BATMYTHOS

Earlier I did a series of essays on DC's Comics chronological presentation of the early Superman stories, in which I observed that while that feature wasn't quite a null-myth, it came close to that status because so many of the situations and characters were rendered very unimaginatively.

In contrast, the first year or so of Batman tales-- ranging from "May 1939" to "Spring 1940"-- starts off much more felicitously.

The first two tales are pretty run-of-the-mill crime-stories aside from establishing some of the Batman's basic myth-elements: Comissioner Gordon and the Batrope, for two. DETECTIVE #27's Bat-tale is just a whodunnit that verges into mad-scientist territory (a chamber of poison gas, a well-placed vat of acid), but DETECTIVE #28 proves a little more interesting, for it features the first time Batman uses inquisitorial torture on a perp. In contrast to a slightly-similar scene in DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, referenced in this essay, here Batman deliberately ties dandified thief Frenchy Blake with his Batrope and then "tosses him out into space," i.e., an apartment window. Then the crimefighter threatens to cut the rope unless Frenchy signs a full confession, which Frenchy does in order to survive. The sequence makes an interesting contrast to Superman's interrogation of a prisoner in ACTION #1, for though the Man of Tomorrow seems to endanger his captive's life, the hero's attitude is so playful that the audience never really thinks him willing to kill for information. With this early version of Batman, one's never quite sure what he might do.

Well-dressed, monocled Frenchy seems a template for a lot of the villains in the Bat's first year. DETECTIVE #29 and #30 introduces Batman's first "super" villain, mad scientist Doctor Death, who has a European-sounding real name and wears, like Frenchy, a monocle, which automatically connotes European aristocracy and its pretensions. Issues #31 and #32 deal with the Monk, apparently a Hungarian vampire, #33 gives readers a faux Napoleon named "Kruger," and #34 has Batman encounter a New Orleans villain called "Duc d'Orterre," who seems a dandified devil-figure right down to his oval head and pointed ears. Issue #35 breaks with the European theme for a little Asian action including both Hindu and Chinese foes, and then #36 gives us the first villain since #27 who isn't stereotypically "foreign" in some way, for all that Hugo Strange wears well-tailored clothes and substitutes coke-bottle glasses in place of a European monocle. But the monocle surfaces again in #37, perched on the nose of "Count Grutt," a "foreign agent," and only with #38, with the introduction of Robin, do we see nothing but plain old homegrown crooks. But the last set of tales-- all from BATMAN #1--stresses "weirdie" villains, giving readers a two-part introduction to the Joker and another go-round with Hugo Strange, who unleashes against the hero a horde of hulking monster-men, a concept probably borrowed from Lester Dent's 1934 Doc Savage novel, THE MONSTERS. And even the most mundane story in BATMAN #1 features a villainess named "the Cat," whose conversion into a costumed "weirdie" was just around the bend.

Now, given that I favor Jungian amplification over Freudian reductiveness, I think that all these European, Asian or Gothic-horror exoticisms *mean* something beyond just Bob Kane and Bill Finger copying every pulp device they could find. Clearly the creators thought there was some advantage of emphasizing so much exotica, or readers would have seen more tales in the DICK TRACY-like mold. DETECTIVE #38 proves that Kane and Finger could do such "mean streets" stories when they pleased (though admittedly #38 contains an extra "bizarre" touch in that it focuses on the intro of Batman's costumed partner).

Another comparison with Superman may be fruitful. Every recitation of Batman's behind-the-scenes origins starts with Bob Kane being informed of the breakaway success of Siegel and Schuster's SUPERMAN, which impelled Kane to come up with some appeal to the same market. Whether from personal penchant or fear of legal action, he didn't attempt to make a super-powered protagonist, but chose to focus on a non-powered costumed hero closer to the model of the Shadow and the Spider than Superman, and got his high-school friend Bill Finger to collaborate on the character.

I said in one of the Superman essays that although the S&S Superman was fairly described as a "personality," no one else in the early tales, except for Lois Lane, possessed much individuality, and even settings and situations seemed pretty threadbare. One almost suspects that Superman's creators wanted nothing to detract from the singular wonderfulness of their star.

Though Kane and Finger surely never thought about the matter in great detail, it does seem that they conceived the Batman as being at least a stylistic opposite to Superman, if not a "polar opposite" as so many current fans delight in declaring. (Just how opposite can they be, when their early versions both have little compunction about performing acts of inquisitorial torture?) Kane and Finger, evidently impressed with some of the style of Expressionist Cinema, chose to put their hero in a world where everything might have "personality."

That's not to say that they were always successful. Doctor Death, Batman's first "supervillain," is just about as dull as Superman's first fantastic opponent, the "Ultra-Humanite." Oddly, Death's successor in the mad-science department, Professor Hugo Strange, isn't any more complex than Death, but Strange's visual appearance is more kinetically arresting, while his mastery of "weird science" is a good deal more impressive, as well as allowing for more Expressionist visual tropes (particularly the city-blanketing fog he conjures forth in DETECTIVE #36). Yet his early appearances, rather like those of SUPERMAN's Luthor, don't quite succeed in reaching the status of myth, but while Luthor's symbolic personality became amplified over time, Strange went into mothballs after two stories and had to wait until the 1970s to take on greater mythopoeic status.

Of the villains that followed Strange prior to BATMAN #1, only the Monk and the Duc D'Orterre have any mythic status, though both appear in stories of surrealistic horror that didn't present any opportunities for follow-ups, even if the creators had wanted to bring either villain back from their comic-book deaths. With the introduction of the Joker, however, Kane and his collaborators arguably figured out a way to present a general mood of weirdness in the BATMAN feature in the form of criminals who were freakish rather than exotic. Or perhaps they simply stumbled across the solution, since it's said that editor Vin Sullivan advised them not to kill off the Joker at the end of the introductory two-parter, because he was just too good a villain to lose. Within the next two years the feature shed most of its Expressionist tropes as it became more "rational" in its presentation, but it may be that the Joker supplied the creators with the model for a freakish continuing villain who summed up the grotesquerie of the feature's first year, but who also fit the genre of crime-stories without needing his grotesquerie explained by references to such exotica as Hindu idols or Hungarian castles.

And once the Joker had appeared, so went the Cat(woman), the Penguin and a host of other weirdies. One might even venture that BATMAN's narrative example influenced far more of its contemporaries than did the Siegel SUPERMAN, at least in the 1940s-- but any proof for that would be far beyond the boundaries of this post.