Month: May 2023

Batman #1 (Spring 1940), Part 4

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“The Joker Returns”

The Joker is back! Already! According to the captions, it’s been literally TWO DAYS. I am choosing to believe that in the intervening time Batman has both slain the poor monster men AND gotten horny for Catwoman. He’s a Busy Guy.

It is essentially a reprise of the first story. We start with The Joker PO’d to heck because he feels like his Big Juicy Intellect has been insulted by being enjailed. You will recall how Batman had explosive chemicals in his boots. As I promised, The Joker also has explosive chemicals secreted about his person. But he keeps them deep in his craw, in fake molars.

“He’s a very unusual man,” says Bruce, holding his chin in contemplation, “he will return with a vengeance!” The Joker’s hideout in this one is also pretty neat.

False teeth? Yes. False tombstone leading to a secret cemetery laboratory? Yes! Now that’s funereal!

He immediately starts doing the same exact thing he did last time, broadcasting a “message of doom” prophesying the certain death of somebody – this time the police chief himself. How is he getting radio equipment? How does Batman know what frequency to tune into? Quiet you.

We get more corpses “grinning in death” as they die of Joker venom. To kill the police chief he… plants a dart? in his phone? Then he calls him so the dart pokes him in the noggin? There’s a lot of potential points of failure here, but okay, sure! His plots are like little Rube-Goldberg machines.

Then he gets the ole Lust for Jewels and plans to steal “The Cleopatra Necklace” from a museum. Remember how he hid in a suit of armor in the first one? This time it’s a “mummy case.”

The captions continue to describe him as “melancholy” and “saturnine.” Which is neat, but I struggle to read that affect in his behavior and dialogue. He seems more… angry and petty. More temper tantrums than eerie sadness. Also, this is a phenomenal face. This is Squall-face.

Gonna be a prissy little pedant here, but that is not a mace, Joker. Anyway, he ruthlessly tries to chop Batman into pieces. There is a brutality to The Joker, I guess is what I meant before. Melancholy seems to imply stillness, weariness, even resignation. But The Joker just straight up has a lust for death. Only a couple pages in and he’s already killed four people. I get why he made such an impact from his first appearances. It’s not that he’s not cartoonish, but compared to so many of the other rogues we’ve seen so far, he is by far the most directly vicious and sadistic.

Anyway, the encounter leaves Batman dazed on the floor with the just-arrived police about to un-cowl him! The book pauses for a moment to drop a cliffhanger: “Is this the end of the mighty Batman?”

No, once again, of course not. He leaps miraculously to his feet and punches out the cops. Batman is “not quite ready for jail.”

Also, I am now imagining all of Batman’s “Sorry gentlemen”s in a suave transatlantic accent. Reader, I must apologize for not pointing out earlier how often Batman says things like, “Au revoir, gentlemen!” This was important and I was negligent in my duties. This is my canon now, but it is also delightful to imagine him saying all of these things in Bale-voice.

And I did! Love when Batman talks to himself. More of that “If you want to get me… you gotta get me first!” energy.

The Batman! Wattaman! Amazing, incredible. Also look at Batman’s 😮 face.

The book then introduces a “reformer” named Edgar Martin who is fed up with the police sucking at their jobs. But the Joker is like:

He then does his whole you’re going to die at the strike of 10 or whatever thing. This time he somehow has smuggled a pack of cards that is oops, all jokers covered in poison into Martin’s house. The cops in these issues are dumb as hell.

I will not believe that Finger is not straight dunking on them. Nothing suspicious about those cards that nobody knows where they came from. Shouldn’t they expect this by now? Last time they let a guy take a phone call and HE WAS KILLED BY THE PHONE. This is absolute negligence. This whole plot is unhinged. The Joker is leaving A LOT to chance. He is skating by on pure luck.

Those cards had venom on ’em. Batman needs faces like this again. Where else will you see this kind of artistic glory? I ask you. Speaking of museum-worthy faces, Bruce is back smoking pipes with Gordon, talking about crimes like it’s any of his business.

Look how smug he is thinking about being better at police than Gordon.

