MYTHCOMICS: "ENDS OF THE EARTH" (ALL-STAR BATMAN #6-9, 2017)

 The stories that endure? The "demons" that win? They're the ones that speak to who we want to be. Not the ones that scare us into being who we don't. They're true because we want them to be badly enough that we MAKE them true. -- Batman to Ra's Al Ghul, ENDS OF THE EARTH FINALE.  

A tagline on the back of the TPB reads, "This is not a Batman story. It's a villain story." It's a reprise of a line Ra's Al Ghul speaks to Batman, albeit in his Bruce Wayne guise, as part of a climactic dialogue between the two enemies. Yet it's not true, and I suspect writer Scott Snyder knew it wasn't true when he wrote the line. For roughly the last fifty years-- the period in which fans became the dominant writers of superhero comics-- an identity between the Dark Knight and his gallery of grotesques and arabesques has been irregularly suggested. The "old pros" of BATMAN's first thirty years probably would have found this imputation of identity too metaphysical, whether one was addressing the creator of Poison Ivy (Robert Kanigher), Mister Freeze (Dave Wood), or the Mad Hatter (Bill Finger). Denny O'Neil, one of the first of the fans to turn pro, possibly understood the identity-dynamic when he created Ra's. Yet Bill Finger seems to be the driving-force behind the dynamic-- Finger, who tapped the power of psychological obsession for heroes and villains to an extent not seen in earlier media like pulps and serials. I commented on this common element in my 2020 essay, THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD.

Plot-wise, ENDS OF THE EARTH is in many respects a standard Bat-villain team-up. Ra's is trying once again to wipe out much of the Earth's population. He suborns the talents of Mister Freeze and The Mad Hatter. Batman interferes, this time with some assistance from Poison Ivy. Snyder injects some elements that are probably original to his take on the Dark Knight-- an armored adult partner named Duke (whom I found tedious), and some new iteration of the Blackhawks. But Snyder surely knew he was selling his particular take on four of the celebrated rogues, by delving into their obsessions as the hero seeks to take them down.

Mister Freeze is one of Snyder's best conceits, with the writer framing Victor Fries' apocalyptic nihilism as springing from a childhood reading of Robert Frost's "fire and ice" poem-- and thus not purely a consequence of his quest to restore the health of his cryogenically preserved wife. In the service of Ra's Al Ghul, Freeze has perfected world-killing spores in his Arctic sanctum-- and even though Batman knows that a squadron of The New Blackhawks plans to firebomb the frigid fiend's laboratory, the Knight is compelled to get there first. Perhaps Batman feels he must be sure of ending the threat up close and personal. Perhaps he still pities the demented scientist, despite his murderous project. Or--

--Maybe Batman just wants to vanquish the cool, cruel villain with his nemesis, that of "heat." I frankly don't know what the propensity of real bats to generate high levels of body heat has to do with Batman using his own anti-virus to destroy Freeze's spores. But it does give the villain the chance to imagine his apocalyptic world of icy stillness ending in a cataclysm of fire.

The hero's triumph is mitigated in Part Two, in that some of the spores escape destruction, and so Batman must seek the help of another old foe. This time the Princess of Plants is off in some wasteland, conducting her biological experiments for the love of pure science. Knowing that Ivy's feeling for humanity is strained at best, Batman still seeks to prune knowledge from his enemy-- while additionally, for some vague reason, the Blackhawks menace Ivy as well. Ivy does help Batman after a fashion, though she makes him listen to a lecture about a supposed true ancestor to the legendary Tree of Life. If Freeze looked forward to a still, cold world of the future, Ivy is by comparison a being who seeks truth in the imponderable world of life's pre-human origins.

But Ivy's aid only slows the fatal influence of Freeze's spores. Batman uses his detective skills to track down a corporation that helped Freeze in some unspecified way and finds himself in the Carrol-esque domain of The Mad Hatter. Freeze and Ivy might not see themselves as aspects of Batman's own psyche, but the Hatter is an enthusiastic advocate of solipsism. But there's only one fantasy to which Bruce Wayne is beholden to, and that's "the window moment," the moment when he saw a bat come into his window and beheld the metaphor to which he dedicated his life.

And so, the Hatter, despite his love of fantasy, provides the real-world clue that leads Batman to confront Ra's Al Ghul in America's capital. The hero doesn't seem to make much of how he found several of the Blackhawk agents working with Hatter, and for all the reader knows, Batman learned nothing from them. He knows only that their confederates are holding Duke prisoner and planning to execute him at a particular time-- as if the threat of Ra's to exterminate half the world isn't sufficient to motivate the crusader. There's a confusing scene indicating that Batman gets Catwoman to masquerade as Batman to draw the villain's fire, and overall this segment doesn't show Ra's at his best. Still, the dialogue describing their conflicting visions-- one demon-haunted, the other haunted by a vision of perfectibility-- makes the more baffling details less worrisome.         

And so ends ENDS OF THE EARTH. Snyder packed in far too many extraneous details to make ENDS an outstanding Bat-story. (For instance, the last section reveals that the Blackhawks weren't working for Ra's after all-- so why were they working with Hatter?) But I can appreciate that Snyder and his five artist-collaborators went the extra mile to spin a new story of the hero and the villains who define him.    
        

QUICK ARABESQUE TURNS

 When I initially wrote my first essay on the artistic differences between "grotesques" and "arabesques" in the Golden Age BATMAN comics, I didn't recall that anyone else had made any similar arguments. But I have come across a couple of observations that loosely parallel mine.                                                                               

 The earliest I've come across is a foreword by Max Allan Collins to BATMAN ARCHIVES 2, which collected the Bat-stories from DETECTIVE COMICS #51-70 and which was published in 1991. Collins doesn't use my word "grotesque" of course, but he speaks of how "in the dark world of the Batman, crime did pay," which is the reason a vigilante was necessary, and he also mentions how the narration boxes convey a "dark, ominous mood." The earliest example Collins finds of a brighter figure is Robin, who debuts in DETECTIVE COMICS #38 (1940), though the writer speaks of The Penguin's debut in DETECTIVE #58 (December 1941) as a "turning point." Collins further asserts that as Jerry Robinson became more dominant on the Bat-comics, the stories lost much of the "noir look" of the early Kane period and emphasized more "humor elements."                           

