The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

I think it’s only right and proper that there should be an animated debate around the 12A Certificate awarded to the latest Batman movie, Batman: The Dark Knight.  It is, after all, a dark and Gothic tale, and the title and Heath Ledger’s terrifying turn as the Joker, alludes to that.  Will the 12 year-olds from a country with one of the highest murder rates in the developed world become more violent as a result of watching this movie?  I doubt it.  (maybe it will traumatise some youngsters though, serve the parents right for brining in too-young kids to talk all though the damned film – Joe) But I think the debate is welcome, as its very presence signifies that we have completely moved away from the tame, camp, and colourful version of the Batman that saw Adam West grace our Bat-screens every week at the same Bat-time on the same Bat-channel, back in the day.  Not that I didn’t love that Batman TV series and Bat movie at the time.  I did.  I was a Batman fanatic, with my own variation of the costume.  I was a super-hero nerd.

(the Batman Black and White Bob Kane statue, (c) DC)

I was intrigued by masks.  Every weekend when I was growing up the Saturday Matinee bill was full of masked people: The Scarlet Horseman, Zorro, The Lone Ranger, Rocketman, and my favourite, The Batman.  Intriguingly, many of the baddies also wore masks; all the baddies in the cowboy movies wore their neckerchiefs over the lower halves of their faces to mask their wicked deeds, and Batman regularly took on some masked nemesis or other.  The mask kept all their true identities secret, it was hard, at times, to tell the good guys from the bad guys – which was possibly, on reflection, a good lesson to learn.

(the Batman serial from 1943, Copyright, © 1943, Columbia TriStar)

Of all these characters, only The Batman continues to have any meaningful cultural impact, and the Batman, from the series, made in 1943 (it ran in UK cinemas for years throughout the 1960s in matinee shows), looks remarkably like the template for Batman today, with no Bat-signal yellow disc surrounding the Bat-logo on his vest, and a very dark, bat-like cowl.  Of course he drove a Cadillac, rather than a Batmobile – but it was the way he drove that mattered.  Also, in a strange way, it too was masked, with the soft-top down Bruce Wayne was at the wheel, and with the top up, the car carried The Batman.  And that Batman, the 1943 Batman, carried more menace than the Batman from the 1960s, and had more in common with Tim Burton’s movie Batman of 1989 and Christopher Nolan’s Batman: The Dark Knight, mainly because all these visions of Batman, like the 1943 serial contained more elements of the original 1939 comic book character than the 1960s pop art, version.

It’s easy today to pick out elements of the story of Batman that came from existing ideas, you can see a bit of The Scarlet Pimpernel, a little Sherlock Holmes, a touch of The Shadow, some Tarzan, a bit of The Bat and much Pulp sensibility.  Kane himself credited Zorro, Leonardo Da Vinci’s bat-like flying machine, and the 1930 film The Bat Whispers as influences, but that is how these ideas work, there is, as they say, nothing new under the Sun.  It is how these characters are combined in a new way that matters.

Much more irritating is the attempt, in some circles to almost remove Bob Kane’s input from the mix, and that is quite ridiculous.  If you take away any other characters, including Bill Finger, who joined Bob Kane’s studio in 1938, as a writer, after meeting Kane at a party and being offered a job ghost writing the strips Rusty and Clip Carson, you still have Bob Kane coming up with his idea of a Batman.  Of course the character may well have looked entirely different; in his autobiography, written in 1989, Kane admits that:

“One day I called Bill and said, ‘I have a new character called the Bat-Man and I’ve made some crude, elementary sketches I’d like you to look at’… I only had a small domino mask, like the one Robin later wore, on Batman’s face. Bill said, ‘Why not make him look more like a bat and put a hood on him, and take the eyeballs out and just put slits for eyes to make him look more mysterious?’ At this point, the Bat-Man wore a red union suit; the wings, trunks, and mask were black…Bill said that the costume was too bright: ‘Color it dark gray to make it look more ominous’. The cape looked like two stiff bat wings attached to his arms…we realized that these wings would get cumbersome when Bat-Man was in action, and changed them into a cape, scalloped to look like bat wings when he was fighting or swinging down on a rope… and we added them(gloves) so that he wouldn’t leave fingerprints.”

Kane would later express regret that Finger wasn’t given a co-creator credit for his input, honouring him as ‘a contributing force on Batman right from the beginning’ and praising him for being ‘influential in setting the style and genre’ of the comic.  Certainly there can be no denying that Bill Finger’s input was essential, suggesting Batman’s cowl instead of the domino mask, a cape instead of wings, removing the red sections from the original costume, and of course creating an explanation of why Batman exists.  It was Finger who came up with the name Bruce Wayne, an amalgam of Scotland’s Robert the Bruce and Mad Anthony Wayne, so his input was clearly invaluable.  For my purposes though, it is worth noting that whilst Bill Finger played a large part in the creation of The Batman’s more menacing look, he also played a large part in softening the character by moving Batman away from Kane’s vision of a superhero-vigilante and turning the character into a scientific detective; and by introducing Robin the Boy Wonder, both testaments to Finger’s appreciation of Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Doctor Watson; and both elements that detracted from the darker, Gothic elements of The Batman’s character.

“Robin was an outgrowth of a conversation I had with Bob… Holmes had his Watson. The thing that bothered me was that Batman didn’t have anyone to talk to, and it got a little tiresome always having him thinking. I found that as I went along Batman needed a Watson to talk to. That’s how Robin came to be.”

For me, Kane’s interpretation of the character remains the best interpretation of The Batman.  Kane’s Batman had more panels, and was drawn smaller than all the other characters in Detective Comic #27, and yet that 6-page inaugural episode was the most dramatic, most visually arresting, story in the comic book, and its impression lingers long in the memory.  It comes as no surprise to me, that there is a notable inclination amongst all the more recent Batman artists, and movie makers, to model their characters not on the later ‘ghosted’ illustrations of the character, but on the original drawings of Bob Kane himself.  And although these drawings are often referred to as ‘crude’ and ‘rudimentary’- sounding eerily reminiscent of the criticisms Siegel and Shuster had to put up with while they were working on Superman – it is not a view shared by the many of today’s Bat-fans, or by illustrators like Jerry Robinson, one of the art assistants Kane hired when DC wanted more Batman stories than Kane’s studio could deliver.

(Millennium Edition, Detective Comics 27, Copyright ©, 2000 DC Comics)

The massive success of the character, and the merchandising opportunities that success afforded, was surely at least part of the reason The Batman began to veer so drastically away from the original vision of a ruthless, masked, vigilante.  As ‘ghost artists’ like Dick Sprang, drawing unaccredited under Kane’s supervision, and writers like Gardner Fox, created a more child-friendly super hero with a heavy emphasis on Batman’s super arsenal of Bat-toys, the character became less of a dark, night-time avenger, and more of a primary coloured day-time hero.

It should be no surprise that Kane’s drawings are still popular, he was, after all, an accomplished and skilful illustrator, who studied art at Cooper Union, and the Art Students League, and then spent time at the Max Fleischer Studio as a trainee animator, before, in 1936, he began producing original comic characters for Wow, What A Magazine!.  About a year later, he joined one of the first ‘comic book packagers’ (a company producing comics on demand for publishers), Eisner & Iger, where he created the impressively dark Peter Pupp, and during this period he would also produce work for the companies that would later merge to form DC Comics, where his creation, The Batman, would debut.

It is not just the look of the character that has endured; the original Bat-vision has too.  In addition to the Bat-costume, all the elements of the Gothic that persist in the story today existed in that debut, and the initial episodes.  Bruce Wayne had a dark doppelganger that haunted the night-time streets of Gotham City, and crept around in a secret bat-ridden passage-way that ran underground between Wayne Manor and an old barn.  Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego was a dark and troubled double, a brooding, masked, vigilante who found justice inefficient, and took the law into his own hands, much to the chagrin of Gotham City’s police department and politicians.

(Millennium Edition, Detective Comics 27, Copyright ©, 2000 DC Comics)

In the first ever Batman story, The Case of the Chemical Syndicate, Batman was pure Pulp, showing no remorse for the criminals he killed and maimed, using whatever weapon came to hand and the police and politicians of Gotham City, and indeed the real people in the real world outside comics, who thought The Batman a bad role model, had a very good point.  That is exactly what he was, and remains, providing people stick to the original template.  The Batman is, after all, a transgressor, a tyrant, a self-appointed judge and jury.  A wealthy socialite and playboy during the day, in the rational world, he becomes a brutal force of nature when night falls on Gotham City’s landscape.  In this respect, Batman is the quintessential Gothic outsider, and the reader can enjoy the terrors and horrors of his transgression, whilst questioning the right of one man to place his judgement above that of others; allowing all the readers themselves to become armchair-vigilantes who rejoice in dispatching the evil doers with extreme prejudice.

Whilst Batman’s exotic villains undoubtedly add to the mix, it is the bare-bones story that continues to thrill, because no matter how many times it is revisited, it adheres to the classic Gothic template.  The Batman’s story produces an uncanny experience for the reader by revisiting the classic Gothic tropes recast to embody and invoke many of the cultural anxieties of the early 20th Century mind; an alienating landscape, in this case Chicago with its dark alleyways and rampant mob murders, a wild untamed forest, represented by the cloud-bursting skyscrapers, and a castle-like building, Wayne-manor, with hidden passageways and hidden chambers.  And it is possible, as Gothic fiction centred on the Southern States of America often focuses on a grand house and an established Southern family disintegrating and decomposing, that the politicians of Gotham represent that decomposing ‘grand house’ and society itself that established disintegrating family.

The “I” of the Gothic tale, the narrator at the heart of the story, is always deserving of special attention and that is especially so in this case.  Is Bruce Wayne a reliable narrator?  He was surely driven at least half-mad in the history that Bill Finger created for him.

(Batman Comics 1, Copyright ©, DC Comics)

It was, surely, at the very least, traumatic when in Gotham’s increasingly lawless streets, young master Bruce Wayne stood by helplessly as his parents were gunned down in cold blood, in front of his eyes, in a robbery.  Just how deep is that scar?  And how brutal was the writer when, as a Gothic plot device intended to create an emotional response in the reader, he orphaned the boy?   The tale of the Batman’s birth is surely one of the most brutal in comicdom.  Forget the story about the fortuitous bat that flies into Bruce Wayne’s room one evening years later, The Batman’s bloody delivery into the world took place in that filth-strewn back alleyway of Gotham, and in that moment, the young Bruce Wayne’s psyche was split in two.

The inspiration of the look of the Joker in Batman: The Dark Knight, supposedly goes back even further than the first Batman story, back to a silent classic made in 1928.  According to Bob Kane, Bill Finger and he created the Joker.  Finger had been to a lot of the foreign films and when he saw the early drawings of a character he remarked that it looked like Conrad Veidt from the movie The Man Who Laughs. A movie, incidentally, based on a story by Victor Hugo about Gwynplaine, whose face has been mutilated into a clown’s mask, his mouth carved into a perpetual grin.  Kane said “He (Finger) took in a movie book with a photograph of Conrad Veidt and showed it to me and said, ‘Here’s the Joker’. Jerry Robinson had absolutely nothing to do with it. But he’ll always say he created it till he dies. He brought in a playing card, which we used for a couple of issues for (the character) to use as his playing card”.

(Conrad Veidt, from The Man Who Laughs, 1928)

The latest Batman movie isn’t perfect, but it is a scary rollercoaster ride, and Heath Ledger is brilliant and terrifying as the Joker.  The thing about The Batman though, is that unlike other major Gothic tales, the story of Batman has been revised and rewritten time and time again, and yet it endures; and more recently it has gone back to its original roots.  At its heart, it is a dark, dark, tale, and at the very end, instead of choosing the rooftops that represent the Sublime, the Batman chooses to head deep into the forest of the city because that is what is required.  It is just another sacrifice for someone who has nothing left but his own sense of duty and personal morality.  No matter what form the story takes or how the adventure twists and turns from here on in, at the heart of its darkness is the story of a young boy whose parents were cruelly taken from him before he could really get to know them, and before they could see what sort of man he would become.

Internationally published cartoonist Rod has a regularly updated blog which you can check out, and for more information and a glimpse at some of his many works visit Rodtoons and enjoy browsing the gallery.