Over the past several decades it seems we have Batman becoming more and more paranoid and suspicious to the point he’s really kind of an generally unpleasant personality.
When did this trend of Batman being kind of a dyspeptic jerk originate?
As with all things, I blame Frank Miller.
Seconded.
I’m slowly reading through all the Batman stories. I’ve kind of stalled out in the Silver Age.
Someone is likely to point out that Batman was originally all dark and gritty. Bullshit. Yes, there was violence. Yes, Batman killed people. Sometimes with guns. But somehow it’s not dark. It’s amusing and Batman is very likable. Actually it’s more Bruce Wayne is very likable. This is way before Batman became Bruce’s ‘real’ identity.
It starts getting goofy in the 40s, which is still Golden Age. It’s assuredly silly in the 50s with the start of the Silver Age. As of 1983, which is the latest issue I have notes on, Batman is not a giant dick.
The Dark Knight Returns came out in 86. So, yeah, it’s all Frank Miller’s fault.
He wasn’t very nice in Detective Comics or Brave and the Bold either.
Imho, I’m beginning to wonder when and why people think he was ever a nice guy.
It goes back to Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams circa 1970, and I think they were just overcompensating for the indignity of the TV show.
Circa 1985, DC was soliciting proposals from writers and editors on all their major characters. With Batman, the competing proposals were from O’Neil and Steve Englehart. O’Neil wanted Batman to be darker and crazier than he had been, and O’Neil wanted him to lighten up a bit and be more of a swashbuckler. O’Neil’s proposal was selected, and Miller’s Dark Knight was an early result of this.
If you think O’Neil didn’t make a huge imprint on Dark Knight, compare it to DK2, which he had nothing to do with. His stylistic fingerprints were all over the first series.
I say that the maintaining of the BatDick comes from the ascendancy of the BatGod. Grant Morrison’s era, starting roughly with the JLA circa 2000ish. If it wasn’t for his obsession with Bat-Man, we might have had a Dini era, which would be far different.
I’ll second this. Batman started getting dark and serious well before Miller came out with The Dark Knight Returns. As Bat Mite (of all people) said in one of the issues of Ambush Bug (about the time TDKR came out), “He used to be fun, always playing with giant props and things. Now his cape is ten feet long and he has no sense of humor.”
He might be right about the reason, too. Just before the damned campy TV series came out they’d revamped Batman, getting rid of the giant props and the outer space villains, giving him a sleek new sporty Batmobile in place of that huge heavy boat of a car, and returned him to his detective roots*. Then TV’s Batman came along and ruined it all. They even put Aunt Harriet in the comic.
*Actually, among all the aliens and the oversized props, the 1950s Batman occasionally had a pretty good “detective” story, where Batman had a genuine puzzle to solve.
He had to keep up with that dick Superman
Those superheroes are all a bunch of jerks. Wouldn’t you be!
So he had to be prepared?
Who watches the watchmen?
(Hey, that’s a great idea for an alternate take on superhero comics!)
To stray a little bit from the OP’s question - should Batman or Bruce Wayne be likable? At its heart, Batman seems to be a revenge story in which a traumatized child has internalized the random and brutal injustice of his parents’ death and wants to make all the criminals he can find pay for inflicting or trying to inflict injustice on others. Through overt, violent crime that is. A white-collar crime-fighting Batman would only be a somewhat interesting concept.
As with many other ideas that are marketed for a mass audience, either the creators or the publishers watered the idea down, in this case the necessary and motivating psychology resulting from the character’s origin, so that he became a smiling Zorro, not Batman.
From the mid 40s through about 1955, Batman was “the world’s greatest detective.” He was much more like a Holmes than an avenger of the night. He was a public hero, went out in the daytime, and worked almost officially with the police. (The newspaper strip of the 40s was also like this. If you can get the compilations, do so.)
The stories were good puzzles, as you say, much better and deeper than the stories in almost any other superhero comic of the time. This was when Batman started to be portrayed as the all-knowing brainiac who knew everything about every inch of Gotham City. He was the first technological comic hero, with primitive computers and sorting machines and punch cards and all the Univac jazz.
I date the change at around the time the comic code came in, passed late 1954 so started affecting the books in 1955. The puzzle stories seemed to vanish almost overnight. I’m not sure why, but my guess is that they started aiming for a much younger audience who couldn’t appreciate the subtleties of a mystery and that even a classic whodunit had to involve a murder and they backed away from any killing. The result was those idiot alien and supernatural stories that lasted for the rest of the 50s and into the 60s. They were the major reason that I jumped over to Marvel and abandoned DC for many years as soon as Stan Lee became San Lee.
A detective Batman would still interest me more than the psychotic Batman. But it also means that the villains can’t be psychopathic torturing freaks. The whole tone of the comic would have to change. But kids don’t read comics today; young adults who watch Saw read comics. Batman isn’t today’s Batman because of his origin. He’s Batman because the world wants torture porn. I don’t, and I stopped reading Batman. Same reason. It skews too young for me.
I don’t think it’s so strict a dividing line. Batman was still doing the “detective story” schtick into the late 1950s. I don’t think he was into the alien stuff in the early 1950s (although he was doing things like time travel even in the late forties/ear;ly 1950s), which does fit your timeline. But the alien weirdness overlapped more straightforward detective stories, which is why I worded it that way.
I’m not that familiar with the early 1950s, but I did inherit late 1950s Batman and Detective Comics, and they reprinted many of those stories in annuals in the 1960s as well.
I loved the Annuals and I bought every one. Still have them in boxes in the basement. If I have some time, highly doubtful this week, I’ll try to pull them out and see when the good stories were dated.
I remember the changeover as being very abrupt, but there were several titles and three stories per issue and lots of writers, so some overlap is certainly plausible. I’ll stick with my main point, though, that the comics code changed Batman hugely and that post-Code Batman was a different personality than pre-code. Heck, they put in Kathy Kane as Bat-Woman just to refute Wertham’s homosexual accusation. Then came Ace the Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite and sob Mogo the Bat-Ape and I can’t write anymore…
Read the Ambush Bug issue(#3 of the original run) with the “Forgotten DC Characters”, especially the hilarious page on “Bat Hound”. It’s good for what ails ya.
You’re entirely right about all this, but I’ll add a footnote that Englehart’s short run on Detective (the Hugo Strange / Laughing Fish arc) was absolutely terrifying.
Oh yes, a dog needs a mask to protect its identity.
Egg Fu’s entry in that volume was classic as well.
Following the thread of super-jerks, I give you Superdickery.com!
There were Batman TAS episodes based on those stories which I have seen. I’ve never read the comics, so what do you mean that Englehart’s short run was absolutely terrifying?