Detective Comics 627

Cover to Detective Comics 627

"He's falling right into that acid tank!"
"A fitting end for his kind."

When I was a kid I would spend lazy Sunday afternoons hanging out in the hammock in my Grandma’s back yard. There was a massive root, like a hardened artery, that jutted from the fattest oak in the yard and coursed through the soil, rising up just below the hammock. One of my uncles once broke a bone when he fell off the hammock and landed on the root, so I was weary of doing anything too spastic. (I was a very spastic child; I once ended up in the hospital after I face-planted onto a potted plant in my grandma’s front yard.) So I mostly spent my hammock time reading comics I got from yard sales or the local pharmacy, where the cool kids went to smoke weed and breaks bottles of their daddies’ beer in the parking lot.

My most vivid memories of those Sundays are rooted in the smell of beef grease frying in a pan (Grandma used to make me the most delicious burgers), and the slightly gritty feeling of old Batman comics against my tiny dirty hands. I had a cardboard box replete with Batman comics from the mid-’80s to the mid-’90s. I remember it being too heavy for me to lift, so I’d drag it around on the floor. Now it doesn’t seem so cumbersome. Looking at them now, with their characters swathed in colored spots, and the endearingly tawdry Nintendo advertisements that pop up like dandelions, and the comparatively modest displays of violence, these 32-page single issues are like epochal slivers of a time long gone. I have a few of these singles amalgamated in graphic novel form, adorned with lush new colors (be gone, spots!) and details previously imperceptible now as clear as crystal. They undeniably look better than their original incarnations, devoid of the musty smell of so many attics where those old comics likely sat in fat stacks for however many months, years, still afflicted with the stigma of being “geeky,”(before geek was chic.

But there’s something missing from these alluring new editions. They look nice and feel nice, but they don’t feel like comics. They don’t have that almost tangible squalor, the seedy back alleys and toppled garbage cans rendered in copious dots of limited color. I feel like I can almost scrape some of that grime off the soft yellowing paper with my thumb nail.

Yesterday was my grandma’s birthday, which is why I’m thinking about these old Batman comics. (I dunno how old Grandma is. Old enough, I guess. But she still functions like a normal person; when I struggled to flip the hamburgers on the grill—how manly I am— she came over and did it for me. Boom, burgers flipped.) I found the comics in the disaster I call a closet last night, while looking for a copy of Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, and spent my night carefully flipping through them. They feel delicate, and I was scared of accidentally ripping them, which is funny since I threw them around without a care when I was a kid. The very first comic I remember having, or at least the one I’ve had the longest, is a special edition, the 600^th appearance of Batman in Detective Comics. The price on the cover reads $2.95, a drastic increase from the 75 cent price of regular Batman comics from that year. The cover is a fetid panting of Batman, ropey muscles discernible through his costume, stubble spread like a rash on his face, swinging through the night with a thug wrapped in his arm. It’s an homage (homage? an homage? which one is correct?) to his original appearance in DC, way back in May of 1939, two years after the dawn of DC. Of course, in his first appearance, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate” (reprinted in this special edition), the Bat-Man was considerably less cautious with regards to killing people. It’s a little jarring for those raised on The Animated Series, seeing Batman shoot people with a machine gun or dangling bodies from a noose in his Bat-Plane. (Bats kills mad people in his early years, actually; his No Killing policy was forged not out of some fervid belief or ideology, but out of DC Comics’ concern that people wouldn’t want to pay to read about a hero who kills people. I wrote about this for The Believer earlier this year—go read it. It’s not such a bad piece.)

The anniversary edition includes four different renditions of the original story, each from a different decade. It’s fascinating to see how different generations of artists interpreted Batman. Bob Kane’s version—sloppily drawn, the story cumbersomely told—is succeeded by a hippie-era Batman, with Robin acting as the good conservative boy who clashes with the rebellious progressives, those pot-smoking scum bags. The story ends with Robin thinking that maybe they aren’t so different after all. The last two remakes are both from 1991, the year after I was born (coincidence? I think not!). The first is a spectacularly gruesome tale that involves an angry young woman who uses a lava gun to melt people. It’s violent and dark, and possess a keen cultural awareness (some might call it an “agenda,” but those kind of people tend to avoid comics, anyway—they might make your son gay!!1!1!). It begins with an Iranian taxi driver being melted, not understanding why this costumed menace is spraying him with fire. “Is it because I am Iranian?” he screams. “I am not a terrorist!” I’m sure the writers didn’t think they were prophesying the impending rise in anti-Middle Eastern racism, but it’s disquieting nonetheless.

The final remake is even darker than the last. Gotham has always been a city built on murder and deception, but here its foundation is rooted in industrial waste as well. Here Batman throws a handful of cocaine into a boy’s face before knocking his lights out, and he shoves a gun staggeringly deep into another thug’s throat, before Commissioner Gordon stops him. It’s not a particularly good comic: the art is inconsistent, with Batman’s face and shape changing to fit different panels; the writing tries too hard to be edgy; and it’s permeated by a distinct “Get off my lawn” crotchetiness. But it acts as a fascinating liaison to the post-Frank Miller years. It exists in that odd synapse between The Dark Knight Returns and Knightfall.

I’m sure there’s some sort of metaphor to be drawn from mu waxing nostalgic about a comic that traces Batman’s past by retelling the same story four times. But I have to go to the gym, so I’ll get around to metaphor-drawing later.

Detective Comics issue 627 gets five nostalgic daydreams out of five