“THE CASE OF THE RUBY IDOL”

Definitely Batman's most racist issue so far, with a cover that bears no relation to what occurs in the strip itself. It looks like Batman is surprise attacking a doctor. Batman please don't be an anti-vaxxer!

For the love of god, he's got a gun again.

So this whole issue is about an explorer stealing a "ruby idol" from a cave in India and subsequently getting death threats from a group of "Kila" worshipping "Hindus." It goes one step further by involving "Orientals" who also want the ruby.

So, yeah. Woof.

I feel like this is like if you fictionalized a mock-Christianity and called him Chesus Jist. Early Batman has so much anti-Asian racism. If you've heard about or seen the 1943 serial you'll know it is explicitly anti-Japanese wartime propaganda. And we see it pre-figured here.

Detective Comics was doing this sort of anti-Asian fearmongering before Batman and it unfortunately continues unabated here.

The museum curator who buys the idol gets this note and honestly I am on their side! Duh, you stole their shit. They want it back. This is not a complicated moral calculus, WELDON.

There's a lot of really racist stuff going on, with Wong being "one of the good ones." Cartoon turbaned thugs and Asian caricatures wielding massive scimitars as dehumanizing stock thugs.

It's awful!

The twist though is that the supposed Chinese villain, Sin Fang, is actually the explorer who originally stole the idol in the first place, Sheldon Lennox, in yellowface. It's like some kind of super racist Scooby Doo.

And he dies by the idol, after Batman throws him from a window. I'm not *really* sure what the moral message of this issue is. But the colonizer-imperialist does get a poetic comeuppance. But it's all rooted in exoticization and unchallenged racist caricature.

I hate it!

What this issue does have to offer, aside from a portal into the racist American psyche of the 40s, is a bunch of stuff like this. I don't think I've shown off Gordon yet. But apparently he just lets Bruce Wayne hang out with him and accompany him to investigate ongoing crimes.

Bruce is characteristically smug and dismissive and Batman is once again riotously horny for vigilante violence.

Look at him. You can practically HEAR him heavy breathing like a real creep. I actually find this panel kinda freaky. He was just standing there in the dark until they turned the flashlight on him.

Or, here's Batman being a total drama queen.

This issue does contain one of the best out of context panels in all of Batman though. It's best enjoyed on its own.

(But actually he was blackjacked again.)

And there is this gem of Batman punching out a cop.

The standard criticism of Batman is that he is an enforcer of the status quo, that his anti-crime lens completely lacks any structural analysis and so he ends up targeting the oppressed and marginalized.

By my count his villains so far fall into the following categories:

Corporate crime: 1
Big ticket thievery: 3
Extortion: 2
Vampirism: 2
World Domination: 1

Later versions of Batman, say in the animated series, are much more compassionate characters. That these issues lack much psychological depth tends towards dehumanizing all of the characters by necessity. Broadly speaking there's room for Batman to identify with the down and out.

But so far Earth-2 Batman seems pretty transparently to want to vent his anger and rage on those he deems deserving. There are few glimmers of genuine pathos. Here he doesn't really seem to care who it is. He just wants an excuse. He is not a likeable dude!

He also kills someone in like every issue. I'll do a death count someday, but we see a character die impaled on a sword in this issue. And Sheldon himself bleeds out on the street before our eyes. So far the spirit of this Batman is "A fitting end for their kind."

It was the compassionate Batman of books like Batman: Black & White, that helped me love the character originally. But OG Batman is a lot more like late Frank Miller or Clint Eastwood than I would have imagined.

While Batman will have dozens of inflections over the years, it seems that the "accepted idea" as Grant Morrison calls it of Batman being "a semi-unhinged, essentially humorless loner struggling with rage and guilt" does have some roots in his original iteration after all.

Originally tweeted by Weird Batman of the Golden Age (@GoldenAgeBats) on June 11, 2022.