THE EXEMPLARY AND THE EXCEPTIONAL PART II

I started refining some of my thoughts on the topic of "quality in popular culture" upon giving more thought about how one might defend certain choices for "best comics stories" on a transpersonal basis, rather than just personal liking. If one's only criterion for inclusion on such a list was exceptionalism, then there's no way that one could ever find room for "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," the first story to introduce the character of the Batman. I've mentioned before that in terms of the pulp aesthetic that prevailed during most of the Golden Age, the Batman stories possessed an overall higher quality than that of most other costumed-crusader features. Yet "Syndicate," the story to initiate the Batman series, was in almost every way a thoroughly ordinary tale, as evidenced by the stiff art above, in which nothing seems to have any life but the dramatic figure of the Batman. Moreover, fan-research revealed that most of the story was cadged from a text-tale from one of the SHADOW pulps, so that it's not even merely a derivative story, but a swiped one. If one's only criterion is one of exceptionalism, of that which exceeds the normal boundaries of a given form, then "Syndicate" would not make an exceptionalist's list.



And yet, "Syndicate" does have that one appealing element of the Batman, flitting in and out of the prosaic goings-on. The earliest form of the character's costume is almost entirely an abstract design, with little resemblance to what a real man in a costume would look like in a representational drawing. Even Joe Shuster's Superman, crude though it is, looks more like a real figure. Yet, as I've observed before, the Siegel-Shuster SUPERMAN posited a supernormal crimefighter who automatically outshone almost all of his adversaries and supporting characters, while Batman, a normal crimefighter with only the appearance of the supernormal, quickly propagated his occult aura outward, so that even minor enemies like the Monk and the Duc D'Orterre became significant figures in the series' expressive design.

Thus, on the basis of the one design element of the Batman, with its enormous kinetic appeal, I can fairly pronounce "Syndicate" to be an exemplary tale in spite of its obvious failings. Poor as it is in many respects, it set a palpable example for better stories. I wouldn't say that every origin-story does this, however, which is one reason I disagree with Tony Isabella's 1000 COMICS book, in which he indiscriminately lists any story that begins a significant series. Some origin stories may actually be technically better than Batman's first outing, but not all first stories are exemplary stories.

In contast to an exemplary story, an exceptional story needs to convey the sense that it has not only fulfilled the requirements of a given form or genre but has in some sense surpassed it. Such is patently the case with the aforementioned six-part DETECTIVE COMICS serial by Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers, which reputedly sought not to simply tell another Batman story but to capture the essence of the Batman concept: condensing in six issues the major tropes of the serial, at least as Englehart and Rogers perceived them.

In the Golden Age there was no thought of attempting such a condensation. Even when Golden Age stories got better, with Bill Finger's scripts becoming more finely-tuned while artists like Sprang and Robinson easily outdid Bob Kane's crudities, there was no sense of "going beyond" the limits of any single Batman story; of telling, in effect, an exceptional "meta-Batman" tale.






In Rogers' work, Batman's costume is no longer as abstract as in the original Kane story, but now it has become a design-element in a greater design, that of Rogers' Eisneresque comic-book architecture. And in like manner, Englehart's story consistently articulates sophisticated (some would say "pseudo-sophisticated") meanings to what the original audience considered to be nothing more than simple pulp fantasies. In the section excerpted, Englehart has villain Deadshot expouse pure moral relativism: "I want what I want, and don't care how I get it!" Earlier in the same story, Rupert Thorne, a crime boss operating behind a respectable front, becomes far more philosophical than any Bill Finger gangster could've been, as Thorne tells Batman that the people of Gotham want the hero gone because he "stirs things up." Whether or not one agrees with me that Englehart and Rogers did succeed in crafting an exceptional Batman story, the conscious intent evident in their stories makes clear that this was what they were aiming for a quintessential Batman story, rather than just another of many stories in the opus.

For those interested, I would say that this refinement should gloss my earlier meditations on the subject, where I devoted considerable energies to defining the reasons "why Batman's as good as The Spirit," with the former being "exemplary" and the latter "exceptional." For my trouble, I was flatly told that I was merely "dancing" around the truth that THE SPIRIT was the "clearly superior work." I don't expect the above refinement to make any difference to proponents of exceptionalism, but I'll put it out there anyway, just for the hell of it.