QUICK ARABESQUE TURNS

 When I initially wrote my first essay on the artistic differences between "grotesques" and "arabesques" in the Golden Age BATMAN comics, I didn't recall that anyone else had made any similar arguments. But I have come across a couple of observations that loosely parallel mine.                                                                               

 The earliest I've come across is a foreword by Max Allan Collins to BATMAN ARCHIVES 2, which collected the Bat-stories from DETECTIVE COMICS #51-70 and which was published in 1991. Collins doesn't use my word "grotesque" of course, but he speaks of how "in the dark world of the Batman, crime did pay," which is the reason a vigilante was necessary, and he also mentions how the narration boxes convey a "dark, ominous mood." The earliest example Collins finds of a brighter figure is Robin, who debuts in DETECTIVE COMICS #38 (1940), though the writer speaks of The Penguin's debut in DETECTIVE #58 (December 1941) as a "turning point." Collins further asserts that as Jerry Robinson became more dominant on the Bat-comics, the stories lost much of the "noir look" of the early Kane period and emphasized more "humor elements."                           

Rik Worth advances a slightly similar argument in the pages of his 2021 THE CREATORS OF BATMAN, his biographical study of the intertwined lives of Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Worth substantially agrees that Bob Kane preferred the noir-look of his early stories but claims that it was artist Dick Sprang who "made Gotham a much brighter and more colorful place." Worth does not source his claim about Kane's preferences and his book does not study in detail the feature's artistic developments any more than this post does. Still, it's interesting that when Sprang produced his first full-fledged Bat-tales for BATMAN #19 (Oct-Nov 1943), one of the three Sprang stories places Batman and Robin in an extravagant fantasy-setting foreign to the world of noir: having the heroes chase down U-Boat Nazis into the sunken city of Atlantis.                                                           

  My nominee for "Batman's first arabesque" precedes the debut of Robin, though. In the first six issues of DETECTIVE COMICS, the Dark Knight contends with ordinary crooks (and in these stories it's Batman who is the grotesque), with the mad scientist Doctor Death (two appearances, with Death getting deformed in the second tale), and with the vampiric Monk, whose two stories pile on lots of Gothic grotesquerie. However, in DC #33, following a two-page origin of Batman (whose script is sometimes attributed to Bill Finger), the ten-page main story concerns a villain who, while obscure today, abandons the reigning spookiness for a duel of science-fiction weaponry. This foe was Carl Kruger, a mad scientist with a Napoleon complex, and I for one find nothing Gothic about him.                                                                                                       

  This ten-pager, "Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom," was written by Gardner Fox while the art is theoretically by both Bob Kane and Sheldon Moldoff. "Dirigible" stands in the tradition of both prose SF-stories of futuristic warfare and movie serials about villains with death-rays. Kruger unleashes a dirigible on Gotham City, causing mass havoc with something like a disintegrator beam. Batman meets science with science, inventing a chemical that immunizes his Bat-plane against the beam before the hero rams the dirigible with his craft. One page later, Kruger's plane crashes to Earth after Batman gasses the villain, and Gotham is saved from its first apocalyptic threat. I am not claiming that Carl Kruger is a particularly memorable villain. However, he's much more of a colorful fantasy-figure than his immediate predecessor in mad science, Doctor Death. Thus, in my book Kruger's blue-and-red attire by itself makes him Batman's first arabesque evildoer, and thus the figurative ancestor to all other variegated villains, from the Penguin onward. It's slightly appropriate that Sheldon Moldoff drew the character, for in later years he would become famous (or infamous) for drawing most of the really wacky Bat-foes in the creative era I've termed "Candyland Batman."  

NEAR MYTHS: "THE JUNGLE CAT-QUEEN" (1954)

The back cover copy for this week's mythcomic, CATWOMAN DEFIANT, correctly states, "Since Catwoman made her debut in BATMAN #1 in 1940, she has become one of comics' most popular villains." However, like other Bat-villains of the Golden Age, Catwoman's potential for symbolic discourse always remained somewhat restricted. I've mentioned some of this potential in other essays, as I did in LEAD US NOW INTO TRANSGRESSION:

... because the established mythology at the time of this 1954 comic continually emphasized a romantic tension between Batman and Catwoman-- that's the narrative value-- the scene (which isn't in the story) takes on a significant value of "battle of the sexes," which is certainly one motif within the story proper (a reformed Catwoman returns to crime because she wants to challenge Batman again). We cannot know if the adult raconteurs who crafted the story (Edmond Hamilton and a "Bob Kane" ghost) were aware of the S&M associations of the whip, particularly when it's wielded by one gender against the other, but if they did they may've assumed that the scene would "tease" readers into buying the comic even though, being 1954 juveniles, they might not know consciously why the scene seemed appealing.

The one Golden Age story that comes close to realizing Catwoman's potential-- 1954's "Jungle Cat-Queen" from DETECTIVE COMICS #211-- was also her last appearance during that Age, after which she vanished from DC Comics for undisclosed reasons, only re-appearing in 1966.

The feline villainess, who had briefly reformed a few years earlier, came back to the criminal life with a vengeance, and makes one of her most potent appearances robbing a mail-plane with the help of a big black panther, and then escaping in her "Cat-Plane."

Batman and Robin are quick to pursue in their Batplane, and just as they're nearing her island hideout, Catwoman performs a "wing-ecdotomy" on the Dynamic Duo's vehicle.

The site of a giant cat-plane shredding the Batplane's wings is alone worth the price of the story, but there's more to come. The heroes bail out and land on the island. They come across a small coterie of white hunters, but the hunters trap the heroes, revealing that they're crooks working with Catwoman. When the villainess shows up, she's attended by a lion and a tiger, suggesting that she's somehow become a "mistress of animals," when before the biggest creature she ever controlled was a housecat. It'll later be revealed that all the big cats have been circus-trained-- implicitly brought into Catwoman's hands by the crooked hunters-- but for the time being, Catwoman plays her image as a "mistress of animals."

For no good reason, she forced the captive crusaders to don animal-skins a la Tarzan, and chases them through the island-jungle with the cats. She claims that she plans to unmask them when she catches them, but this may be a cover for preserving their lives against the other crooks, since she's seen luring her own beasts off the heroes' trail. Inevitably, Batman and Robin get the upper hand over the beasts and their trainers, but Catwoman gets a reward her for refusing to kill the good guys, in that the script allows her to get away at the end.

Given that one of the big attractions of Edgar Rice Burroughs' TARZAN mythology is sexual in nature, scripter Edmond Hamilton seems to be upping the sexual elements by having Batman (and, to a much lesser extent, Robin) turned into jungle-men. There's naturally no actual sex between Bat and Cat here, but their contention through the agency of controlling lower animals may be deemed a displacement of such sexual energies.

THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY PT. 3

Regarding the first three ages that I assigned to the Batman franchise here, modern fandom knows little or nothing about what concerns attended the transitions from one phase to the other, be it on the part of the producers or the readers. Since the BATMAN titles did not start carrying regular letters-pages until 1959, fans today cannot know what was on the mind of the fans in the 1940s as they saw Batman's adventures change from the weird horror of the first period to the Gould-like sophistication of the second one. Nor did the producers of the Batman comics call attention to the changes when they started having Batman encounter more aliens and magic imps in the hero's "Warm and Fuzzy Age," though a few fan-writers recorded their (generally negative) impressions in the burgeoning world of fanzines.

In the letters-page of the BATMAN features, we do have some clues as to how both comics makers sought to portray the transition from "Warm and Fuzzy" to "the New Look," as well as contemporary reactions by readers. It's a subject that might reward an exhaustive study, were I writing an essay on the topic for academic publication. But I'm only writing this blog largely for my own amusement, I'll confine myself to just a few representative quotes.

The first "New Look" Batman comic to appear on U.S. news-stands was DETECTIVE COMICS #327 (May 1964).  The letters-page does not print any responses to the preceding issue by Jack Schiff, substituting instead half a page to the plans Julie Schwartz (who is, however, not mentioned in the text) has for the title. The page's other half is allotted to a letter from Big Name Fan Tom Fagan talking about the fourth annual Halloween parade in Rutland, Vermont, in which he mentions that the parade included several members of the Batman Family-- including newly dumped semi-regular characters Batwoman and Bat-Mite. Schwartz, or whoever may have written his copy for him, does not precisely denigrate the works of the previous era, but the copy does extol the "New Look" over its predecessor in subtle ways.

There's a "new look" about the BATMAN art (the handiwork of the peerless pencil-and-pen pair, Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella)-- and there's a slicker, more dramatic style of storytelling (from the "talented" typewriter of John Broome).

The ensuing paragraph further informs the readers that a new backup feature, that of the Elongated Man, has ousted the Martian Manhunter from the pages of DETECTIVE COMICS; this section does not specifically champion the qualities of the new feature except to mention-- evidently playing to the hardcore fans in the audience-- that its writer and artist, Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino, are both winners of awards from the Academy of Comic Books Arts and Sciences. Schwartz's announcements conclude with obliquely informing the readers of the "big event" to come in the next issue of DETECTIVE-- which, as all good Bat-fans should know, was the death of Alfred, a "big event" subsequently reversed when the producers of the teleseries wanted to keep the Bat-cave's butler around on the show.

The art of the "New Look" Batman is not compared to that of the previous raconteurs, largely Dick Sprang and Sheldon Moldoff, because all of this art was billed as having been produced by Bat-creator Bob Kane. Some fans were certainly deceived: a letter from BATMAN #172 credits the improvements on the art to the inking of artists like Giella and Sid Greene on "Kane."  But the letters-page's comment on the writing of John Broome is without a doubt an attempt to persuade readers that the "New Look" would offer improvements on the previous period's writing, calling Broome's style "slicker" and "more dramatic."

One cannot always be sure that all the letters in Silver Age lettercols were genuine, save those that were written by "Big Name Fans" whose frequent appearances insure that the editors were not likely to have used their names flagrantly.  The letters-page of BATMAN #168 leads off with a representative comment by a known letter-hack of the period, Leonard Tirado, and this reader makes no bones about unfavorable comparisons to the previous Schiff regime as he comments on a story from BATMAN #165:

"As all of us in fandom know, the new look policy in BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS will mean newer and better stories like those featured in the current BATMAN. All previous attempts at faked-up science-fiction have been wiped off the somewhat depreciated slate of the dynamic duo. "The Man Who Quit the Human Race" was different than all others in that the science element was just used for what it was intended... to make the tale plausible, and not serve as a cover-up for "A monster is on the loose, boys" type plot."

Since one of the more vocal fan-complaints in later years concerned the inappropriate injection of science-fiction motifs into the Batman stories, Tirado's 1964 comment suggests that some readers didn't mind such motifs in Batman; they just didn't approve of seeing these elements dumbed down for the purpose of simplistic monster-stories, as Tirado implies was the case during the Schiff regime. For Tirado at least, Schwartz and his stable of raconteurs succeeded in bringing a "slicker, more dramatic" feel to the Batman franchise. Modern fans might not see that much difference between the Gardner Fox story in BATMAN #165 and previous alien-happy offerings from the Warm and Fuzzy Era. But there can be little question that some readers not only found Schwartz's editorship more pleasing, and that they found his version of Batman more "legitimate" even though Schiff's version, having been authorized by DC Comics, was just as legitimate. For many years, most fans echoed Tirado's verdict in respect to "Schiff vs. Schwartz," though in recent years Schiff's legacy has received a bit more critical attention.

The issue of legitimacy, however, was raised with far greater force with the debut of the BATMAN teleseries in 1966. Again, while one cannot be 100% sure of the authenticity of Silver Age letters-pages, I tend to consider genuine letters expressing grievances about how the teleseries was adversely affecting the comic books. My representative example is from another BNF, Peter Sanderson. from BATMAN #194:

"... it seems to me that you [editors] think, 'If the readers want campiness, let's give some to them-- if we don't, we won't sell as many mags,' Now, look. Your magazine will NOT drop in sales if you get rid of the 'batbrellas,' the 'holy ____.' If you think that your sales will be crippled without campiness, remove the camp stuff from BATMAN and DETECTIVE and have those two mags for people like me, and for the Camp-ers, put Batman in another mag wherein he teams up with the Inferior Five, because to readers who won't read an 'Uncamp Batman,' he's just a bundle of laughs."

I see one implied element held in common by all three of the quotes cited. Schwartz (or his spokesman) emphasizes "slickness" in a non-pejorative manner, meaning something like "streamlined," and claims that the work will be "more dramatic," which connotes a better appreciation of how to make stories work in dramatic terms. Many fans of the period would agree that the stories from Jack Schiff's editorship had become too ritualized, too formulaic, with rare exceptions like the fan-favorite story "Robin Dies at Dawn." Schwartz was no less invested in delivering formulaic stories-- certainly, in later comments the editor cantankerously disparaged his Silver Age readership.  At the time, though, Schwartz understood that one way to boost the readership of the Bat-books might be to appeal to the hardcore fans, who didn't want to see their favored genre as routine and repetitive, and enjoyed seeing genre-works that paid closer attention to matters of drama and verisimilitude.

Oddly, what the BATMAN teleseries delivered was closer in spirit to Schiff than to Schwartz. Whereas Schiff invoked formulaic elements simply in the belief that this was what the readers ought to want, the TV producers invoked those elements for purposes of spoofing and/or satirizing. Both were, for very different reasons, invoking the Langerian concept of *the gesture,* but in a very ostentatious manner, calling attention to the gestural nature of the fantasy so much that I'm tempted to consider it a sub-division of the gesture, which I will provisionally label "artifice." Thus Sanderson dismisses the camp teleseries as irrelevant to what he wants, since it's just "a bundle of laughs."

In conclusion, this brief overview shows that the original statements of Noah Berlatsky, cited here, were flawed in presuming that all comics-fans ought to have embraced the teleseries if they wanted legitimacy. I don't think most fans of any period wanted legitimacy if it meant trashing the original stories that they enjoyed; it's my impression that fans wanted Batman to be loved for the very escapism he incarnated, not as an ironic commentary on some in human society or psychology. And even the considerations of legitimacy were secondary, just to wanting better Batman stories.

FOUR AGES OF THE DARK KNIGHT

Before proceeding to more questions regarding percevied issues of "legitimacy" within the BATMAN comics franchise, a quick sketch of the first four "ages of the Dark Knight" seems appropriate, to show in capsule-fashion how the franchise changed over the years in creative terms.

I'll christen the ages as follows:

(1) THE FEVER-DREAM AGE: The first year of Batman's adventures in his initial two titles may have started out with a swipe from a SHADOW pulp-tale, but most of the stories read more like THE SPIDER than THE SHADOW. During this short-lived, pre-Robin period, the artists favored lots of chiaroscuro effects and physical grotesquerie, and the plots leaped madly from one weird subject to another, from killer clowns to vampires to mad scientists to devil-men who turn people into flowers.

(2) THE DICK TRACY AGE.  In or around the introduction of Robin, stories took a more ratiocinative, procedural feel. Grotesquerie still appeared, notably with the 1942 introduction of Two-Face, but now it was subsumed by plots that were more nominally more logical, rather than simply lurching from one wild battle to another. Artist Dick Sprang did not work on Batman until 1943, but for fans of the feature Sprang's design-sense has become synonymous with this age.

(3) THE WARM AND FUZZY AGE.  In 1955, the producers of the Batman franchise, headed by editor Jack Schiff, took the first step in imitating the more successful Superman franchise captained by editor Mort Weisinger. In June 1955 Batman and Robin acquired the recurring character of "Ace the Bat-Hound," very possible in response to the introduction of Krypto in ADVENTURE COMICS #210 that March.

Some further additions to the "Batman Family" of the period actually predated any one-on-one comparable figures in the Superman Family, in that 1956's "Batwoman" predated the introduction of recurring character Supergirl in 1959.

However, it should be pointed out that Superman had encounter distaff versions of himself prior to 1956; they simply had never been intended as recurring or series-based characters, as with this 1951 super-powered version of Lois Lane.

Though Dick Sprang continued to contribute to the Batman features into the early 1960s, the artist most associated with the franchise in the early Silver Age was Sheldon Moldoff. Even in 1955, Moldoff can be seen trying to retain the hard edge of Sprang's line. However, by 1956 one can see Moldoff's line becoming more "warm and fuzzy" in that characters have a more rounded aspect. Indeed Big Name Fan Mike Tiefenbacher, former editor of THE COMIC READER, once commented that in this period Batman began to look rather chubby-cheeked, like the Legion's Bouncing Boy

Stories from this period became somewhat more antic, as Schiff endeavored to build up Batman's repertoire of costumed villains. However, the period has become better known among Batman fans for the introduction of the impish Bat-Mite, a clear derivation from Superman's spritely villain Mxyzptlk, and for the introduction of many contrived alien menaces. Possibly the editor had some idea of taking advantage of a moderate science fiction in comics of the late 1950s, but it should be said-- as I pointed out here-- that Mort Weisinger was also pursuing a similar strategy at the time.

(4) THE NEW LOOK AGE: Imps, aliens and the old members of the Batman Family all got the heave-ho in 1964, when editor Julius Scwhartz took over the Batman features and instituted the first overtly heralded change in the Batman family: what the cover of DETECTIVE COMICS #327 called "the New Look."  In BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY PT. 3 I'll deal with the ways in which the changeover was announced and some ways in which readers reacted, but for now I'll conclude by referencing, for anyone interested, this essay as to what was different about the "New Look."