Superhero Parents: The Hidden Difference

This is part of a series of essays written for Chris Gavaler’s comics class.

What happened to Peter Parker’s real parents? Most people cannot answer that question, and many have never even considered it. But anyone with a basic understanding of comics knows that Parker’s real parental guidance comes from his aunt May and uncle Ben. Because of Ben and May, Peter goes from a nerd given superpowers to a real superhero. Similarly, it is an event related to Bruce Wayne’s parents that transforms Bruce into Batman; if Mr. and Mrs. Wayne survived the gunshots outside of the cinema, Bruce would just be the next wealthy leader of Wayne Enterprises. Meanwhile, in a more modern comic, Ms. Marvel: No Normal, we can see that Kamala Kahn’s parent’s overbearing control actually sets her free and enables her to become a superhero because of her initial need to rebel.

Comics, much like Disney movies, have a tendency to eliminate parents early and to portray them as an obstacle for development. THIS IS WRONG – parents aren’t an obstacle. When parents are taken out of their picture, their guidance still lives on through their children. Parents play an instrumental role in the development of superheroes. But they remain an often overlooked part of superhero comic analysis.

How did Bruce Wayne become a superhero when he has no powers? Bruce and his parents were walking home from a movie when a gunman held them up and shot both Mr. and Mrs. Wayne mercilessly. This moment was incredibly emotionally painful for the young Bruce, but it was also a critical moment in Bruce’s transformation. In a panel in Detective Comics following the blood-soaked concrete of his parents’ death, we see a praying Bruce saying: “And I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.” With those words, Bruce Wayne begins his physical and mental preparation for his later transformation into Batman. Thus, we can see here that it is explicitly stated that he fights criminals because of his parents’ death and their unforgotten guidance.
 

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Later, the reader is introduced to Batman’s future sidekick, Robin. In the introduction, the young man, named Dick Grayson, witnesses the death of his parents on a trapeze ‘accident’. When the boy plans to call the police, Batman stops him and invites the young Grayson to join his vigilante quest against crime. Of course, Robin accepts the invitation. Batman quickly becomes a fatherly figure for Robin, pointing him in the direction against crime and advising him in the same way Grayson’s father may have. Thus, if it weren’t for Batman essentially adopting Dick Grayson, and for the tragic loss of both of the heroes’ real parents, neither Batman nor Robin would be stopping crime.

Why did Peter Parker, a nerd mad at the world and given superpowers, decide to use his powers for good? Peter Parker — the “teacher’s pet”, “science nerd”, “mama’s boy” of high school — is given supernatural powers in a classic superhero development story. An irradiated spider falls from the ceiling and bites Parker, shocking him with a jolt of power relative to that of a spider. Needless to say, Peter’s life changes – now the kid who got bullied has an opportunity to be the bully. Prior to the surge of power, Peter had said that he loved his aunt and uncle but that “the rest of the world could go hang, for all [he] cares!” Initially, Peter’s childish attitude and apathy towards helping others with his new powers leads him to miss an opportunity to save his uncle from death. Consequently, Parker proceeds to have a life filled with regret. He feels forever in debt for the guidance that uncle Ben gave him, and he also feels a responsibility to help his aunt May because of her becoming a widow. Uncle Ben left Peter with some extremely valuable words, and Peter never forgot them: “With great power there must also come – great responsibility.” Those words define Peter, and uncle Ben’s death serves as an awakening for Peter to recognize the importance of helping others. Still, it is aunt May that serves as his constant reminder to always act with honor.
 

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Ms. Marvel is not a classic comic. It’s maybe not even a comic you’ve heard of unless you are an avid superhero comics reader. However, Ms. Marvel has gained significant media attention since its publication because of how different its protagonist is from many other superheroes. She is given her powers from a spiritual hallucination of Captain Marvel. Kamala Kahn struggles through her teenage years until this Captain Marvel offers her an opportunity to change and to break away from her overbearing parents. Kamala had been feeling pressure from her parents and was stressed about her identity, so this transformation allowed her to develop into a hero. Initially, Ms. Marvel is uncertain about what to do, but before she can seek action, the excitement finds her. Before entering the scene and helping a drowning girl though, Ms. Marvel recalls a lesson from her father that reminds her that “whoever saves one person, it is as if he has saved all of mankind.” With this lesson in mind, Ms. Marvel acts heroically. She continues to act with this moral compass throughout the story, and several more times she attributes her good deeds to the guidance of her parents. Thus, it is the overbearingness of Kamala’s home that forces her into rebellion and leads her to her powers, and then it is the guidance of her parents that make her a true hero.
 