Rik Worth advances a slightly similar argument in the pages of his 2021 THE CREATORS OF BATMAN, his biographical study of the intertwined lives of Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Worth substantially agrees that Bob Kane preferred the noir-look of his early stories but claims that it was artist Dick Sprang who "made Gotham a much brighter and more colorful place." Worth does not source his claim about Kane's preferences and his book does not study in detail the feature's artistic developments any more than this post does. Still, it's interesting that when Sprang produced his first full-fledged Bat-tales for BATMAN #19 (Oct-Nov 1943), one of the three Sprang stories places Batman and Robin in an extravagant fantasy-setting foreign to the world of noir: having the heroes chase down U-Boat Nazis into the sunken city of Atlantis.                                                           

  My nominee for "Batman's first arabesque" precedes the debut of Robin, though. In the first six issues of DETECTIVE COMICS, the Dark Knight contends with ordinary crooks (and in these stories it's Batman who is the grotesque), with the mad scientist Doctor Death (two appearances, with Death getting deformed in the second tale), and with the vampiric Monk, whose two stories pile on lots of Gothic grotesquerie. However, in DC #33, following a two-page origin of Batman (whose script is sometimes attributed to Bill Finger), the ten-page main story concerns a villain who, while obscure today, abandons the reigning spookiness for a duel of science-fiction weaponry. This foe was Carl Kruger, a mad scientist with a Napoleon complex, and I for one find nothing Gothic about him.                                                                                                       

  This ten-pager, "Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom," was written by Gardner Fox while the art is theoretically by both Bob Kane and Sheldon Moldoff. "Dirigible" stands in the tradition of both prose SF-stories of futuristic warfare and movie serials about villains with death-rays. Kruger unleashes a dirigible on Gotham City, causing mass havoc with something like a disintegrator beam. Batman meets science with science, inventing a chemical that immunizes his Bat-plane against the beam before the hero rams the dirigible with his craft. One page later, Kruger's plane crashes to Earth after Batman gasses the villain, and Gotham is saved from its first apocalyptic threat. I am not claiming that Carl Kruger is a particularly memorable villain. However, he's much more of a colorful fantasy-figure than his immediate predecessor in mad science, Doctor Death. Thus, in my book Kruger's blue-and-red attire by itself makes him Batman's first arabesque evildoer, and thus the figurative ancestor to all other variegated villains, from the Penguin onward. It's slightly appropriate that Sheldon Moldoff drew the character, for in later years he would become famous (or infamous) for drawing most of the really wacky Bat-foes in the creative era I've termed "Candyland Batman."  

UP WITH FANTASY, DOWN WITH HORROR

 In WORLD AS WILL AND REPRESENTATION, Schopenhauer distinguishes between "intuitive" and "abstract" representations: humans share "intuitive representations" with other animals, in that they are based in the body's "percepts."  But humans alone have the power to conceive "abstract representations," for humans alone can base representations in "concepts."-- HERO VS. VILLAIN, MONSTER VS. VICTIM PART 3 (2012).

So in my previous essay I extended my terms of "grotesque and arabesque" to two "super-genres," horror and fantasy. I call them "super-genres" because both subsume so many subgenres that it's difficult to claim that any single genre embraces works as far apart as Poe's HOUSE OF USHER and the Chichester-Johnson JIHAD (for horror) or Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS and Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique" stories (for fantasy). I think it's plain enough as to which super-genre is aligned with the grotesque and which is aligned with the arabesque.

It's more challenging, though, to place these super-genres-- which extend their influence far beyond their manifestations in popular fiction-- in the Schopenhaurean categories of authorial will. I've attempted to rename, for my literary project, Schopenhauer's names for his two types of representation, "intuitive" and "abstract," but I'm not going to reference any of my revisions in this essay. I want to get at a very narrow aspect of how audience expectations form patterns within authorial will.

I referenced that aspect-- or two manifestations of that aspect-- in the 2012 HUXLEY, JUNG AND STRANGENESS, where I summarized Thomas Huxley's distinctions between what he termed "upward transcendence" and "downward transcendence." 

UPWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind that Huxley doesn't adequate define, though he associates it with "theophanies" and the veneration of a " liberating and transfiguring Spirit."


 DOWNWARD TRANSCENDENCE-- a state of mind in which the transcendence "is invariably downward into the less than human, the lower than personal."  Huxley's three main venues toward this form of transcendence are "drugs, elementary sexuality and herd-intoxication," though he mentions some others as well.

It also should not be difficult to guess which super-genre I'm likely to align with downward transcendence, and which with the upward species. Although the "intuitive representations" that human beings share with lower animals are not inherently "lower" by themselves, they become "lower" in contrast with "abstract representations," which generally suggest principles that supervene the world of base animal existence. Such principles may be metaphysical, as in religion, or empirical, as in science, but both systems depend on abstractions in order to promote the philosophies of their adherents. I may never have reason to further use terminological terms for the two forms of literary transcendence, but for convenience I'll name them after two Greek religious terms: "chthonic" for "earthbound," and "ouranian" for "heaven-bound." 

So what are the "audience expectations" I referenced above? With respect to the super-genres, horror is expected to give audiences "the worst case scenario," and fantasy is expected to give audiences "the best case scenario." There are naturally exceptions, and I named two of them above. 

HOUSE OF USHER is in every way a grim, grotesque look at familial relations, and thus represents the "mainstream" of horror fiction. In contrast, the narrative of JIHAD somewhat transcends many of the gruesome activities of both Cenobites and Nightbreed, and offers to the audience-- if not to the characters-- a metaphysical rapprochement between their respective worlds.

 LORD OF THE RINGS offers a panoramic vision of human courage against overwhelming odds, and of redemption even in the face of near-total degradation (i.e., Gollum, Frodo's "shadow-self.") Thus Tolkien's book represents the mainstream of the fantasy super-genre. In contrast, though Smith's "Zothique" stories take place in an apocalyptic fantasy-verse full of colorful arabesques, many of them have downbeat or diffident endings worthy of Smith's idol Poe. Yet none of these exceptions disprove the rule, the rule being that audiences look to fantasy for the feeling of positive life-affirmation, while they look to horror to feel as though they have met the negativity of all life-denying forces, and still survived. 

I may develop these points further, but that's a decent stopping-place for now.

DARK ANTIPATHIES AND COLORFUL SYMPATHIES PT. 2

 Batman, then, despite his handsome face and ripped body, is at heart a grotesque, because the very look of his costume inspires fear more than admiration. Robin’s costume, in contrast, evokes the fanciful spirit I term arabesque. He affects bright daytime colors of red, green and yellow in direct contrast to Batman’s night-hues-- DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES, 2020.

 I want to re-emphasize my qualifications of this statement in Part 1, that these characterizations are what I believe to be the DOMINANT ways in which audiences relate to "grotesque" and "arabesques." But to ground my characterization a little more, I should draw upon the more general terminology of colors.

The standard division is as follows:

(1) Red, yellow and orange are "warm" colors, said to enhance positive and invigorating emotions.

(2) Blue, green, and purple are "cool" colors, said to bring relaxation and thus somewhat negative feelings.

(3) Black, white and grey are "neutral" colors, that evoke neither positivity nor negativity.

Now, to go back to my initial examples of Batman and Robin, both mix hues in different categories. 

What I called "daytime colors" in Robin are two "warm colors," red and yellow, and one "cool" color, green, though I think it inarguable that the two warms trump the one cool.

Batman is a little more complicated, as described in this thorough 2013 essay on a sadly defunct site, GOTHAM ALLEYS. His original costume was dominated by two neutral colors, grey and black. However, on the comics page the black was rendered with blue highlights, and over time the colorists reversed this practice, so that the black parts of the costume became blue with black highlights. (One comment on the essay even claims that "black highlights" are impossible, though obviously he's speaking of real life, not art itself.) So the accepted Batman attire is dominantly one neutral color and one cool one, with some slight mitigation by the warm color of the utility belt. 

Now, the standard attribution of "cool colors" doesn't speak of "negativity" as such. Yet when one thinks of the chosen color-scheme for the Famous Monsters of Cinema-Land, many of them are dominated by neutral or cool colors. I believe this is because the horror-genre associates such "calming" colors with such macabre connotations, associated with death, pain, and other mortifications.

The "magical fantasy" genre is in many ways the polar opposite of horror, and I would generalize that fantasies usually privilege warm colors. using the cool ones largely as contrast. Because magical fantasies tend to be insular, there's no familiar grouping of icons that are regularly associated in pop culture, but the 1939 WIZARD OF OZ is probably best known for using bright, vivid colors as an express revolt against the dull neutral colors of "reality."

So these are the sort of dominant associations I find with the use of coordinated color-patterns as they occur in popular culture. (The patterns may well apply to canonical "high culture" as well, but that would require something less like a blogpost and more like a Camille Paglia Guide to Color-ology.) In my next post I'll examine how the visual tropes of the grotesque and the arabesque apply to broader categories of authorial will.

DARK ANTIPATHIES AND COLORFUL SYMPATHIES

Batman, then, despite his handsome face and ripped body, is at heart a grotesque, because the very look of his costume inspires fear more than admiration. Robin’s costume, in contrast, evokes the fanciful spirit I term arabesque. He affects bright daytime colors of red, green and yellow in direct contrast to Batman’s night-hues, and some of his garments, such as boots and tunic, are designed to evoke famed swashbuckler Robin Hood. Even his main weapon in early stories, a David-style sling, carries an arabesque quality in comparison with Batman’s deadly looking Batarang.-- DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES, 2020.

As a prelude to some more involved meditations, I wanted to align my concepts of "the grotesque and the arabesque" (swiped from Poe, who probably swiped them from Walter Scott) with the more pervasive concepts of "antipathetic affects and sympathetic affects." My most elaborate scheme of these parallel affects appeared in 2013's TRIPLE THE TREMENDUM AND THE FASCINANS, though my more distant inspiration was Aristotle's terms of "terror and pity," which I found too limiting.

I didn't specify in the 2020 essay that my interpretations of "dark, fearful visual tropes" and "colorful, life-affirming visual tropes" were affects, so I do so now, going by the definition of affect I laid down in 2014's AFFECT VS. MOOD:

..."affects" spring from the main characters, the focal presences, with whom the readers identify. In this formulation, then, "affects" spring from "character," even though the focal 'character" may not be a human being, since the cathexis of emotional affects can focus upon any number of phenomena, ranging from the will-less robot hero of GIGANTOR to the amorphous spirits of THE EVIL DEAD.

 I will specify, though, that "dark" doesn't always signify antipathetic affects and "colorful" doesn't always signify sympathetic affects; they are merely the DOMINANT ways in which these visual tropes are utilized. As stated in DARK GROTESQUES, Batman uses the fearsome mana of a bat as a means of psyching out criminals, so he remains a heroic figure who dominantly inspires a sympathetic affect, probably closest to what I've called "fascination" (TREMENDUM). 

