'Building a Better Batmobile': Transactions Between the Gothic and Pop in the Batman Comics of Grant Morrison

1 Title: ‘Building a Better Batmobile’: Transactions Between the Gothic and Pop in the Batman Comics of Grant Morrison Event: Tenth Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association, University of Heidelberg, 2-5 August 2011 Panel G2 – Graphic Gothic Date: 4 August, 16:00 – 17:30 [SLIDE 2] Today I’m going to be talking about Grant Morrison, who currently stands at the forefront of America’s superhero comics industry: a comic book auteur, described in his DC Comics biography, as ‘a “counter-culture” spokes-person, a musician, an award-winning playwright and a chaos magician.’ My paper today will focus squarely on Morrison’s Batman comics and their treatment of the now seventy-two year history of the Batman franchise. When I met Morrison last month at a signing of his new book (Supergods) and told him I was writing this paper, he laughed, and wished me good luck in explaining it. On that auspicious note, I’ll begin by briefly sketching out only the most relevant aspects of that history, in order to contextualise Morrison’s work and define the terms of my argument. [SLIDE 3] 2 The crime-fighting alias of billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, Batman began his career as a vigilante in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Detective Comics #38 introduced Batman’s sidekick ‘Robin, Boy Wonder,’ and together the two fought crime as specially deputised lawmen in their hometown of Gotham City, following the launch of Batman #1 in the spring of 1940. In 1954, the introduction of the Comics Code put tight restrictions on how the gothic and crime genres, associated with Batman comics from their inception, could be depicted. [SLIDE 4] Writers were forced to get creative, and for a time there seemed to be no limits to what Batman could represent. Listed here are several examples of the strange transformations the character went through during this period, from ‘Batman – Indian Chief!’ to ‘The Alien Batman!’ By the end of the decade, Batman headlined a nuclear ‘Bat-family,’ his self-proclaimed number one fan a fifth-dimensional puckish sprite called ‘Batmite.’ [SLIDE 5] Enter the fifties’ and sixties’ ‘anti-art’ Pop Art movement, which revelled in the products of mass consumer culture, including comic books, then widely reviled as ‘non-art.’ As Pop Art became part of the art establishment, ‘non-art’ became art, and today there are a growing number of exhibitions dedicated to the work of commercial comic book artists. With ‘Pop’ now disconnected from the art movement, it becomes, like ‘gothic,’ a somewhat nebulous term. [SLIDE 6] Today I’ll be using it to denote a ‘Pop Art’ or ‘Pop’ aesthetic defined by bright, contrasting colours 3 and explosive sound effects, as appropriated from the comics and exaggerated by Pop Artists like Roy Lichtenstein, before it influenced the mid-sixties Batman comics; the ABC network television series; Morrison’s Batman comics, post 2006; and the recent Cartoon Network series Batman: The Brave and the Bold. These ‘Pop’ Batman texts ‘mash up’ the tropes and clichés of popular genre fiction, infusing them, charging them, with a revitalizing ‘Pop sensibility’ (an anarchic joie de vivre). [SLIDE 7] Whilst claiming to be returning the character to his roots, creators like Dennis O’Neil, Neal Adams, Frank Miller and Christopher Nolan came to define their ‘grim’ and ‘gritty’ Batmen in opposition to their more colourful ‘Pop’ and ‘camp’ precursors. And in the eighties and nineties a binary emerged whereby conflicting ‘Gothic’ and ‘Pop’ aesthetics became synonymous with Batman versus Joker, ‘meaning’ versus ‘anti-meaning,’ the serious versus the glib. Today I will show how a poststructuralist approach, suggested by Morrison’s work, complicates this binary. Not limited to gothic but employing surrealism, carnival, the fantastic and grotesque, traits common to many seemingly disparate Batman texts, Morrison crafts a comprehensive and compelling narrative out of Batman’s convoluted history that is at once playful and ‘fun,’ sinister and exciting. It also offers him a platform through which to apply magical 4 theory and practice to the subject of brands and marketing in a global context. [SLIDE 8] Morrison’s first contribution to the franchise was his graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, a book featuring unique portrayals of familiar characters, painted by Dave McKean throughout in an idiosyncratic, phantasmagoric style. Setting out to ‘create something that was more like a piece of music or an experimental film,’ ‘Batman from the point of view of the dreamlike, emotional and irrational hemisphere,’ Morrison cites surrealism and Lewis Carroll as among the book’s key influences. An exceptional text, hailed as ‘high art,’ Arkham Asylum has its roots in Batman’s earliest, most crudely articulated gothic tales. Detective Comics #34, for example, the second, predominantly gothic Batman tale, contains traces of both surrealism and Lewis Carroll, while the Alice books recur throughout Batman’s publication history. [SLIDE 9] A year later, Morrison’s four-part storyline Gothic quoted Batman’s first gothic adventure, from Detective Comics #31, including its iconic image of a ‘gothic’ Batman, referenced by numerous artists over the years. Both stories feature monks as their antagonists; only Morrison quotes Matthew Lewis’s Monk, in addition to such other eighteenth- and nineteenth century 5 gothic texts as Otranto, Justine, ‘Ancient Mariner’ and ‘House of Usher.’ In Supergods Morrison calls Batman ‘a brooding Gothic hero of the old school,’ but I would like to suggest that it was only during the late eighties and nineties that Batman’s ‘roots’ were being consistently and explicitly identified as ‘gothic’: in Tim Burton’s Batman films; in graphic novels reimagining Batman as a variety of gothic monsters; in storylines like Dennis O’Neil and Alan Grant’s ‘Destroyer,’ and Peter Milligan’s ‘Dark Knight, Dark City,’ which created ‘gothic’ origins for Gotham City that, twenty years later, Morrison would be among the first to revisit. [SLIDE 10] In 2006, Morrison returned to write DC Comics’ flagship Batman comic, the title for his first issue doubling as a mission statement: ‘Building a Better Batmobile’ means building a better vehicle for what was, at this point, an ailing franchise. [SLIDE 11] The ‘Black Casebook,’ a variation on the ‘discovered manuscript’ trope, facilitates the return of Batman’s repressed heritage, reframing the sci-fi Batman stories as Lovecraftian ‘weird’ fiction, ‘cosmic / psychological horror,’ whilst hinting at a conspiracy stretching back into this period, connecting all these texts. Much use is made of Tzvetan Todorov’s conception of the ‘fantastic’, with the reader left hovering between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ explanations for events that, Morrison suggests, did not necessarily occur as originally written. [SLIDE 12] Bat-Mite’s return exemplifies this. Is he real, or just fantasy? Rendered in a more ‘realistic,’ three-dimensional form, a 6 (literally) floating signifier that ‘might’ signify any number of things, he now carries a creature on his back, that peers over his shoulder to snicker at Batman. A creepy twist on a familiar character, it remains, like ‘Might,’ open to interpretation. [SLIDE 13] The grinning monster could be read as representing the scab left on Batman’s psyche by Dr. Simon Hurt following Bill Finger’s ‘Robin Dies at Dawn.’ In this story Batman found himself alone on an alien world, before Robin arrived and, shortly afterward, was killed. Left alone, Batman grew increasingly paranoid, even suicidal, before waking up to discover he had never left Earth, had hallucinated the entire ordeal whilst participating in an isolation experiment. The eyes he had felt watching him belong to this then unnamed military doctor – an entirely benign character, never seen again until Morrison’s paranoiac reading and rewriting of the text recreates him as Dr. Hurt. Morrison goes on to write that during the experiment Hurt discovered Batman’s true identity and details of another adventure, France Herron’s ‘Batman – The Superman of Planet X!’ [SLIDE 14] In this story Batman either dreamt of, or was actually taken to the planet Zur En Arrh, where he was ‘super-strong, invulnerable and immortal,’ 7 with ‘a super-scientist alien ‘“double” called Tlano for a buddy.’ Through post-hypnotic suggestion, Hurt makes ‘Zur En Arrh’ a trigger word that will deactivate the ‘Batman’ persona: a metafictional twist whereby this particular text is construed as a flaw, a weakness in Batman the franchise. In the two years preceding this revelation, ‘Zur En Arrh’ appeared as spray-painted graffiti, a recurring motif instigating readerly paranoia. Batman, having figured out Hurt’s plot, reclaims ‘Zur En Arrh’ so that, when activated, it triggers a back-up personality based upon Tlano. Reclaiming his past to launch a counter-attack, Batman (and Morrison) show there’s still some creative mileage (and money) to be gained from revisiting these concepts, with stories once deemed worthless made available for re-evaluation via the publication of a Black Casebook anthology. [SLIDE 15] Morrison’s run on the Batman title reached its climax with Batman R.I.P. In this, Hurt claimed to be Dr. Thomas Wayne, whose death – gunned down alongside his wife, Martha – inspired their son, Bruce, to become Batman. Thomas Wayne was also, according to legend, ‘The First Batman’; so when Hurt dons his costume, he becomes Gothic’s perennial ‘bad dad.’ There are also hints that he could be a character no longer considered to be in current continuity: Bruce’s mad brother, Thomas Wayne Jr. To further confuse things, Morrison creates a third Thomas Wayne: a late eighteenth century aristocrat, a confirmed diabolist and a 8 possible vampire. A network of allusions ranging from the King James’ Bible to the Rolling Stones’ ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ compounds a sense of Hurt’s being Bruce Wayne’s own personal Satan. Describing himself as ‘the hole in things,’ Hurt embodies the interpretive abyss, another recurring motif in Morrison’s recent Batman comics. The most sinister new Batman villain in recent years, Hurt’s presiding over a Danse Macabre that turns into a fist-fight in the style of the ABC series, presenting ‘Gothic’ as gleeful ‘Pop’ spectacle, also confirms him as being among the most fun. [SLIDE 16] A sense of fun was ingrained in Morrison’s next project, Batman and Robin, as the original Robin, circus acrobat Dick Grayson, became the new Batman. Where Morrison equates Bruce Wayne with ‘gothic,’ he reminds readers that Dick Grayson’s parents ‘were show business people,’ that his ‘roots’ are in carnival. This becomes a way of acknowledging the franchise’s carnival roots: harking back to a time when Batman was ringmaster; when the thwarting of bank robberies by Batman and Robin, the ‘dynamic duo,’ played out like circus routines; when the original Batwoman came equipped with her own circus. [SLIDE 17] The site of her murder in the seventies, it’s now haunted, according to Morrison. Meanwhile, villains like the Joker, Gotham’s ‘Clown Prince of Crime,’ and the Riddler, a former carnival barker, come to haunt ‘abandoned amusement parks.’ The ‘dark carnival’ trope, appearing in almost all the 9 major Batman graphic novels, and many other Batman texts produced in the eighties and nineties, though neglected of late, makes a triumphant return via Professor Pyg’s ‘Circus of the Strange’ in Batman and Robin. [SLIDE 18] Describing the book’s tone as an attempt to imagine the ABC series as if directed by David Lynch, Morrison claims that as a child he did not find the series ‘funny, camp or ironic’ as so many adult viewers did, but ‘thrilling, scary, and completely addictive.’ This, when combined with an aesthetic described by Morrison, variously, as ‘dark psychedelia,’ ‘necrodelia,’ and ‘toxic bubblegum,’ and such memorable moments as when Professor Pyg activates his pink ‘I-pod’ to perform a lap dance for Robin, call to mind Wolfgang Kayser’s definition of the grotesque as ‘playfully gay and carelessly fantastic,’ yet also ‘ominous and sinister.’ More on I-pods in a moment, but first I’d like to point out how Pyg’s ‘viral narcotic,’ ‘an addictive identity-destroying drug’ set to ‘revolutionize the drug trade,’ complements Morrison’s reading, in Supergods, of comic books as drugs and their readers as addicts. The book plays on the uneasy distinction Walter Benjamin makes between the phantasmagorias of consumerist spectacle that promote audience passivity, and the ‘enchanted commodities’ that wake up spectators to a more critical awareness. As I will now show, Batman and Robin’s brilliantly baffling surface, while it can be enjoyed as thrilling spectacle, also encourages sustained engagement with the text. 10 [SLIDE 19] The cover art for #2 recalls the iconic ‘gothic’ image from Detective 31, presenting a scale model of the city ablaze with neon signs that, following Morrison’s well-documented advocation of mixing chaos magic with the icons of consumer culture, suggests the ‘spooky or alien’ numinous appearance of magic ‘sigils.’ In Batman #664, a faceless I-pod The cover art for advertisement towers over an exhausted Batman. Batman and Robin #4 repeats the image. In #5, Batman is described as ‘a brand, a logo, an idea gone past its sell-by date,’ by a rival aiming to make Batman ‘obsolete, like the I-Pod killed the Walkman.’ In 2009, Batman and Robin was the I-pod of Batman comics, among the bestselling titles of the last decade. [SLIDE 20] Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams the third’s Batwoman in Detective Comics, another breakout success at this time, was the only other title to embrace ‘dark psychedelia.’ By contrast, Paul Dini and Dustin Nguyen’s Streets of Gotha, represents the ‘Walkman’: its drab watercolours dilute the iconic stroke generic ‘gothic’ images of twenty years earlier, when virtually every other Batman comic book featured a nondescript image of Batman posing with a gargoyle on its cover. [SLIDE 21] I’d like to now consider an example of the ‘dark carnival’ trope, taken from Batman and Robin #3; in particular, this panel by artist Frank 11 Quitely. The strangely titled tableaus featuring skeletons instead of waxworks suggest exclusionary in-jokes. And here, the devil really is in the details, peering out of the smoke with only one eye exposed, near the centre of this panel, while another eye, tightly framed, further to the left, also seems to stare out at the reader. According to Dick Grayson, it’s this ‘cranky, creepy attention to detail’ that gives away the Joker’s haunting offstage presence. For this was, originally, the Joker’s circus, as featured in Alan Moore’s seminal Batman graphic novel The Killing Joke. [SLIDE 22] Pyg’s colliding with this painted smile, next to which there later appears the Joker’s handwritten signature seems, at once, funny and sinister. Funny, because a man crashing into a wall never goes out of style; sinister, because it leaves the reader wondering what stands on the other side of the curtain. Not a man, but something big and flat and unknowable. [SLIDE 23] According to Morrison’s Joker, he and Batman share ‘a yin-yang thing,’ representing the interrelated forces of creation and destruction. The Joker creatively lays ruin to every best laid plan, while Batman reads meaning into every apparently meaningless occurrence. Following R.I.P. Morrison makes Batman’s complaint, that ‘the hole in things was everywhere [he] looked,’ synonymous with the rictus grin that pervades the iconic rogue’s gallery. Recognising their iconic power, their faces culled from films, advertising and children’s storybooks, Morrison rebrands them ‘Pop 12 criminals,’ nihilists who gleefully mock Batman and the readers’ attempts ‘to find meaning in a meaningless world’ stroke text. [SLIDE 24] In The Return of Bruce Wayne, the eponymous hero embarks upon a timetravelling adventure exploring different possible genre influences on the Batman franchise. Here, the lexical field suggested by the terms listed on screen, and his description of a gleaming space fortress as an ‘old haunted house’ or ‘crumbling castle’ confirm Bruce Wayne’s being in possession of a distinctly ‘gothic imagination.’ Batman may not be limited to gothic, but the way in which the series returns to it, time and again, suggests that Morrison sees Batman as owing more to the gothic than to any other popular genre, making its return synonymous with the return of Bruce Wayne. [SLIDE 25] Morrison’s latest project, Batman, Inc., seems a good place to conclude a paper for a conference entitled ‘Gothic Ltd.’ As ‘Batman’s war against crime goes global,’ Bruce Wayne determines to make the best of his brand. [SLIDE 26] In this double page spread from #6, in the third panel from the left, hooded monks, in another nod to Detective thirty one, confirm the persistence of gothic in a reduced but still significant, potentially virulent capacity. ‘We’re building a ghost,’ says Batman, ‘a bogeyman too big to 13 be clearly seen, its edges indistinct,’ ‘a terror made of shadows and flapping wings.’ Updating the legend of the Batman for the twenty-first century, dissolving ‘Batman’ and ‘Gothic’ into ‘Nyktomorph,’ ‘nightshape,’ Morrison confirms both as slippery subjects, instantly recognisable yet also amorphous, evading critical capture as sometimes frightening, sometimes funny, exhilarating pop culture phenomena. Thank you. Grant Morrison’s Batman Comics Batman: Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (15th Anniversary Edition). Illus. Dave McKean. 1989. New York: DC Comics, 2004. Batman: Gothic [collecting Legends of the Dark Knight #6-10]. Illus. Klaus Janson. 1990. NY: DC, 2007. 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