The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Glen Weldon has been a theater critic, a science writer, an oral historian, a writing teacher, a bookstore clerk, a movie usher, a PR flack, an inept marine biologist, and a slightly-better-than-ept competitive swimmer. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Slate, The Atlantic, The Village Voice, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and many other places. He is a panelist on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and reviews books and comic books for NPR.org. The author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography and The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture, he lives in Washington, DC.

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The Caped Crusade

INTRODUCTION

Batman, Nerd

Over his seven decades of fictive life, the elastic concept of “Batman” has taken on a host of shapes. He started off simply enough, as a murderous, gun-wielding rip-off of the Shadow. Since then he’s clocked field time as a time-and-space-hopping gadabout, a Pop Art scoutmaster, a globe-trotting master spy, a gadget-happy criminologist, and a grim, remorseless ninja of the urban night.

No single image defines Batman, because any single image is too small to contain the various layered and at times contradictory meanings we’ve instilled in him. Since his first appearance, we have projected onto the character our own fears, our preoccupations, our moral imperatives, and have seen in him what we wish to.

It’s this limitless capacity for interpretation that sets him apart from his comparatively stolid fellows in spandex. It’s why so many different iterations of Batman have managed to escape the nerd enclave of comics to blithely coexist in the cultural consciousness of normals. Anyone can look at Christian Bale’s Kevlar-suited, mouth-breathing Batman, croaking his dire threats like an enraged, laryngitic frog, and immediately recognize him as the same character as Adam West’s Batusi Batman, out there on the go-go floor, shaking what his dead mama gave him.

They are both equally true, because every thirty years or so Batman cycles from dark to light and back again. Twice before in his seventy-seven-year history, the Dark Knight has given way to the Camp Crusader, and twice before a small subset of his most ardent fans have risen up in protest to demand that Batman return to his grittier roots. These hard-core enthusiasts accept only the darkest, grimmest, most hypermasculine version of the character imaginable and view any alternate Bat-iteration as somehow suspect, inauthentic, debased, and ssssorta gay.

Adam West’s Batman ended one cycle in 1969, and Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’s Batman began the next the following year. Joel Schumacher’s Batman ended that second cycle in the mid-nineties; ten years later, Christopher Nolan’s Batman began the one in which we now find ourselves.

But this recursive pattern isn’t immediately apparent to the casual fan. To the culture at large, it’s the mix that matters.

To most people, there is no one Batman, but an endless blurry parade of Batmen, broadly identifiable by a series of core signifiers: millionaire Bruce Wayne, dead parents, bat costume, secret lair, and Gotham City. Precisely how these signifiers combine, and in what idiom—crime noir, gothic melodrama, Boy’s Own adventure, spy thriller, broad slapstick, or slick science fiction—remains endlessly, defiantly mutable. It’s exactly this protean adaptability (paired with a multinational megaconglomerate’s marketing muscle) that has ensured the character’s longevity.

That, and his vaunted “relatability.”

THE MYTH OF RELATABILITY

“Batman’s my guy,” a friend and lifelong comics fan told me when I described this book project to him. “No powers, just grit. He’s human. He’s relatable.”

This is an oft-heard refrain among the subset of people who talk and think about superheroes. We were sitting in a diner; our order had just arrived. “You or I,” he said, pointing with his French fry at each of us in turn, before dipping it into his milkshake, “could be Batman.”

Here’s the thing: we really could not.

But we think we could.

There is a widespread tendency, among nerds and normals alike, to dismiss the impact of Bruce Wayne’s billionaire status on the idea of Batman. But of course that wealth is Batman’s true superpower. Its narrative function, in any Batman story, is to turn the flatly impossible into the vaguely plausible. It works, essentially, as magic.

Yet few fans acknowledge that socioeconomic wish fulfillment plays even a small role in the bond they feel with him; many don’t even consider his wealth to be a core element of his character.

Which, given that it is only this unimaginable wealth that makes his whole one-man, Chiroptera-themed war on crime possible in the first place, is a) nuts, and b) fascinating. It speaks to the abiding and uniquely American belief that anyone can become obscenely rich if they just . . . want to, really hard.

This belief aligns closely with the wildly aspirational and borderline-delusional conviction among even the most indolent of nerds that becoming Batman is an achievable goal, given sit-ups enough and time.

That is the key difference between Batman and many of his other super-cohorts: Superman, after all, represents an ideal we can never achieve, and we know it; that’s pretty much the whole point of him.

Yet one unintended and insidious consequence of Batman’s humanity is that consciously or not, we are doomed to compare ourselves to him, and we cannot help but find ourselves wanting. In the ad for the fitness regimen, the miracle diet, we are forever the before photo, and he, always, the after.

But of course, there’s more than just a few workout DVDs separating us from him. However much Bat-fans profess it, Batman’s status as a nonpowered human being is not the true reason they feel such a kinship with the character. There is something lurking deeper in the character’s essence that speaks to them. Something coded into his conceptual DNA.

The bond fans feel with him has less to do with the tragedy that formed him—the violent death of his parents—and everything to do with his singular reaction to it.

Which is to say: his oath.

Young Bruce Wayne first swore it back in Detective Comics #33 in 1939. He’d been around a while by then, having made his first appearance months earlier in Detective Comics #27. It took him seven issues to merit an origin story, albeit one dashed off in a brisk twelve panels.

Having seen his parents gunned down before his eyes, wee Bruce Wayne makes the following vow by candlelight: “And I swear by the spirits of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.”

This oath is ridiculous on its face, so laughably grandiose and melodramatic that only a kid could make it.

Which is exactly its power.

That oath is a choice. An act of will. A deliberate reaction to a shattering injustice. More crucially, it is an act of self-rescue. It’s these twenty-four words, after all, that give his life purpose and launch him into an existence entirely devoted to protecting others from the fate that befell him. This is why, for all the character’s vaunted darkness, he is now and has always been a creature not of rage but of hope. He believes himself to be an agent of change; he is the living embodiment of the simple, implacably optimistic notion Never again.

But in the 1970s, something odd happened to Batman’s childhood oath. It entered puberty.

Writers of Batman comics spent the seventies and eighties desperately striving to course-correct for what they saw as the grave disservice done to the character by a late-sixties fad of frothy Pop Art Batmania. In a very real sense, everything about the dark, grim Batman that exists today in the public imagination was born in reaction to—and would not exist without—Adam West’s goofy, groovy Caped Crusader.

Many of the changes introduced...