And though I've labeled some Bat-villains to be "arabesques," such as Penguin and Catwoman, they don't inspire, whether as subordinate or superordinate icons, pure sympathetic affects, but a mingling of the sympathetic and the antipathetic. Catwoman is the main character of CATWOMAN DEFIANT, but she's never purely an admirable hero. There's always a little bit of the villain mixed in with her most heroic acts. 

 That's enough for now on grotesques and arabesques, but referencing the original essay led me to test one of the tentative conclusions I made there. I termed a period of Batman comics from perhaps the mid-forties to the the end of the Golden Age (1955) as the "Dark Procedural" period, in contrast with the very brief period of "Gothic Batman." So I tested that analysis with a random selection of readings, from the solo BATMAN title going from 1950 to 1952. This very minor survey did not yield very many moments of Gothic morbidity, much less justifying my claim that the raconteurs still used a lot of night scenes. The one above, in which Batman struggles with a villain in a Batman outfit, and in which one of them perishes (a trifle gruesomely) is one of the few night-scenes I found, from "Ride, Bat-Hombre, Ride" (BATMAN #56, 1950). 

I still found a few Gothic-isms-- a hoax about a living mummy, or one about a "haunted cellar" that drove visitors mad-- and that's more than one would find in any other DC superhero of the period. And that's because DC tried to make most of its heroes as safe and gimmicky as possible in that period, making an exception for Batman only because that feature was one of their best sellers. At any rate, there aren't enough "dark grotesque" elements to justify my calling the period "Dark Anything," so I now rename that period, "Police Procedural Batman." Penguin, Joker and Catwoman all made significant appearances in those two surveyed years, as did newbies like Killer Moth and Deadshot. But all criminals have mundane criminal motives, including their attempts to slay the Dynamic Duo, and so Batman and Robin must use police procedural methods to corral them. 

There are isolated elements of overt science-fiction, like "Lost Legion of Space" (BATMAN #67, 1951), wherein the 20th century Robin is given the chance to travel forward in time and meet the Batman and Robin of 3051. But there's nothing comparable to the outpouring of wacky, rather light-hearted alien menaces seen in the years from 1955 to 1964, which I continue to term "Candyland Batman." And just to round things out, I also maintain the term "Gothic Procedural" for nearly everything after 1964. Ever since the Julie Schwartz years, I would assert that most raconteurs have sought to emphasize either Gothic elements or Police Procedural elements, or else to combine the two in felicitous ways. The brief series based on Cartoon Network's BATMAN THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD would probably be the only place where "Candyland Batman" has re-surfaced.

MYTHCOMICS: BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN (1996-97)

In contrast to the many admirers of the Loeb-Sale LONG HALLOWEEN, I didn't get much out of the collected issues after two separate readings, aside from appreciating Sale's art. I'm not sure that I realized that it was supposed to be a direct sequel to Frank Miller's celebrated BATMAN: YEAR ONE, though obviously HALLOWEEN had to occur early in Batman's career due to the absence of any members of his Bat-family. 

In this iteration Batman has just barely started to make inroads against the entrenched "Roman Empire," the reigning crime family in Gotham, represented by local godfather Carmine Falcone, aka "the Roman." The Caped Crusader has already won the confidence of police captain James Gordon, and much of the action in HALLOWEEN centers around the way Batman and Gordon also bond with D.A. Harvey Dent in their attempt to bring down criminals. Organized crime is the true foe of these do-gooders, while the notorious super-villains of Batman's mythos are regarded as "freaks," particularly by the career criminals. Batman has met most of his big-name foes at this time-- Joker, Riddler, Penguin, Scarecrow, Mad Hatter, Catwoman, and Poison Ivy-- though Loeb and Sale also make use of two lesser lights in the Bat-mythos, Calendar Man and Solomon Grundy. At this point in time, Harvey Dent has not yet undergone his transformation into Two-Face, and indeed that transformation is the culmination of HALLOWEEN's main plotline.

Still, I wasn't deeply impressed with the Loeb-Sale treatment of either the ordinary crooks or the super-crooks, nor with the retelling of Dent's transformation, or with the "serial killer" mystery that extended across all 13 issues of HALLOWEEN. Each issue represented a month in the Bat-universe, during which Batman proved unable to keep the mysterious assassin Holiday from executing at least one victim a month, always on a popular holiday. Most of Holiday's victims are also members of the Falcone crime family, and so a major part of the mystery is the attempt to determine whether the killer belongs to a competing family-- or someone who hates crime but has decided to go outside the law-- someone like Harvey Dent.

I confess that even though I'm not a great admirer of Christopher Nolan or his collaborator David Goyer, their prologue to a 2011 collection of HALLOWEEN gave me a new insight. Both filmmakers stated that the Loeb-Sale work had been a seminal influence on their first two Bat-films. Remembering how much THE DARK KNIGHT plays off of HALLOWEEN's leitmotif about "belief"-- particularly with the phrase "I believe in Harvey Dent"-- I realized that whatever I thought about the films, HALLOWEEN was about how even among good men, belief is always vulnerable to corruption.

In most Batman stories, the hero can track down any serial killer, because the murderer always conveniently leaves clues that enable the crime-fighter to track down the miscreant. HALLOWEEN goes to the other extreme. Even though Holiday leaves behind some holiday-themed token every time he (or she) kills, Batman learns nothing from the tokens, and he almost nver manages to anticipate where Holiday might strike next, despite knowing what day the assassination will take place. Holiday remains "off-camera" for most of the story, since Loeb and Sale were creating a genuine mystery, even if their denouement is somewhat ambivalent. Oddly, one of the few super-villains who has some mythic presence here is the lower-tier felon The Calendar Man. Though Julian Day is not directed involved in the Holiday killings, his obsession with seasonal occurrences gives him in HALLOWEEN a function like unto that of Hannibal Lecter in RED DRAGON. Batman consults with Calendar Man as Clarice consulted with Lecter to learn the nature of the Red Dragon-- with the main difference being that Calendar Man only provides one useful yet highly ambivalent clue, as if he were a Greek oracle dispensing problematic advice.

