighter-colored costume. They were like kids together. Emotionally Bruce was still a boy and some of those goofier older stories work more ‘realistically’ when seen in that light.
And again, when Robin leaves to go to college – at that point, we get the Denny O’Neill/Neal Adams stories which returned to a grimmer, 30s influenced Batman…and that’s obviously his emotional response to losing his little best friend to the grown-ups.
In other words, squaring the fucking circle.
I recommend this interview– even if one cares nothing for Batman, or is of low ways, there’s always an immense pleasure in being exposed to the thought process of a very smart person. Problem solving is fun. (But math class is hard.)
March 1st, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Actually, Sherlock Holmes started off as a cokehead, then Doyle had to clean him up (with Dr. Watson as nagging counselor) as he became more popular.
March 2nd, 2008 at 3:25 pm
Combines your two favorite subjects: Batman and Frank Miller
http://www.i-mockery.com/comics/longbox20/default.php
March 4th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
Baron Münchhausen: It’s not till The Sign of Four that Holmes does cocaine. And when he did, it wasn’t illegal or looked down upon. Doyle was actually way ahead of his time in having Watson try to wean Holmes off of the drug. It’s also been noted that Holmes’s alternating use of cocaine and morphine kept him from being addicted to either of the drugs. (I’m only talking Canon here and don’t want to bring in stuff like Meyer or other lesser pastiches.) Of course, we also observe him in an opium den (Man With the Twisted Lip) but that was, so far as Holmes lets on, for crime-fighting purposes. I think Watson even mentions at one point that Holmes is too self-disciplined to get addicted to anything. I’d add that certainly anybody who’s read The Dying Detective would know just how fucking self-disciplined Holmes could get, and how he could fool even his best friend if necessary. But Holmes did not “start off as a cokehead” (though we see him directly take the drugs in an early novel and the first short story, as I just learned from the internet). Neither did Doyle stop him from being one for fear of public opinion, because remember: Doyle _was_ the one who killed him off (with the same public results as we would get if J K Rowling had killed off Harry Potter), and plus, if Doyle feared public opinion, he wouldn’t have done/written any of the later spiritualist stuff that he did.