Hitting the Wall X: Batman

With the Batman franchise remaining one of DC's better-selling lines since the end of the 1980s, one might question the claim that something had gone wrong with the handling of the character. DC's financial side would probably argue the point, pointing to the revenues he generates through comics, toys, books, and movies.

Nonetheless, recent treatments of Batman tend to bear this out. The character, in conventional contemporary interpretation, has become flattened, a walking ball of pain and obsession that has two facial expressions: a scowl and... a different scowl.

This post-1985 version of Batman represents at least two revisions of the character, both with intent to redefine the minimal Batman and thereby strip away inappropriate storytelling paraphernalia. However, somewhere along the line DC's editorial decide decided having a personality - as opposed to having one or two personality traits that have to serve as the entire person - did not belong within the definition of the character.

Robin as First False Step

One theory of Batman's history suggests that the character took a wrong turn very early on by taking a juvenile sidekick. Commercial and storytelling reasons suggest the advantages of such a decision; in the comics of the dawn of the forties, the kid sidekick provided a means for young readers to connect to the superhero, somewhat serving as a proxy for themselves within the context of the story.

Nonetheless, within the first two years of his appearance in print, Batman suffered a change to his concept that would make him seem friendlier and more accessible, much less likely to inspire fear into the criminal in the street. Robin, after all, seems more likely to evoke the occasional snicker - green bloomers and elf-boots and all.

After Robin came onto the Batman scene around 1940, one did not see the original Kane - Finger creation again except in tribute (or, sometimes, unintentional caricature). The Batman who killed vampires with a .45 had moved on, and the all-ages Batman had taken his place. This Batman would remain the predominant interpretation for almost 30 years.

The Giant Object Era

With Batman as object of terror comfortably retired, Batman had to take to different methods of defining himself as a character. He therefore became something of a Curator of the Museum of Bat-Hardware. So readers began to see more and more objects prefixed with bat-: Batmobiles, Bat-Caves, bat-copters, batgyros, batplanes, batarangs, and a variety of dry goods that would have served him well as a product line if he had chosen to market them.

By the fifties, Batman had become rather silly and not particularly scary. In some ways the schtick had become bigger than the man, and stories appeared which featured Batman's paraphernalia as much as the man himself; for instance, stories like "The Joker's Utility Belt" explored the possibilities inherent in Batman's enemies taking up his approach to self-referent hardware.

A variety of (frequently out-of-concept) stories marked this period. Batman acquired, in this day, the original Batman "family," including the original Batgirl, Batwoman, Bat-Hound, and Bat-Mite, all of whom DC would abandon with the advance of the nineteen sixties. Furthermore, Batman frequently fought ridiculous giant monsters, opponents much better suited to Superman's comics. He even occasionally went to other planets, as if an urban crimefighter had any business in a spaceship (though Will Eisner and Wally Wood had made this approach work for a short interval with the Spirit).

One eccentricity most seems to evoke this period, though. In the stories of what Batman readers might call the Dick Sprang Era, Batman stories seemed infested with giant objects. Giant pennies, pies, hourglasses, and other objects seemed to invade the stories that stick in the memory. Frequently these stood as exhibits at the site of crimes, sometimes as the actual targets of these crimes; frequently they would serve as weapons Batman would use against his enemies or his enemies would use against him.

By this time, clutter had mostly taken over the Batman books. The characters took a back seat to Bat-hardware and the oversized tools that Batman and the Joker might use to bludgeon each other with. To ask a kid how to define Batman in those days would probably return an answer that related to Batmobiles, Bat-caves, or Bat-planes.

Batmania

The Batman television series - an unusual and aberrant piece which skyrocketed to a completely unlikely popularity - appeared at an excellent moment for the comic, which had gone adrift for some considerable time. DC had, in the mid-sixties, attempted to revamp the Batman franchise through methods like bringing on Schwartz as an editor and involving rising talent like Carmine Infantino on the book, but sales still lagged. However, with the explosive (and ephemeral) popularity of the television show, a study in the ridiculous that cast an ironic eye at the absurdity inherent in the very notion of costumed heroes and villains, Batman books once again started to move off the shelves.

To look at the pieces, one can note changes. Sprang no longer defined the characteristic Batman (not since 1963), and much of the silliness and strangeness of that era's pieces had gone into the limbo of comics a publisher wants readers to forget. Bat-Mite, Bat-Woman, the original Bat-Girl, and the ever-popular Ace the Bat-Hound had all disappeared.

As a fad, Batmania would not endure long, and the boats lifted by this tide would again sink into the sands as the frenzied waters receded. By 1968, Batman's television series had ended - stamping the careers of its stars with the prospect of appearing in costume at boat shows rather than starring in television or movies again. The Bat-titles themselves began to sink again, to lower nadirs than before, and DC realized the Batman franchise did not enjoy the numbers to justify long-term publication. DC, after thirty years, began considering canceling the books.

Adams, O'Neil, and the Minimal Batman

By the end of the sixties, Batman found himself in trouble. Not the sort of trouble that typified his printed appearances; writers and editors could sort out the latest cliffhanger through whatever means necessary to keep the character alive for the next month's issue. This kind of trouble reflected something deeper; Batman's sales had lagged before the Batman fad connected with the television show, and the sales sank further after the television spike went the way of most fads, into the oblivion of disinterest.

DC Comics knew they needed to do something about this. The what of the matter came from the fevered brows of two (then-) young talents, Neal Adams and Dennis O'Neil, who took a long, hard look at what had gone wrong with the Batman character. From their subsequent actions, we might assume that they had concluded "everything."

O'Neil and Adams stripped the barnacles away from the Bat-franchise until almost none of his well-established baggage remained. They sent Robin packing to college (seeing that having a youthful sidekick made the character too friendly to have much in common with the original Kane-Finger version). They ignored the cumulative gimmickry of Bat-Mites, Bat-Women, Bat-Hounds, and bat-gadgets a-plenty, leaving but a few - say, the occasional Batmobile, Bat-boat, or Bat-plane - to remain carefully subdued and never to become central elements of the concept.

Instead, they sought to present readers with the core of Batman - a scary manhunter in a mask who cleaned up the streets by preying on the fear (supposedly) inherent in the entire (supposedly) cowardly lot of evildoers. This version played more like a human version of one of the fates than the friendly figure a few pictures up seen dispensing Christmas presents; this version represented something you did not want to meet late at night.

Batman, prior to their efforts faced a real risk of cancellation. Thirty years later his books take up almost half of the DC shelf space. The math suggests that Adams and O'Neil knew exactly what they had to do, and they did it.

Frank Miller, Year One, and Dark Knight Returns

No good thing lasts forever, and the Adams - O'Neil duo did not persist forever, but the need did not truly exist, insofar as they had (arguably) saved the Batman franchise from the extinction that poor sales occasion. As O'Neil moved increasingly into the editorial side of DC, and a variety of other talents explored the character - consider names like Haney, Aparo, Colan, Conway, Moench, Barr, Englehart, Rogers, Austin, Golden, Newton, and a veritable roster of some of the keenest pens (or typewriters) of the seventies - the character flourished, but became somewhat more humane. Bruce Wayne became more of a fixture by the early eighties.

Then came Frank Miller, whose darkened vision of Batman echoed, in some ways, O'Neil and Adams' reinvention of the character, but partook considerably of Miller's own cinematography, insight, and cynicism. Miller's angry Batman seemed a bit like the O'Neil - Adams version on a bad day that never ended. Miller would, for his part, make the character compel again, but lesser talents would ultimately misuse his redefinition and create a flattened, dumbed-down version of the character more suited to the gloomy, nihilistic comics of the nineties.

Grant Morrison and the Omnipotent Batman

By setting a precedent - Batman, and an old one at that, prevailing over Superman in Dark Knight Returns - Miller inadvertently set the stage for yet another abuse of the character. Miller's surly and scowling Batman defied well-done recreation but did invite dumbed-down imitation, and soon the character would become an amalgamated mass of obsession, separation trauma, perpetual scowling, pointy ears, and a bat on his chest. The cluster of gimmicks came to replace characterization.

Morrison, once at the helm of JLA (the late-nineties version), saw more to the character than the interconnected mass of trite cliches, and may have looked to the most impressive moments of the character's past for inspiration. Either through derivation or parallel thinking, Morrison, like Frank Miller before him, assumed that Batman's strength lay in his ability to out-think, out-plan, and out-scheme any enemy he might confront.

Therefore, as a member of the Justice League, Batman became increasingly important. Instead of seeming out-of-place amid a body of peers (almost all of whom possess excessive power to the point that it makes storytelling on a human scale difficult), Batman became something like a costumed human deus ex machina.

While this might impress some fans who see superhero comics as some kind of stone-breaks-scissors equation - with characters becoming more interesting as the scope of their abilities outstrips anything allowable by conventional physics - it put the character at risk of becoming boring (why even show the conflict, since he always wins?) or unusable (why write about him when everyone knows nothing can get the better of him?).

None of this, so far, seems to hurt the bottom line for the character, meaning the sales of DC's line of Batman themed titles. In the same way that X-Men titles dominate Marvel's shelf space, Batman titles similarly dominate DC's. Some months feature between ten and twenty releases featuring Batman. However, some signs suggest editorial troubles brewing for the character.

Waid and the Evicted Batman

Mark Waid, within three issues of becoming the regular writer on JSA - a position that he seems to have fought for red in tooth and claw - he dispensed with Batman as a member of the Justice League. The explanation "Waid hates Batman" doesn't explain anything and probably does not fit the facts; if Waid hated Batman, why make him so central in 1996's seminal Kingdom Come?

Another theory - which you can accept or reject, as your own better judgment inclines you - suggests that Waid, following Morrison, found the Batman character too powerful, even among a company of thoroughly overpowered peers. For a writer, after all, such a character presents storytelling problems. Consider the stories of Superman in the 1950s and 1960s when writers had to craft ways that the bad guys had even a small chance of putting one over on him - stories in which the mismatch in power between Superman and his enemies forced the flowering of an entire garden of Superman-peculiar menaces, from more types of Kryptonite than most hard-core fans can name, to a rainbow of solar colors (each with a different effect on his powers), to magical enemies (from Superman's helplessness versus magic). All of these approaches, even when quite valiant in their ingenuity, failed to directly address the real problem: Superman had become too powerful for anything to challenge.

Similarly, we might see in the inflation of Batman's power a kind of decadence. That Mark Waid chose not to use the character in his run of JLA after a very few issues does not much testify to any confidence in the character's viability, at least not in his current synthesis.