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Many of us would perhaps call your own parents “superheroes”. In our lives, it is our parents who enable us to face stress and to feel loved. With this idea in mind, it is unimaginable to consider a world without them. Incredibly, both Bruce Wayne and Peter Parker harnessed their emotions and used events relating to family and past guidance to turn themselves from powerful people into superheroes. Meanwhile, Kamala Kahn gained her powers because of a dislike for her parents’ control, but then trusted her parents’ advice most in hard times. Thus, all of these characters gained their powers by different means, but they all are superheroes because of the everlasting guidance of their parents.

Frank Miller Triumphant

Frank Miller (c. 2016) is the Donald Trump of comics. Not merely because he’s demonstrated some ebullient racism, not because he really hates Muslims, not because of his warped ideas about women, but because of the general incoherence of his vision. The sad thing is that Miller considers Trump a bit of a “buffoon.”

There’s a whole article to be written about Miller’s political beliefs from the 1980s to the 2010s: how a man who wrote a satire on Reagan and Nuclear Armageddon could transform (?) in latter years into such a reactionary (presumably he always was one); how an artist who created a comic about an all conquering female ninja and her masochistic, castrated male partner (he only gets an erection when he submits) could come to see women in latter years as harlots. I guess Freudians would put this down to a Madonna-Whore complex.

Frank Miller the thinker is a slightly knotty problem, but there’s nothing especially complex about the drawing hand of Frank Miller circa 2016. The one time master of dynamic movement and page composition has hit rock bottom and his fans aren’t amused.

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He has a 12-page back-up story in The Dark Knight III: The Master Race #4 which is little more than one big fight scene with some barely sketched out characters just limply hanging in blank space. Then Aquaman appears in all his shoddy glory and…the end. This is a rigorous reflection of the story in the main body of the comic which is also little more than an extended fight scene between Superman and his daughter, with Batman and Carrie Kelley as spectators. Remember the scene in The Dark Knight Returns where Batman beats Superman to a bloody pulp under some street lights like the lowlife street mugger he is? Well, the new comic is yet more fanservice for Batfans who think the Man of Steel sucks (Miller is the inspiration here, not the cause).

But it’s not all corrupt—if you take individual panels out of context you can still see some remnants of the old artist. A silhouette here and some adequate superhero posing there.

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Still, no one really cares about Miller’s subliterate backup story; the internet is far more disgruntled by his series of covers for DC. The most recent culprit is his portrait of Wonder Woman for a DK3 #4 variant cover.

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Yet for me, this seems closer to that time when Trump emerged from a relaxing spa a few months back and said that he would be friendly with Russia—which is infinitely preferable to World War 3 I should add.

Yes, she looks a bit sullen but not everything needs to be fun and games a la Marston and Peter. He’s on song again because of the nostalgia he has for the warrior-child motif from his days as a fan of  Lone Wolf and Cub. The thing isn’t conventionally erotic or pornographic; this Wonder Woman doesn’t want to make love to you; she doesn’t even want to be tied up with her sorority girlfriends. She just wants to beat you up, hence the gorilla-like stance with her fists on the ground. The breasts are a wee bit big but they’re covered and it could just be the armor doing the talking. The bicycle shorts are cool and the stars quite well drawn. Anyone who knows anything about recent Miller will tell you that this is “decent” Miller as opposed to OMFG Miller. To wit:

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I will accept intimations that this image is a natural extension of Miller’s penchant for night spots of all sorts in his sequential work, and thus a homage to drag queen clubs; maybe a bad homage but a homage nonetheless.

Every few months, Miller releases his new modernist vision of superheroes to the world to the general consternation of the Twittersphere. And every time, one of these images appears, the internet expresses equal parts astonishment, outrage, and delight that something so grotesque should exist in this universe. It’s like stepping on some dog poo just as you’re about to get into work—you have to tell someone because it just stinks. If you don’t, they’ll find out and then where would you be?

Everytime one of these things hits the stands, it’s as if Miller is pulling out his dick and saying, “Fuck you, DC! And fuck your pet rabbit!” The most obvious screw you was his infamous Superman with a package (he packs to the right) splash page/cover.

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Miller fans point to moments like these as expressions of his genius and his innate feminist instincts—the drawing hand may be withering but that brain! It still works and wants to let the supermen (and their cocks) have it as good as the superwomen.

The people who go to conventions and collect original art were well apprised of this paradigm shift in Miller’s abilities at least a few months in advance of the general public, with responses ranging from delight at owning a hand drawn masterpiece from the Master to earnest attempts at retrieving whatever vestiges of dignity remained in the art—the equivalent of trying to pick a really dry piece of snot from your nostrils. Utterly disgusting for all concerned.

Any hesitation to declare this a sharp deterioration in artistic prowess does not simply reside in the level of respect Miller has garnered over the years from the fan community but the simple fact that you simply don’t make jokes about the afflicted. And Miller has looked pretty ill for some years (the exact nature of his ailment is a mystery). The internet gasped with incredulity when Miller took a photo with Stan Lee recently.

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But there’s every indication that he’s on the mend. The recent photos while far from hearty are still a significant improvement over those from not so long ago. Like a mud-caked Batman in The Dark Knight Triumphant, Miller is having it out with the Mutant Leader. Something is telling him to stop with the art but he’s not listening to it; and that’s all for the best.

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So if you’re sick (and there is by no means any public confirmation of this) and are still able to support yourself, I think more power to you. And if you want to do a Dark Knight IV all by your lonesome in years to come, well, I guess why not—DC deserves it, and fuck “artistic legacy.” But, you know, get Klaus Janson to help out a bit I think, now that you’ve both kissed and made up. Because there’s really no shame in getting help, especially when not getting help results in this:

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These monstrous ninja zombies are of course depictions of Miller most famous creation, Elektra; which sort of makes sense considering her resurrection in Miller’s early Daredevil comics. I guess if you created the character, you get to decide if the lady has flat-rectangular shaped nipples or has a tattoo of Matt Murdock on her left thigh or has glow in the dark areolae. There’s little doubt that Miller considers most of these images transcendent spank material.

Speaking of which, how much do you think this wank material is worth? $2000 maybe? You need to account for the fact that we’ve had several suppositories of Quantitative Easing for close on 10 years (though with nary an effect on inflation). So maybe $4000-5000? Miller is a living legend in superhero circles afterall. Apparently a nice big Batman sketch like this goes for somewhere in the region of $10-12K.

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The Elektras? 8.5-9.5K. There were nasty rumors circulating that customers who bought an Elektra stood a better chance of getting a Batman. When I heard about this from a fellow collector, I assumed it was a buy one and get one free deal. But no chance, Frank Miller (and his handlers) are nothing if not great businessmen.

Which only goes to show that you don’t need close readings or a smattering of comics history to understand the baseline ethic at work here.  When exciting new conceptions of the decaying female form  are greeted with ready wallets, then Capitalism dictates that we sell them. As for the rest, DC will just have to suck it up because they started it first.

Wonder Woman in Batman vs. Superman

There’s a new (new!) Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer. Watch it now!
 

 
Online reaction seems pretty skeptical, centering on Jesse Eisenberg’s jittery camp. People don’t want jittery camp from their supervillains anymore, I guess. No love for Frank Gorshin.

Anyway, as you’ll see if you can make it to the end, Gal Gadot shows up as Wonder Woman right at the close, in a moment also played for cutesy laughs. Doomsday (I guess that’s Doomsday) shoots some sort of special effect thing at Batman, and our dour hero is about to be incinerated, when Wonder Woman leaps in with her shield. “Is she with you?” Superman asks, with Henry Cavill demonstrating that he’s got nice comic timing. “I thought she was with you,” Batman replies in grim dark bat voice.

Part of the joke is about the wrong-footed testosterone. Wonder Woman, as a woman, should belong to either Superman or Batman. But (feminism!) she doesn’t. The conflicted bromance m/m romantic comedy (complete with meet cute at the trailer’s beginning) is interrupted; the gritty ballet of manly men thumping each other gives way to the sit-com shuffle of manly men belching in confusion as the woman of the house swoops in to be competent.

William Marston, Wonder Woman’s creator, would probably find a bit to like here; Wonder Woman as invader of man’s world (metaphorically and literally) resonates with his original themes to some degree, and of course it’s nice to have her saving the bat dude rather than the other way around. The perspective, though, is inevitably wrong way round. Wonder Woman, the original comic, started out after all with Steve Trevor invading Paradise Island, and even in Man’s World, Diana was surrounded by sorority girls and fellow Amazons, so that Steve was always the lone dude in a female community.

The whole point of the original Wonder Woman was that Wonder Woman was the standard; women were the normal thing, and men were the sometimes odd, sometimes sexy, but always secondary other. Wonder Woman in Dawn of Justice is heroic, but she’s heroic through the eyes, and from the perspective, of the two guys whose relationship is the title of the film. Which isn’t surprising, really, but does mean that, Supergirl, Jessica Jones, Buffy, or any superhero show where the woman is in the title, is going to be truer in many ways to Marston’s vision than the character called Wonder Woman in a film titled Batman vs. Superman.

Should a Superhero Have a License to Kill?

 
James Bond might not be a superhero, but he does dedicate his life to battling bad guys. Plus he has a codename: 007. Yeah, that means he’s just one guy in a league of 00s, so nothing unique—same as any Green Lantern in the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps. Maybe Earth-based agencies are different, but then that would strike Black Widow from the superhero census list too. Also, like Natasha, James has no superpowers, at least not compared to Thor or Superman. He’d make a pretty good match for Batman though. He even sports his own utility belt’s worth of Q-engineered supergadgets.

Mr. Bond also wields Dr. Who’s shapeshifting powers. I watched his edited-for-TV Sean Connery incarnation from my parents’ couch as a kid, and his Roger Moore from theater seats as an adolescent. I even witnessed his awkward Timothy Dalton stage while I was finishing college and his franchise was waiting for Pierce Brosnan to come-of-age too. But I have to admit Daniel Craig is the David Tennant of the Bond universe. I’m looking forward to seeing his current Spectre adventure.

The character struggled after losing his mission-defining Evil Empire, but Skyfall’s Judi Dench gave him back his raison d’être:

“I’m frightened because our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map. They’re not nations. They’re individuals. Look around you. Who do you fear? Do you see a face, a uniform, a flag? No. Our world is not more transparent now. It’s all opaque. It’s in the shadows. That’s where we must do battle.”

Batman is all about shadows too, turning the darkness of his parents’ murders against the shady elements of murky Gotham. But, unlike a trigger-happy 00 agent, Batman would never kill anyone on purpose, right?

Well, actually the unlicensed Dark Knight racked up a Bond-level body count during his first year in Detective Comics. Not only did a holster hang from his utility belt back then, the batplane included a mounted machinegun: “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary!”

DC editors reined in his homicidal writing staff after Batman #1, but even the comparatively wholesome Superman had a killing streak then. In June 1939, same month Batman was kicking jewel thieves off skyscrapers, Superman was dropping a mobster to an identical death. Granted, it wasn’t Superman’s fault he lost his super grip: “If he hadn’t tried to stab me, he’d be alive now.—But the fate received was exactly what he deserved!” Though what did Superman think was going to happen when he destroyed the Ultra-Humanite’s propeller mid-flight? The supervillain somehow escaped the crash, but no thanks to the death-indifferent Man of Steel.

Comic books usually protect their heroes from having to kill directly. In that same Action Comics, a rotating blade shatters against Superman’s impervious skull and slices up a nearby thug.  Or in another early Batman adventure, a “foreign agent” is accidentally impaled on his own sword, and Batman self-righteously declares: “It is better that he should die! He might have sent thousands of others to their death on a battlefield if his plans had been successful!”

If this makes your feel morally queasy, listen to Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko on superhero morality: superheroes are “moral avengers” who must kill criminals in order to show “a clear understanding of right and wrong,” even if that means violating the “pervading legal moral” code.

Mr. Ditko currently resides in the crazy-old-man dimension of the comics multiverse, because his Ann Rand philosophy isn’t a page in today’s superhero bible. Batman’s and Superman’s most recent film incarnations take little license with the Sixth Commandment. In fact, the plot of Christopher Nolan’s 2008 The Dark Knight pivots on Christian Bale’s Batman struggling not to kill the Joker—even though killing him is necessary to protect others and exactly “what he deserves.” And remember the fan outrage when Henry Cavill’s Superman snapped General Zod’s neck in Man of Steel? It was that or let the General’s laser vision slice up a family of cowering Metropolitans, but Superman’s super-wholesomeness got sliced up too.

Both Zod and Joker are weirdly suicidal supervillains, goading their arch-enemies into committing murder. But then that’s the point. Superheroes are supposed to oppose killing out of principle. So where’s that leave Mr. Bond?

We could say his license strikes the “super” from his heroness, maybe even replacing it with an “anti.” His comic book counterpart might be the Ditko-esque Punisher, a sometime supervillain depending on who’s penning the story. But in James’ defense, killing isn’t the core of his mission. It’s just the most efficient means for getting important jobs down. He’s paid to be indifferent to death.

And that’s the problem. I remember Roger Moore’s 007 dangling a “foreign agent” by his tie from the edge of a building. The thug had been gunning at him seconds earlier, so the scene meets the “what he deserved” test. But was it necessary? Couldn’t he have holstered his license and knocked the guy out instead of dropping him to his death? Sure, the guy was a cog in the Cold War wheel trying to squash Democracy, but did Roger Moore have to grin? Did the movie have to play the scene for laughs, toying with the villain’s tie as he quivered for life?

I don’t blame his character though. James Bond was designed to be a cold-blooded Cold Warrior. You could argue the hero type was a product of its times—and so a bad fit with ours. Connery, Moore, Dalton, they all performed indifference so their 60s, 70s and 80s audiences could forget about the nuclear arsenal aimed at their hometown theaters. Take Bond out of that context and he just seems callous. The same way the original Superman and Batman made more moral sense as their readers teetered on the brink of a Nazi-driven World War.

The current Daniel Craig incarnation fixes that. He still shows his killer license when needed, but he’s not indifferent about it. He understands what it means to take a life. Like the 2013 Superman, he only snaps a villainous neck when it means saving innocent ones. He takes no pleasure in it. If anything, that hint of inner turmoil makes him almost superheroic. He does the dirty work so no one else has to. He’s not a 00 by self-righteous nature, but by self-sacrificing choice.
 

The Hole Picture: Art, Religion, and Identity

“…all beings have a twofold face, a face of light and a black face. The luminous face, the face of day, is the only one that the common run of men perceive. Their black face, the one the mystic perceives, is their poverty The totality of their being is their daylight face and their night face”
-Henry Corbin

If, in the realm of human endeavour, there is one single activity which closely parallels or even mirrors the workings of identity, it has to be art. Art and the experiencing of art can define, describe, delimit, and categorize the personal in much the same way that identity does.

It should be no cause for wonder, then, that art and identity get conflated more often than not, with artist and spectator both viewing the engagement with art as integral to their personality.

Where this identification of art or culture with identity is a common occurence in the 21st century Occident, it has almost completely occluded a relationship that was previously of
immense significance- that between art and religion.

These days, inasmuch as identity, or the experience of the personal, is a prerequisite for the production of art, it should be unsurprising that much of contemporary spiritual or religious art lacks character. It is a risk of all art that genuinely and honestly seeks to express any sort of mystical experience; for the apex of the religious experience is a transpersonal one. It is exactly the direct transcendance of the limitations of selfhood which incapacitates the mystic to express that experience, for he lacks the personality to express it with. Like the captive shaman in Borges’ ‘La Escritura del Dios’ who discovers the secret name of God and the infinite power it would grant him, but who declines to use that power to escape his prison because the newly acquired infinite, cosmic vantage point makes him see the futility of his human desire to be free.

Perhaps art’s function has always been to express what is no longer there, to fix what moves onward in constant flux, to capture ghosts; thus to be, in a sense, non-being.

In that spirit, to propose how art can move beyond its (and our) own identity, i will offer an exegesis of the following panel from the comic-book The Dark Knight Returns by Miller,
Janson & Varley (DC Comics, 1986).
 

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It is a Batman comic, with all the connotations about ‘secret identities’ that are apposite to our subject. Like most comic-book periodicals promoting the corporate-owned product of superhero characters, this book moves a fixed set of characters along a chessboard grid. That this particular version acquired a modicum of mainstream fame in its time, due to the introduction of certain radical elements into the Batman mythos, is of little significance.
Its central achievement is that it understands the medium; constrained by its nature as corporate product and juvenile entertainment, it finds freedom in the technical aspects of
storytelling, in the dance of the draughtsman’s hand.

A tale of an aged Batman coming out of retirement to fight crime one last time, it metes out, on the narrative level, heavy-handed symbolism and clunky metaphors in an attempt to instill the juvenile concept with a measure of adult validity. There is the Joker, whose face-paint reveals rather than masks his identity; Two-Face, one side of his visage horribly disfigured, mirroring the Batman’s dual nature, Superman portrayed as a spineless slave
to political power. The mask, the masked, nature and morality, with these themes and more, the book plays a pleasing aesthetic game, but for all its visual rhyme and striking juxtapositions, as a narrative it does not delve very deep.

Yet despite this narrative superficiality, there are statements which only the comic-book image-maker is capable of making, and the comic-book storyteller through his technique must push the image-maker to the point where meaning (relevance to the plot’s progression, or symbolism pertinent to the story’s subject) becomes subsumed in the textures of the drawings – where the ink, as it were, is allowed to speak its own language; to comment, in blackness, on the proceedings in the narrative, creating a counter-narrative, the majestic current of a subterranean river traversing chthonic realms of obscure meaning.

There are statements which only the image-maker has the authority to make, and I hope to unearth some of these statements, and by this reversal of the artistic process, the extrication not just of meaning but of meaningfulness, the being-full-of-meaning, to show that the making of art is a ritual burial, a negation which leaves the disinterment , or resurrection, even, to the reader or spectator. It is a dying of the Self into the Other.
 

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Taking as context the surrounding images, the panel reads as a face emerging over the rim of a circular mirror which has just confronted the face with the result of cosmetic surgery restoring its disfigured left side. But this reading does not take into account the key to interpretation we are offered when reading on. There, we find what is in every sense a key moment to the book; a flashback scene showing the pivotal moment that (however shallowly) motivated multimillionaire Bruce Wayne to ‘fight crime’ as the Batman: the death of his parents at the hands of a street robber. The flashback, designed as a rigid four-by-four panel grid imbuing the scene with the staccato inevitability of fate or nightmare, stretches and stretches until coming to a slow halt in the relentless close-up focus on the robber’s gun getting tangled in Mrs. Wayne’s pearl necklace, showing the gunshot against her neck only through the increasing distance between the pearls of the necklace as it tears; a constellation of white orbs against a black background, which becomes the blackness of outer space, unmooring the young Bruce Wayne from all notions of home and safety. Suddenly this boy is cast into a deep interplanetary coldness; his universe stretches like the necklace; the gaps widen as the pearls scatter, the planets fall; time stops; and the void yawns wide.
On the narrative level that scene is simply the key to the Batman’s pathology. On the visual level, we have been presented a manual instructing us how to read these images. Time has stopped; the pearls are no longer connected; it is Judgement Day, and each picture must stand on its own.
 

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Thus, we come to the panel at hand, with all sense of human scale utterly blasted. An image of apocalyptic implications, with its opaque black globe encroaching upon a human face, leaving only one amazed, or frightened eye visible. A vast face peeking over the curving horizon of a blackened planet, like a sunrise witnessed from space.

And the word balloon says ‘oh, my god,’ -but who or what is it, that speaks?

The face has no mouth, no visible mouth at least, and the balloon’s tail points towards the black globe- black as the theatre of Lord Chamberlain’s men ( Shakespeare’s troupe),The Globe, after it had been reduced to ashes by fire- a blackened Globe, a full stop, an end to masks and costumes and assumed identities.

The blackness, unmasked, speaks. Let us pause to examine how this blackness manifests itself in a few other instances, to help give direction to our reading.

Batman’s costume is traditionally depicted as having a blue colour, we can assume to suggest night or darkness while still keeping the figure legible when drawn against a night sky or in darkness. But throughout The Dark Knight Returns, the night sky is painted in subtle hues of dark metallic blues and greys, with Batman outlined starkly against its gradients in pure black silhouette. Like the familiar trick of the picture that represents at once two faces and a vase, foreground and background here shift their significance between them:the sky becomes illustration, painted backdrop behind the iconic shape of Batman’s absolute blackness, but it might also be perceived that the perfect night sky has been pierced, revealing a more profound darkness behind it. An image not to look at, but through.

Let us return with this idea, the suggestion that there is a darkness underlying all surfaces,to our original picture, and examine it anew.
 

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It is, of course, a hole. A hole in a picture of a face. Or rather, it is the face of nothingness of that face, the individuality punctured, and it is this face of nothingness which exclaims, with the last vestiges of personality: ‘oh, my god.’

As Shaykh Lahiji writes in his commentary on Mahmud Shabestari´s Golshan-e Raz (the Rose Garden of Mystery): “Suddenly i saw that the black light was invading the entire universe. Heaven and earth and everything that was there had wholly become black light and, behold, I was totally absorbed in this light, losing consciousness.”

This black light (nur aswad), which in some traditions is seen as the hair of God invisibly permeating the universe (predating by several centuries the concept of Anti-matter of contemporary physics) is not to be mistaken for mere darkness, a simple absence of light.

It is very precisely not a matter of negativity, of emptiness or absence. In fact, in the light of what we have previously established, it is the Ink that speaks, that articulates the blackness. And this Ink, because it holds the promise of all forms, as writing, or drawing, can be said to represent an incomparable plenitude.

There are two curious and little known sayings of the prophet Muhammad: “All that is in the revealed books is in the Qur’an and all that is in the Qur’an is in the Fatihah [the Qur’an’s opening verse], and all that is in the Fatihah is in Bismi’ Llahi ‘r Rahmani ‘r-Rahim [the Fatihah’s opening line or Basmalah].” and “All that is in Bismi’ Llahi ‘r Rahmani ‘r-Rahim is in the letter Ba, which itself is contained in the point that is beneath it.”

Shayhk Ahmad Al-‘Alawi, who lived in Algeria at the beginning of the previous century, wrote a treatise on this subject, titled ‘The Book of The Uniqe Archetype which signalleth the way unto the full realization of Oneness in considering what is meant by the envelopment of the Heavenly Scriptures in the point of the Basmalah,’ and therein, to illustrate his point (and The Point), he quotes at length Abd al-Ghani an-Nabulusi, from the Diwan al Haqa’iq, about Ink:

“For it was before the letters, when no letter was;
And it remaineth, when no letter at all shall be.
Look well at each letter:thou seest it hath already perished
But for the face of the ink, that is, for the Face of His Essence,
Unto Whom All Glory and Majesty and Exaltation!”

It is a commonplace of the comic-book craft that a picture must not describe what the text is saying and vice-versa, but the obverse of that coin is that a text which means the same as the picture but describes it in a different way is a felicitous convergence and divergence at once; the two aspects of the medium maximizing each other’s potential.

Of our picture and text- our picture as text-both instances are true. Without exclamation mark, the phrase by itself is a quiet expression of baffled incredulity, a sigh perhaps, although its subtlety is undermined by the italicized emphasis of “god,” while the open-endedness of the sentence as indicated by the three dots articulates a bridge to the surrounding image.

But the words, too,form a picture, the ‘oh’ being both the sound and the form of the silent black void encroaching upon the face.”O” is the circumference of the Basmalah’s Point; the outward manifestation of the all-encompassing blackness of the Ink representing the Incomparable Plenitude of the Divine. The “O” therefore signifies the same as the italicized “god.”

The third word in the balloon(“My”) is there to act as a bridge between these two manifestations of the Divine, if only it can allow itself to surrender to the engulfing Black Light spreading over its image. Like a mirror, it is the conduit through which the Divine passes on Its way to Itself. In Its path, It completely obliterates “my” and “I” and all notions of Selfhood, for once the Self has seen the True Reality of its Absorption into the totality of the Ink, it ceases to be anything other than the Ink; It can only recognize, from then on, the Ink-ness as it were, of its existence. As the “my” falls away from the text, and the face is obliterated in the picture, God as text and God as meaning cross the divide of Selfhood to become the One which the illusion of “my” tried to oppose. Identity perishes. Blackness surrenders to the meaning of blackness. And that is the Face which ever remains.
 

Batman Never Goes Bad

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Various people had informed me that the Batmobile drove off a cliff in the third season of the Adam West TV series. Budgets plummeted, single episodes rather than two-parters became the norm, direction was lost, and sadness reigned even among the giggling villains. Matt Yockey argues that the growing political turmoil of the 60s made it harder for the show to sustain its delicate balance between conservatism and satirizing conservatism, leading to incoherence, dwindling market share, and falling quality.

At least as far as the last goes, it ain’t necessarily Bat-so, though. The low points of the series aren’t in the third season, I don’t think — nothing is clearly worse than the first episode of the 2nd season, or than the limping crossover with the Green Hornet. There are certainly weak moments — the three-part trip to Londinium, largely composed of half-hearted jokes about how the British are so British, is pretty crappy, and the special sexism episode where Nora Clavicle takes over the police department is just about as offesnive as Chief Screaming Chicken. But, on the other hand, the shorter episode length and the sense of improvisatory confusion lends some episodes a manic genius rare in the rest of the series. The Joker surfing episode is particularly brilliant, abandoning all pretense of coherence as the Joker uses a machine to sap the abilities of a pro-surfer and challenges Batman to a surf-off because supervillains want to rule the beach? The whole episode seems like an excuse to get Chief O’Hara to declare, “Cowabunga, B’gora!”

So, if the quality doesn’t fall off, particularly, why do people insist it does? Hard to say…though I think there’s an impulse to try to find some aesthetic reason, or (with Yockey) some historical reason, or really any reason at all for the show’s meteoric ascent and equally meteoric fall. Everyone loved it, so the show must have been doing something right — then everybody stopped loving it, so the show must have been doing something wrong.

I do think popularity often has something to do with quality or aesthetic choices — but what or why is often hard to figure. Maybe Batman grabbed the zeigeist just right as Yockey suggests, and then the times passed it by. But then again, maybe people just got tired of it. Capitalism is prone to bubbles of various sorts; for a second there everyone wanted Batman, the way everyone wanted mortgage securities or tulips. Then people stopped wanting them. The tulips were never worth anything to begin with; Batman never changed in quality. But the market revalued them because that’s what the market does. It’s sort of like the Penguin infecting all the cash in Gotham city with a beetle-carried sleeping sickness. It doesn’t have to make much sense.

Holy Unstable Hierarchy, Batgirl!

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In his study of the Batman TV show from last year, Matt Yockey argues that season three’s introduction of Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) carefully maintains patriarchal norms. Batgirl is always subordinate to Batman, Yockey says, and/or to her dad, Commisioner Gordon — or even to Alfred. “The implicit threat of the female crime fighter is contained by Alfred’s knowledge of her dual identities.” Batgirl gets to be somewhat heroic, but ultimately some guy in Gotham is always the boss.

This analysis fails to take into account one small fact. Namely, Season Three (or at least the first few episodes I’ve seen) is not an ordered hierarchy. Instead, it is a huge, staggering, lurching mess. The second episode in particular, with Frank Gorshin returning as the Riddler after a season long absence, teeters on the verge of utter incoherence, before plunging gleefully over the edge.

Seasons 1 and 2 followed a regular two-episode formula arc, from the introduction of the villain to the meeting with the commissioner through the cliffhanger to the escape and on to the defeat of the bad guy. But season three exchanges the two-parters for single episodes, and throws in the addition of Batgirl as an extra bonus crimefighter. The result is a plot that see-saws widely every which way. The Riddler pretends to be the prizefighter Mushi Nebuchudnezzer, drugs various prizefighters, wheels Joan Collins out as a super-villainness who sings a high-pitched note to mind-control other prizefighters, calls Batman a coward to lure him into a fight, uses magnets, tries to mind control Batgirl, fails, and connives with a sports reporter as the narrative veers back and forth between Batgirl running around and Batman and Robin running around, with a brief interlude for Dick Grayson’s aunt Harriet Cooper to explain that she’s been traveling abroad. The winking, knowing humor of the first two seasons dissolves into manic idiocy, summed up by Frank Gorshin bouncing and bobbing around the prize-fighting ring, looking punch-drunk one moment, walking into Batman’s fist the next, gleefully punching the magnetized Caped Crusader from behind in the third.

I guess it’s possible that the show’s creators were nervous about the threat of a female crime fighter and were trying to carefully maintain patriarchal order. But that’s not what happens. Instead, the introduction of Batgirl coincides with a show going utterly off the rails. Batman, who in earlier seasons has every answer at his bat-gloves’ finger-tips, now seems to be almost drowning in the whirlwind of plot. He doesn’t know who Batgirl is, and barely seems to know what he’s doing as he thrashes around in the ring with the Riddler until Batgirl demagnetizes him. In the next episode, (featuring Joan Collins again in a skirt so short it’s amazing it got past the censors) Batman, who has been resistant to the blandishments of all other villainnesses, has his Batbrain scrambled, and has to be rescued by Batgirl and Robin.

I wouldn’t say this is some sort of programmatic feminist message. But the first two seasons of Batman always carefully balanced celebrating the superhero as all powerful fuddy-duddy force of order and mocking him for being an all powerful fuddy-duddy force for order. In season three, the female crimefighter arrives, and the fuddy-duddy force for order experiences some sort of apocalyptic bat seizure. System disintegrates; super-villains profligately flock together, Bruce Wayne’s will, heretofore inviolable, is mushed by the exigencies of plot and the power of Joan Collins.

Most of the mix up is no doubt a simple the failure of capital, as cratering popularity and slashed budgets undermined the Wayne fortune and the shows’ shooting budget. But part of it is, too, the addition of that Domino Daredoll. Spending narrative time with the Batgirl-cycle may not topple the patriarchy, but it at least leaves it in massive disarray.
 

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