BATMAN COMICS
ARE DUMB
(or I’m old and food tastes like dust in my mouth)
Me and my brother used to read my comic books in the cubby-hole we had underneath the stairs. Normally, this was the space where you would stick suitcases, Christmas decorations, maybe the skeleton of an elderly relative that you hid to get their welfare cheque. But for us it was the space we’d read West Coast Avengers, we’d flick through issues of Spider-Man where he grew four arms, we’d swap Batman comics and talk about fighting crime when we were older.
Now I’m Batman’s age and I have to say: Batman is dumb and there’s a reason kids don’t read Batman comics anymore.
This year I was in an Uber cab with noted New York based coward Nate Waggoner and asked him if his tweets about enjoying certain Batman comics were sarcastic. They were not. Good for him for enjoying something non-ironically you might say. But it troubled me that this man, who applied a mauve colored paint to his glasses so he could see everything through an Instagram filter was able to enjoy something innocently while I, paragon of youthfulness and Joie de Vivre, got really angry and mumbled to an empty room while reading them.
Batman comics used to be about criminals who’d leave clues and Batman would foil their crimes, sometimes people would get knocked in the noggin with a batarang but it was all harmless fun, less lethal than backyard wrestling at the least. And then somewhere along the way the guys who had enjoyed it when they were younger grew up and started writing it and brought with them their shitty male power fantasies and privileged depictions of crime and mental health.
It used to be that Batman was the guy who had the angles figured out, he was smarter than you, trained harder than you, was…gosh darn it, just a swell dude. He adopted a young orphan, something I can say with certainty nobody reading this has done. He was gracious and supportive. Grant Morrison, in his eight year run on Batman knew this and incorporated it into the grit of modern comics, making him into a guy who was prepared.
Other writers? I can’t say they even understand the things that they’re failing at.
Like, now Batman is an idiot, a fool. I am fairly liberal, for example I believe that marriage should be for everyone, even between, say, the psychological concept of bicameralism and the Moon. But reading Batman comics makes me yearn for the death penalty. We’re all familiar with the trolley problem (he said, frantically googling to remind himself), where there’s a trolley (or a MINE CRAFT, EH, KIDS) hurtling down a track to five orphans you’d adopted. You can switch the trolley to a new track, where there is only one person. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO? What if that one person also just cut off the faces of the orphans you had adopted over the years? You…you what? You let the trolley kill all the kids? Well, uh, that’s not that weird of a choice, because that’s what Batman chooses every month.
Please note: I am only aware of the concept of the trolley problem because of a book called Batman and Philosophy. What do you mean being around me is embarrassing.
Here is (from Wikipedia) the beginning of the plot that the above picture is taken from: “Joker marks his return to Gotham by attacking the GCPD and recovering his preserved face, killing 19 police officers in the process. He later televises a warning, via the son of his first recorded victim, that Mayor Hady will die that night, referencing another of his earliest crimes. However, the police assigned to protect Hady are killed by a combination of chemicals while Hady survives.”
That’s a lot of dead cops.
In Batman comics, in Batman games (the Arkham series) and now Batman cartoons (based on the Arkham series) Batman week after week punches someone in the face who has just murdered ten security guards, a bank teller and whoever is unlucky enough to be Deputy Mayor that month. The villains used to be considered insane because they were like performance art, their eccentricities overshadowing their crimes (they did not succeed, in any case). It was fun, it was a day out for the police force made up almost exclusively of Irish stereotypes. And then progressively things got darker and grittier without becoming more clever and so you have comics like Batman: Zero Year, where the Riddler takes over the city in a way that is completely unlike The Dark Knight Rises because it is the Riddler and not Bane cutting the city off from the outside world. The Riddler kills lots of people, shooting some, feeding some to lions and at the end is just thrown into Arkham Asylum. Where he’ll one day (soon) escape and walk around and nobody will shoot him in the face for feeding their dad to a lion.
There’s a reason why kids don’t read comics anymore, it’s because the comics are simultaneously emotionally immature and realistically depicted. You could say it brings out Cognitive Dissonance (and it’s a shame nobody uses Myspace anymore so we could see how many bands called themselves that). You can’t at the same time agree that mass-murderers should face minimal incarceration in a world where 24 hours a day there are broadcasts about the need to bomb countries that may contain a few terrorists. That’s why kids watch cartoons, the world of cartoons doesn’t need to be defended. Cartoons (whether through ratings requirements or better writing) keep their world consistent. Comics don’t and that’s why it’s harder to engage with them and almost impossible to defend when there is often (excusing Morrison, obvs) no subtext presented or inferred, just gritty things happening and then at the end both the police and a vigilante morally absolving themselves of perpetuating them happening.
And that’s ignoring the endless debate over who would become Batman in his absence (who cares, he’s not your dad)(Don’t Become Your Dad is the name of my self-help book coming out next Fall), glorifying The Joker and Harley Quinn’s abusive relationship and other dumb nerd concerns. The comics are never going to go back to where they were, they’re murder magazines recycling plots from movies that came out two years ago (!!!). And that’s cool if you’re into that but I’m not anymore.
Which is a shame because I really liked reading them…even if I never grew up to be a crime-fighter and instead became another dum dum complaining about dumb things online.
I’m on twitter (@blakingpoint) where I will not reply to you.
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