Webcomic Wednesday - “Mark of the Bat” by Josh Simmons

There’s an old Seinfeld bit where Jerry talks about the way sports fans love a certain player until he gets traded to another team, at which point they hate him even though the only thing that’s changed is his uniform.  You’re not rooting for the player, the joke goes—you’re rooting for his laundry.

If I may respectfully borrow the image, there aren’t many superheroes whose laundry I root for. In comics, there’s never ever been a superhero character or title I keep collecting regardless of who’s writing or drawing it simply because I love that character so much. I’m interested in the work being done by the creators involved, not the fact that there’s a drawing I can recognize as Wolverine wandering around somewhere in that work. I’m far more likely to follow an individual cartoonist or writer than the hand-me-down heroes they’re working on.

But there are a small handful of characters I can think of who come close to meeting that rooting-for-laundry threshold. One is the Hulk, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who to me represents the superhero idea in its purest form: a big huge guy hitting things. (The fact that he’s a brainiac whose power is activated by his immense and inexhaustible well of rage is just the icing on the cake.) Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Superman, when done right, represents a more benevolent twist on that big-guy-punching-stuff formula, a formula that originated with the character; too bad he’s so rarely done right. (Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s All Star Superman is the be-all and end-all of stories featuring that character.) A string of lengthy, high-quality runs by individual creative teams have given me a lasting soft spot for the Lee/Kirby/Bill Everett creation Daredevil, though it’s so tied to those teams (Miller, Miller/Mazzucchelli, Bendis/Maleev, Brubaker/Lark) that I’m not sure it counts.

The superhero for which I’m the biggest mark, though, is undoubtedly Batman. Bill Finger and Bob Kane’s creation dominated the pop-culture consciousness at the exact moment my own was beginning to take shape – 1989, the year of Tim Burton’s marvelous movie (without any question still the weirdest, most stylish, best superhero movie ever made). His costume, his milieu, his origin, his rogues gallery (the best in all of pop culture), his wonderful toys (ditto),  the sense of dark glamour that pervades his every adventure: This stuff was absolute catnip to me – a vector, I suspect, for the more openly sinister things I’d soon come to love in art to invade and reshape the heroic fiction I was already so fond of in Tolkien and Star Wars and He-Man and suchlike. A copy of Frank Miller’s magnificently big Batman graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns given to me by a classmate who stole it from his big brother helped keep my understanding and appreciation of the character rooted in comics, even though I didn’t even read the things at the time. Even though characters like Two-Face and names like “Selina Kyle” were totally unknown to me, I knew I wanted to know them. (And man, did I ever have a crush on Robin in that book.)

To this day, even as maltreatment of creators and overrated blockbusters and a general disillusionment with stories about extraordinary individual solving problems through violence have soured much of my fascination with the genre, seeing that Batsymbol on a t-shirt still fires my imagination, somehow. The story of Batman, after all, is the story of a boy who beats himself and the world around him into just the right shape to fill the gaping wound in his soul. That’s a mighty combustible fuel for a story.

“Mark of the Bat,” cartoonist Josh Simmons’s spectacularly bleak “parody” of Batman, plays with that fire until there’s nothing left to burn. His “G_____ City” is a fetid, claustrophobic place, roofed by a solid ceiling of low-hanging black clouds and overrun with cramped, joyless skyscrapers, as if the art-deco-expressionist hodgepodge developed by the Burton Batman’s art director Anton Furst had gone cancerous and overrun the host body. His Batman has gazed into the abyss until it’s all he can see, his obsession with crime overriding his basic human needs – to sleep in a bed, to bathe, to maintain any semblance of normal life. When Simmons’s uncharacteristically jaunty Catwoman shows up (dressed like any young, athletic woman might dress in the city in the summer, with the exception of the cat-mask), Batman is so enervated that he can neither fight nor flirt. “You know…” she tells him, “I used to have a bit of a crush on you…You used to be…powerful. Sexy. But nowadays…not so much.” “I’ve been a bat for a long, long time…” Batman murmurs after she leaves him alone with his thoughts, and you can feel the weight of every Bat-moment in his slouch.

The plot concerns this Batman’s development of a new “Bat-device,” a workaround for his solemn oath never to kill the criminals he catches. How can he make any kind of permanent dent in the juggernaut of criminality without lethal force? Is there a way to mark criminals so that they can be recognized and shunned on sight, whether or not Batman’s around to ship them back to Blackgate Prison or Arkham Asylum? It’s in answering these questions that Simmons reveals the depths of his Batman’s sickness. The method is pure madness, and when weighed against his world-weary demeanor at all other times, the evident delight and comfort Batman takes in deploying it is tremendously disturbing. Was this what that black void in the middle of the bright light of the Batsignal symbolized all along?

To be blunt, any idiot can do a superhero pisstake – they’re thugs, they’re perverts, they’re fascists, they’re for growth-stunted manchildren, you know, the usual. Some people have even made careers writing superhero comics about how much they hate superhero comics, which is an aesthetic moebius strip I’ve yet to mentally untangle. Simmons, however, moves his rifle scope away from those easy targets and fires into something far messier, something that feels less like a goof on Batman and more like a worst-case-scenario alternate-dimension version. “Mark of the Bat” picks and picks and picks at our dovetailed drive for cruelty and need to feel superior to others until the fingernail tears off. It leaves a mark.