"They represent American youth who love their country, and are glad to fight for it. Wherever crime raises its ugly head to strike with the venom of a maddened rattlesnake, Batman and Robin strike also. And in this very hour, when the Axis criminals are spreading their evil over the world, even within our own land, Batman and Robin stand ready to fight them, to the death."
-
Batman (1943), from the opening narration
***
So I heard
last week that Grant Morrison is writing a "definitive" history of superheroes from the 1930s to the present. Funny, I thought he'd already written one about Batman.
Oh sure, Morrison's tenure as writer of plain vanilla
Batman had a continuing mystery at its core, with subplots and character introductions and whatnot, and it didn't lay out the specifics of Bat-arcane year by year or anything, but to me it was undoubtedly a
history of Batman, taking the sprawling entirety of the character's improbable life and times and trying to say something about where it‘s left him. Same as
All Star Superman, really; it's said that most superhero comics in this age of decadence are metatextual at their core, but few are so broad in their scope; Morrison's Batman groaned almost audibly under the weight of its prerogative, and even what little we've seen of the new
Batman and Robin seems keen to pick and choose from happier/scarier passages from the Batman era.
But who says history need be comprehensive? There's a bit of an argument blinking in and out of view these days as to the presentation of history in vintage comics reprints, which are more patent today than ever in their status as visions of a time, design and scholarship combining with the source texts to create
impressions of
Gasoline Alley or the John Stanley catalog or your favorite
gekiga from days long gone. I'm prone to thinking that everything sends a message; the rub, one presumes, is whether the message sent is responsibly steeped in facts as opposed to merely dazzling the reader with misleading assertions in the costume of truth.
History is not a block of concrete, though, and idiosyncratic impressions can have their own pleasures. One of my favorite books so far this year is Fantagraphics'
Supermen!: The First Wave of Comic Book Heroes 1936-1941, edited by Greg Sadowski. It's primarily a collection of 20 superhero stories published before the U.S. entrance into World War II, but through its intense variations in tone -- often departing from how you'd expect old-timey superheroes to behave, as in "don't stab people" or "maybe your secret identity as a drug addict merits some rethinking" -- it posits the pre-WWII era as a time of furious energy for superhero comics, still hot from the proverbial Big Bang of Superman (if sometimes even older than that), and not yet constrained by codification of what superheroes "can" or "can't" do.
There's very little prose in the book. Endnotes are brief, and interestingly inclined toward narrative rather than annotation. Combined, all elements of the book dress their period as mad and wonderful, burning and colorful, with WWII and the even greater fortunes of publishers acting as the boot camp to whip those crazy costumed kids into shape, to be "good" in a prescribed way, to be a grown, sedated industry.
Yet we all remember Batman carrying a gun. I doubt Morrison will forget in his book. He didn't forget in his comic, where he cast that early aspect as a mourning period for the Caped Crusader, swinging around to deliver the piece that killed his parents back to the murderer, the most intensely hurtful, raw time in his history.
It overlaps, ‘history.' Yet how can these often eccentric multitudes help us process the facts that are cruel? The undeniable moments where the culture shifts, for a time, in a queasy direction? The stuff even Grant Morrison left out of his Bat-saga? The stuff people still remember?
As WWII raged, Batman first hit the silver screen. It was a 15-chapter serial, titled simply
Batman; the year was 1943. This was far from the first superhero serial, of course; some say the very first superhero movie was a serial, French filmmaker Louis Feuillade's
Judex, produced in 1916, as the Great War devoured France's youth. The serial format had changed by ‘43, however; the novelistic style and varying tones of the early stuff had congealed into a fun but simplistic approach, with the last five minutes of every near-uniform chapter consisting of chaotic fistfights or stunt sequences, always with a cliffhanger to be resolved next week. Still, superheroes thrived in chaos, and it seemed as good for Batman as anyone.
But there had to be more there, in ‘43. A patriotic wartime message, suitable to fire up a Dark Knight against the true evils of the globe. As the narration of Chapter One boomed, a shabby line of shops and doors coming into view:
"This was part of a foreign land, transplanted bodily to America and known as Little Tokyo. Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs it has become virtually a ghost street, where only one business survives, eking out a precarious existence on the dimes of curiosity seekers."
That's right, this was no Joker Batman was facing: it was the new-old Yellow Peril, in the form of one Dr. Daka, a wicked Japanese spy who murderously evaded virtuous deportation to strike at Gotham and our United States with his hideous zombie machine and a hand-held Radium Gun that'll blow up anything. Daka hides in a haunted house ride, the Japanese Cave of Horrors, devoted to wax scenes of Japanese military atrocities against white soldiers. That's the aforementioned one surviving business, and a telling one: the only value of trash Japanese culture is the novelty of white enjoyment, and the rest is at best worthless and at worst overtly sinister, best locked in a camp somewhere. As it did actually happen.
Need I even mention that Daka is played by Caucasian ‘ethnic' character specialist J. Carrol Naish, speaking in an off the mark accent equidistantly between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd (shoulda made that left at Albuquerque), squinting through heavy makeup that has the bonus effect of making him seem distinctly effeminate? Double the bad, that!
