The Caped Crusade 1 Origin and Growing Pains (1939-1949) Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot. So my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible . a . a . --DETECTIVE COMICS #33 (NOVEMBER 1939) But out of the sky, spitting death . The Batman! --BATMAN #1 (SPRING 1940) The very first thing Batman does--and he does it right up at the tippy-top of page 3 of his very first adventure in Detective Comics #27, which was dated May 1939 but actually hit newsstands in late March--is strike a pose. Even then, as he was first set loose upon the four-color world, striking poses was already his thing.
He stands on a rooftop, behind two burglars. The text floating in the night sky above him offers a luridly gleeful introduction that could have been lifted straight from pulp magazines of the day: "As the two men leer over their conquest, they do not notice a third menacing figure standing behind them . It is the ''BAT-MAN!''" Indeed it is. Instantly recognizable as Batman to our modern eyes, if we allow for nearly a century of iconographic shift, he glowers at the thugs with his feet shoulder-width apart, arms folded across his chest. Despite what those words over his head would have us believe, his carriage does not quite rise to the level of menacing as much as it lends him an air of snitty impatience. He seems a stern and gravely disappointed dad. Standing on a roof. In a Dracula getup.
Said getup seems less familiar to us as we gaze back at it from our contemporary vantage point. His ears are devil''s horns, thick and conical--two large carrots sticking out of a snowman--and the angle''s wrong. They jut from the sides of his head at forty-five-degree angles like the arms of a ref signaling the extra point, or a Village Person doing the "Y." The cowl itself is fine, revealing only the nondescript mouth and chin of the man inside it, as we have come to expect. The color scheme checks out, mostly: gray long johns, blue-black trunks, yellow belt--and, bizarrely, purple evening gloves.I The chest insignia is still little more than a black squiggle, but that will change. The cape is where the real drama of the garment lives: it arcs out and away from his shoulders, hanging above them in vaulting parabolas (clearly there''s some underwire involved) that allow the graceful concavities of its deeply scalloped hemline maximum visual impact. The cape will prove to be a constant, adding an Expressionist punch, a bolus of gothy showbiz.
In the hands of his first artists, like Bob Kane, Sheldon Moldoff, and Jerry Robinson, it''ll take the form of stiff bat wings or flow like silk, depending on a given story''s needs. Later, under Dick Sprang, Win Mortimer, Jim Mooney, and others, it will settle down a bit, save for snapping in the breeze to convey Batman''s speed. By the 1970s, Neal Adams, Jim Aparo, and Dick Giordano will overlay a rigorous and unforgiving photorealism onto Batman''s universe, yet the cape will remain unfettered to such mundane concerns as physics. It will lengthen and shorten at will or swirl around him like tendrils of malevolent smoke. Later still, stylists like Marshall Rogers and Kelley Jones will literally and figuratively stretch the cape and its role in storytelling to dazzling lengths. It will become a major character, a silent but expressive narrator who guides the reader''s eye and infuses the action with layers of meaning, evoking a moldering grave shroud, or the leathery wings of a demon, or the fierce and howling winds of Aeolus. But back on that rooftop in the spring of 1939, facing down two thugs who have just murdered a wealthy businessman and pilfered his safe, dude was basically wearing an umbrella. The final visual element that clicks into place has less to do with how he appears and more to do with where he appears.
He has carefully interposed himself between the robbers and the full moon, which looms over his right shoulder like it''s trying to steal a peek at them. This imagery--Batman in silhouette against the round yellow circle of the moon--is deeply embedded in the character''s narrative DNA. We''ll see echoes of it in the Bat-Signal and in the chest insignia that distinguishes the Batman of the sixties. It''s a motif that will occur and recur on all manner of Bat-merchandise, from jigsaw puzzles to bath towels; Tim Burton''s 1989 Batman film will stop its third act dead in its tracks to pay it homage. Batman and the full moon are inextricably linked, and they have been ever since this very first adventure. RAW ELEMENTS The building blocks were in place from the start. He was a detective; you couldn''t miss that. The title of the story, not to put too fine a point on it, is "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," deliberately evoking Poe, Conan Doyle, and dime detective novels.
The familiar story beats are plain: After dispatching the two goons on the roof,II the Bat-Man reads the contract they lifted from the wealthy man''s safe, pieces together the nefarious plot behind the murder, and makes for the head villain''s lair to confront the mastermind behind this grisly business. This first outing also establishes the Bat-Man as a skilled martial artist, or at least an effective bruiser. In writer Bill Finger''s prose, as in the pulp magazines he loved, no noun would think to be seen in public without a modifying adjective on its arm; thus we are informed that our hero''s headlocks are "deadly," his right crosses "terrific," his heaves "mighty," his tackles "flying." We witness him deliver a powerful sock to the jaw of the chief bad guy,III which sends the poor schmuck tumbling backward through a guardrail and into a waiting tank of acid. Here at the start, this freshly minted, antiheroic hero''s vigilantism takes a particularly ruthless and frequently deadly form. The story''s opening panels reveal that "this fellow they call the ''Bat-Man''" has been active in his as-yet-unnamed city long enough to attract the ire of Police Commissioner Gordon. As for the Bat-Man''s attitude toward his own violent actions, or any hint of what first set him down this grim road, this first adventure offers no clue. Old-School Bat-Man is a laconic cuss, a creature of action, not words.
It''ll take a few more issues for us to earn even a glimpse of our hero in repose. It will take even longer for the advent of thought balloons to make us privy to his inner monologue. So we know only what we see: the Bat-Man punching a villain over a railing to his agonizing death and commenting to a nearby hostage, "A fitting end to his kind." This homicide proves only the beginning of his murderous spree. In just the first year of his existence Batman will send some twenty-four men, two vampires, a pack of werewolves, and several giant mutants to their ultimate ends, occasionally at the business end of a gun. Eventually--after the tyke in the pixie boots shows up to lighten the tone--Batman will find himself resorting to deadly force less often, and will ultimately reject the use of firearms outright. For now, though, he''s a remorseless killer. The final element is the story''s last-panel revelation that the Bat-Man is secretly wealthy young socialite Bruce Wayne.
The notion of a masked vigilante with a secret identity was certainly not new. Neither, in a time when the country was still climbing shakily to its feet after the Great Depression, were light entertainments that revolved around the lives of the young, beautiful, and very rich. It was the era of The Thin Man, Topper, Private Lives, and Anything Goes. Millions of Americans passed long, happy hours in theaters watching the adventures of gadabouts in smoking jackets and sylphs in organza gowns, trading barbs and champagne toasts against a backdrop of unimaginable luxury. And even though the quaint drawing room whodunit was passing out of vogue, supplanted by the pulpy urban noir of hard-boiled detective yarns, a fascination with the upper crust lingered. In "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate," and indeed in many of these first adventures, it''s notable how thoroughly writer Bill Finger grafts the guns-and-gumshoes tropes from pulp magazines like Argosy, True Detective, Spicy Mystery Stories, and Black Mask onto the rarified world of old-money privilege. The result is a puzzling alloy indeed: Bored man-about-town Bruce Wayne lives a life of pampered ease and dons his outlandish garb to bust the heads of brutish thugs. Crucially, he does so not to defend the rights of the honest American workingman like the populist hero Superman, but more often to protect his wealthy friends and associates--and their money.
In this first adventure, he settles a dispute between rich rival businessmen over a chemical fortune. In his next, he nabs jewel thieves. Over and over, throughout this first year, he faces down those who would threaten the lives of millionaires to extort their millions from them. Of course, the wealth of Bruce Wayne, and by extension the social world he inhabits, is a central tenet of the Batman mythology, and one