The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1142: Detective Comics #624, December 1990

Honestly, I'd read the entire series of Simon Petrarch's adventures as Batman. The brief glimpses we get in these three comics are mad, but such a pleasant strain of madness.

The villain gets his, eventually, and Batman figures it all out. Looking back over the story, I see now that the mystery was really just an excuse to have Flint Henry and Dick Sprang come onto the book and make something magical. It was a pretty run of the mill Batman story, but it facilitated one of the coolest Batman stories I've read. According to the GCD, this run of Detective has never been reprinted, but I highly recommend tracking it down if you want to see a really different interpretation of the Dark Knight.

I think there's something to this story that I'm going to have to think about more deeply. A repentant Satan and a soul-less adventurer team up to fight crime in Gotham City, assisted by a child possessed by an angel calling himself Robin and his psychiatrist in a red wig as Batgirl. The very explicit inclusion of Christian imagery is neat. We only usually get such blatant references in Superman stories, but Batman as repentant Satan? That's a new one for me. But I'll think more on this later.

An excellent little tale, a nice dipping of the toes back into the mainstream DCU. But tomorrow we're going somewhere else, somewhere no man has ever gone before.

More to come...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1140: Detective Comics #623, November 1990

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...

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1138: Detective Comics #622, October 1990

As I was rearranging my collection a while back, the Batman comics we're going to look at over the next few days jumped out at me because of these AWESOME COVERS!! It really is just some over-the-top nuttiness, and so beautifully rendered by legendary Dick Sprang. The story beneath the covers is part of one of my favourite superhero sub-genres, in which the hero(es) must figure out a mystery through the vehicle of a comic book. In today's issue, an unauthorized Batman comic appears to be connected to a series of killings, responsibility for which is claimed by "the Batman." This issue opens with 9 pages of an alternate version of Batman, one linked to a repentant Satan, but still based in Gotham. In looks, he's very like Quinn and Vigil's Faust, who himself owes much to Batman. An interesting loop. And when the Batman is revealed in the pages of this faux-comic, we immediately cut back to Bruce Wayne at home, reading the comic, and reacting to this strange iteration of his story.

I'll get a little more into how the comic within a comic is functioning over the next couple of days, but one cool thing is the slight hint we're given, straight from page 1, that this is not "real." Each page of the comic is slightly smaller that the actual page it's printed on, and has another "border" that is ostensibly the edge of the page. So the whole page of the fictive comic, including its edge which is actually a border, are contained within the page and boundaries of the actual page. I'll have to get back to my Groensteen to see what all that means.

All that aside, it's an entertaining little Batman story, perhaps the first I've looked at for this project since I read through Morrison's Batman.

More to come...

Edit: I did a bit of research on the colourist for this issue, and sadly Ms. Roy passed away in 2010. Here's an example of her art outside of comics, and of a place I'd love to visit one day, the New Jersey Pine Barrens: