I taught my class this week about the idea of "iconic abstraction." It's something that Scott McCloud talks about in Understanding Comics, and though it's looked at as naive by scholars these days, I still find it to be a useful way of thinking about not just the styles and ways of making comics, but also the ways in which myths function in our culture. Icons are metonyms. The Cross is everything that is bound up with the philosophies of Jesus. That Bat-symbol up there in the lower corner of the cover, divorced of context, still carries with it everything that is bound up in the idea of Batman. When I'm teaching visual grammar, the primary recognition of something being a representation, and a subjective one at that, is very important.
What this particular storyline is doing in a really cool way is showing us the same process happening within the fictional world of the DCU. The superhero story is iconic, in that it occurs in a simpler universe than the one we inhabit. More than anything else in their existence, the superhero has been used as metaphor. The struggle with inner darkness and despair - Batman. Explosive anger issues - the Hulk. The mythic stories that play out in superhero comics are similar to the kerygmatic texts of the major religions, taking common human dilemmas or concerns, and playing out ways of dealing with them through the magic of story. So what happens when this fictive, simpler, iconic world, is represented in a comic in it's own universe? The iconic abstraction, in this case, is a further simplification. The premise of the Batman comic we glimpse in the pages of Detective hinges on the redemption of the Devil, the most iconic (at least in Western literature) expression of evil. In today's issue, the Joker's hideout is filled with silly signs, like "No Swimming" over a vat of acid. It's like Batman as seen through the lens of Looney Tunes. It's still grim'n'gritty, but in a far more slapstick way. Is this how fictional civilians in the fictional universe think about the superheroes with whom they share this universe? Do they imagine the lives of the superheroes in the same way that we imagine the lives of the gods and heroes of Greek myth? How, then, is the psyche of the average person in a superhero universe affected by the presence of what they perceive as the equivalents of such characters as Ajax or Agamemnon? (That's a silly question, really, but it's definitely something I think about!)
Also, Bathound transforms into the Batmobile. It's pretty epic.
More to come...
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