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The Hoard Potato: the Boy Wonder and the Last Pulp Hero
As some of you may recall, I have a Blogger account, reserved, in theory, to be my soapbox for ranting about pop culture in general and comic books in particular. I originally established it with the intent of participating more fully in the "comics blogosphere".* Unfortunately, it had the opposite effect. Due to the inconvenience of the interface** and the pressure of Treating This Like A Column instead of whipping out a stream-of-consciousness LJ entry, I didn't use it much -- but I also found myself making fewer LiveJournal entries about comics, because I felt I had to "save" them for Kirby Dots & Ditko Ribbons.
*Translation: all the cool kids had one.
**Translation: a password too long and complex to log in consistently.
So, just as an experiment, I'm going to start whipping up comic-related posts on LJ, and cross-posting them to KDDR. The movie and TV posts you're used to seeing under "The Hoard Potato" header may follow, as well.
Here we go:
The other day, working at the comic shop, I had a conversation with one of my teenaged customers about the early years of Batman. and he reiterated something I've heard for decades. Jules Feiffer groused about it in The Great Comic Book Heroes, insisting that he'd felt this way since childhood, so the complaint's been around pretty much as long as the character.
It's the idea that the introduction of Robin the Boy Wonder was a Bad Idea and Ruined The Whole Batman Concept.
After reading the first few volumes of The Batman Chronicles, however, I think it's just the opposite.
Before Robin, "The Bat-Man" was just another pulp character.
Oh, those early stories are nice, tight little packages of action and suspense, just like the pulps that inspired them -- but there's the key. They were just like the pulps that inspired them; a bit more compressed, perhaps, and with the exotic appeal of the new medium, but the protagonist was interchangeable with any of the lesser mystery men of the Street & Smith line.
Unoriginal, undistinguished; a guy in a bat costume with (eventually) boomerang. He didn't have the intricate network and multifarious identities of The Shadow; he didn't have the small army of geniuses that followed Doc Savage; he didn't even have the exotic Old California setting of Zorro, the character he really most resembled in those early years.
It was only after the introduction of Robin that Batman really started to come into his own, started to develop his own distinctive motif and theme, started to evolve what could rightfully be known as a mythology. Even Miller recognized that, when The Dark Knight Returns has Bruce reminiscing that Dick named The Batmobile -- "a kid's name."
Before Robin, he was just Zorro in New York. Not The Shadow, mind you; despite what the revisionists of the latter day would have you think, the obsessed devotion to the War On Crime wasn't a major part of the character in those pre-Robin days. Bruce Wayne's effete disaffection with everything around him was misdirection, no doubt, but nonetheless, those early stories convey the impression that, on some level, he put on the costume to fight crime because he was bored.1
It's tempting to assume that Robin just happened to be introduced at the same time as the elements that make Batman so distinctly Batman, but I don't think so. I think that the new character dynamic of the duo was a key factor that shaped a truly mythic character.
Before Robin, Bruce had a social life. Bruce had a fiancée. The Batman was something Bruce Wayne did. It wasn't yet who he was... until he took on a partner.
With a confidante, someone who knew both sides of his life, Robinson, Finger and Kane could let Bruce Wayne immerse himself in the role of Batman.
The conventional interpretation is that the introduction of the brightly-clad wise-cracking kid sidekick was a distraction that pulled the Batman away from his Holy Mission. If you really sit down and read the stories, though, the opposite is more the case. The idea that everything Bruce Wayne does is really just to serve the needs and goals of his alter-ego only emerges post-Robin.
The modern Batman, the revisionist Batman, the grim, obsessed avenger, lurking in the shadows, devoting his entire life to his personal War, is intriguing today only because he's an anachronistic example of a once-profligate phylum. In that time, in that place, he would never have stood out enough become the iconic archetype that we know today -- if he had ever really existed in that form back then.
It's not Superman who's the last survivor of a lost race.
1This is not, in itself, an unacceptable motivation for a fictional crimefighter; Sherlock Holmes got a great deal of mileage from it.
*Translation: all the cool kids had one.
**Translation: a password too long and complex to log in consistently.
So, just as an experiment, I'm going to start whipping up comic-related posts on LJ, and cross-posting them to KDDR. The movie and TV posts you're used to seeing under "The Hoard Potato" header may follow, as well.
Here we go:
The other day, working at the comic shop, I had a conversation with one of my teenaged customers about the early years of Batman. and he reiterated something I've heard for decades. Jules Feiffer groused about it in The Great Comic Book Heroes, insisting that he'd felt this way since childhood, so the complaint's been around pretty much as long as the character.
It's the idea that the introduction of Robin the Boy Wonder was a Bad Idea and Ruined The Whole Batman Concept.
After reading the first few volumes of The Batman Chronicles, however, I think it's just the opposite.
Before Robin, "The Bat-Man" was just another pulp character.
Oh, those early stories are nice, tight little packages of action and suspense, just like the pulps that inspired them -- but there's the key. They were just like the pulps that inspired them; a bit more compressed, perhaps, and with the exotic appeal of the new medium, but the protagonist was interchangeable with any of the lesser mystery men of the Street & Smith line.
Unoriginal, undistinguished; a guy in a bat costume with (eventually) boomerang. He didn't have the intricate network and multifarious identities of The Shadow; he didn't have the small army of geniuses that followed Doc Savage; he didn't even have the exotic Old California setting of Zorro, the character he really most resembled in those early years.
It was only after the introduction of Robin that Batman really started to come into his own, started to develop his own distinctive motif and theme, started to evolve what could rightfully be known as a mythology. Even Miller recognized that, when The Dark Knight Returns has Bruce reminiscing that Dick named The Batmobile -- "a kid's name."
Before Robin, he was just Zorro in New York. Not The Shadow, mind you; despite what the revisionists of the latter day would have you think, the obsessed devotion to the War On Crime wasn't a major part of the character in those pre-Robin days. Bruce Wayne's effete disaffection with everything around him was misdirection, no doubt, but nonetheless, those early stories convey the impression that, on some level, he put on the costume to fight crime because he was bored.1
It's tempting to assume that Robin just happened to be introduced at the same time as the elements that make Batman so distinctly Batman, but I don't think so. I think that the new character dynamic of the duo was a key factor that shaped a truly mythic character.
Before Robin, Bruce had a social life. Bruce had a fiancée. The Batman was something Bruce Wayne did. It wasn't yet who he was... until he took on a partner.
With a confidante, someone who knew both sides of his life, Robinson, Finger and Kane could let Bruce Wayne immerse himself in the role of Batman.
The conventional interpretation is that the introduction of the brightly-clad wise-cracking kid sidekick was a distraction that pulled the Batman away from his Holy Mission. If you really sit down and read the stories, though, the opposite is more the case. The idea that everything Bruce Wayne does is really just to serve the needs and goals of his alter-ego only emerges post-Robin.
The modern Batman, the revisionist Batman, the grim, obsessed avenger, lurking in the shadows, devoting his entire life to his personal War, is intriguing today only because he's an anachronistic example of a once-profligate phylum. In that time, in that place, he would never have stood out enough become the iconic archetype that we know today -- if he had ever really existed in that form back then.
It's not Superman who's the last survivor of a lost race.
1This is not, in itself, an unacceptable motivation for a fictional crimefighter; Sherlock Holmes got a great deal of mileage from it.
no subject
(I loved DKR. Not so wild about the two decades of ramping up Bruce's Asshole Factor that followed.)
What I was trying to convey before I started drowning in the stream of consciousness was that the introduction of Robin allowed Batman to survive long enough to get there.
And yes, Robin saved Batman -- not just from poor sales at the time, but from drowning in his own particular sea of fellow pulp-adventure holdovers.
Potential fodder for another post: since Denny bundled Dick off to college back in 1970, The Batman has slowly accrued more and more of the trappings of other, forgotten pulp characters. A lot of people still think of Batman as a loner, but he's got so many sidekicks, apprentices, and auxiliary characters nowadays that the "Batman Family" is really one of the larger super-teams in the DCU.
And that's NOT including the Outsiders in their number.
Incidentally, back in the Pre-Crisis Universe, when Dick first gave up the Robin identity to (eventually) become Nightwing, it was all very cordial. He and Bruce were on fine terms. Dick's rationale was that "Robin would always be the second part of 'Batman and...'" -- and HE'S the one who gave the old costume to Jason Todd.
no subject
Who doesn't love DKR? It is pretty much the high point of Miller's career, where his cinematic style flourished without being bogged down by the absurdity of his characterizations and his disturbing recurring motifs (such as his obsession with prostitution and his work to turn every female character into a drug addicted hooker). I wish the modern Batman was a lot more O'Neil and a lot less Miller, myself, but you can't fault DKR, really. Fault everyone who uncritically accepted the unspoken premises to the extent that the deconstruction was ignored to the extent that it was adopted and became part of the undeconstructed assumptions of the genre (uh, I THINK I just came up with an interesting issue with deconstruction right here with you, now, in the sense that deconstruction can be subverted into non-deconstructed works, it can be adopted into the genre . . . which explains a lot about DKR and The Watchmen and subsequent comic book development). It's probably the key reason that I like Dick Grayson more than Bruce Wayne - he's sometimes allowed to be, y'know, a nice guy. (I am also troubled by the current construct in comic books that child abuse makes a person a better crime fighter, ugh.)
And, see, I was right that you would know more about the continuity of events! ;) But I first started reading about Robin as part of The New Teen Titans, so I pretty much had the "Batman is a controlling jerk" as one of my foundational personal comic book mythologies.
But, yeah, I think that in practical terms, the inclusion of Robin has certain allowed Batman the longevity to develop into the iconic figure he is now. Bigger than Jesus! But part of that is definitely Robin. In great truth, no Robin, no Batman.
I also noticed that the people who whine about Robin are also the ones who cleave most strongly to the worst of the characters in comicsdom (IMO). They're the crazy nutjobs who love the Punisher and any character with a huge body count, the asshats responsible for turning Wolverine into a troubled guy looking for redemption into a blood-minded mass murderer without remorse and the depth of a wading pool. Thanks, guys, hehe. You go over there and sharpen your triple bladed knife and I'll stay over here behind my pile of comic books. That MIGHT have been a touch of rant. ;)
no subject