In case it was not crystal clear by now, villains in the 30s/40s were absolutely out of their mind horny for gems. Most importantly:

Truly we do not deserve these glories we have been gifted to behold.

See, what did I JUST say. I MUST!!!

Also it is important to note that among the great pleasures of early Batman are things like: Batman driving his little car or Batman flying his little plane. But also The Joker reading the newspaper. They don’t make ’em like they used to. Everyone is learning about jewels to steal from the paper. As far as these comics would indicate, the paper is printing nothing but articles about which cool gems rich people have.

Yadda yadda he does the radio thing again. He runs into the police and starts “blazing away.”

He has killed at least eight people so far in this story alone. Anyway, he runs out onto the roof where he encounters the waiting Robin. The Joker punches him off the roof. (By my measure, the most dangerous hazards in the Batman universe are being punched off of buildings or getting blackjacked.) He catches himself on a flagpole and as Joker takes aim at Robin, about to kill him again, Batman steps out of an alley drawing his fire. This thankfully lets Robin plummet onto an extremely convenient awning allowing him to bounce and land on The Joker’s back.

I’m gonna put this next whole page because it’s quip city.

What does it mean to “look like a duece?” You’re the crappiest card in the deck? I guess when a guy makes playing cards his like whole thing this is a pretty bad burn.

“Mind if I try to stop you?” What can I say, dear reader. I merely bask in my delight. Could Cary Grant have played Batman? Can you imagine it? Well, stop, things are getting serious.

Then The Joker stabs himself and we get this wild panel:

THE LAUGH IS ON THE JOKER! LAUGH, CLOWN, LAUGH!!! The tone veers off a cliff here into something pretty damn disturbing. Also, if this looks familiar, you are right!

I didn’t know at the time that this was a callback to this issue!

These faces are nuts. Also, Batman, what the HELL.

The duo leave his corpse for the police, but, of course, he is not, in fact, dead. He’s mysteriously still alive.

After re-reading this story, I’m actually pretty haunted by it. The Joker’s “death” is pretty terrifying. And his final lying there dead but alive ends the issue on an extremely bizarre supernatural note. It gives The Joker an inhuman cast, almost as if he can’t die. This seems to presage the many times Batman is unable to kill The Joker, from Killing Joke to The Dark Knight Returns to Legends of the Dark Knight. It’s, here, disconnected from his moral code, but the mysterious symbiosis of The Batman and The Joker is already present, as if they are reflections of one another, each unable to kill the other because they could not exist without their reflection.

That’s the overriding sense of this story to me: Batman’s dark mirror and the implication that inversions of him are almost leaping fully formed, from nowhere, into Gotham. It’s The Joker’s sheer brutality that I’m left with. The character fascinates because he is so strange and conflicting – the comic’s most superficially comedic and cartoonish entity is at once its most nihilistic and bloodthirsty. It seems fitting that we don’t know where The Joker came from. He is an emissary of the void.

Weirdly, I can’t say I love these initial stories. Despite what I just said, The Joker’s seething narcissistic pettiness feels repellant. The issue starts with him fuming about having his intellect slighted, for example. But maybe that’s part of the point. It is interesting that The Joker’s death is enabled by Batman willingly throwing himself into potential death (by gunfire) to save Robin. It’s almost as if Batman’s sudden flash of selflessness is what “kills” The Joker.

We’ve entered a whole ‘nother level in this story, I think. The latent psycho-mythology of Gotham is starting to congeal into something tangible. Of course, as a whole, Batman #1 is an absolutely wild tonal mishmash. But the pieces are clicking into place: purple pulp mixes with cartoonish comedy mixing, in turn, with startling violence and the first hints of that semi-oneiric psycho-myth. Monster Men was a dark issue, but, in a way, meta-textually – its darkness lying more in my response to Batman’s violation of the moral code I expected him to follow (based on my familiarity primarily with his future incarnations). This is probably Batman at its most overtly, textually dark, so far. It’s an issue saturated with grinning corpses and meaningless deaths in an almost existential darkness. I’m eager to see what lies ahead.

