BY MICHAEL USLAN
Recently, The New York Times took DC Comics, the comic book industry generally, and Batman specifically over the coals for what they claimed might be an insensitivity toward all the supervillains like the Joker, Two-Face, the Scarecrow, and Catwoman, whom they apparently saw less as “villains” and more as mere victims of assorted types and degrees of mental illness.6 Concerned psychiatrists and psychologists, it seems, feel that comic books denigrate these poor souls as “dangerous,” “evil,” and even “lunatics,” mix-matching in the process such clinical appellations as “psychotics” and “schizophrenics” with “costumed crazies” and “homicidal maniacs.” Some psychiatrists and psychologists argue that the comic book supervillain stereotypes promote shameful generalizations that continue to cause every new generation of comic book readers to fear or mock these afflicted and misunderstood antagonists.
Particularly targeted by these critics is the comic book institution known as Arkham Asylum (the word “asylum” no longer being a politically correct term of art) and the references to its patients as “inmates” (the latter word also no longer politically correct). The panels of the stories visually depict scenes of these afflicted victims sitting in barred cells (the word “cells” no longer politically correct in this context), wearing straitjackets or shackles (the word “straitjacket” no longer politically correct). Comic books are accused of ratcheting up bias, prejudice, and fear against the Joker and his compadres. Indeed, these psychiatrists and psychologists now see Batman as more of the bad guy than the so-called supervillains he opposes. They give no credit to the Dark Knight for his decades-long non-use of butterfly nets (while not specifically mentioned in the article, I’ll venture to guess that the term “butterfly nets” is also no longer politically correct) to corral his opponents who break out of Arkham seemingly every Wednesday the new comic books go on sale.
Left to right: Comic-Con panelists Robin Rosenberg, Michael Uslan, Travis Langley, Adam West, Jerry Robinson. Photo by Alex Langley.
The bipolar opposite of this rather sensationalistic approach to Batman and the comics with all the trumped-up charges against the Caped Crusader is the scholarly and insightful book you now hold in your hands. Superherologist Travis Langley is a university professor and an eminent scholar on the psychology of comic book superheroes and their real-life fans. Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight represents the culmination of his professional journal articles, chapters, blogs, many convention panels, and lifetime of contemplating the nature of heroes both factual and fictional, especially the one who guards Gotham. His professional credentials, mixed with his love for comic books and the character of Batman, create a fascinating, entertaining, and educational read. What makes Batman tick? Are superheroes with secret identities schizophrenic? Is Batman neurotic? Psychotic? And are Batman’s rogues gallery of supervillains truly not rogues or supervillains, but rather victims of a heartless society who are in need of better understanding and far more compassion than shown to date by the Gotham City Police Department, Batman, Robin, Superman, and even the entire Justice League of America? Find your nearest couch, lie down, and let Dr. Langley explain it all.
Michael Uslan
Gotham City
2012
Michael Uslan is a comics scholar, writer, and filmmaker experienced in taking on one Goliath after another. To get approval to teach the first course on comic book folklore at any accredited university, he asked a university dean to recount Superman’s famous origin and then pointed out that the dean had just described the story of Moses. Michael has written some of our most enduring heroes’ comic book adventures (Batman, The Shadow, The Spirit, Archie), but is best known for bringing our hero to the big screen as executive producer of every Batman movie since the 1980s—originally another giant battle because studio executives at the time had trouble believing audiences would want a serious Batman.
Note
6 Bender, Kambam, & Pozios (2011).
Introduction
DENNIS O’NEIL
Let us agree, here at the beginning, that Batman does not exist—not, anyway, as you and I exist. You can’t filch his Social Security number, you won’t meet his third cousin at a party, you’ll never follow him into a polling place, and you’ll never press his flesh, even if you spend your midnights lurking on rooftops.
So no present-tense, living-and-breathing, genome-bearing reality for the Dark Knight. But although he is not real, he does have a reality, a kind of reality he shares with mythology, folklore, legends, imaginary friends, and (let us lower our voices) maybe even a deity or two. What I’m suggesting is that Batman is not just a fictional character. Oh, he is that, and once he was nothing more. But not now.
I learned of this somewhat disconcerting reality years ago when, as the editor of Batman comics, I presided over what became known, in the Batman office of DC Comics, as the telephone stunt. What happened was, we had a character—Batman’s second sidekick and the second junior hero to be called “Robin”—whom we didn’t much like. We suspected that a lot of readers shared our feelings. What to do? Overhaul his personality? Send him to some distant clime? Kill him? Ah. Kill him. We conjured up the telephone stunt. Our writer, Jim Starlin, put the kid into a situation that could do him in. We then gave the readers three days to decide Robin’s fate: call one phone number and he lives to fight another day; call another and requiescat in pace.
Three days and over 10,000 calls later, the nays had it. R.I.P. Boy Wonder.
Then the aftermath: big reaction; lots of reporters and interviews and broadcasters and journalistic fuss. And I realized that I had been thinking of my job as producing fiction for a publishing backwater—comic books—and that I was wrong; my job was being in charge of postindustrial folklore. Batman (and Superman and Wonder Woman and maybe a few others) had been around so long, in so many media, that they were embedded in our collective psyches. Even folk who hadn’t read a comic in years—even those who wouldn’t read comics—knew, at least dimly, who these characters were and had some amorphous feeling for them.
None of which changed my workday: plots and cover copy and manuscript editing and long, long meetings…. you know, publishing stuff. Nor did it change what Batman was to me: a great vehicle for storytelling. But I now knew that he had something of the mythic in him. Like mythic heroes of old, he reflected the values of his time, though those values weren’t constant, and that was good—that allowed him to retain popularity for, as I write this, 72 years and counting. He evolved. The essence of what his creators, Bill Finger and Bob Kane, brought to the party in 1939 hadn’t changed much: the nocturnal vigilante endlessly and symbolically avenging his parents’ murders; an origin tale stark and simple and primal and, I submit, perfect. But virtually everything else did change over the decades: costumes and supporting cast and crime-fighting gadgetry and the kinds of crime fought and the kinds of villains who perpetrated the crimes…. The range of stories appearing under the Batman logo went from farcical to macabre, while always being a Batman. Not the Batman—there is no the Batman—but a Batman, one appropriate to whatever was contemporary.
This plasticity not only kept Batman commercially viable; it allowed different writers and artists to interpret him according to the dictates of their own experience—the world outside their windows. It also allowed him to be more than a mirror; he could be a receptacle, too. Writers could pour into him a lot that was happening in their consciousness and maybe even more that was happening in their subconscious: what they learned, what they knew, what they didn’t know they knew.
Not deliberately, of course. No comic book writer sits down and creates a psychological profile of a character before writing a line of dialogue. But our characters are human—what else could they be? Granted, these are not real humans—I gently remind you that Batman does not exist—but depictions of humans: greatly simplified, exaggerated, caricatured versions of we mortals. They represent what hundreds of writers and artists over a h
alf-century thought and felt and believed about who and what we are, and it’s a safe guess that most of that thinking and feeling and believing occurred subconsciously. But it did filter into the fiction.
The history of comic book superheroes encapsulates, in brief, easily digestible form, the history of storytelling. The first tales our hunter-gatherer forebears told were apparently simple reactions to that bad noise in the sky and the other ugly events that tormented the clan and, after tens of thousands of years and enormous evolution, resulted in the metafictional productions of the postmodernists. Similarly, the first comics presented simple good-guy-versus-bad-guy melodramas. We knew the good guy was good because he—almost always a “he”—conquered the bad guy, who was bad because his actions incurred the good guy’s disapproval. It was all plot-driven, with characterization either ignored or expressed by the occasional foible, speech pattern or—yes!—even a funny hat or two. Then, gradually but pretty darn briskly, creative people learned how to tell stories in this odd medium and publishing requirements altered to allow longer stories, and those things resulted in greater sophistication on the parts of both writer and reader. Writers could put a lot into Batman and his ilk, consciously and subconsciously, and they were still allowed the occasional funny hat, too.
