I don't have a whole lot of interest in seeing the new Batman Vs. Superman movie, a film which has achieved something I didn't think was possible. It actually caused my dear friend Leonard Maltin to use the word "sucks" in his review. Even Rob Schneider never managed that and lord, how he tried.
Actually, for reasons I probably should elaborate on someday, I don't have a whole lot of interest in seeing any recent movie which takes a character I followed as a younger reader of comic books and turns him into a live-action merchandising vehicle.
In the same way it's possible to love James Bond when Sean Connery is playing him and not when someone else is in the role — or to enjoy a novel but not the movie based on it — it's possible to love a comic book character only when he's a comic book character…or only when he's a comic book character rendered by certain writers and artists or in a certain style. I'm also not a huge fan of action movies loaded with CGI and I really need to write a post on how that technology has made it harder for me to think of the people on a movie screen as mortal human beings. In some of the films I've seen, they clearly were not.
But I'm especially not interested in seeing this new Batman-Superman Meeting of the Merchandising. First off, all the trailers and ads make it look very dark and grim and violent. To me, a dark, grim and violent Superman make about as much sense as a dark, grim and violent Bugs Bunny. I don't think it's cool or adult or realistic. I think it's just the wrong approach to the character, especially when they strip him of all sense of humanity. It reminds me of those YouTube videos where someone executes a deliberate clash of styles like "What if Bambi had been directed by Sam Peckinpah or Quentin Tarantino?"
I can more easily view Batman in that light except that when they make him dark, they usually make him psychotic and kind of personally repulsive. Often, he's not different enough from the foes he's battling for me to particularly care who triumphs. That's someone else's Batman and it may be fine on its own terms. But mine has a guy I care about in the bat-suit and I ain't seen much of him for a long time.
Really though, it comes down to this for me: Superman and Batman don't belong in the same world. They really don't.
I absolutely understand the marketing reasons. If I were the guy in charge of them, I wouldn't be able to resist the sales advantage of crossing them over and teaming them up. But since that's not my job, I can look at it from another, purer angle. It's fun to see your favorite characters meet and maybe even fight. I didn't read it but some years ago, someone worked out the contractual problems and did a crossover comic of The X-Men and Star Trek. I'm sure that was delightful for fans of both properties and very lucrative…and since it was a one-time event, not particularly injurious to the mythology of either. Readers could just mentally declare it "out of continuity" and not worry about how it maybe damaged the internal logic of one fictional world to merge it with the internal logic of another fictional world.
It's harder to do that with two mismatched properties that appear together on a routine basis. Superman and Batman were created and configured as standalone, self-contained features. They were no more intended to appear together than Popeye and Prince Valiant…or Flash Gordon and Donald Duck.
Some history. In 1939, the firm we now know as DC Comics had a chance to publish a comic to tie-in with the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair. It was a 96-page anthology featuring stories of all the company's top characters and naturally, it cover-featured Superman. Batman certainly would have been in it but he was just then being created.
The comic sold so well that they squeezed in a 1940 edition. This time, there was a Batman story and they put Batman, Robin and Superman together on the cover. It also sold well so they kept the anthology going without a World's Fair tie-in. At first, it was World's Best Comics but apparently, another company which had a comic called Best Comics objected so it became World's Finest Comics. For years, it was a top-seller. It was a little more expensive than other comics of the day but it felt very special, featuring as it did one story of Superman and a separate tale of Batman and Robin. All three were on every cover in a little scene which didn't appear anywhere inside…since Superman and Batman didn't appear together inside.
Over the years, comic books got thinner and thinner. For production reasons, the page count of a comic book had to be a multiple of 16 and when they reached the stage where comics went to 32 pages, they decided that was as low as they could go. DC was selling 32 page comics for ten cents and they had a few, including World's Finest Comics, which had 64 pages for fifteen cents. Even with Superman and Batman (and other features) in each issue, World's Finest wasn't selling well. It had lost its "all-star" feel and was no longer an exception to a rule of marketing that comic book publishers had learned the hard way. If you put out comics in two different prices, kids would buy the cheapest ones, regardless of how much they got for their money. To most buyers, it was simple: If you had fifteen cents, you could buy a comic book…or you could buy a comic book and a candy bar. The latter just felt like more.
Also, retailers didn't like having two different prices of comics. Comic books were a small profit item and if your clerk accidentally sold a few fifteen-cent comics for a dime each, it could wipe out your profits for a day. Many distributors urged publishers to make all their comics the same price. A few years later when DC began publishing annuals for 25 cents, they calmed distributor concerns by promising that any comic that sold for more than the standard price would have a flat spine so it would feel different, alerting the cashier it was different.
A 32 page comic book had about 25 pages of comics in it. This presented a problem for World's Finest. Did they keep the 12 page Superman stories and the 12 page Batman stories and drop the other strips, which at the time were things like Tomahawk and Green Arrow. Or shorten everything? They didn't want to do either of those. They also didn't want to chuck either Superman or Batman…so someone came up with the bright idea of having the lead story in each issue be Superman and Batman — team-up stories and then follow it with shorter stories of the lesser features.
The alter-egos of Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne had met here and there in comics and also on radio but only for brief moments. Now, they became a regular team and that's kind of where things went awry. Yeah, the comic sold but the price that was paid was that Batman was severely damaged.
You see, hero stories require villains and menaces. Batman was a mortal. His origin may have been contrived and melodramatic but it was not scientifically impossible. No one in his world could fly without an airplane. No one came from another planet. No one could look smug as bullets bounced off his chest. That happened in Superman's world and that's where Batman wound up…and he had to go into the different "reality" of Superman's strip instead of vice-versa. If you'd put Superman into Batman's world, he could have captured The Joker in four seconds and the Penguin in under two.
So the stories had to be about menaces that could present a challenge to a guy who could fly and who had x-ray vision and super-speed and superhuman strength. That meant monsters and aliens and mad scientists and such. They were silly stories and they also weren't very good. I can think of lots of good Superman stories from this period and lots of good Batman stories but not a lot of great Superman-Batman stories. The plots were all so awkward as the writers struggled to come up with ways that the menace could not too easily be bested by Superman…but Batman — a guy who couldn't fly or smash through walls or see through them could still participate.
And since Batman was fighting those kinds of foes in World's Finest Comics, it bled into his own comics, which had the same editor, writers and artists. Batman and Robin in outer space? There's a real premise-killer. And then along came the Justice League of America so Batman really became a guy who associates not with the real-world scum of Gotham City but with aliens and beings with amazing powers, often on other worlds or in other dimensions.
A lot of folks will point to those Batman vs. Space Alien issues and say they represent the nadir of the character's existence…and they were usually poor stories that corrupted the series premise. But Batman never stopped being a guy who palled around with guys from the other worlds, Martian manhunters, Amazon princesses, members of the intergalactic Green Lantern Corps, etc. He's still a guy with no super-powers operating in a world where most heroes can fly under their own power and lift up school buses. No wonder he's so grim all the time.
Again, I understand the marketing reasons. I understand how much fun some of that is for Batman fans. I just think that characters like Superman and Batman suffer at some point because so many people handle them and try so many different interpretations that the properties eventually become undefined. There's almost no rule about who they are and how they operate that one of their handlers won't break. The concept gets turned upside-down so many different ways that after a while, there's no rightside-up. Is Batman a sane man in an insane world or is he just as cuckoo as The Joker? Depending on which comic or dramatization you check out, it could be either. How powerful is he? Depends who's writing him this week. What are his motives? His principles? Again, depends on who's deciding that.
It was wrong, wrong, wrong in those comics in our illustrations here that he was battling aliens from other planets…but now there's a multi-zillion dollar movie in which he fights a guy from Krypton. So what's the character all about any more? All I know is that if there's nothing wrong with what a character does and is, there's nothing right. So I think I won't go see Batman Vs. Superman.