-To the Batmobile, let's go.
-Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed
Batman & Robin
My friend Mikhail, an obsessive compulsive former roommate with a love for the nerdier side of life, was my comics guy or better yet the Obiwan to my Anakin; a mentor who later I would master, anyways the guy liked his comics. I never was tempted by that beast as a kid and my stepdad has a massive chest filled with old comics from the 70's, something like that should be a young boy's dream but it just never clicked for me. That all changed when Mikhail hooked me up with Watchmen. In the 2ish years since that fateful introduction I've reread the book at least a half dozen times, every time finding new intricacies in the work of writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Gibbons. Watchmen, of course, is the canonical superhero text, the text that invariably gets teached in comics courses along with Maus and The Dark Knight Returns. Watchmen does the comic book such a big favour because of its realism. When Moore wrote it he was growing tired of the continuity of the comic book world where nothing could be fundamentally changed. In Watchmen heroes and villains were subject to human extremes and could easily die at any moment, not only that but the characters were old and mostly past their prime, rejected by a world they were trying to save. Not only that, most of the characters make you wonder whether they are heroes anyway. These were not your friendly neighborhood Spiderman-types, these were Watchmen (actually New Minutemen) and who watches the Watchmen? Certainly not editors interested in selling Moore's characters to young boys. The Watchmen story is set in a world so close to our own that masked vigilanteism and masked crime reasonably exist, become a fad and eventually die out. The masked criminals give up their flashy costumes first and the heroes have to fight political protesters and the Vietcong until the government outlaws them permanently. Of the Watchmen characters only one has superpowers (given to him by science, of course) and the rest are just really good fighters with various methods of punishment that go all the way up to capital. In this way the Watchmen always comes off to me as a Batman story sans Batman. Batman is not a superman, unless we're factoring in Nietzsche. However, Batman does live in a world where many of his friends and foes do.
I bring up Watchmen because I think that that world is one wherein all the heroes are similar in their odd ways to our beloved Bats. Rorshach, for instance, strikes terror into the hearts of criminals through violent force and a wicked costume but him and Bats split on the whole killing evil bad guys front. Rorschach states that he truly owns his name when he burns a child molester alive, Batman would never do this because Batman believes in the justice system and even though say the Joker has a nasty penchant for murder and mayhem and Batman knows that if he kills him he'll undoubtedly save lives Batman refuses to do so and has even saved the Joker's life. Nite Owl and Ozymandias also remind me of Batman with their intelligence and resources but Ozymandias, I feel is very much in his own class of heroism. But anyways you can read the book for that one. For the next chat, we shall hopefully touch on Batman in the 80's starting with more Moore and some Miller time as well and maybe touching on the theatricality of messrs. Burton and Keaton in the film adaptation. And of course, still to come: Adam West, Kevin Smith, Christian Bale's retarded voice, Brian Azzarello's urban retelling of the Batman myth and so much more... So stay tuned: same Bat time, same Bat blog
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