Batman Unmasked

May 26, 2008 on 12:53 pm | In 1 Stars | 2 Comments

Batman Unmasked
By Will Brooker
(Continuum Books, 2001)

Right from the start, the title of this book was misleading. I picked it up thinking it was an analysis of what kind of man would put on a cape and cowl and fight crime to avenge his parent’s death. Instead, what I got was a love letter to all the worst stereotypes of Batman.

In his book, author Will Brooker offers up the history of Batman’s creation and development in comics, film and television. It may not have been what I was hoping for, but it’s a good subject all the same. Unfortunately, Brooker seems to champion two of the worst aspects of Batman’s history: the 1960s TV series and the idea that Batman might actually be gay.

Let’s start with the TV series. 

The 1960s Batman was a lot of fun … in the 1960s, when comics had become watered down, campy versions of their former self, courtesy of Dr. Fredric Wertham and the Comics Code Authority (see my review of The Ten Cent Plague for more on that subject). Today, the series is synonymous with camp. As Brooker points out in his book, the TV series was an attempt at pop art, which was very popular at the time.

This representation of Batman — typically called “The Caped Crusader” — is one of two almost contradictory persona’s adopted by the character; the other is known as “The Dark Knight.”

The former is a bright, friendly, smiling guy who gets along swell with the other members of the Justice League and always carries bat-shaped cookies in his utility belt just in case he and Robin bump in to Scooby and the gang. Again, this is the watered down, happy-shiny Batman created in the post-Wertham world of comics. His other person, as featured in this summer’s coming film by the same name, is a dark, scary, brooding creature of the night hell-bent on making up for his own inability to save his parents by adopting a terrifying iconography and spending his nights shoving his Bat-boots 3-feet up some criminal’s colon! 

Both are fine representations from different points in times, and both have very strong and faithful followings today.
 
Me? I sit in the Dark Knight’s corner. I just see it as a more faithful telling of the original story created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. So Brooker and I split on this issue, but if you fancy the Adam West-Batusi-POW-BIFF Batman of the 60s, then this is right up your alley.

Secondly, let’s talk about the concept that Batman might be gay.

This idea was widely popularized by Wertham in the 1950s. He claimed it was so obvious that it sent deviant messages to impressionable young minds. The irony is: it was probably not something most people noticed until he himself brought it up, as if to feed his own thesis and sell more books. Furthermore, it wasn’t until after Wertham’s watering down of comics in the 1950s that this image of a bright, campy, sometimes homoerotic Batman came to be. In a strange way, he’s responsible for creating the very thing he was fighting against. 

Most of the arguments today continue as jokes, double-entendres and people reading more into things than they should. Brooker not only lines up these moments in his book, but he does so as if to say, “hey, maybe Batman really is gay.”  

There are certainly gay readings that can be taken from the stories. I’d be lying and ignorant to say there were none, but readings and intention can often be two different things. Some people can read Shakespeare and find lessons and allegories to today’s world … that doesn’t mean it was ever the author’s intention. I personally don’t think that Batman is gay. I think there have been times when the creators were throwing out silly jokes or jabs at the reader, but I don’t think there’s ever been an editorial decision to declare that Batman is gay. 

Without that editorial decision, it simply cannot be true. Batman exists only in the form that his creators and editors allow.
 
Brooker does present a thorough and interesting look at the creation and development of Batman over the years. His historical documentation is impressive, but it’s his social commentaries that bother me most. I understand how a fan might recognize and appreciate these elements of the character through their historical and social contexts, but to champion them as dominant just doesn’t make sense to me. 

I’d give this book only one-star! 

FUN FACTS: Adam West rose a ruckus when the 1989 Batman movie was released, because (at then-age 51) he thought he should have been given the part of Bruce Wayne/Batman.