Oh and right, I almost forgot the very last panel: The, uh, “Golden Rules for ‘Robin’s Regulars’. Which seems to be like… be nice and helpful! But there’s no uniform or actual organization to join. Just be a good little doobie. Above all, follow the guidelines of this cute little acrostic:

Readiness
Obedience
Brotherhood
Industriousness

…

NATIONALISM?

WHAT!

Also, what does it MEAN to “be REGULAR!”

Good digestion? Just… be normal?

Also, why is Robin SCOWLING in the background? Isn’t this his thing?

I almost spit out my drink at NATIONALISM.

I’m at a loss for words, once again. You heard it here first, kids – nationalism is good!

Batman #1 (Spring 1940), Part 3

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“The Cat”

Holy historical importance, Batman #1 is a whizzbang. It is, in retrospect, pretty wild that after only a single year it introduces two characters that will, unbeknownst to its authors at the time I’m sure, remain absolutely central to the Batman universe right to present day. Not to mention its continuing use of Hugo Strange, who though decidedly less famous appears in some form in every continuity all the way to Rebirth.

The Joker’s first appearances in this issue are actually much darker than I imagined they would be. I erroneously assumed, largely out of ignorance of the pre-Crisis era, that the original Joker would lighter in tone than something like The Killing Joke. Maybe I had Cesar Romero in my head? But OG Joker is pretty damn malevolent (“I’ll kill you!”). Jewel theft is a major motivation of a lot of the early rogues. (I’ve heard this attributed to these being written at the very tail end of the Depression.) But The Joker’s MO in these first issues is straight up murder, maybe with a theft involved, but he’s plotting to kill multiple people in the first issue alone. The captions repeatedly describe him as consumed by hatred. His laughter is “funereal.” It renders his name immediately (and darkly) ironic. Maybe he deviates from this portrayal in the Silver Age or maybe his tone changes rapidly in more immediately future issues like Batman himself did with the introduction of Robin – I don’t know! I’ll find out! But, my point is I usually associate that kind of dark tone with Post-Crisis stuff, but here is The Joker trying to kill Robin in his very first appearance, so there’s a continuity in characterization I didn’t expect.

I say all this because Catwoman’s – or rather The Cat’s – introduction is a complete tonal 180 from the preceding two stories. It’s frothy, goofy, comedic. It’s completely nuts to me some of the things that happen in this story. And it features one of Batman’s most iconic single panels (sic). I’m concurrently reading post-Crisis Batman, starting, of course, with Miller’s Year One. (After The Monster Men, I was intrigued to learn that a lot of Golden Age stuff gets a revive in the Year One/Year Two era). But unlike The Joker, compared to her introduction here, Catwoman maybe got the darkest alteration to her character in the P-C books (though she is, importantly, ten thousand times cooler).

Okay, so. We’re on a yacht and an old woman has some mad expensive jewels. I have so many favorite parts of this story, but first, I enjoy that Bruce is at home reading the paper aloud, possibly just to himself. Second, why is Mrs. Travers bringing her 500,000 dollar necklace on board? Third, why is this printed in the paper? Why is this news! Oh, and there’s gonna be a masquerade party. How fun for us!

Anyway, Bruce thinks everyone’s gonna be there. But he has “another job” to do, so he decides to send Robin in by himself. Somehow he is hired as a steward on board the boat. Or he’s posing as one? But in any case, the other stewards seem to have accepted him as one of their own. There’s a bunch of people in Mrs. Travers orbit: her skeevy nephew, who has brought an old woman named MISS PEGGS he met while helping her walk with a bad ankle on board with him (NOT SUSPICIOUS), and her doctor? Who she apparently lends money to all the time because he keeps blowing it on the stock market? Anyway, they’re all lookin’ to get their grubby mitts on her necklace and/or cash.

We stan a janky king.

Robin searches his snoot for clues as to what might go down. Thankfully the skeevy nephew gets things started by suspiciously chucking a crumbled up note overboard, but “by a queer quirk of fate” the wind throws it back on board. Duder didn’t even make sure it hit the water. More confusingly, he was JUST talking to the old woman (who is, spoilers, The Cat in disguise) in the prior scenes. Why couldn’t they have briefly talked about this in person? Why did they need a mysterious note? BECAUSE.

