Convention has it that Batman’s adventures work best when they’re rooted in a basically realistic world of gritty crime violence and backstreet reprisals, but from the very start of his career, he was drawn into demented episodes of the supernatural, uncanny and inexplicable. His was the territory of the dark unconscious, after all, and writer Finger wasn’t afraid to try Batman in any kind of story that played with elements of the grotesque. For instance, another story, indebted to the Decadent and Symbolist authors of the late nineteenth century, was set in Paris and featured a man whose face had been wiped blank for reasons never adequately explained. “ASK CHARLES HERE,” the swooning heroine pleaded with Bruce Wayne, “HE WHO OWNS NO FACE. HE CAN TELL YOU. HE IS NOT AFRAID TO DIE.” Even without a mouth, the afflicted Charles was somehow able to explain himself perfectly, and he quickly identified the source of his unlikely troubles as a Duc D’Orterre, who sounded like an escapee from a bound volume of the Marquis de Sade or Comte de Lautréamont.
A confrontation with the diabolical Duc ended when Batman was hurled from a giant spinning wheel through a trapdoor in the ceiling, only to land in an upstairs garden where the giant flowers all came complete with life-sized, female, and exquisitely made-up faces at the heart of their petals. During a brief, matter-of-fact conversation with the head of a blond girl on a giant green stalk, it was requested of Batman that he “release” the girls. This baffling episode was never mentioned again or resolved in any way, and its conclusion staunchly offered no explanation for the chatty flowers. As for the evil Duc D’Orterre, he perished obliquely without revealing the lucrative secret of how to genetically splice giant crocuses with Parisian showgirls.
Superman would have seemed pompous and preposterous in Gotham, but Batman pioneered and owned his twilight territory with the swiftness of an alpha predator. The hard-boiled noir, the supernatural, the high-tech, the superrich, the fetishistic—all combined in Batman. He was the Rolling Stones to Superman’s Beatles, the Oasis to his Blur. Immediately and without question or competition, Batman became the coolest superhero of them all.
The stories in the Superman strips dealt with politics and injustice on the daylight stage of jobs, media, and government, but Batman took the fight to the shadows: the grimy derelict warehouses and dive bars where criminal scum plied their trade beyond the reach of the law but not beyond the range of a batarang or a leathery fist. Batman was out there nightclubbing in his crackling black leathers and battling almost supernatural villains, chemically deranged, archetypal bad-trip fairy-tale nightmares who would never feature in Superman’s world.
As everybody knows, the Joker was Batman’s most enduring, accommodating, and iconic nemesis. Foreshadowing David Bowie, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, he shared Batman’s chameleonic ability to adapt his routine to suit the tastes of the day. In his first appearance (Batman no. 1, 1940), the “Grim Jester” was a sour-faced homicidal maniac who left chilling clues for the police. Ten years later, he’d become a chortling crime clown robbing banks in his Jokermobile. In the eighties, he was a gender-bending serial killer, and in actor Heath Ledger’s 2008 film portrayal, he appeared as a punk-influenced agent of performance-art-inspired chaos. The Joker’s ruined mug was the face at the end of it all, the makeup melting on the funeral mask of Von Aschenbach in Visconti’s Death in Venice, the grinning skull caked under troweled layers of cosmetics. Corrupt and unhealthy, protopunk, proto-Goth, he was skinny, pale, hunched, and psychopathic. He was Johnny Rotten, Steerpike, Bowie strung out in Berlin, or Joel Grey in Cabaret. The Joker was the perfect dissolute European response to Batman’s essentially can-do New World determination, toned physique, and outrageous wealth. While Batman cut a swath through blackened streets and leapt between skyscrapers, the Joker had to hunch beneath bare bulbs like a heroin addict facing a nightmare comedown with an acid tongue and a graveyard wit. He dressed like a riverboat gambler, his face composed to suggest some unhallowed marriage of showbiz, drag culture, and the art of the mortician. If Batman was cool, the Joker was cooler. The pair shared the perfect symmetry of Jesus and the Devil, Holmes and Moriarty, Tom and Jerry.
