Geek book of the week: The many faces of Batman
As the early and mostly negative reviews of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice crash-landed on Earth Tuesday evening, the DC fan community descended into civil war. Not the fun, joke-filled Iron Man vs. Captain America type of Civil War, either, but full-throated nerd rage.
At the center of this conflict: an argument about exactly who Bats and Supes are supposed to be, and whether this latest on-screen portrayal had captured their essence -- or whether director Zack Snyder had betrayed our two oldest and most venerated superheroes.
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So there's no better time to stop, relax, take a breath and read NPR critic Glen Weldon's history of Batman, The Caped Crusade, which also landed Tuesday -- and is our second pick for Geek Book of the Week.
Because here, in these entertaining pages, you will discover that nerd rage over the Dark Knight is nothing new. In fact, fans have been arguing over exactly who Batman is, what he should be doing, how he should be doing it and who he should be doing it with from the very beginning.
Batman wears many faces. He is both a superhero in tights and a gritty detective. He's Adam West and Ben Affleck. He's both heterosexual and kinda gay, and that's okay. He's a grown man who likes to surround himself with young boys, and he's a haunted loner who occasionally tangos with a dominatrix in a cat costume.
It is impossible to read this book and conclude that Batman is not all these at once. Does he contradict himself? Why, then he contradicts himself. He is vast; he contains multitudes.
The dark and gritty reboots didn't start with Christopher Nolan. Batman was dark and gritty to begin with, sadistic enough to throw villains down stairs and cackle while he was doing it. Then he added Robin the Boy Wonder to his roster, and the ambiguous imagery was enough to alarm the anti-comics campaigners.
In the wake of a Congressional witch hunt against comics in the '50s, the Batman comics got a bit silly (think spaceships and Bat-Dogs). The extended Bat Family got so large that it was like an episode of Fuller Bat House.
The 1966-68 Batman TV show was sillier still. Though it brought millions of mainstream fans to the franchise -- Weldon calls them the Normals -- the nerds loathed it, loudly, even in the pre-Internet comments section age.
As did the comic book writers. So much so that the comic Batman was rebooted for the first (but far from the last) time in 1970 -- darker, grittier and sans Robin.
The 1989 Tim Burton blockbuster version was widely loathed by comic nerds, as was Burton's sequel. The two Joel Schumacher movies in the 1990s -- Batman Forever and Batman and Robin -- helped spawn one of the Internet's earliest hissy fits, in part because Schumacher chose to embrace the ambiguous Bat-sexuality. He also made the infamous mistake of adding bat-nipples to the Bat-costume.
In fact, you start to get the notion that to be a true Batman fan you have to hate almost everything about Batman. (I've made a similar point about Star Wars fans in the past.) There are roughly three iterations of the character that won universal praise: Nolan's Dark Knight (the other Nolan movies, not so much), Batman: the Animated Series and Frank Miller's classic 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns (though nobody liked the 2001 sequel).
Given the giant Batarangs of bat-hatred over the years, the fact that Ben Affleck's portrayal of Bruce Wayne is winning praise -- in a generally not-praiseworthy movie -- is a minor miracle.
As much as Weldon likes to get into the weeds -- and he does, citing back issues of Detective Comics like they're chapter and verse -- he's also a healthy skeptic. He sees clearly everything Batman has ever been, good and bad, and he's happy to tell you all about it in a breezy, friendly voice.
He doesn't fail to point out, for example, that the superhero he has loved his entire life has been surrounded by a shocking amount of plagiarism. Batman, Weldon reminds us, was largely ripped off by Bob Kane and Bill Finger from a radio serial character called The Shadow, and amalgamated from a host of prior comic book characters -- including one simply called The Bat.
In the early years, Kane even lifted panels from other comics casually, like they were boxes of chocolates: Don't mind if I do.
The very first Batman comic stole its story from a Shadow book called Partners in Peril. So it seems entirely appropriate that the Batman TV pilot was casually ripped off from a Batman comic, word for word.
Yet at the same time, because this is self-contradictory Batman we're talking about, the character is also surprisingly original. He was the first superhero to ever introduce a sidekick, for one thing; a year after Robin arrived, every muscle-bound man in tights had a kid along for the ride. Sorry, Bucky, you're a rip-off too.
And then there's The Oath, the one part of Batman lore where Weldon sheds his amused and neutral geek expression. The Oath that's taken by young Bruce Wayne in his first origin story -- to avenge his parents "by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals" -- is the one thing absolutely essential to the character, Weldon says.
The key words here are "rest of my life." Batman knows he can never win the war on crime; he's just never going to give up trying. He's a pathological obsessive, Weldon insists, and would never think of hanging up his cape the way Christopher Nolan suggested he might.
Batman, in all his guises, is as obsessive and geeky about defeating crime as his fans are obsessive and geeky about denying all versions of Batman they don't like.
In a nutshell, that's why this character will always be with us, no matter what happens to Batman v Superman at the box office. He is both society's darkest shadow, and its brightest light.
Chris is a veteran tech, entertainment and culture journalist, author of 'How Star Wars Conquered the Universe,' and co-host of the Doctor Who podcast 'Pull to Open.' Hailing from the U.K., Chris got his start as a sub editor on national newspapers. He moved to the U.S. in 1996, and became senior news writer for Time.com a year later. In 2000, he was named San Francisco bureau chief for Time magazine. He has served as senior editor for Business 2.0, and West Coast editor for Fortune Small Business and Fast Company. Chris is a graduate of Merton College, Oxford and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a long-time volunteer at 826 Valencia, the nationwide after-school program co-founded by author Dave Eggers. His book on the history of Star Wars is an international bestseller and has been translated into 11 languages.