The skeevy nephew is in cahoots with The Cat. Robin rushes to Mrs. Travers’ cabin but he’s too late! The necklace has been stolen!

You can tell Mrs. Travers is distressed because she too looks janky. Don’t worry, the coast guard shows up. They’ll help find the thief.

JUST KIDDING IT’S CRIMINALS! Then Mrs. Travers completely loses her gourd. I imagine her saying this with her mouth closed like a ventriloquist.

Every single face in this issue is unhinged. A slow madness is taking over everyone on board.

A gangster pulls out his gun and is about to start blastin’ when Dick leaps into action.

I think I’ll change its appearance, he says, LIKE AN ALIEN.

“Get that kid!” “If you want to get me you’ll have to get me first!”

BAD QUIPS BAD QUIPS. My treasures.

Batman then shows up because his other crime didn’t pan out. They lasso all the thugs. And then Batman? does? THIS?

BATMAN WHAT. Absolutely adore how much this issue loses its mind. He immediately risks Robin’s life for the sake of this fourth wall break. But, Robin takes on the four thugs and beats the bejesus out of them, so no harm, no foul (I GUESS). Then he TSK TSKs AT THE CAMERA (?) like he’s on The Office before turning directly to YOU! the reader:

Batman you are being quite bold asking us to ignore how you machine gunned a bunch of people down IN THIS VERY ISSUE.

Anyway, let’s forget all that. TIME FOR A MASQUERADE PARTY! WOO HOO! Goody goody! Goo!

Batman goes as himself and wins the prize! (Show off.) He returns all the stolen jewels. Hooray for rich people getting their gems back! Something we are all very concerned about.

But then the fire alarm goes off! And he notices… something peculiar.

Old Miss Peggs’ got some GAMS on her. They capture her and scooby doob her disguise, because the gams hepped Bruce to the fact that she is actually! THE CAT!

And then, as he removes the last vestiges of her disguise – her makeup – we are treated to one of the most unforgettable panels in all of Batman history.

What can I say? What words are appropriate in response to what we have just witnessed. Only these:

WHAT NEVER SEEN A PRETTY GIRL BEFORE??? The Cat’s face is only marginally less unhinged than prior faces. The Cat invites The Bat to join her in a life of crime. But alas, he cannot, despite how tempting it would be to do jewel heists with a hot babe.

Batman then takes The Cat on their little boat back to the mainland. The Cat understandably asks why Batman had to personally take her to the police. HE’S GOT HIS REASONS! SHUT UP!

The reasons? HORNY.

I cannot tell you how much I adore Batman going like, “Hmm.. nice night isn’t it, Robin? Doot dee doot dee doot.”

I am once again at a loss for words. This issue ends with Batman hornily daydreaming about Catwoman after letting her escape on purpose. Only ONE THING will come between Batman and his pursuit of justice: leggy dames.

ALSO, as Batman helpfully reminds us, HE IS ALREADY ENGAGED TO JULIE.

Tsk, tsk, Batman. “Hmm…” is right.

That’s it. That’s the story! Bat-boner to speed. I guess Frederic Wertham didn’t read this issue, which surely would have reassured him of Batman’s heterosexuality.

I thought it was really weird and out of character when Batman and Catwoman boned on a rooftop early on post-Flashpoint. And then I was surprised to see them doing kissing all the way back in Year One’s Catwoman: Her Sister’s Keeper. (Miller’s Year One, to which the aforementioned is a direct companion piece, seems notedly un-horny by comparison.) But little did I know this goes all the way to the top.

We actually don’t get a lot of Catwoman in this issue. Most of her panel-time consists of the aforementioned scooby-doobing and being threatened with Papa’s spanks. Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, there is a strange and unfortunate kind of continuity between this Catwoman’s introduction and Miller’s re-imagining. Both are subject to terrible misogyny. Only this time, it’s Batman doing it. Who Catwoman is as, like, a human person remains to be seen as our quest continues.