The other super-villains almost function as date-markers during Holiday's year-long campaign of targeted killings, and all of them are pretty routine. The Joker is crazy. Catwoman is unpredictable. Poison Ivy uses her hypnotic plants to suborn Bruce Wayne's will. Arguably none of them shine, because the focus is on Harvey Dent, whom the reader knows is destined to become Two-Face. 

None of the "ordinary crooks" in HALLOWEEN get any better treatment, despite Sale's borrowing from visual elements in THE GODFATHER. All of the hoods knocked off by Holiday are ciphers, while Loeb doesn't bring any interesting dynamics to Carmine Falcone and the various literal members of his family: wife, sons, daughter. There's a minor subplot revealing how, many years ago, Thomas Wayne saved Falcone's life, but not much comes of it.

Though no one cares about the bickering of the criminals, freakish or normal, Loeb and Sale spotlight the trials of the just at every opportunity. Dent's busy schedule as prosecutor causes him to neglect his wife Gilda, and on one occasion she's injured by a bomb intended to kill both of them. Because of Thomas Wayne's past action, Dent tries unsuccessfully to prove that Bruce Wayne has some collusion with Falcone, though of course the fighting D.A. does not know that Wayne's other identity. The troika of Batman-Gordon-Dent is strained as the first two suspect Dent of having adopted the identity of Holiday in order to murder the ganglords of Gotham. 

But before Batman and Gordon have the chance to accuse Dent, one of the crime-lords strikes a decisive blow: assailing Dent's face with acid. Crazed by pain, Dent flees to the underworld of Gotham's sewer system, where he forms an odd bond with the undead monster Solomon Grundy, simply because Dent knows the "Solomon Grundy" rhyme. And although Harvey Dent is not guilty of the Holiday murders, his ambivalence about the law's effectiveness transforms him into Two-Face. Only with the passage of a full year do Batman and Gordon finally figure out how to trap the real Holiday, and that's only with Calendar Man's help. But the damage is done. Two-Face uses Grundy to liberate the other fiends from Arkham Asylum, and though Batman manages to corral them all, he can't prevent the formerly righteous D.A. from going over the line and killing Carmine Falcone.  

Two-Face is arrested as well, but he's beyond the pale to his former friends, and they can only ask themselves if their actions were just. Loeb and Sale then throw in a last "teaser" to suggest that there's an angle to the Holiday killings that the two crime-fighters will never learn.

One podcast professed the opinion that HALLOWEEN was all about how the ordinary crooks were displaced in the Bat-mythos by the super-crooks. On the contrary, I think the diminished importance of the super-crooks' deeds in the story indicates their transitory effects on the crime scene. Yes, by the end of the story "the Roman Empire" has fallen, but every Bat-reader knows that other crime families simply filled the void in present-day Gotham. Sale's deliberately cartoon-like art frequently exaggerates the super-fiends to the point of absurdity. When Batman punches the Joker in one scene, the villain's neck stretches like the body of a jack-in-the-box. In the Penguin's brief appearance, he sports a monocle so big that no human eye-muscles could hold it, and Poison Ivy has "leaf-hair" that's longer than her entire body. Compared to the scourge of ordinary criminals and the poisonous effect they have even on righteous people, the super-fiends themselves are like the calendar's holidays: attempts to punctuate the dull round of human existence with the celebration of non-rational customs. And that is the "master thread" by which BATMAN THE LONG HALLOWEEN can be accurately read as a mythcomic.

THE EXCLUDED THIRD

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.-- Thomas Hobbes, LEVIATHAN, Chapter 13.

My use of the term "excluded third" is an idiosyncratic one, for it has nothing to do with the term's use in formal logic, where it's better known as "the excluded middle." But it amused me to use a high-flown philosophical term for a "third" that I simply neglected to include in one of my classification endeavors.

In 2020's DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES, I applied the established art-terms "grotesques" and "arabesques" to two dominant trends in the mythos of the BATMAN comics. First I applied the term "grotesque" to Batman, due to the forbidding nature of his costume and his origins in a traumatic experience. Then I applied "arabesque" to Robin, to characterize his bright, colorful costume and the dominant playful attitude he took to fighting crime alongside his mentor. Then I extended the same metaphors to the duo's rogues' gallery, according to whether the rogues were dominantly "fearful" or "fanciful."

In my second essay on the topic,THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD, I attempted to distinguish between the dominant motives of grotesque villains and arabesque villains:

So, having made Robin’s presence more essential to the overall development of the Bat-mythos, the bachelor-thread for the overall series must balance the elements of darkness and brightness. Additionally, although the heroes are victims of trauma, many of the villains are less traumatized than simply maladjusted, usually by virtue of greed. Obsession rather than trauma as such seems to define the Bat-mythos. Batman himself starts the ball rolling by extending his chosen identity to such tools as the Batarang and the Batmobile; the Joker follows suit with a poison that causes his victims to laugh themselves to death, and so on. So perhaps a trial thread might read something like, “Though the Greeks wanted to find beauty only in bright things and ugliness in dark ones, virtue and vice have equal propensities to be either light or dark, depending on the nature of the obsession.” This thread-concept would even remain in operation during the era I call “Candyland Batman,” when Batman himself is very nearly the only character who projects any grotesque affects, and nearly every new villain is conceived along the lines of the Penguin’s arabesque obsessions, thus leading to crooks who base their crimes on the use of kites and freeze-rays and polka dots.

I don't retract any of these classifications, which I think apply across the board to all of the "super-villains." However, there is a third category of Bat-foe who is not "super" in any way: the category of the "ordinary crook." Extraordinary crooks and ordinary crooks align respectively with what I have called "abstract goal-affects" and "concrete goal-affects" in the essay EXPENDITURE ACCOUNTS:

In THE NARRATIVE DEATH-DRIVE PART 2 I formulated the joint idea of "concrete goal-affects" and "abstract goal-affects," which were affects located within the personas of fictional characters, with whom audiences are meant to identify.  I asserted that the former affects were "directed toward the goal of gain or the goal of safety," that is, to the desire to achieve a specific real-world effect, while the latter were more oriented on the faculty of *esteem,* which the Greeks called *thymos.*  I noted that "neither the logic of the desire for gain nor the desire for safety seems to govern the operations of *thymos.* 

The more I think about Hobbes' "three principal causes of quarrel," however, the more I come to believe that these three might be subsumed into two.  The aggressor who wants to build up his store of goods by robbing his neighbor is in a sense following the same concrete instinct as the victim who fights back, trying to protect what he already has... One might therefore see Hobbes' categories of "gain" and "safety" subsumed into one concrete goal-affect, which I will term "acquisition" after Bataille's use of the term. "Glory," in contrast to both "gain" and "safety"-- the main manifestations of acquisition-- lacks the practicality of the concrete affects, so that its overriding category is that of expenditure, also covered in the above essay. 

The majority of ordinary crooks in Batman's world have no interest in playing "games of expenditure" with the Dynamic Duo. Pure acquisition is their modus operandi: either they want to acquire the goods of others or to keep tight hold of the riches they've plundered. They don't challenge Batman with jokes or riddles, and even though some of them may come up with imaginative schemes to promote their larceny, particularly during the gimmicky tales of Batman's Golden Age, making money is their concrete goal, and so they carry the association of acquisition. 

The principal exception is that of revenge, as when a malefactor seeks to seek vengeance on a law-abiding person, or a law enforcement figure, for having caused harm to the malefactor or some ally. At first glance this might seem related to Hobbes' notion of "reputation," as when Crook A wants to show the law-dogs that Policeman B cannot get away with causing him injury. But this sketch fails the expenditure test, for at the roots of Crook A's desire for vengeance is the desire not to be challenged in his criminal activities, not the will to challenge a superior opponent, as we get whenever the Riddler attempts to out-riddle Batman.

Though most Bat-fans have enjoyed the hero's jousts with extraordinary criminals far more than the opposite, it's a mark of the franchise's groundedness that the hero has always had a substantial number of encounters with ordinary, acquisitive felons. This is certainly logic given that both Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson lost their parents to ordinary crooks, and this coheres with the fact that although children enjoyed Golden Age Batman comics in an escapist fashion, those same children knew the consequences of real crime. If they had no real-world experience of crime in their mundane lives, they would still know how thoroughly organized crime had infested American life, would have heard of scandals like the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929. And, at least in fantasy, they could imagine a hero capable of tearing out such festering sores.

All of the Batman mythcomics I've reviewed on this blog concentrate upon "extraordinary crooks," who inevitably have a stronger tendency to inspire symbolic discourse than their ordinary compeers. The sole exception is the two-page ORIGIN OF BATMAN, and even this concentrates not on the nameless criminal who kills the Waynes, but on the hero's singular response to this trauma. There may well be examples of "mythic ordinary crooks" somewhere amid the Bat-mythos, possibly obscured by the larger-than-life array of grotesques and arabesques. Additionally, the problem of crime itself may be conceived of as mythic in nature. In a previous post I noted that although ordinary crooks cannot harm the Spectre thanks to his almost unlimited powers, collectively the world of crime has the power to prevent the Ghostly Guardian from giving up his crusade and passing on to his heavenly reward. Crime as a whole has a similar hold on The Batman. Ordinary crooks cannot challenge him, but their ubiquity remains a constant thorn in his side-- and this is the role ordinary, acquisition-based crooks play in the next mythcomic I review, BATMAN: THE LONG HALLOWEEN. 

THE BAT-BACHELOR THREAD

I concluded my GROTESQUES AND ARABESQUES post without formulating a “bachelor thread” for the Batman comics-series, because I wanted to rethink the matter somewhat more in relation to the influential 1966 teleseries. I’m never going to attempt to review all the Batman comic books, but I have considered doing an episode-by-episode myth-analysis of the teleseries. To do so, I would need to determine what aspects of the comic’s “bachelor-thread" the series-writers chose to follow, and what aspects they replaced with others.

My original thought for the Batman comic in toto was going to be something like, “the darkness of trauma, though usually breeding monsters, may also breed a slayer of monsters.” I even had this approximate notion in mind as I began GROTESQUES AND ARABESQUES, but in the midst of crafting the essay, I began to think a lot more about how Robin had altered the aesthetic of the series. Though he as much as Batman suffered a trauma that caused him to become a crusader against evil, Robin certainly does not become a “creature of the night.” If anything, his bright, colorful costume suggests the stubborn renewal of life and light after the temporary reign of darkness. The legendary Robin Hood was almost certainly the exemplar on which the teen hero was modeled, but arguably over time the more important connotation was that of the robin as “the first bird of spring.”

 Robin’s vernal presence certainly doesn’t dispel the monsters of fear and darkness, of course. He debuts after Batman’s encounters with a handful of early, somewhat crude grotesques—Professor Hugo Strange, the Monk, and the Duc D’Orterre—but the Boy Wonder is on the scene for all the major grotesques: the Joker, Clayface, Scarecrow, Two-Face. And because of the visual and narrative interplay of the grim Dark Knight and his playful “squire,” the writers began coming up with more villains who were more sprightly in nature, foremost being the Penguin. (As noted elsewhere, it took the writers a while to come up with a well defined version of Catwoman.)

So, having made Robin’s presence more essential to the overall developm ent of the Bat-mythos, the bachelor-thread for the overall series must balance the elements of darkness and brightness. Additionally, although the heroes are victims of trauma, many of the villains are less traumatized than simply maladjusted, usually by virtue of greed. Obsession rather than trauma as such seems to define the Bat-mythos. Batman himself starts the ball rolling by extending his chosen identity to such tools as the Batarang and the Batmobile; the Joker follows suit with a poison that causes his victims to laugh themselves to death, and so on. So perhaps a trial thread might read something like, “Though the Greeks wanted to find beauty only in bright things and ugliness in dark ones, virtue and vice have equal propensities to be either light or dark, depending on the nature of the obsession.” This thread-concept would even remain in operation during the era I call “Candyland Batman,” when Batman himself is very nearly the only character who projects any grotesque affects, and nearly every new villain is conceived along the lines of the Penguin’s arabesque obsessions, thus leading to crooks who base their crimes on the use of kites and freeze-rays and polka dots.

The idea of obsession, incidentally, glosses my earlier ruminations on the nature of artifice. Most if not all familiar literary tropes incite in their ardent readers a heightened feeling like that of obsession, but one channeled through the matrix of game-playing. The very attraction of a literary trope lies in the fact that it is artificial, like the rules of any game. Truly ardent lovers of mystery-fiction never tire of the consummatory pleasures they receive from the masterful resolution of a whodunit, while an outsider to such pleasures can only wonder, as did Edmund Wilson, “who cares who murdered Roger Ackroyd?” Obviously the love of the game runs deeper in some than in others. A Gary Groth may start out loving the aggressive fantasies of superheroes and barbarians, only to lose his taste for those pleasures, and to spend most of his career lecturing other readers on the childish nature of their fantasies.

When such fantasies are seen through a distancing lens, such as that of the campy irony present in the Batman teleseries, some audiences are pleased to think that they’ve escaped the hidebound rule of the old game, and entered a more challenging, more adult form of play. This would seem to the case with a 2014 essay by Noah Berlatsky, in which the author could not imagine why Bat-fans didn’t want to toss out old; childish Batman in favor with new, ironic Batman. I answered his question with my essay-series THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY, but for the purpose of this essay, I want to look at how the teleseries attempted to rewrite the rules of the comic book’s scenario.

The essence of the word “irony” is that of saying one thing and meaning something else. William Dozier and his collaborators were certainly not the first pop-culture dabblers in this domain. Al Capp’s LI’L ABNER, though dominantly a broad comedy, is full of instances where characters revisit familiar story-tropes to indirectly make fun of them.The most famous of these appeared when simple-minded Abner would geek out on the gory misdeeds of his comic-strip hero Fearless Fosdick, a blatant send-up of DICK TRACY. There had been various superhero spoofs in comics and in cartoons before ’66 BATMAN. But Dozier and Co had the inspired notion to adapt the overall mythos of an established superhero-serial, playing it straight for kid-viewers but injecting any number of sly asides to please the adult audience.

This was, of course, a game no less restrictive than the rules of the Bat-comic, and nothing shows this more than the pastel-filled visual approach of the ’66 show. At the time of the show’s airing, DC’s two Bat-features had just made an attempt to reject the aesthetics of Candyland Batman, since the books weren’t selling as well as desired. This shift in editorial policy led to a very modest revival of grotesque/Gothic imagery, as seen in the May ’66 appearance of the Death-Man.

 However, though Dozier et al borrowed from a few stories that appeared during the post-Candyland phase, the show-runners were largely married to the aesthetics of Candyland Batman, where villains with weird obsessive traits popped up for no particular reason, almost existing purely to counter Batman’s own crime-fighting obsession. Mister Freeze was one of the few TV-villains to be given a particular reason for his criminal career. Usually, though, if there wasn’t something about a villain’s modus operandi that really begged for explanation, the writers dispensed with even simple melodramatic motivations.

In the universe of ’66 BATMAN—a admixture of both adventure-tropes and ironized versions of them— both the heroes and their villains still had their obsessions, but they barely tied in to any life-events (Batman mentions the cause of his crimefighting obsession once or twice, almost as an afterthought; Robin, like the majority of villains, gets no origin at all.) Thus the rules of the show were far more formalized than those of the comic book. For instance, during the first two seasons, the two-part episodes all have cliffhangers at the end of the first segment. Building on producers’ statements about their audience, presumably the idea was that kids would be worried about the heroes’ survival while adults would wonder what absurd trick the writers would use to save the good guys. Since all episodes in those seasons had to have a cliffhanger, every villain had to nurture the impossible dream of devising a deathtrap good enough to extinguish the Dynamic Duo. In such a ritualized world, neither darkness nor dark obsessions really exist. So my makeshift Bat-bachelor thread, when passed through the devouring gullet of the ’66 Bat-serial, becomes: “Virtue and vice alike take the form of pastel, often psychedelic arabesques, and virtuous arabesques only triumph over those of vice because the rules say that they must.”

That said, Dozier et al knew that they couldn’t quite undercut all the rules of the comics-feature, or they couldn’t be sure of winning over the kids. Thus, Batman and Robin’s fights are never burlesqued as one sees in most superhero spoofs. The gigantic sound-effects provide a distancing effect for adults, but do not efface the effects of two heroes who are just so good with their dukes that they can outfight three or four plug-uglies at once. Similarly, though Robin no longer serves the purpose of “brightening” Batman’s Gothic domain, he still fulfills the same role of the junior hero receiving tutelage from his elder. Though the duo’s goody-good personas are often subverted, the familial affection between the two is played straight.

To conclude, if I was ever to perform a critical analysis of ’66 BATMAN, I would have to look at each episode to see how well it balanced the use of adventure-tropes with irony-tropes, and whether or not the balance attained the higher levels of mythic discourse—just as a sustained analysis of all Batman stories might emphasize the balance between dark grotesques and colorful arabesques.

DARK GROTESQUES AND COLORFUL ARABESQUES

As I’ve noted here and thee, most serial narratives never evolve any sort of discourse-thread beyond the level of “good will triumph over evil.” Though I’ve defended the idea of the Golden Age Superman more than once, I can’t say that the execution of the idea rises above this level in its first fifteen years.

