Our Batmen, Ourselves

This first ran over at Comixology.
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“Morrison’s reclaimed the gaudy, unsettling craziness of Silver Age Batman comics,” Douglas Wolk gushes. Wolk’s a smart guy; he’s not just gibbering enthusiastically here, but is actually ironically referencing the gibbering enthusiasm of Silver Age letter columns. The twist is that by building his abject shilling on the abject shilling of old, Wolk’s manages to posit his views as more considered, and therefore as actually even more naïve and nonsensical, than those of his forbears. His silver affectation is silver-er than real silver, in exactly the way the Batcave was foreshadowed by, and is therefore more real than, Plato’s cave.

As Wolk notes, the awesomest thing about Grant Morrison’s Batman and Robin is that Grant Morrison takes all the Batman mythology there’s ever been — Lazarus Pits, Red Hoods, — and turns it into somnolent cyberpunk hash for drooling continuity porn addicts. If you get a thrill down your spine when you hear Dick Grayson tell Damian Wayne never to underestimate Jason Todd, then your spine will rise right out of your esophagus and do an Adam-West-style bat-dance when resurrected clone-zombie-Batman burps out “Old Chum!” while shambling around Wayne Manor. What Morrison understands, through a Jungian intuitiveness born of years of intensively soldering corporate slogans onto the sacred flesh of his unnameables, is that crazy throw-off moments from the past gain weight and profundity by being repeatedly embalmed and disinterred. Every time Bob Haney hawked up a loogie, Grant Morrison was there, mouth open like a baby bird, ready to ingest, digest, and re-emit it for the sole purpose of waddling his sublimely stained Bat underoos over to the nearest university English Department for professional sterilization and veneration.

The second awesomest thing about Morrison’s Batman and Robin is the faux-Batmen. Morrison is obsessed with Batman and Robin replicants — an evil vigilante Batman and Robin; a British Batman and Robin, Batwoman and whoever her sidekick is, etc. etc. This obsession is actually even more mirrored because it imitates Morrison’s run on Batman, which also had lots of different Bat guys running around, from Man-Bats to the Club of Heroes to lots of clones created by Darkseid.

Or so I’ve been told. I didn’t read the Darkseid arc…which I think is actually the perfect critical stance. All these imitation Batmen deserve an imitation reader, a false fanboy imperfectly refracting and reinscribing the imperfect fanfic. My failure to do due diligence is actually an ironic metacomment on the failure of Morrison to write. a. goddamn. story. Instead, both he and I together are involved in a reproducible narrative meme; thematic material about people wearing masks and having their faces ripped off float off into the marketing ether, where its post-modern non-reference affixes itself to the non-identities of the nonentities who, through reading these comics, actually cancel their own (non) existences.

This sense that Morrison is deliberately talking into a void — or creating a void through his incessant talking — is only intensified by the brilliant decision to instruct the artists to derail the flow of action. For instance:

She “thinks” she can hurt him in twelfth-generation Frank-Miller-retread noir-thought-captions — and the utter exhaustion of the tired “trope” is given a humorous fillip by the fact that the confusing “arty” “angles” exist mainly to “distract” from the “main point”, which is that her “clever” “inner-plan” involves, “like,” “hitting” “him”. Robin’s “Gnnr!” subtly parodies artist Philip Tan’s use of an incompetent delivery system to contain stupid content; it is, in fact, the reader’s “Gnnr!”, a reflexive stimulous-response of simulated approbation as the Pavlovian Bat-joy-schtick is manipulated with crass incompetence to show that we are all just “little boys” abusing ourselves without even token help from our “evil doubles” to whom we have shelled out our $2.99.

Or how about:

Through clever positioning, sparkling dialogue, and the indeterminacy of whatever that is on the floor, artist Andy Clarke makes it unclear for just a moment whether Robin has just hit Batman with a sword, or whether Batman is falling through the floor in the nick of time to escape Robin hitting him with the sword.

It’s true that these are small touches — but it’s this kind of careful attention to detail that most clearly reveals Morrison’s subliminal hermeneutics. Batman comics, like the Batmen themselves, proliferate and subdivide, with no purpose or meaning other than their own infinite iteration. Mainstream super-hero comics are, in this vision, the most perfect of all popular art forms, severed as they are from populace, art, and even form. Like a virus, these comics exist only to perpetuate themselves. Reading them is to hear nanogears grinding pointlessly in the cracks of the universe. Aren’t we all, really, lame, doddering, toothless parodies of corporate properties, wandering brainless through some clichéd post-everything landscape before sinking into our own unmourned and ludicrous tombs? Morrison’s Batman and Robin is a savage satire not only of mainstream comics per se, and not only of Morrison’s own previous work, but of human dignity itself. We wait, not for Godot, because we must existentially hope, but rather for Batman, because we are fucking stupid.

Months Later and You Still Smell Like Mutant Wolverine Fart

A slightly edited version of this appeared a while back on Splice Today. It’s something of a homage to the inimitable Tucker Stone.
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Batman and Robin #13
Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Frazer Irving

Grant Morrison kicks this off with Bruce’s mother lying on the ground dead, Bruce beside her, and Thomas Wayne standing over them muttering triumphantly. And if you need a scorecard to tell you who the characters are and what’s wrong with this picture, you’ve wandered into the wrong primal scene, jack. This is for people in the know, returning to their childhood toys as the super-patriarchs they used to pantomime, ritually defiling their dreams in the name of celebratory nostalgia and a simulacra of naïve wonder gushing decadence and cyberpunk. Thomas Wayne is the evil daddy, the Joker is the evil daddy, some guy with a pig face is an evil daddy. Gordon’s the good daddy and the old Robin’s the new Batman trying to take the place of a daddy for the new Robin who has issues. Frazer Irving’s stiff figures, waxy flesh tones and over-saturated colors give the whole thing the air of plastic surrealism; a perfect self-referential Freudian fugue with action figures taking the place of fathers. It’s not Thomas Wayne who’s your papa, Bruce, but the toy you got in your Happy Meal. Play with it till you get old and bored, cut off its head, and then declare loudly that it’s more profoundly entertaining than ever when it self-referentially sits there.

Spider-Man #12
Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: David LaFuente

Marvel has ret-conned and alt-universed Spider-Man so many times it’s a wonder poor Peter Parker has enough brain cells left to pull his red tights out of the way when his nether web spinner incontinently dribbles. In theory this story is about an exact duplicate who’s replaced our favorite web-slinger, but I prefer to think that it’s just the same old Peter bashed one time too many in the head by the latest creative team and trying desperately to recover. There’s some strong evidence for my position — for example, “false” Peter references lines from old, old sixties scripts (“Face it tiger, you’ve hit the jackpot”) which he could only know if said scripts were still shuttling about painfully through the hollowed out shell of his continuity addled cortex. Because writing a teen adventure melodrama with somnolent shout-outs to the wannabe-hip patois of forty-five years ago — that would just be stupid, right? No, it’s much more likely that Stan Lee is actually a sentient self-replicating tapeworm that Bendis ingested with his morning Starbucks, and the Man has been slowly replacing his host’s tissues with slithering segments of hype and misattributions of co-authorship. Eventually the worm will grow so enormous that its tail will come thrashing bloodily out of Bendis’ forehead in a giant fountain of brain bits and achingly slow dialogue. “Faaaaacccceeeee itttttt tigggggeeeeeeerrr, yoooooooovvvvvvveeeeee hiiiiiiiiiittttttttttt ttttthhhhheeeeee….blaaaaaaaaarch!”

Superman #701
Writer: J. Michael Straczynski
Artists: Eddy Barrows/J.P.Mayer

Superman is an adolescent power fantasy. Some of us have adolescent power fantasies that involve beating up bad guys and rescuing damsels in distress. Some of us have adolescent power fantasies that involve walking across the country dispensing hippie wisdom about how you’ve got to take a stand where you are and you shouldn’t kill yourself if you think you’ll still have one good day in your life and Thoreau said something profound which only a humble seeker wearing his underwear on the outside can truly understand.

J. Michael Straczynski’s power fantasies are of the second kind. His Superman isn’t a hero; he’s an insufferably smug guidance counselor/guru, getting in touch with the real America by serving it a steady diet of flatulent koans and end-of-episode heartwarming morals. Don’t you wish you could dispense flatulent koans? Don’t you wish you could win arguments with a quiet wisdom indistinguishable from contempt? Don’t you wish you could walk on and on until you “run out of road”? If you do, could you please go off and write a self-help book or join the Peace Corps or go to the far north to join your fortunes with the wild lonely musk ox? Just don’t write comic books, okay? Because they will suck.

Strange Windows: Keeping up with the Goonses (part 5)

This is part five of our look at comics, cartoons and language– today focusing on the comic book

Art by Don Newton and Alfredo Alcala

“Jeff and Tom are an item? Isn’t that cradle-robbing?”

“Oh, total Batman and Robin, you know.”

That same online gay and LGBTglossary consulted in part 4 gives the following definitions:

BATMAN AND ROBIN
(n., adj.)

1. Inseparable.
2. A leader and his sidekick.
3. Daddy-Son relationship; an older man with a younger lover.

This last usage chimes with Dr Frederick Wertham’s warnings about the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder.

Dr Wertham, struck speechless by the sheer depravity of comic books

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