Batman and the Joker

Contested Sexuality in Popular Culture

Chris Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000169706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Social Sciences

This cultural analysis of visual and narrative elements within Batman comics provides an important exploration of the ways readers and creators negotiate gender, identity, and sexuality in popular culture.

Thematic chapters investigate how artists, writers, and fans engage with, challenge, and interpret gendered and sexual representations by focusing on one of the most popular and heated fictional rivalries ever inked: that of Batman and the Joker. The monograph provides critical insights into ways queer reading practices can open new forms of understanding that have generally remained implicit and unexplored in mainstream comics studies.

This accessible and interdisciplinary approach to the Caped Crusader and the Clown Prince of Crime engages diverse fields of scholarship such as Comics Studies, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Literature, Psychoanalysis, Media Studies, and Queer Theory.

1 Dragged into desire

Bruce Wayne’s woman problem

In his discussion of James Bond, another popular icon who has appeared in countless guises since the mid-twentieth century, Craig Owens (2005) compares the character to his famous penchant for vodka. “Colorless, flavorless, and odorless […] unlike blended scotches or whiskeys, vodka’s versatility comes from its simplicity and consistency. The blankness that constitutes it is not just nothing, but a placeholder for the something—the anything—vodka is capable of becoming” (107). Owens goes on to compare Agent 007 to the drink, arguing that “Bond is not [a] collection of various characteristics; rather, he is the blank middle they fill in” (111). I have always liked this analogy because it helps to explain how Ian Fleming’s character continues to function and evolve in popular culture. Owens’ insights also suggest the question: What does Batman drink, and how does it reveal his function and evolution within larger cultural formations?

If you follow the comics—or watch the films—you know that Batman does not imbibe. He keeps his body and mind in top form, always ready for the next challenge. But the famous playboy Bruce Wayne often appears lazing in exclusive lounges or dining with swooning debutantes, and he would stand out without a drink in his hand. Wayne knows this and regularly carries a champagne flute or a glass of fine wine in public, which he surreptitiously pours out or leaves untouched.¹

Owens argues that Bond blends with the markers of his time, becoming indistinguishable from them in the same way vodka takes on the flavors of cola, juice, or vermouth. Bond absorbs the traditional masculine images of each era, which has included bedding the nubile pearl diver Honeychile Rider in Dr. No, the cat burglar Pussy Galore in Goldfinger, and Japanese Secret Agent Kissy Suzuki in You Only Live Twice. It has also meant conspicuously consuming Rolexes, BMWs, Tom Ford clothing, and, of course, expensive drinks.² He often does this without any witnesses in the narrative and therefore ostensibly acts on his own desires and impulses. Bruce Wayne, by contrast, performs a drag routine in public, studying the mannerisms, purchases, and drinking habits of contemporary masculine figures, and passes himself off as a model of the modern man when he knows people are looking. Wayne exhibits his sexual prowess, consumption of luxury goods, and the excesses of alcohol but never actually partakes. This performance may seem mundane compared to the more theatrical acts we associate with burlesques or drag shows, but it perfectly embodies the kind of everyday performances of gender that Judith Butler (2007) argues, “constitute the identity they are said to express or reveal” (192). In such a “performative accomplishment,” which Butler contends is often much more unconscious than my description of Wayne might lead one to imagine, “the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.”

Bond is an emblem of the dominant ideals of masculinity in each era. Wayne is a simulacrum. The billionaire becomes a dead ringer of a “real man” based on meticulous study and deft mimicry. Much like the drag performers Butler (2007) discusses, Wayne “implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency” (187). Batman has no drink to which he compares, but stands out for pretending to drink. He illustrates what it means to be “an imitation without an origin” (188), feigning an effete persona as Bruce Wayne because it allows him to pass through high society and donning a cape and cowl as Batman because this fear-inducing act gives him an edge against the cowardly and superstitious criminal underworld. These repeated performances constitute both Bruce Wayne and Batman, much as the serial issues of the comics themselves constitute heroes and villains through recurring imagery and storylines. No single iteration produces the character. He is always becoming Batman through these repetitions.

These continuing iterations mean that Batman can never be a fully hegemonic male figure nor a fully progressive non-conformer, neither truly straight nor truly gay. “If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is a fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false,” argues Butler (186). Rather, genders are “produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.” Similarly, Batman himself is fabricated through multimodal discursive practices that do not render him “accurately,” regardless of how closely they may converge on Bob Kane’s 1939 version, or one’s favorite iteration, be it Frank Miller’s hulking maniac, Alex Ross’s nostalgic father figure, or even Jiro Kuwata’s acrobatic バットマン to name just a few.³

Traces of Batman

In the 1960s, Bob Kane enjoyed renewed fame as Batman aired on ABC and the character he claimed to have created on his own became a household name. Kane would frequent a children’s show called Wonderama, drawing impressive sketches of Batman for the young audience (Weldon, 2016). What the cameras did not capture, however, was that Joe Giella had already drawn the characters in a light blue pencil that Kane would artfully trace with a Magic Marker. With the glowing confidence it seems that only straight white men of a certain class can exude, Kane would take the audience through his sketches, impressing onlookers and raising his celebrity profile. This tracing is an apt metaphor for the ways Batman fills in an always-already circulating masculinity, “an imitation without an origin” (Butler 2007, 188).

To many fans, Batman represents the perfect man. As Brown (2018) notes in Batman and the Multiplicity of Identity, contemporary devotees purchase shirts and stickers that ask things like, “What would Batman do?” Yet, as with Kane tracing Giella’s sketches, locating a “true” or “original” Batman is problematic. Brown offers a list of “imitators who mimic his look and persona” (7), which includes Marvel’s Moon Knight, Fantomex, and Night Thrasher; Millarworld’s Big Daddy and Nemesis; Image’s Shadowhawk; Dynamite’s the Black Bat; and DC’s Nite Owl from The Watchmen. But I think Brown follows a siren’s song in seeking to locate the original and arguing that “each Batman-like character reconfirms the original’s importance and the stability of his iconography” (7). Such a list may indeed lead back to Batman. But it could easily extend further to Batman’s predecessors.

Despite the character’s undeniable influence on contemporary popular culture, referring to Batman as “the original” obscures a much messier archive. Like Baudrillard’s (1994) simulacra, the Dark Knight masks his origins so well that he seems to become one. Building on Henry Jenkins’ (2009) notion of “multiplicities,” Brown (2018) acknowledges the myriad ways Batman appears in popular culture, from dark and brooding to campy and comedic, arguing that they all have their place in Batman’s nexus. Part of the allure is that Batman absorbs things deeply enough that “original” and “imitation” seem to lose their meaning. Examining the character closely, however, Batman is evidently much more of a bricoleur than many people care to admit.

When designing the Caped Crusader, Kane first produced a blatant copy of Superman, the world’s newest and most popular superhero. This sketch was too obvious an imitation and so, with Finger’s intervention, Batman became darker, a figure of the night rather than the bright and outspoken character in whom Americans first found inspiration. In doing so, however, Batman retained some of that character’s spirit. Much as Ward (2015) argues “the persistent present-absence of homosexuality (and the homosexual)” is a key element “within the project of building heterosexual men” (42), Batman cannot be understood as an urbane mortal and tragic loner without the present-absence of the good ol’ boy from Kansas, a superpowered alien who brightly embodies American family values. Part of Batman’s identity, therefore, depends on not being Superman.

If one were to peruse the available films and magazines of the 1930s, it would not be difficult to find precursors to the Batman we know today. Roland West’s film The Bat Whispers (1930) about a detective who stalks his prey in a bat costume resonates profoundly with the comics, down to the shadows cast on street corners and the prototypical Bat-Signal (see Fig. 1.1). When the comics Bat-Signal first appeared in Detective Comics #60 (1942), it bore a striking resemblance to the one from West’s film (see Fig. 1.2). The Dick Tracy newspaper strip, which began in 1931, centers on the eponymous detective who joins the force after robbers murder his girlfriend’s father. The Doc Savage pulp hero, launched in 1933, features a handsome man who methodically trains his mind and body, wears bulletproof armor and a utility belt, and solves mysteries with advanced forensics equipment. An early advertisement for the ten-cent stories describe him as a “Superman […] of Master Mind and Body.” The Black Bat Detective Mysteries (1933–1934) featured a spread-winged bat silhouetted by a full moon on the cover of its magazines. Better Publications’ 1934 Popular Detective showcased a character from Johnston McCulley, the creator of Zorro, named Dawson Clade who sees a dark animal flying past him in the night and exclaims, “That’s it! I’ll call myself the Bat!” With the continued popularity of Batman today, a collection of McCulley’s stories was recently reprinted, including “The Bat Strikes!” “Bite of the Bat,” “Shadow of the Bat,” and “Code of the Bat,” all originally published between 1934 and 1935 (McCulley 2009). The February 1936 issue of Spicy Mystery Stories featured “Batman” by Lew Merrill on its cover, a tale of a “brain graft” that creates a monster reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Figure 1.1 Image from The Bat Whispers (1930) directed by Roland West.

Figure 1.2 Detail from “The Case of the Costume-Clad Killers” in Detective Comics #60 (1942) by Jack Schiff (w), Bob Kane (a), Jerry Robinson (a), and Fred Ray (a).

One could also find myriad representations of the masked vigilante Zorro, who had first appeared in All-Story Weekly in 1919 and whom Douglas Fairbanks played in The Mark of Zorro (1920). Zorro remained popular in the 1930s with several stories, film serials, and the theatrical release of The Bold Caballero (1936). In many iterations, Bruce Wayne and his parents view a Zorro film before their tragic encounter with a gunman, an element subtly included in the recent Joker (2019) film. Phillips includes The Gay Blade (1981) on the marquee, likely because of its release date and not because George Hamilton’s over-the-top performance would inspire young avengers. The Dark Knight Returns (1986), by contrast, depicts an older Wayne accidentally catching The Mark of Zorro (1920) on television and reliving the trauma of his parents’ deaths. “You loved it so much,” he tells himself, lit dramatically by the blue screen. “You jumped and danced like a fool…” Seeing the film again is enough to momentarily break the grizzled hero as he sits alone in his home.

Kane and Finger also turned to the popular character the Shadow, appearing in pulp magazines and radio shows at the time. His grizzled voice and tendency to sneak up and confound criminals is a clear inspiration for Batman. An advertisement from 1938 featured in an issue of Doc Savage Magazine describes the mysterious figure as a “scourge of the underworld” who engages in “breathless battles of Justice against crime.” The creators borrowed from the British “consulting detective” Sherlock Holmes, having Wayne visit Commissioner Gordon and contribute his intellect to crimes that baffled police. They later gave “the world’s greatest detective” his very own Watson with the addition of Robin, allowing for more dynamic dialogue and narrative exposition (as well as homosexual undertones, which the British detectives could never evade either). Finally, Bram Stoker’s vampire from the 1897 gothic horror, which Bela Lugosi had recently portrayed in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), seemed to inspire Batman to enter through windows, use his black cape to hide his face behind the crook of his elbow, and cast impressive shadows.⁴

In the late 1930s, Kane traced a drawing of Flash Gordon swinging on a rope, eventually giving the character a dark mask and cape. He took a copy of Gang Busters in Action (1938), illustrated by Henry Vallely, and outlined many of the figures for what would become the first issues of Detective Comics to feature the Bat-Man in 1939 (Eury and Kronenberg, 2009). Kane also traced an image of Hal Foster’s Tarzan, replacing the pulp character’s bare chest with a bat symbol. He and Finger likely saw the first comic strip of the Phantom in May, 1939, in which the character vows on the skull of his father’s murderer, “to devote my life to the destruction of all forms of piracy, greed and cruelty.” In November of that year, young Bruce Wayne swears “by the spirit of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals” in Detective Comics #33 (1939). Kane later produced drawings that attributed his inspiration to the more high-brow Italian Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci and his sketches of a winged “flying machine.” But few seem convinced today.

This brief retracing of Batman’s “origin” does not invalidate the importance of the character or indicate that he is more derivative than other heroes—most share similar, though perhaps less infamous, pedigrees. Instead, it emphasizes Batman’s contingency and demonstrates that if Superman, Tarzan, Zorro, and myriad others had not come before him, Batman likely would not exist or the hero may look starkly different. If Kane had not met with Finger in Poe Park, located in the Bronx near the former poet and father of the American detective story’s cott...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A note on the comics
• Introduction
• 1 Dragged into desire: Bruce Wayne’s woman problem
• 2 Lavender lapels and poison pansies: The Joker as a queer trickster
• 3 With the lights out: The then and there of Gotham City
• List of comics
• Bibliography
• Index