Batman #1 (Spring 1940), Part 2

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Spring has sprung and I am called forth once more from the void to write my silly little Batman blog that no one will ever read. And yet, how can I read ancient Batman comics and not share all of the little treasures inside in hopes of some future traveler one day finding them and doing a little chuckle. A little “hehe,” if I’m bold, maybe even a “haha.” Let alone, a “wow, neat.” But I’m getting too big for my Bat-Britches.

There’s three more whole stories in here to write about. But I’m just gonna give you the best, most unhinged bits.

Story 2: Professor Hugo Strange and the Monsters

Hugo Strange is breaking out of the prison he was just put into a few issues ago. He then breaks into an “insane asylum” and frees all the “nuts.” You can tell they are both excited and cRaZy because they say things like, “Goody! Goody!” and “Oh, goo!” But don’t be fooled, the events which follow are neither goody goody nor goo.

Not long after the break-out at the insane asylum, fifteen-foot tall monsters begin terrorizing the city.

Wha! Huh? Where did these monsters come from, you cry, astonished. Certainly Hugo Strange couldn’t be responsible! Well, Batman has a Bat-Hunch that he is, so he does the thing we all love: flies around in his little plane and finds Strange’s hideout.

Wait-a-second, you say, interrupting me AGAIN. I don’t remember there being a MACHINE GUN mounted to the Bat-Gyro. Yeah, neither do I, but it’s probably nothing and I wouldn’t worry about it at all.

So, Batman lands, approaches the house and goes, “This is probably a trap, but I gotta risk it.” He is, predictably, immediately entrapped.

First of all I love Batman saying, “Er… Good Evening, Gentleman,” like a stand-up comic in front of a tough crowd. What a sassy little queen.

And would you believe it? His Bat-Hunch was right! It turns out that Hugo Strange “discovered an extract that speeds up the growth glands” and he used it on all of the escaped “lunatics” he broke out of the asylum. The serum apparently “distorts the body but also the brain.” I don’t know what that means, but neither does Hugo – “Soon he is a MONSTER!” he cries.

I also just need to point out that at some point in the chaos, Strange made his “monsters” not only gigantic fifteen-foot tall clothes and coats but also giant hats, as we saw earlier. That’s how you know you’re dealing with a supervillain. Were these massive hats necessary? If you’re even asking that question, you’re just not seeing the aesthetic vision here and I don’t know what to tell you.

Anyway, Strange injects Bruce with the serum, giving him eighteen hours before it takes fatal effect! That’s a decent amount of ti-

Batman actually gets hit in the face this time, so it’s not technically a blackjacking. But the tradition of Bat-Head Trauma continues apace.

Don’t worry, Batman had explosives in the heels of his boots and after almost eighteen hours he woke up from his semi-coma and exploded his way out of his cell. The Joker will do this two stories later, except he puts his portable explosive chemicals in his teeth.

So far, there’s a lot going on in this issue. Most importantly, we’re not dealing with… an especially sensitive treatment of mental illness in this story. Certainly, the most horrific aspect of this issue is Strange using a vulnerable and marginalized population as experimental test subjects and disposable zombie-like crime slaves. But don’t worry, surely Batman will find a cure to save himself and reverse the terrible afflictions Strange has visited upon his unwitting victims/accomplices, right? Certainly, the script in its final resolution will reveal Strange’s dehumanization of the mentally ill as a prime example of the evil Batman is fighting against, right? RIGHT?

Well, hold your understandably concerned horses for a minute. First, Batman’s gloves disappear and he punches Strange off a cliff, to what we can only assume is his certain death. Making me nervous again, Batman.

The “monsters” show up. Batman uses a giant stick to confuse them and they start fighting each other. With valuable time bought by this distraction, he has time to do some last-minute, high-stress science.

Soon, everyone will be safe! Right???

NO! Of course not! They killed each other! Exactly as Batman “hoped!”

They are now dead.

Batman gets into his little plane to chase down the remaining monsters, being transported by thugs in trucks to the sites of their future intended crimes. How will Batman stop them? Uhhh, just watch for yourself.