Bill Finger wrote the Joker with relish, finding, as he did with Batman, fresh and unremittingly inventive ways to reintroduce the villain. His narrative captions took on a deliciously creepy-crawly tenor any time the Clown Prince of Crime made an entrance:
THE JOKER—GRIM JESTER, ARCH-CRIMINAL, MASTER-FIEND … AN EMBER OF LIFE GLOWS WITHIN THAT GHASTLY SHELL OF HUMAN CLAY … AND THE ICY CLAWS OF FEAR AND APPREHENSION CLUTCH TIGHTER ABOUT THE HEARTS OF THE DENIZENS OF THE WORLD!! ONLY THREE DARE TO PLAY THE GAME OF CARDS WITH THIS MAD, EVIL GENIUS—THE FEARLESS BATMAN, THE HEROIC ROBIN, AND THE BEAUTIFUL, LITHE CAT-WOMAN … TO THE WINNER BELONG THE PHARAOH’S GEMS … THE LOSER—GETS DEATH!!
The rest of Batman’s rogues’ gallery personified various psychiatric disorders to great effect: Two-Face was schizophrenia. Catwoman was kleptomania. The Scarecrow was phobias of all kinds. By psychoanalyzing his enemies with his fists, Batman may have hoped to escape the probing gaze of the analyst himself, but it was not to be. There was, after all, something deeply mad about Batman. Superman made a kind of sense in a hopeful, science fiction way: a do-gooding orphan from another world who decided to use his special alien powers to help the people of his adopted world achieve their greatness. The decision of the rich but otherwise powerless Bruce Wayne to fight crime dressed as a bat took a bit more swallowing. After witnessing the senseless murder of his parents (a story revealed in Batman no. 1), the young Bruce would have been forgiven for spending his inheritance on drink, drugs, hookers, and therapy, but instead he chose to fight crime on his own somewhat unconventional terms. Madness haunted Batman from the start.
And then there were the ladies. The essentially monogamous Superman would never dare to indulge enemies like the Catwoman (also from Batman no. 1), Poison Ivy (1966), or Talia (1971’s “Daughter of the Demon”—and eventually mother of Batman’s son Damian), but these were exactly the kind of damaged sex kittens who prowled regularly into playboy Bruce Wayne’s anything-goes world. The bad girls in Batman were all deranged fetish queens who loved and hated the hero in equal, exquisite measure. These were tough, glamorous dames, always happy to engage in full contact, to-the-death rooftop bouts with the world’s greatest martial artist when the hypno-lipstick failed to do its job.
Batman, then, may have been a construct, but he was an immaculate construct, precision engineered to endure. Batman was born of the deliberate reversal of everything in the Superman dynamic: Superman was an alien with incredible powers; Batman was a human being with no superhuman abilities. Superman’s costume was brightly colored; Batman’s was grayscale and somber with mocking flashes of yellow. In his secret Clark Kent identity, Superman was a hardworking farmer’s son who grew up in small-town Kansas, while Batman’s Bruce Wayne enjoyed life as a wealthy playboy—an East Coast sophisticate descended from old money. Clark had a boss; Bruce had a butler. Clark pined after Lois; Bruce burned through a string of debutantes and leading ladies. Superman worked alone; Batman had a boy partner, Robin, who wore green briefs, a black mask, and a yellow cape. Superman was of the day; Batman was of the night and the shadows. Superman was rational, Apollonian; Batman was Dionysian. Superman’s mission was the measured allotment of justice; Batman’s, an emotive two-fisted ask-questions-later vendetta.
Superman began as a socialist, but Batman was the ultimate capitalist hero, which may help explain his current popularity and Superman’s relative loss of significance. Batman was a wish-fulfillment figure as both filthy-rich Bruce Wayne and his swashbuckling alter ego. He was a millionaire who vented his childlike fury on the criminal classes of the lower orders. He was the defender of privilege and hierarchy. In a world where wealth and celebrity are the measures of accomplishment, it’s no surprise that the most popular superhero characters today—Batman and Iron Man—are both handsome tycoons. The socialist and the socialite, the only thing Superman and Batman could agree on wa
s that killing is wrong.
