The Superhero as Avatar I: Batman and the 1930s

This column, as the first in a series about the characteristic heroes of various eras of comics, explores a theme concurrently with a parallel study on Juzda's Just Another Comics Page (see this take on the theme here).

End-of-century superhero comics frequently explore the iconic role of superheroes. Sometimes we casually discuss a superhero's iconic function, but the term suggests something. When a superhero stands as an icon, what does he represent? The model of a hero, after all, tends to change with time, even if a root concept unifies the specific heroes of particular times.

Some heroes seem to represent their own times especially well. To escape the necessity of defining medium-specific milestones to divide periods, we can divide comics history into calendar decades, a unit which still provides meaningful periods with characteristic heroes. This column, therefore, begins a series that describes the various exemplary heroes of all the past decades of superheroes. Separate columns detail representative characters of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

For the 1930s, Batman, the creation of Bob Kane and Bill Finger, stands out. His contemporaries, characters like Timely's Human Torch and DC's Superman, did not express their times so well, belonging more to the stable of forties superheroes who followed.

In matters of tone, philosophy, concept, and methods, Batman clearly belongs to the thirties, even if he arrived late in that decade. To see what makes this so, some investigation of his era might provide some illumination.

Vigilantism and Paranoia

A dark tone infected much popular literature of the thirties. The times demanded this. Consider the history that preceded the thirties: the Great War threatened to wreck the world while it happened, yet its aftermath falsely promised to remake the world as something better. Each post-war utopian notion collapsed in its turn: The League of Nations did not usher in a new globalism; the Bolshevik Revolution failed to allow mankind to transcend history and, instead, cast increasingly sinister shadows; and optimism in general did not prove a very sound philosophy, if one might judge by its ability to predict and explain the events that followed the First World War.

By 1920, a kind of political paranoia, based on extrapolation from events in Europe and eastward, hinted that peace and plenty might not belong in mankind's future. The prosperity of the twenties temporarily gave the lie to this even as consequences of Prohibition created a new culture of corruption; but the bubble of American prosperity burst with the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, the first symptom of the Great Depression. From there, menace piled atop menace; all the old and new solutions seemed to fail; and a new threat of war in Europe became increasingly likely.

Such times called for men who acted decisively and did not fret over principles, ideology, and dogma. The world of the thirties fostered lawbreaking, a fairly intractable problem inflated by sensationalist coverage to seem like an epidemic of vicious crime. People in the thirties recognized names like Dillinger and Capone in the way they might recognize the names of sports figures today. If one kind of criminal worked for money, another played games in which politics and power offered rewards. To many, every shadow might harbor gangsters, spies, saboteurs, or subversives. Even science, which still seemed to promise much to improve the future - before it, like most intellectual pursuits, came to bend the knee to politics - seemed to threaten new horrors.

Given such a context, much of the pulp hero seems reactive to the times. We see in this context a world that might make figures like the Shadow necessary or even inevitable.

Noblesse Oblige and the Perfectibility of Man

In spite of the ills that beset the times (and some say because of them), an ethos persisted that would contribute to that era's definition of the hero. The Gilded Age of the turn of the twentieth century had done much to promote notions of progress through effort (as opposed to materialist notions of progress as an inevitable result of irresistable physical and political principles), and although mores had changed in the intervening decades, the belief in self improvement (as an ethos rather than as a means) had endured.

A post-Victorian notion of charity, tempered through the mildly utopian lens of American Progressivism and its aftermath, had done much to reinforce the notion of noblesse oblige. America, though lacking an old-style European monarchy, does enjoy a royalty of wealth, and the concept of noblesse oblige attaches to this class in the same way as it might touch a member of the surviving European royal families.

In Doc Savage, for instance, we see a central expression of this concept. He turned his great personal and financial gifts to the twin tasks of self-improvement and serving his fellow man, rather than to the morbid and self-absorbed hedonism that has ruined many a millionaire and even destroyed entire royal dynasties overseas.

Batman enjoyed a dual persona. As Bruce Wayne, he enjoyed the benefits of inherited wealth, evidently in the east coast tradition of old money (since he initially had wealth but did not lower himself to dabble in business). Like Doc Savage, Bruce Wayne, as Batman, turned his wealth into a tool for benign purposes - if not to improve his world, then at least to practice damage control.

The Hero as Wish Fulfillment

I've heard tales of a story that Harlan Ellison wrote in the sixties where he cast himself as a hero. Rather than taking a conventional approach and exaggerating his physical virtues and the strong points of his character, Ellison exaggerated his own deficiencies. If Ellison the man possessed a less-than-heroic height, he exacerbated this in his hero, whom he made twice as short and twice as near-sighted. This story seems to sneer at the idioms of the hero as his protagonist acted as a caricature of the author he represented.

Ellison seemed to recognize the role of a hero as wish fulfillment in this legendary piece, because his creation inverted that element so perfectly that we can dismiss the possibility of coincidence here.

Batman, and his alter ego, Bruce Wayne, however, played up the wish fulfillment element of a heroic concept without irony and without self-consciousness. He had the money, he had the looks, he had the square-jawed resolve to which many an adolescent and not a few adults might spend their lives aspiring.

Things like the costume and fast cars serve mainly to ornament an essence, however. The wealth served as a tool and not a characteristic; the essential Batman appeared in that creation's psyche. Batman had what it takes in his heart, head, and backbone, and one could argue that the best models of manhood position that abstract quality, particularly in its virtues, precisely in those locations.

The soul of his heroism lived as his unflinching determination. This defining resolve unifies the versions of Batman that matter; the trait reliably appears in the minimalist reinterpretations of the character that the various Batman revisionists, including the likes of Neal Adams, Dennis O'Neil, and Frank Miller, left to posterity.

The Enduring Schtick

With the aforementioned elements cemented in place, Batman does not yet greatly differ from heroes of an earlier time; but Batman enjoyed the peculiar vices of the superhero, conceits that distinguish his kind from the pulp heroes that spawned them. Pulp heroes might have nicknames - "the Shadow," "the Avenger," and "the Spider" come to mind - but it took the superhero build an entire persona, complete with gaudy regalia and thematic accessories, from a handle.

Batman dressed in a costume that borrowed a number of impractical details from the creature that inspired it. Pulp heroes kept at least one foot on the ground and avoided eccentricities like masks with pointy ears on them, theatrical capes, and modified circus garb. Superheroes, on the other hand, took such absurdities as emblems of their kind, just as professions like medicine enjoy symbols like the red cross and the cadacaeus.

Batman's particular schtick included an ever-growing array of thematic gimmicks. He customized automobiles to become Batmobiles. He customized boomerangs to become Batarangs. He hid in places where bats might seek refuge and adopted a nocturnal approach that resonated with a kinship to the nasty plague-carrying insectivore which gave him his name.

Batman didn't make the next leap that one saw in his contemporaries - he didn't violate the laws of physics in manners that reflected his concept, as did figures like the Human Torch or Superman, who would come to represent the powered superhero more typical of the 1940s - but he inspired an entire category of garishly-clad "mystery men" who would include the likes of Sandman (retrofitted to the superheroic model), the Tarantula, the Guardian, the Manhunter, Captain America, the Atom, Wildcat, Mister Terrific, the Crimson Avenger (also remade from a pulpish original), Green Arrow, the Vigilante, Quicksilver (before Mark Waid gave him super-powers), and a cast that could populate a small city.

These heroes represented the pulp tradition in the era of the superhero. They managed to bridge this gap mainly because Batman, as the epitome of their kind, showed them the way; and this makes Batman the characteristic superhero of the 1930s.