Suddenly, while some of us were looking the other way, comics, like jazz and movies before them, had attained full parity. They were respectable—they were An Art Form.
And a well-credentialed professor with a gratifyingly lucid prose style and a sense of humor wrote a book about the psychology of Batman. (You may have noticed it in your hands.) It is a terrific book. It explores the psychological implications of Batman’s various incarnations, in print and on screens both large and small, and in the process gives us a pretty thorough biography of Batman, his friends, and his enemies, and demonstrates the kind of reality Batman enjoys. Not a literal reality (we agreed that Batman does not exist, remember?), but a way of existing in people’s heads that extends past fiction into the realm of postindustrial mythology. I know of no word that exactly defines this kind of myth, but when somebody gets around to creating one, they may very well use Travis Langley’s book as a reference.
Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight performs another task and performs it better than anything I’ve encountered before. It serves as a witty and absolutely clear introduction to psychology, especially clinical psychology.
Batman-who-does-not-exist (we do have to keep reminding ourselves of that!), in the incarnation I’m most familiar with, is, like his predecessor Sherlock Holmes, fairly disdainful of the liberal arts and soft science sections of the library. But he’d read this book. He’d have to, wouldn’t he?
Dennis O’Neil
Crime Alley
since 1939
Writer and editor Dennis O’Neil, in addition to his award-winning work weaving humanity and social consciousness into the adventures of heroes like Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and Iron Man, has been one of the most prominent custodians of the legacy Bob Kane and Bill Finger began. With artist Neal Adams, he restored Batman to his darker roots after the campier stories of then-recent years. Denny’s work with the Dark Knight has included creating characters like Ra’s and Talia al Ghul, overseeing the editing of all Batman titles, and novelizing the motion pictures Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.
1
Beneath the Cowl
Who Is Batman?
Adam West once asked me if I thought Batman was crazy. Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight is my answer.
Since his debut in 1939’s Detective Comics #27, Batman has thrilled billions across the globe over time, and through a multitude of media. Of the world’s three best-known comic book heroes—the bat, the spider, and the man from another planet, a trio of orphaned boys—he’s the one who works by night, needs a car to get him into town, and is the most mortal. He’s the superhero with no superpowers, the one we can most easily believe might inhabit our world. While his secret identity is the most fantastic of the three, one charmingly handsome billionaire living in a grand mansion on top of a vast cave versus two nebbishy newspaper employees, that fantastic wealth helps us accept his masked identity as something that feels real. Someone has to pay for those wonderful toys. The real world has more people known to be superrich than superpowered. Batman is the hero even adults can envision existing in real life, with less suspension of disbelief. Even though he has opportunities few people enjoy, Bruce Wayne hails from a city, not a mythical island or distant world, and he builds himself into a hero through training and hard work—no radiation, secret formula, or magic ring required. His origin is tragic and brutally believable. It taps the most primal of our childhood fears: A family outing twists into tragedy when a mugger guns his parents down before his eyes.
His films among the highest-grossing in history, this character has starred in more movies and television series, both animated and live-action, than any other comic book hero. Why does this brooding vigilante, this tormented soul who stalks the streets looking for trouble, dressed like a vampire, fascinate us so? Duality and obsession, his enemies’ and his own, fill his stories. His enemies reflect and distort facets of himself. He’s smug, he’s sly, he’s so intimidating that he can enter a room full of people who can fly, read minds, cast spells, or run faster than light, and yet they’re the ones daunted by him—and that’s what we love. Strong and smart, unfettered by fiscal limitations or anybody else’s rules, he brings a deep wish of ours to life. Batman’s the part of us that wants to scare all of life’s bullies away.
In creating bright, shining Superman, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster caught lightning in a bottle. One sleepless night, Jerry conceived “of a character like Samson, Hercules, and all the strong men I ever heard of rolled into one—only more so.”1 Jerry and his artist friend Joe drew inspiration from divine heroes throughout the ages to create not just Superman himself, but the very concept of the costumed superhero. They made the meme. They launched modern mythology.2 Superman became an immediate hit. On the heels of that first caped hero’s success, publishers scrambled to concoct more. Superman’s publisher hired young cartoonist Bob Kane to generate their next costumed do-gooder.3 Ahead of all the upcoming Superman imitations, Kane and his collaborator Bill Finger pulled not from the superhuman figures who’d inspired Jerry and Joe, but instead from the dark mystery-men of silent movies and pulp fiction, most notably Zorro and the Shadow, extraordinary men but men nonetheless. Where Superman drew his might from Earth’s sun, Batman found his in a city’s darkness.a Jerry and Joe played with the bright and impossible; Bob and Bill expanded that meme by adding the coin’s other side, the dark and improbably possible.
Nobody today gets to read that first Batman story without already knowing that the vigilante puzzling authorities will turn out to be the bored rich boy who spends his time, up until the final panel, as Commissioner Gordon’s literary foil, a sounding board to whom Gordon can voice his thoughts—no more than we might scratch our heads over a classic Robert Louis Stevenson novel because we can’t figure out mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll’s connection to that lout Mr. Hyde. We know the name and face of the man behind the mask, but what lurks behind the face? The question “Who is Batman?” strikes deeper than Batman’s cowl, Bruce Wayne’s façade, or any name he chooses to use. It’s a who question packed with why: Why does he fight crime? Why as a vigilante? Why the mask, the bat, and the underage partner? Why are his most intimate relationships with “bad girls” he ought to lock up? And why won’t he kill that homicidal, green-haired clown?
Does Batman have bats in his belfry?
Right to left: Bat-Films executive producer Michael Uslan, Batman television actor Adam West, and psychologist/superherologist Travis Langley discuss Batman and the Joker at San Diego Comic-Con International. Photo by Alex Langley.
Notes
1. O’Neil (2008), 1.
2. Action Comics #1 (1938).
3. Kane & Andrae (1989).
&nbs
p; a “The first light had cast the first shadow.”—Grant Morrison (2011), 26.
2
Which Batman?
“Will the real Batman please stand up?”
—message on a Joker playing card in The Dark Knight (2008 motion picture)
Before we can analyze the character, we must define our parameters. Before we can explore the question of who along with all its whys, we first must consider which Batman we mean.
Even though Batman originated and endures as a comic book character, most of us first met him on TV. From the time I was a toddler, Adam West was the live Batman. I also watched the Caped Crusader in Saturday morning cartoons, pitted Batman and Robin toys against the Joker in his green plastic van, and, wearing a towel cape and black gloves, played like I was Batman. Voiced by Olan Soule, a more serious (though still upbeat) Batman teamed with Superman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman to form an undersized Justice League, the original Super Friends, on Saturday mornings. Those television versions set me up for some big surprises when I finally got to read the comic books’ darker stories for myself.
A generation later, my sons knew Batman best through Batman: The Animated Series. My older son, age eight when that show began, had known Batman from other media, but memory is a funny thing and the cartoon burned its way backward through time as if it had retroactively gotten there first. He remembers that as his earliest Batman even though he knows this cannot be right. My younger son discovered Batman more like I did, as a preschooler unbothered by details like the fact that Batman didn’t really exist, which may be why, of the two boys, he became the bigger Bat-fan. His enthrallment started with Batman Returns toys that came out months before Batman: The Animated Series debuted; however, the most powerful impression seared into his young mind—for him, where Batman begins—was the edited-for-TV Batman Returns Batmobile breaking away parts of itself so it could speed through a narrow alley. His previous passion for toy cars locked onto that vehicle. Batman amazed him, and so did his toys.
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