NEAR-MYTHS: "THE DEMON LIVES AGAIN" (1971), SON OF THE DEMON (1987)

                                

In the mythos of Golden Age Batman, as with those of many heroes in that era, criminality is a short-term menace. World-conquerors in this period are relatively few, and the various spies and agents of foreign powers represent a different type of villainy. Batman’s best-known rogues seem content to rip off company payrolls and visiting potentates. Sometimes they even commit crimes with no real end beyond dueling with Gotham’s premiere protector.

In 1971, however, writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams added two characters to the rogues’ gallery that became as well-known to Bat-fans as any of the classic Golden Age malcontents: Ra’s Al Ghul and his daughter Talia. In various interviews O’Neil averred that his primary inspiration for these characters were that father-and-daughter team created by Sax Rohmer: the world-conquering Fu Manchu and his daughter Fah Lo Suee. Like Fu Manchu, Ra’s Al Ghul—whose name is routinely translated as “the Demon’s Head”-- has used weird science to live far longer than his normal span of years. Further, like Fu, Ra’s commands a covert army of Oriental assassins, with whom Ra’s hopes to change the entire structure of Earth’s sociopolitical system. However, there are also important differences.

In his early adventures Fu Manchu has no daughter. That said, the first story-arc introduces a femme fatale, Karameneh, and when Doctor Petrie asks who she might be, Fu’s perpetual opponent Nayland Smith speculates that she might be the arch-fiend’s own spawn. Rohmer doesn’t introduce Fah Lo Suee until 1930, after which the character remains a permanent feature of the prose-series. Fah Lo Suee is often seen aiding her father’s schemes, though when convenient she lends aid to Nayland Smith and Petrie. When she does help the Englishmen, it’s because of her amour fou toward Nayland Smith, an amour of  which her father definitely does not approve.

O’Neil, however, introduces Talia Al Ghul slightly before her father’s debut, and when Ra’s shows up, he first puts Batman through a series of ordeals. Then the vaguely Arabic-seeming overlord announces to the hero that because Talia has fallen in love with him, Ra’s wants Batman to give up the life of a crime-fighter and inherit Ra’s mantle, the governance of the League of Assassins.  Batman of course opposes the criminal plots of his would-be father-in-law, even though the hero reciprocates Talia’s feelings.

Most of the Ra’s/Talia stories don’t reach a high level of mythicity. However,  in one respect Ra’s improves on his model. Whereas Fu Manchu simply uses an alchemical elixir to cheat death, Ra’s is first seen literally rising from the dead in a two-part 1971 arc, thanks to the help of a supernatural resource: a “Lazarus Pit.” The second part of the story,  “The Demon Lives Again”(BATMAN #244), develops this revelation by positing that when Ra’s first comes back from death, he becomes temporarily insane as well as having “the strength of ten,” equally temporarily. Thus he might seem to be the horror of bridegrooms everywhere: the father-in-law who’s never really out of his little girl’s life.

Yet perhaps the most mythic aspect of Ra’s culminating narrative is his battle with Batman beneath the desert sun of Old Araby. Fu Manchu is never seen fighting his enemies, but Ra’s, despite his great age, is every bit as battle-worthy as his prospective son-in-law. “Demon” concludes with Ra’s and Batman doffing their shirts and fighting with swords beneath the Arabian sun. Briefly, the desert seems to intercede on the behalf of its human representative, for a scorpion stings Batman, presaging his death. But Talia, in her first real betrayal of her father, slips an antidote to the hero. Batman then returns to face his foe again, giving “the Demon’s Head” his first opponent who seems to match Ra’s for deathlessness.

For fans of BATMAN, the comic book rarely exceeded the intensity of this Oriental romanticism. Over the years, this scenario, in scripts both by O’Neil and by other DC writers, the “eternal triangle” between Batman, Talia and her fanatical father proved a fruitful source of high melodrama, particularly as Ra’s becomes increasingly portrayed as an “eco-terrorist,” out to purge the world of humankind’s corrupting influence. But with the possible exception of Grant Morrison’s BATMAN INCORPORATED serial-- which I’ll address separately— no one succeeded in giving the Ra’s-myth deeper connotations.

In the 1987 graphic novel BATMAN:  SON OF THE DEMON, writer Mike W. Barr and artist Jerry Bingham create an “alternate-world” scenario for the threesome, about a year or so after Frank Miller did the same with his vision of THE DARKKNIGHT’S RETURN. Without speaking to the personal involvement of the authors, SON seems to be aimed firmly at the “Talia-shippers” among Batman-fandom, since the story alters the “triangle-scenario” to make the three characters one big happy family, complete with a little one on the way.

To achieve this familial bliss, Barr creates a mutual enemy for Batman and the Al Ghuls: a terrorist named Qayin (the Arabic version of the name given to the Bible’s first murderer). Batman encounters one of Qayin’s terrorist-cells in Gotham, and almost immediately Talia shows up on his doorstep, inviting him to join her and her father in rooting out this world-menace—who just happens to be an indirect part of the Al Ghul family, since Ra’s is Qayin’s godfather. Talia’s reasons for pursuing Qayin are more personal than Batman’s, for Qayin slew her mother Melisande. (Parenthetically, this seems to be the first extensive accounting for the absence of Talia’s female parent.) Batman is invited to join not only in hunting down the terrorists, but to join with Talia in holy matrimony. On rather short notice, Batman not only puts aside his commitment to Gotham City and becomes the de facto son of Ra’s Al Ghul, so that the hero can remold the League of Assassins into a paramilitary force trained in the crusader’s non-lethal techniques. Further, Batman puts a bun in Talia’s oven, hence giving Ra’s his first grandson. Although Talia is now depicted as a kung-fu mistress—for the first time, I believe-- Batman tries to protect her from harm.  However, she loses the child, and after Batman vanquishes Qayin and his nuclear threat, the hero returns to Gotham. The novel then ends on a peculiar note: suggesting that Talia faked losing the child and sent the baby away to be adopted, though Barr supplies no hints as to why she might do so.

The most mythic aspect of SON OF THE DEMON would be the story’s evocation of the trope of “the hero tries to walk away from his destiny.” Barr’s handling of the myths of both Batman and the Al Ghuls is pedestrian at best, while Qayin is a make-work villain. He becomes embittered toward Ra’s because Ra’s sent Qayin’s parents on a mission that resulted in their deaths, which by itself is banal. Further, the circumstances under which he kills Melisande don’t track either. She surprises her godson messing around near one of Ra’s Lazarus Pits, but it’s not clear if he has some idea of using the Pit to bring back his patents, or if he just wants to deprive Ra’s of the resource. To complicate things needlessly, Barr also reveals that at some point Qayin becomes terminally ill, which apparently accounts for his willingness to destroy the whole world—which is also extremely jejune in terms of any discourse, symbolic or otherwise.

However, simplistic as SON OF THE DEMON is, it did contribute some tropes to the Bat-mythos that proved vital to Morrison’s massive “encyclopedia of all things Batman.”