Yeah.

Batman is off the fuckin goop in this issue. We had just gotten a few issues where Batman seemed to stop killing. And here he is machine-gunning people down, HANGING THEM from his plane, and gassing them to death. It is possible that this could be explained by the fact that this issue was originally intended to be released earlier as DC #38, before Robin’s introduction (he is noticeably absent here). When Robin appears things start to lighten a little bit.

I think one of the most fascinating parts of early Batman is the way it borrows from the movies. Batman himself must be at least partially pulled from Roland West’s The Bat and The Bat Whispers. The Joker’s design famously references Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs. And we’ll see this most overtly in the first Clayface story in DC #40. Here, the last monster’s death scene clearly evokes King Kong from 1933. And Hugo Strange’s “monster men” recall any number of 30s horror film tropes: hypnotism, zombies, killer apes. But Strange’s “speed up the glands” speech most sounds like, to me, Dr. Moreau’s description of his scientific project in The Island of Lost Souls from 1931. In that movie, Moreau has found a way to accelerate evolution, turning animals into human-like creatures. The effect in this issue is kind of the reverse, though – which, in turn, echoes the many movies that deal with the “reversion” of men into beasts, like Werewolf of London or the various Jekyll and Hyde movies.

But, in Island of Lost Souls, one of the most striking scenes is when Moreau calls upon his creatures to speak “The Law,” a series of commandments, such as “do not shed blood.” Each law is answered with the creatures shouting in unison, “Are we not men?” Embedded in the movie is an understanding that these creatures are the mad scientist’s victims. What at first, for Moreau, is a means of control becomes a cry for their humanity to be recognized. And Kong’s death scene is no less tragic. It’s characteristic of 30s horror to depict the tragedy in its monsters. Even the worst “monsters” are often depicted with a kind of tragic empathy.

This issue borrows a lot from the movies but it has no room for the weightier existential tragedy it should invoke. The subjectivity of the “lunatic” who is physically and psychologically “distorted,” which we might expect to find in even a then contemporary film, is completely absent here. So, ultimately, we have an issue where Batman openly acknowledges that actually some people are too far gone and all we can do is kill them – they might even be “better off that way.” For both Batman and Strange, the marginalized end up disposable or instrumental. Which is totally upsetting. It’s also the the most extreme example of Batman before his “no guns, no killing” code so far. As over the top as this story is, it’s also maybe the bleakest one I’ve read yet.

Apparently, Bill Finger agrees, specifically regretting this story and acknowledging that Batman could have resolved things without killing. The “no killing” rule, from what I gather, emerges much sooner than I anticipated, being stated overtly in Batman #4. Batman’s reputation in some circles for being a vigilante who beats up the vulnerable is, unfortunately, entirely deserved in an issue like this. But a refusal to kill anyone for any reason radically alters the moral universe in which Batman operates. That Polygon article pulls these panels from Legends of the Dark Knight Annual #1:

It is this belief in the sacredness of human life that defines Batman for me. It doesn’t seem like any of this mattered to Bob Kane. But it did to Finger. Without this aspect of his character, Batman has no human or moral center. He’s just a vigilante, at best no different from those he fights, at worst, worse because he has a choice to do otherwise. If you believe that every life is sacred, you can at least believe in the possibility of redemption, you can at least have a genuine kind of hope that things can change for the better.

Someday, I’ll read the 2006 “Batman and the Monster Men” to see how this is handled in the Year One era. But for now, I’m interested to see where any flickers of that compassion will appear in future issues, any peek into the interiority of the victimized, any identification with those who do evil. At his best, Batman’s character grapples with his own contradictions. In his ultimate refusal to dehumanize others, I imagine, lies a fundamental recognition that in some essential way he is both Joe Chill and Joe Chill’s victim at once. But there’s 80 years of continuity that explore this a thousand ways back and front, the surface of which I can barely begin to scrape in a few words here.

For now, I will lighten these sombre notes with my favorite part of every post, the weirdest little Batmans in this issue: