Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Darkest Knight: The Gothic Roots of Batman Comics

2020; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/711341

2328-207X

Thomas Andrae,

Cinema History and Criticism

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Darkest Knight: The Gothic Roots of Batman ComicsThomas AndraeThomas Andrae Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAppearing in Detective Comics no. 27 (May 1939), “The Bat-Man,” as he was then called, was unlike anything seen before in comic books. With long, prominent ears that looked disturbingly like satanic horns and enormous batwings for a cape, Batman was initially as menacing as any of the villains he faced. Although Superman’s fight against injustice was based on altruistic motives, Batman’s war on crime emanated from vengeance for the murder of his parents during a robbery. Though usually unacknowledged in this way, Batman was the first major gothic superhero in comic books.The initial inspiration for Batman came from Bob Kane, a young cartoonist barely in his twenties. Kane began his career drawing humorous comics for the Eisner-Iger Studio. He continued drawing humor strips for DC Comics as well as two adventure features, the kid strip Rusty and His Pals, and Clip Carson, about a globetrotting soldier of fortune. Kane was a novice at drawing adventure strips when he first drew Batman. Consequently, his art was cartoony and lacked a grasp of human anatomy and perspective. But his style was perfect for creating a surreal atmosphere of bizarre menace. Kane depicted a world of malice and derangement by drawing on techniques similar to those used in the German expressionist films of the 1920s, noted for employing a nonrealist mise-en-scène that expressed characters’ unbalanced mental states. Kane innovated in his use of weird angle shots, brooding dark shadows and chiaroscuro, eerie moonlit landscapes, and grotesque villains, creating a noir style for comic books preceding the development of film noir in 1940s American cinema.Kane was aided in the development of Batman by writer Bill Finger. Finger not only wrote detailed scripts specifying various angle shots and other visual effects but also was instrumental in developing Batman’s costume and much of the Bat mythos we are familiar with today, including most of Batman’s bizarre cast of villains. Kane’s art and Finger’s scripts melded together a mélange of influences from crime-mystery pulp magazines and films, horror films, and the athletic exploits of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in The Mark of Zorro (1920). Giving Kane stills of Fairbanks’s exuberant athletics, Finger helped to make Batman into an acrobatic hero, a dynamic counterpoint to the darkness of plot and character. Finger was so instrumental to Batman that he must be considered the Caped Crusader’s cocreator.According to literary critic Fred Botting, “[a] negative aesthetic informs Gothic fiction.”1 Gothic was a counterdiscourse to the dominant paradigm of the Enlightenment, which stressed reason, science, and technology as the means for attaining freedom and human progress.2 Instead of the clarity of reason and knowledge, the gothic emphasized dreams and hallucinations as well as negative emotions: fear, terror, horror, and disgust. The gothic emphasized transgression, excess, violence, and perversity, a rebellion against norms by those assumed to be monsters, deviants, and villains. However, the gothic was not a unified discourse, but was ambivalent; in gothic texts, monsters and villains were both frightening and repulsive as well as fascinating and exciting— fear and desire so intermingled as to be identical.The gothic genre reached a peak during the nineteenth century. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818) embodied the Romantic trope of the Faustian over-seeker destroyed by his creation. The genre culminated in the late Victorian era with the publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). These novels formed a trilogy of archetypes that became the basis for the emergence of the modern American horror film in the 1930s. Appearing during the nadir of the Great Depression, horror films encoded the fear, confusion, and deflation of that period. Variants of all three cinematic archetypes appeared in early Batman comics.Detective Comics nos. 31–32 (September and October 1939) featured a two-part Batman story (fig. 1) about his fight against a mysterious red-robed-and-hooded villain called the Monk, who turned out to be both a vampire and a werewolf. The story was written by DC scripter Gardner Fox, who took over Batman-writing chores for Detective Comics nos. 29–34, perhaps because Finger had trouble getting scripts in. The story was influenced by the 1931 Dracula film, in which the count travels from Transylvania to London in order not only to find fresh blood to sate his thirst, but also to colonize it in order to feed his ever-growing flock of vampires. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula was noted for his commanding gaze that put his victims into a trance. Similarly, the Monk commands victims with his hypnotic gaze, almost turning Julie Madison, Bruce Wayne’s fiancée, into a murderer and temporarily immobilizing Batman. The hypnotic trance was a metaphor for the irruption of id-like impulses and tabooed behavior from the victim’s unconscious. The story invokes fears of gender breakdown and inversion. Like Dracula, it contrasts two women, one good, one evil: Julie, who is domestic and passive, a damsel in distress who is often depicted in a trance state and has to be rescued by Batman; and Dala, a masculinized female, who is aggressive and destructive. Dala turns out to be one of the Monk’s vampires, who has fanged Julie, fools Batman into trusting her, then knocks him out. Capturing the Dark Knight, the Monk threatens to turn Julie into a werewolf, but Batman escapes the Monk’s insidious death traps and kills the two vampires by firing silver bullets into them while they sleep in their coffins. The story encodes a familiar form of gender transgression, but unlike Stoker’s novel and the filmic Dracula, the comic tale evacuates suggestions of unleashed female sexuality. Rather, it is the threat of gender identity destabilization that is at issue: that Julie would become a werewolf and run with the Monk’s wolf pack. Symbolically, it is the threat that the normative domestic woman should become wild, assertive, and free—independent of marriage, motherhood, and familial patriarchal control.Fig. 1. Cover of Detective Comics, no. 31 (September 1939), featuring Batman versus the Monk.Late Victorian texts voiced post-Darwinian fears of atavism, that there was a savage “beast” within each individual and that humans could revert to the supposedly primitive remnants of their primordial ancestors.3 The psyche was perceived to be a battlefield between good and evil, reason and instinct, human and animal. Appropriately, vampires and werewolves are hybrid identities, part human and part animal, encoding the fear of regressing to one’s “animal instincts,” and a fear of both one’s emotions and the body. According to social Darwinism, racial Others were believed to be inferior to whites on the evolutionary scale and therefore closer to humans’ “primitive” forebears, just as males were believed to be superior to women in rationality and control over their emotions. Batman battles a parade of violent, savage ethnic stereotypes in this era, including giant Indians and Mongols, Chinese masterminds and drug lords, Tong hatchet men, Hindu cult worshipers, and others. White upper-class males like Bruce Wayne were thought to exemplify the highest level of rationality and self-control. Kane modeled the look of Batman on Lugosi’s Dracula,4 and the Dark Knight functions as a double of the villains he fights. He represents the acme of heroic development by being able to both access the savage, primoradial instincts manifested by villains and direct his violent impulses solely against criminals.The Depression saw the male’s authority and power in the family and society greatly diminished as a result of widespread poverty and unemployment. Although supposedly only a disguise, the Bruce Wayne identity emblematizes the feminization of masculinity during the 1930s: he is an enervated, ambitionless, wealthy playboy. Batman is his inverse: virile, muscular, athletic, and passionately dedicated to justice and combating evil. His hypermasculinity enables him to counter fears surrounding the male loss of agency, power, and identity. Although he is highly vulnerable and, in contrast to Superman, can be injured and killed, Batman is able to free himself from villains’ death traps due to his athletic skills, willpower, and American know-how—an armory of high-tech weapons including the Batgyro (an early Batplane), Batarang (boomerang), gas pellets, and silken rope.The story exemplifies what critics call reverse colonization. Victorians had a fear of racial degeneration, and of the British Empire’s disintegration. As a result, Gothic texts registered a fear that Britain might be subject to invasion and colonization just as it had invaded and colonized other peoples. Dracula comes from eastern Europe, encoding Orientalist fears of immigrants into the tale. The Batman story maps these gothic figures onto a late-1930s America still bedeviled by the Depression and staunchly isolationist in its beliefs, fearing entanglement in another world war. It recasts fears about demons and monsters and racial outsiders into xenophobic anxiety. A panel in Detective Comics no. 31 shows a mass panic as the city dwellers below mistakenly perceive Batman’s auto gyro as a giant bat that inaugurates an invasion of Martians and the coming of doomsday. This scene references Orson Welles’s famed War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which caused widespread panic in 1938. This mass hysteria was partly due to a recent war scare in eastern Europe that erupted into a full-scale war with Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, barely a month after Detective Comics no. 31 appeared.5Outlaw heroes and monster films had been very popular during the Depression, a time of mass disillusionment with the political and economic systems. On the surface, early Batman stories seem to be conservative law-and-order melodramas in which a virtuous hero brings evil villains to justice and restores social order. Covertly, however, these tales offered readers a measure of subversive pleasure: flamboyant, fascinating villains like the Joker mock and best legal authority, rob the rich, and (because he is a recurring villain) commit crimes seemingly without any lasting punishment by the law. Even the early Batman was an outlaw sought by the police. These narratives grew not only out of the type of ambivalence toward villains invoked in gothic stories but also out of Finger’s tortured psyche. Many of Batman’s villains were Finger’s alter egos, expressing his tortured feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing as the uncredited and underpaid cocreator of Batman. Finger had a passive-aggressive personality and expressed in his work what he feared doing in real life. Clayface, a Batman villain inspired by The Phantom of the Opera, was a Finger alter ego, embodying his resentments about his editors. Appearing in Detective Comics no. 40 (June 1940), the story is about a famous horror film star named Basil Karlo, who secretly kills off the cast of a movie he was excluded from starring in because he got into scrapes that garnered bad publicity and a fall in popularity at the box office. Thus, he was considered to be unhireable by his director, an allusion to DC’s view of Finger, who was considered “unreliable” by his editors because he was notoriously tardy with scripts. Karlo’s displacement by other stars mirrors Finger’s fears that he could be replaced by other writers on Batman. Finger’s villains often embodied dark emotions readers could identify with. For example, Clayface’s desire for vengeance toward his employers deeply resonated with Depression-era audiences facing displacement and unemployment. Revenge became a recurring theme of many Batman stories, even forming the basis of Batman’s origin as a crime fighter after his parents’ deaths.The early Batman brutally killed or threatened to kill his foes, often in grisly ways. In Batman no. 1 (Spring 1940), Professor Hugo Strange, a mad scientist, drugs docile patients in an insane asylum and turns them into huge, raving monsters similar in appearance and character to the monster in the movie Frankenstein (1931). Finger also drew on another classic horror film for his plot: in a swipe from the movie King Kong (1933), a monster tears down an elevated train as he rampages through Lower Manhattan, mimicking the behavior of the giant ape in that film. But unlike Kong, the monster’s attack in the Batman story is only a ruse enabling Strange to capture Batman and to send his monsters to loot the city’s banks. However, Batman escapes and, flying in his Batplane, kills most of them with machine-gun blasts, then lassoes an escapee with his rope (fig. 2). In a series of gruesome images, the monster is strangled as he struggles to free himself.Fig. 2. Batman hanging a monster, from Batman, no. 1 (Spring 1940).Finger uses the image of these Frankenstein-like monsters to represent primitive bestiality. They are “normal” humans who become raging beasts through an atavistic irruption of primitive “animal” instincts which take over their psyches. The monsters are emblems of subaltern groups and even wear the clunky workman’s boots and ragged clothing worn by the filmic monster, also suggesting an image of an impoverished underclass. The monsters symbolize the fears of social unrest and militancy by downtrodden groups contesting the social order during the Depression. At this time, the United States was experiencing demonstrations by the unemployed, resistance to home evictions, and other forms of direct action by the populace. Social movements advocating a radical restructuring of wealth from rich to poor drew huge numbers of members. And a resurgence of labor activism led to a wave of strikes and workers’ takeovers of factories. These were often led by socialists and communists and accompanied by violence. Some came to believe that these struggles would lead to industrial warfare between the classes—even the possibility of revolution.The association of political activism and labor unrest with forms of savagery and anarchy has a long history.6 Indeed, Shelley’s novel Frankenstein was written in the wake of fears of the violence of the revolutionary mob conjured up by the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, in which many thousands of supposed counterrevolutionaries were imprisoned and many guillotined.7 These events were discussed by Shelley’s parents, utopian social reformer William Godwin and pioneering women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. At the same time, Shelley presents the creature as an oppressed, alienated figure rejected by his creator and by society because of his grotesque appearance. Thus, the novel is critical of the institutions of law, religion, and the bourgeois family that drive the creature to rebellion and revenge.The Batman story contains no such nuances. In another reference to action in King Kong, the last monster climbs an Empire State–like skyscraper, then the summit of modern America. Batman shoots it from a machine gun mounted on his Batplane, but the bullets cannot penetrate the monster’s armored clothes. Batman then pummels it with asphyxiating gas pellets, and it topples and falls to its doom. Ironically, the killings of the monsters are arguably unnecessary because Batman had already created an antidote that would reverse the drug’s effects on them. Rather they pose such dangers to capitalism—and civilization itself—that it requires military technology from World War I (aerial bombardment from machine-gun fire and lethal gas) to ultimately contain them. Although both the Frankenstein monster and Kong had been sympathetic characters in their original contexts, the monsters here are subhuman brutes fit only for extermination.After the story’s appearance, Kane and Finger were told never to have Batman carry a gun again or to kill anyone. As Kane recalls, “The editorial policy was to bring [Batman] over to the side of the law and get away from the vigilante he originally was and not to carry a gun. They thought that this was more in keeping with the social mores of the times and making him a murderer would taint his character. The policy was to make him an honorary member of the police force who was outside the law but still working within it. The whole moral climate changed after 1940–1941—you couldn’t kill or shoot villains.”8 Batman’s use of a gun resulted in DC creating its own in-house censorship code which every writer and artist had to follow. Among other rules, it stated that there should be no whippings, no hangings, no knifings, and no sexual references in stories. Even the word “flick” was prohibited because DC editors feared the letters might be merged together in the printed copy.In Detective Comics no. 38 (April 1940), Finger and Kane added Robin, the Boy Wonder, to the Batman strip in order “to humanize Batman” and to add more complexity to the plots.9 The first major Boy Wonder in comics, Robin was such a hit that it became de rigueur for new comic book superheroes to have a young sidekick. The addition of Robin significantly altered the tone of the stories, transforming Batman from a grim, menacing vigilante to a father figure to Robin, who had become his ward. After Robin was created, Batman became less a creature of the night. His ears were shortened, making him look less satanic, and he smiled more, rather than being dour and hostile.As Batman became less sinister in the early 1940s, the villains in the strip assumed more importance, in effect becoming leading men (and a leading woman). With the first appearance of the Joker and the Catwoman (called the Cat here) in Batman no. 1, Kane and Finger launched a rogue’s gallery of recurring bizarre villains who would supplant the ethnic stereotypes and recycled horror movie monsters of the 1930s. These villains continued to tap into the gothic ambience of earlier nemeses and the ambivalent emotional appeal of the monstrous Other to readers’ fears and desires.Finger also innovated in creating several sympathetic villains who were victims themselves. These stories destabilized the good/evil binary of most superhero narratives, giving Batman’s antagonists a voice through the development of significant backstories. Although preceding them, they were much like the fatal males of film noir, who were doomed by their own self-destructive impulses and a hostile environment.In “The Ugliest Man in the World” (Batman no. 3, Fall 1940), a student is accidentally given a serum during a fraternity hazing that transforms him into a grotesque-looking monster whom everyone rejects and reviles because of his ugliness. He takes revenge by hunting down those who were at the hazing and injecting them with the serum, threatening to do the same to the fiancée who rejected him. This turns the group into an “ugly horde” intent on destroying all forms of beauty. Dick Grayson says that he understands why the ugly man went insane, and Bruce Wayne comments that “the blame lies with those who caused his tragic plight” and that they should have “understood and sympathized.” This villain was also a Finger alter ego: Finger’s writing partner Charles Sinclair notes that Finger had teeth so crooked that he was shy about smiling and had all his front teeth capped in the mid-1960s.10Finger returned to this theme in the story of Two-Face, a Jekyll-and-Hyde character. Handsome district attorney Harvey Kent (later changed to Dent) has half his face horribly deformed by acid thrown at him by a criminal he was prosecuting. He is shunned by society, and even his fiancée Gilda, a sculptor who worships beauty, cannot bear to look at him. As in many noir films, he is doomed by fate: he makes chance his guide and decides to be good or evil on the whim of a coin toss (fig. 3).11Fig. 3. Cover of Batman, no. 50 (December 1948–January 1949), featuring Two-Face. The image shows his divided face, reflecting the two sides of his personality.Rather than simply a demonic menace, Two-Face is a tragic figure who longs to have his face repaired and to regain the love of the faithful Gilda, whom he mistakenly believes no longer loves him. It is his rejection by society, and its irrational and discriminatory equation that conflates ugliness with evil (and social norms that equate beauty with goodness), that leads Dent to become evil and turn to a life of crime. Here Finger destabilizes our notions of normality, showing them to be arbitrary conventions, and suggests that we have based our notions of morality solely on appearances and the assumptions we make about what they indicate. Appropriately, Batman fights the villain over a huge image of his face on the movie screen, thematizing the notion that struggles over good and evil in popular culture are displaced onto struggles between those who appear good and those who look monstrous.Two-Face’s doubleness reflected the tortured existence of a writer who had cocreated a comic book icon yet was denied credit and appropriate remuneration and was routinely humiliated by his editors, resulting in his self-loathing. Finger’s fascination with duality may also have stemmed from his existence as an assimilated Jew writing in a medium in which the heroes were all Anglo-Saxons, where anti-Semitic stereotypes and discrimination were rife, and where Jews were portrayed as pathological, even monstrous. Indeed, Finger changed his first name from Milton to Bill because he believed he would be discriminated against because of a Jewish-sounding name.12By the early 1940s, Batman tales had lost the dark, expressionistic look that had first characterized them, becoming more illustrative in design as other artists took over more of the art from Kane. Simultaneously, the villains in the strip were sanitized. Kane left the comic book Batman in mid-1943 to work on the Batman daily strip. In 1946, after the strip’s demise, he returned to work on Batman comics with the aid of several ghost artists, and the latter were responsible for most of the art from the early 1950s through the late 1960s. Kane retired in 1966 to focus on fine art. A year later, he received a purported million-dollar buyout from DC. In Kane’s original contract with DC, he had signed away ownership rights of the character in exchange for monetary compensation and a sole mandatory byline on all Batman comics and adaptations. In contrast, Bill Finger received limited acknowledgment for his scriptwriting in the Batman comic book only in the 1960s. His name appeared, for example, on the letters page of Batman no. 169 (February 1965), where editor Julius Schwartz named Finger as the creator of the Riddler, one of Batman’s recurring villains. Finger died in 1974, alone and in poverty. However, in 2015, thanks to a public outcry spearheaded by writer Marc Tyler Nobleman and Finger’s granddaughter Athena, Bill finally gained cocreator status on Batman, and the Finger estate received a financial settlement from Warner Bros.13 It was a long-overdue correction to one of comic books’ greatest injustices.Notes1. Fred Botting, Gothic, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2014), 2.2. Ibid., 11–13.3. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).4. Thomas Andrae, Creators of the Superheroes (Neshannock, PA: Hermes Press, 2011), 57.5. John Gosling, Waging the War of the Worlds: A History of the Broadcast and Resulting Panic, Including the Original Radio Script (Jefferson, SC: McFarland, 2009).6. See Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992).7. Botting, Gothic, 94.8. Kane quoted in Andrae, Creators of the Superheroes, 66.9. Andrae, Creators of the Superheroes, 66.10. Jim Amash, “You Two Ought to Do Something Together: Charles Sinclair on His Partnership—and Friendship—with Bill Finger; An Interview with Charles Sinclair,” Alter Ego, no. 84 (March 2009): 43.11. “The Crimes of Two-Face,” Detective Comics, no. 66 (August 1942).12. Marc Tyler Nobleman, Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman (Watertown, MA: Charlesbridge, 2012), 3.13. Batman & Bill, directed by Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce, released May 6, 2017, on Hulu, https://www.hulu.com. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 40, Number 1Fall 2020The Comics Issue Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711341 © 2020 by Bard Graduate Center. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.