Killspeak

In 1990, my father took me to watch Batman. I had no prior exposure to anything Batman-related; the one I was introduced to was scary, violent, and stiff-necked. I have very fond memories of the movie. I remember being scolded by my teachers for grabbing other children’s shirts, pulling them up to me, and hissing “I’m Batman,” in their faces. Despite feeling only the distant ripples of its American marketing campaign, I developed an appetite for Batman stuff. I was overjoyed when my grandmother bought me a foot-tall, pirated Batman doll; I carried my toys around in a cheap Batman bag for years; I requested that Danny Elfman’s Batman theme be played at my birthday party; I watched Batman: The Animated Series whenever I could (its title sequence is one of the coolest TV-show intros ever); and I was crushed when my mother gave both my cousin and I Robin costumes to wear—after I had explicitly requested a Batman costume. (It was a political move, no doubt, meant to maintain the balance of power between us.)

Perhaps I was growing out of it, or perhaps I was put-off by the later Batman movies, but my enthusiasm for things Batman dwindled in the mid-nineties. It resurfaced only recently, when a friend shared a few of his comics with me. I didn’t find the Hush series of Batman particularly good, but it did make me curious to read some other comics that are: Gotham By Gaslight, Batman: Year One and Two, Arkham Asylum, and, of course, The Dark Knight Returns. With the help of Les Daniel’s Batman: The Complete History (which I read cover-to-cover in a single afternoon) and the web, I was able to quickly immerse myself in Batman again.

I’ve come to realize that Batman is many things to many people (master detective, allegorical vampire, caped crusader, gay icon, money-making franchise undeserving of respect) but, as stated in Jay Pinkerton’s latest article, his appeal comes most strongly from one thing.

Batman isn’t a great character because of the camp value.
Batman isn’t a great character because he’s dark and gritty.
Batman is a great character because he’s batshit-bat-fucking-crazy.

Jay’s not the first to notice this: it’s been a theme in the ongoing Batman comics since the end of the Silver Age. Certainly, the gritty noir of Dark Knight and Tim Burton’s Batman is cool, but it’s incomplete without Bruce Wayne’s creepiness and tortured history. Batman’s mental instability, as well as that of his enemies, is what makes the myth so interesting. Superman, the Flash, and the Green Arrow (despite having a run of twenty-or-so well written books a few years ago) are all shallow do-gooders. They’ve all the appeal and moral flexibility of dedicated boy scouts. Batman, on the other hand, is nebulous and troubled, sometimes as twisted as the villains he fights. He’s a control freak who deals with his childhood trauma by beating the crap out of people at night. He’s a great character to watch, not so much because you want to be him, but because he’s so screwed-up.

I can’t be sure of just how much of my interest has been warped by time, introspection, and talk of the upcoming Batman Begins. Whatever worries I have about the purity of my interest disappear when I watch Batman Returns, and I can’t deny that I’m eager to see Begins. Here’s hoping that it can live up to both my fan-boy expectations and childhood memories.