Batman, meanwhile, is played by Lewis Wilson, whose second most noteworthy film role would be 1951's
Wild Women (aka:
Bowanga Bowanga: White Sirens of Africa), which probably says enough. He
does look great as Bruce Wayne, but he essays a distinctly husky Caped Crusader, saddled with a legendarily shabby costume adorned with devil horns and granny panties and sagging fabric on the legs. His crusade against foreign terror is aided by Robin -- perfectly decent, 16-year old Douglas Croft, known for his boyhood portrayals-in-flashback of the leading men of
Yankee Doodle Dandy and
The Pride of the Yankees -- and William Austin as a frantic, comic relief Alfred. Former Miss California Shirley Patterson screams and faints a lot as the obligatory female, and Charles "Ming the Merciless" Middleton pops up for a few chapters as the grizzled owner of a radium mine. Many stuntmen tumble; rear projections menace. The cliffhangers creak, with Our Hero often surviving more out of sheer luck rather than any skill or daring. Spoiler: we win the war, and Batman prompts
The Doom of the Rising Sun (ch. 15).
On one hand, I sort of can't believe Morrison didn't bring back Dr. Daka for a spin in his own Bat-run, but I suspect nobody at DC is eager to relive the magic of these halcyon days, as influential as they were. I do, however, imagine Morrison has read Bryan Talbot's 1992
Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight story
Mask (#39-40) -- the story of a hurtful doctor who drives Batman mad with doubt over his tortured history -- which obliquely references one of the serial's cliffhangers and pays some silent homage to its ratty costume as the ugly ‘realism' behind the Batman ideal. Sure, it's an out-of-continuity movie, but this serial marked the first appearance of "The Bat's Cave," entrance via clock, dig the rubber bats on strings and minimalist desk ‘n seats décor, and its Alfred likely inspired the formerly corpulent butler's shift to the svelte gentleman's gentleman we know today.
And its superhero history stretches back and forth. The Yellow Peril villain is a long-standing icon of majority Western fear over immigration and Eastern influence, active in the serials and pulp magazines that inspired Batman's creation. Even Judex, the first movie superhero, was born from the success of movie adaptations of popular super-criminal novels, the reign of
Fantômas. From there came the ‘dark' superheroes, drawing a line of aesthetic from Judex to the Shadow to Batman. And hell, Dr. Daka even has a zombie machine; do consult Jess Nevins' essay in the back of the new
Incognito (#4) for some info on that.
So it's not just a serial; it's a pulp serial, on film, racist and ragged as those early avengers could get. The ‘ragged' got adopted more than anything, as the Batman serial fell into obscurity, then rose again as a favorite of clubs and college audiences in the ‘60s, a new icon of camp that influenced the creation of the Batman television show. You don't think those cliffhanger endings came out of
nowhere, do you? Some Bat-fans used to get angry that the show didn't take the character seriously, which is silly, but often today you hear folks go on about how the show was really a very faithful translation of the comics of the time, which is politic but hesitant, lingering on adaptation like it's nothing more that a computation of how best to be ‘faithful' in the most efficient manner.
No, Batman the show was
camp, man, a knowing appropriation of mainstream detritus for various effects, maybe only to build a culture of love from the slime and prejudice of the past, where effeminacy is no longer wicked and capers could pulse vibrantly with humor and sex. Morrison has said that he never knew the old Batman show wasn't serious, and neither did I. It's a continuum, this history; I was really worried that Batman and Robin would die bloody deaths in the show, like Jason Todd died in the comics, because fun and energy and blood and angst were what superheroes
were to me in the ‘80s, as a kid, watching reruns, and maybe it's bad news that the genre is like that, prismatic, but it assured its future, its niche, Batman's mission.
How excellent that Morrison's man who prepares for everything managed to take even the grotesquerie of his racist ‘40s past and transform it into part of the very thing that assured his brighter, moral survival. Buckle up old chum,
THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE FOREVER.
And yet.
The racism isn't a huge part of the 1943 serial. These things never are. It wasn't necessary to
sell the internment camps, say, to the audience, the kids and such; it's just
mentioned, with the expectation of scattered applause and happy acknowledgement, nudges and smiles. It's normal, the camps, normal for Batman.
That's how it soaks, and sickens.
You think back to the Batman cartoons of the ‘90s, and the gangsters in hats. That's
these thugs! Real ‘40s men in real ‘40s hats, firing death rays at Batman and Robin on a rooftop! Batman is led to Dr. Daka.
"Oh, a Jap!" shouts Batman. The Oriental sneers, and leads the costumed hero to the zombie chair.
"Why you Jap devil!"
This is the idealized era. The flashpoint of wider Bat-popularity. They
changed the comics to look more like this, because this was popular.
And then Sadowski's history springs to mind. WWII as the calming of the superhero. Where the violence used to be random, ugly and varied, it became focused on nations, and peoples, in wartime. It too became codified, nationalized, politicized. And then came the Batman serial, the next big step in a superhero's popularity, and his most lasting expression of reprehensibility; the stain of growing bigger, as the history informs up.
You might say it was wartime, sure. That's right. Media was racist all over, then, and it turned off with the combat. Except, the Yellow Peril never did turn off, from its origins, did it? It found new purchase.
So I think back to Judex, the first movie superhero, fighting at the height of WWI. All those French boys dead, yet there's no racism in there, no propaganda; instead it's a ‘dark' man with a profound care for life, every death a tragedy, even in the worst conditions, even knowing the state of the world in 1916.
Excuse my French but that is goddamned
superheroic. Call it a beginning to history. Hell, pray it is.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
