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Living With Batman
| Article
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20351 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1992 |
2,751 Words |
| Author
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John C. Tibbetts
John C. Tibbetts, an associate professor of theater and film
at the University of Kansas, contributes regularly to national
music publications and is editor of the recently published
Dvorak in America.
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Embalzoned on a Detective Comic cover in the summer of 1939 was a bizarre new comic book hero. He wore a tight-fitting gray-blue suit with black bat wings attached to his shoulders. A helmet like sable mask with upright, pointed ears concealed his features. He swung from a rope high above Gotham City, with a hapless villain struggling in his clutches. On the inside page, huge block letters reared up against a yellow moon and proclaimed the newcomer’s identity--The Bat-Man.
Although the six-page story of vigilante justice was simple and crude, the colors drab, the artwork amateurish, and the anatomical drawing of the characters imperfect, this "mysterious and adventurous" figure, as that first story described him, created an immediate sensation and has gone on as one of the most popular superheroes in comic book history.
For more than fifty years, Batman (the hyphen was soon dropped) has battled the "evil forces of society" in numerous movie serials, newspaper strips, television shows, and blockbuster feature films. He has moved through a claustrophobic world--a Gotham veiled with heavy, syrupy shadows and mists, whose swollen skies are scored with sable ropes and nets and with sable ropes and nets and whose spires and steeples tilt crazily against a monstrous moon. He and his archenemies--the Joker, the Rider, and the Penguin--are locked on a collision course.
Batman was the first superhero without super powers--a paradox that has always intrigued and delighted his fans. He triumphs not by having uncanny power but through the application of intelligence, scientific training, and criminological skill. His fight for truth and justice seems almost contradicted by his shadowy appearance and nocturnal habits. His identity has decidedly psychotic implications. The conceit that he could be one of us is somehow accompanied by a small shiver.
"Batman has a mysterious intrigue to him," says the man who created him more than fifty years ago, Bob Kane. "He's vulnerable, but he puts himself on the line. He does things in the dark most of us just wish we could do."
Creating Batman
Kane was a young man in his early twenties, an apprentice comic book artist living in New York, when the caped crusader sprang from a wild mixture of his boyhood memories and associations. "When I was only twelve, I saw a book of drawings of inventions by Leonardo Da
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