This fascinating new hero was horned like the Devil and most at home in darkness; a terrifying, demonic presence who worked on the side of the angels. Whatever the reasons, these carefully calculated tensions and contradictions ensured Batman’s cyclically renewed popularity, while Superman’s appeal would eventually blur into something tackier as his fierce humanism became reconfigured as nostalgic self-delusion. Superman’s brand of essentially optimistic problem solving found its cynical counterpart in Batman’s obsessive, impossible quest to punch crime into extinction, one bastard at a time.
As distinct as they were, Superman and Batman would eventually become friends. This future meeting would inaugurate the dawn of the shared DC Comics universe—an immense virtual reality inhabited by fictional characters, spanning decades and hundreds of thousands of pages, with its own rules, laws of physics, and alternative forms of time. The first emergent comic-book universe began with this grand separation of light from dark, is from isn’t, this from that, up from down, in a kabbalistic, Hermetic symmetry. The first light had cast the first shadow.
A kind of alchemy was under way.
CHAPTER 2
ONCE THE FORMULA was established, dozens, hundreds, of variations and combinations of the hero type could be run. Some had special powers, but most were otherwise ordinary men and women who gave themselves names like the Mighty Atom (1940), Phantom Lady (1941), or Black Canary (1947) and dressed in flamboyant disguises to fight crime, armed only with their wits and a seemingly insatiable appetite for violent street justice. Many superhero strips were based around a single gimmick: the Sandman (1939) sent his crooked victims to sleep with a gas gun, while Madame Fatal (1940) was secretly retired actor Richard Stanton, who fought crime dressed as an old lady—making him the first transvestite superhero, although certainly not the last.
The rapid growth of superhero titles in the wake of Superman and Batman and the devouring demand for fresh material encouraged young writers and artists to pursue increasingly surreal pixie paths to inspiration. Superheroes were driven to specialize in a savage Darwinian search for new, evolutionary niches.
The most successful of these specialists were two early entries from one of National Comics’ biggest rivals. A publisher called Timely Comics sprang up to take advantage of the superhero fad and launched its first title, Marvel Comics, in October 1939, with two new characters: the Human Torch and Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner. Batman and Superman were the pillars of what would come to be known as the DC universe; the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch were the first residents of what would one day be the Marvel Comics universe.
Timely’s big innovation, which was to serve the embryonic Marvel well and help to distinguish it from DC, was to come down from Olympus and give voice to the elements themselves by personifying the forces of nature as heroes.
Prince Namor (Roman spelled backward) of Atlantis, the Sub-Mariner, was the creation of seventeen-year-old Bill Everett. In photographs, the handsome Everett has a shock of hair like Rimbaud, geek glasses, a pipe clenched between his teeth, and a demonic glint in his eye. Superman sometimes flouted the law, but decent people had nothing to fear from the essentially upstanding Man of Steel. Prince Namor was different: This half-human terrorist was prepared to inundate the just and unjust alike as he rode on whaleback at the foaming apocalyptic crest of the devastating mega-tsunami that he unleashed on New York in his first adventure. Everett’s version of the crude, comic pulp style was edgier, more angular, and more fantastic than anything seen previously.
With his jet-black widow’s peak, piercing eyes, pointed ears, bladelike cheekbones, and winged feet, the otherwise naked prince of the deep wore only a pair of scaly green briefs as the badge of his nobility. Namor was the face of JD insolence, awaiting rock ’n’ roll, Marlon Brando, and James Dean to ratify his power. Driven by passions and brief allegiances, Namor faced the entire world with a fuck-you snarl, committing acts of high anarchy on a scale undreamed of by terrorists in the real world.
There was no shortage of sea stories, tales of Atlantis, storms, piracy, dynastic succession, and imperial vengeance from which to draw inspiration for Namor’s fertile new fantasy playground.
His inevitable counterpart and opposite, the Human Torch, was less of a success. An intelligent artificial man with a serious design flaw that made him combustible in air, this do-gooding mechanical man was less easy to relate to than the impulsive Namor, and interest in the Torch declined steadily. (When Stan Lee revived the concept for The Fantastic Four, he wisely made sure the new Torch was a human being; a literally hotheaded teenage hipster.)
The elements of water and fire were soon joined by a reborn pantheon of gods and figures from legend and myth. Hawkman, for example, resembled a hieroglyphic god from an Egyptian frieze, an avatar of hawk-headed Horus, the lord of force and fire, the son of the ancient dying god Osiris. When he spread his wings in comic form, it was as Khufu, an Egyptian prince resurrected conveniently in the manner to which he was accustomed as millionaire Carter Hall.