Although Bob Kane and Bill Finger created Batman as a response to Siperman’s sudden popularity, they evolved a far more creative property than either the Man of Steel or the great majority of Golden Age serial concepts. During the first six years of the feature’s history—the period I’ve termed “Gothic Batman”—displayed a unique approach to the characters, even though the stories might appear to advocate simple “good vs. evil” morals for the kid-readers. I, like many critics, have emphasized that the early years possess an extravagant, somewhat morbid creativity that bears some comparison with the better prose Gothics. And yet, it’s recently occurred to me that those years are also marked by a certain amount of whimsical fantasy, closer in spirit to stories of swashbuckling adventure than to Gothic deeds of darkness.

To be sure, both adventure tales and Gothic horrors loosely descend from the courtly romances of the Late Middle Ages, so such an alliance has a certain appeal. I’m now of the opinion that the introduction of Robin to Batman’s grim world insured that sinister Gothicism and fanciful adventure would become conjoined; a true marriage of the grotesque and the arabesque.

(I could write a long sidebar as to why I chose to hijack these art-history terms for my own purposes, without agreeing with the way the terms are used in art history, or by such luminaries as Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Walter Scott. But at present, it seems to me that commonplace dictionary definitions back up my usages, so I’ll let it go at that.)

As I stated earlier, Batman’s pre-Robin world depicts the hero battling common criminals, malefic masterminds and supernatural horrors with stoic determination. Batman’s seventh adventure, scripted by Gardner Fox, roots the crimefighter’s joyless struggle in personal tragedy. To be sure, though, a lot of earlier heroes began with traumatic backstories, ranging from Dick Tracy to the Lone Ranger to the Shadow. Indeed, Batman’s devotion to stamping out evil—with no reference to finding the killer of his parents—bears strong resemblance to the origin of the first Phantom, who devotes himself to fighting evil after losing a parent to vicious pirates, and then passes the same cause along to his descendants. But Golden Age authors did not tend to revisit origin-tales as have later generations. In a world where Robin never joined Batman, it would have been routine had readers eventually forgot the reason why Batman became a costumed hero.

Now, I’m not saying that the Golden Age stories, as we have them, make any more reference to the origins of either Batman or Robin than, say, the CAPTAIN AMERICA title kept coming back to the origins of that hero and his sidekick. However, in contrast to most features that paired superheroes and kid sidekicks, BATMAN continuously emphasized the daily familial interactions of Bruce Wayne and his youthful ward. Thus, even if a reader didn’t know exactly how the two characters came together, he’d be able to find out from readers-in-the-know that Batman quasi-adopted the Boy Wonder because they’d shared a similar tragedy. And even if some readers never knew about these interlinked origins, the authors knew, and they played the contrast of the worldly adult with the exuberant youth for all it was worth. (To be sure, once Robin shows up Batman rarely affects his original obsessed, near-humorless attitude, though on occasion the writers allowed the Big Bat a few moments of fear-inspiring brutality.)

Batman, then, despite his handsome face and ripped body, is at heart a grotesque, because the very look of his costume inspires fear more than admiration. Robin’s costume, in contrast, evokes the fanciful spirit I term arabesque. He affects bright daytime colors of red, green and yellow in direct contrast to Batman’s night-hues, and some of his garments, such as boots and tunic, are designed to evoke famed swashbuckler Robin Hood. Even his main weapon in early stories, a David-style sling, carries an arabesque quality in comparison with Batman’s deadly looking Batarang.

The dynamic between Batman and Robin also extended to the way the raconteurs created their super-villains.

Some villains project fearful visages, just as does Batman. These include such notabes as the Joker, the original Clayface, the Scarecrow, Two-Face, the Monk and Doctor Death.

Yet others, however destructive, project images that are more fanciful in character. Thus, the somewhat shorter list of notable arabesques includes the Penguin, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Cavalier, and the Catwoman (who, it should be noted, had as her first costume a simple dress and a cat-head mask).

With the grotesque-arabesque distinction in mind, it’s possible to see that later creative eras can be seen as putting increasing emphasis on one mode over the other. “Dark Procedural Batman” doesn’t entirely eliminate all sinister content from the feature, but the Joker becomes more of a harmless clown, while villains like the Riddler and Killer Moth never project any sort of fearful aspects. I sardonically termed the period after the Comics Code ‘Candyland Batman” because the dominant art-style emphasized lots of daytime scenes and new villains who were usually characterized by bright colors, ranging from goony aliens to goofy one-note villains like the Kite-Man and Mister Polka Dot. This overemphasis on the arabesque resulted in a downturn of the BATMAN franchise, and the following era, “Gothic Procedural,” borrows from all three previous periods, emphasizing ratiocinative detective tales and occasional forays into the Gothic, but not entirely dropping goony sci-fi menaces. Probably most of Bronze Age Batman, to which I’ve assigned no name, became almost totally focused upon Gothic images and tropes.

What I find interesting is that in the 21^st century, some fans-turned-writers have become intrigued by the arabesque craziness of the Candyland era. Grant Morrison revived bizarre figures like the Rainbow Creature, and the teleseries BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD celebrated all the light-hearted aspects of both the Bat-comics and numerous other DC features. Arguably, though, the biggest influence that the Candyland era ever had on the career of the Dark Knight was its effect on the 1966-68 BATMAN teleseries, which took the wacky kid-fantasies of the early sixties and viewed them through an ironic prism. (And yes, I know that they borrowed story-content from the following era as well, but the show’s producers never showed much interest in the franchise’s more grotesque aspects from any era.)

Thus, there's definitely something to be said for the aspect of Bat-mythology that Alan Moore called "funny uncle Batman." At some point in the future, I may incorporate this bachelor-thread concept into a wider analysis of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries.