Batman, then, despite his handsome face and ripped body, is at heart a grotesque, because the very look of his costume inspires fear more than admiration. Robin’s costume, in contrast, evokes the fanciful spirit I term arabesque. He affects bright daytime colors of red, green and yellow in direct contrast to Batman’s night-hues, and some of his garments, such as boots and tunic, are designed to evoke famed swashbuckler Robin Hood. Even his main weapon in early stories, a David-style sling, carries an arabesque quality in comparison with Batman’s deadly looking Batarang.-- DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES, 2020.
As a prelude to some more involved meditations, I wanted to align my concepts of "the grotesque and the arabesque" (swiped from Poe, who probably swiped them from Walter Scott) with the more pervasive concepts of "antipathetic affects and sympathetic affects." My most elaborate scheme of these parallel affects appeared in 2013's TRIPLE THE TREMENDUM AND THE FASCINANS, though my more distant inspiration was Aristotle's terms of "terror and pity," which I found too limiting.
I didn't specify in the 2020 essay that my interpretations of "dark, fearful visual tropes" and "colorful, life-affirming visual tropes" were affects, so I do so now, going by the definition of affect I laid down in 2014's AFFECT VS. MOOD:
..."affects" spring from the main characters, the focal presences, with whom the readers identify. In this formulation, then, "affects" spring from "character," even though the focal 'character" may not be a human being, since the cathexis of emotional affects can focus upon any number of phenomena, ranging from the will-less robot hero of GIGANTOR to the amorphous spirits of THE EVIL DEAD.
I will specify, though, that "dark" doesn't always signify antipathetic affects and "colorful" doesn't always signify sympathetic affects; they are merely the DOMINANT ways in which these visual tropes are utilized. As stated in DARK GROTESQUES, Batman uses the fearsome mana of a bat as a means of psyching out criminals, so he remains a heroic figure who dominantly inspires a sympathetic affect, probably closest to what I've called "fascination" (TREMENDUM).
And though I've labeled some Bat-villains to be "arabesques," such as Penguin and Catwoman, they don't inspire, whether as subordinate or superordinate icons, pure sympathetic affects, but a mingling of the sympathetic and the antipathetic. Catwoman is the main character of CATWOMAN DEFIANT, but she's never purely an admirable hero. There's always a little bit of the villain mixed in with her most heroic acts.
That's enough for now on grotesques and arabesques, but referencing the original essay led me to test one of the tentative conclusions I made there. I termed a period of Batman comics from perhaps the mid-forties to the the end of the Golden Age (1955) as the "Dark Procedural" period, in contrast with the very brief period of "Gothic Batman." So I tested that analysis with a random selection of readings, from the solo BATMAN title going from 1950 to 1952. This very minor survey did not yield very many moments of Gothic morbidity, much less justifying my claim that the raconteurs still used a lot of night scenes. The one above, in which Batman struggles with a villain in a Batman outfit, and in which one of them perishes (a trifle gruesomely) is one of the few night-scenes I found, from "Ride, Bat-Hombre, Ride" (BATMAN #56, 1950).
I still found a few Gothic-isms-- a hoax about a living mummy, or one about a "haunted cellar" that drove visitors mad-- and that's more than one would find in any other DC superhero of the period. And that's because DC tried to make most of its heroes as safe and gimmicky as possible in that period, making an exception for Batman only because that feature was one of their best sellers. At any rate, there aren't enough "dark grotesque" elements to justify my calling the period "Dark Anything," so I now rename that period, "Police Procedural Batman." Penguin, Joker and Catwoman all made significant appearances in those two surveyed years, as did newbies like Killer Moth and Deadshot. But all criminals have mundane criminal motives, including their attempts to slay the Dynamic Duo, and so Batman and Robin must use police procedural methods to corral them.
There are isolated elements of overt science-fiction, like "Lost Legion of Space" (BATMAN #67, 1951), wherein the 20th century Robin is given the chance to travel forward in time and meet the Batman and Robin of 3051. But there's nothing comparable to the outpouring of wacky, rather light-hearted alien menaces seen in the years from 1955 to 1964, which I continue to term "Candyland Batman." And just to round things out, I also maintain the term "Gothic Procedural" for nearly everything after 1964. Ever since the Julie Schwartz years, I would assert that most raconteurs have sought to emphasize either Gothic elements or Police Procedural elements, or else to combine the two in felicitous ways. The brief series based on Cartoon Network's BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD would probably be the only place where "Candyland Batman" has re-surfaced.
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