Green Lantern, who first appeared in 1940 in All American Comics no. 16, weighed in with an updated Aladdin story in which railwayman Alan Scott discovered a mysterious railroad lamp with equally mysterious powers. To make his inspiration even more explicit, the lead was to have been called Alan Ladd, but that name had already been taken by a popular screen star, and so Ladd became Scott. Leaving behind his ruggedly blue-collar life as a railwayman, Alan Scott chose to fight crime wearing a green, red, and yellow trapeze artist outfit that far outshone Superman’s and anticipated the excesses of glam rock by thirty years. If Liberace had arrived at a Bel Air pool party dressed as the immaculate collision of circus aerialist with Christmas tree, the Green Lantern would still make him look drab by comparison—as well as thoroughly butch. With the sexy villainess Harlequin vying for his attention and comedy foil Doiby Dickles by his side, Alan Scott was secure in his masculinity, and there was something challenging about his “costume” that deferred mockery. Not one criminal commented on the Green Lantern’s elaborate departure from any form of sartorial normality or functionality. He was also the first superhero influenced by the esoteric culture of the East: His wish-fulfilling gem recalled the language of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, while the Lantern was Arabic, Islamic, and exotic. Echoes of the Green Lantern’s eccentric costume—the high collar or the billowing sleeves—would appear in later “mystical” superheroes such as Doctor Strange as visual shorthand for the same Eastern influence.
The Flash (1940) was the first of the accidental supermen, prefiguring the heroes of the future Marvel universe: all victims of science, motivated by sheer altruism to use their great powers in the service of their communities. Jay Garrick, a research chemist who inadvertently inhaled “heavy water” fumes that gave him his power, wasn’t strong or invulnerable or immortal, but he could run fast, and what kid hadn’t dreamed of running faster and faster until the whole world accelerated into a blur and hurricane? In his crime-fighting guise as the Flash, Jay Garrick wore a tin-winged helmet, a red shirt with a lighting bolt motif, blue slacks, and boots with wings. In this way, he personified comic books’ debts to one of their secret patron gods.
We’ve all seen the logo of the Interflora chain of florists. We may be familiar with Greek statues depicting a gracefully gliding youth in a tin helmet. This hat and the Flash’s winged heels belong to the Greek god Hermes and his Roman counterpart, Mercury. He is the messenger of the gods, and he represents, quite simply, language itself. Like language, he is swift, inventive, tricky, slippery, and elusive.
In India, he is personified as elephant-headed Ganesh, who writes the story of existence with his own broken-off tusk. In Egypt, he was Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe. The earliest Babylonian cultures portrayed him as Nabu. In the voodoo pantheon, he is Legba; to the Celts, he was Ogma; and Viking mythology knew him as Odin, the one-eyed god, from whose shoulders the magical ravens—thought and memory—fly hither and yon to bri
ng the god instant knowledge from all corners of the cosmos. In 1940 Hermes just couldn’t resist showing up in person to join in all the fun as his fellow gods were reborn on paper.
He washed up with the rest of the trash in the swill of twentieth-century gutter culture but was given a new vitality down there where no one but children and illiterates were looking. No longer a god, but still a popular representation of a god, he was that bridge between man and the divine now known as the superhero. And the wing-festooned Flash was only one manifestation: Those were Hermes’ fledged heels on Prince Namor, too, and the swift god’s lightning brand would be worn by generations of superheroes. But he would find his truest expression, perhaps, in the form of Captain Marvel, the bishonen, the condemned young man who became the most serious threat to Superman’s sales domination.
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Today every comics company has at least one, and sometimes several, characters who are direct analogues of Superman: Mr. Majestic, Supreme, Samaritan, Sentry, Hyperion, Omega, the High, Apollo, Gladiator, Omniman, Optiman, the Public Spirit, Atoman the Homelander, Superior the Plutonian, Alpha One—the list unfurls like a toilet roll. All of these characters are thinly disguised copies of Superman published by companies other than DC, or in some cases by DC itself, as if one Superman was too few.
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