While I don’t particularly care for boxing in real life, I’m a huge sucker for boxing in fiction. I’m a fan of Brian De Palma’s Snake Eyes and Raoul Walsh’s Gentleman Jim. Hell, Robert Wise’s The Set-Up is up there as one of my all-time favorite movies. I’m also fascinated by the fact that this is probably the most prominent sport in Batman comics…
Boxing has served as the basis for interrogation scenes (like in the classic Joker tale from Batman #251), for action set pieces (Batman #466 features a chase at a Hall of Boxing Heroes), and for small character moments such as this one:
Detective Comics #38
Or this one:
Detective Comics #596
In part, I guess the comics’ infatuation with pugilism has to do with the fact that this is not just a popular sport, but a common motif in crime fiction. Besides the melodramatic raw matter of sweaty people punching other people for a living and the simple visuals of the square ring, there is something easily metaphorical about the whole thing. It’s no wonder some of the greatest crime films of all time feature boxers among the main characters, including the original The Killers, 99 River Street, On the Waterfront, and Pulp Fiction. Even the classic Body and Soul is more of a crime flick than a sports movie, with very little boxing until the climax (ultimately, the film is best seen as one of a string of super-gritty, leftist social dramas of the late 1940s, along with Thieves’ Highway and Brute Force).
As far as Batman tales go, my favorite take on the symbolic potential of boxing is the white-knuckle thriller ‘Count Ten… and Die!’ (The Brave and the Bold #88, cover-dated February-March 1970). This is the one that opens with Bruce Wayne in a dusty slum, about to enter a dingy place whose sign offers rooms for 50¢ a night while the narration informs readers that it’s ‘night in Gotham City, and the neon glows feverishly, like the hopes of defeated men…’ Bruce is looking for retired heavyweight champion Ted Grant (aka Wildcat), whom he eventually convinces to coach the US boxing team at the World Youth Games, in Vienna. Once they get to Austria, Grant is challenged for a match with Russian boxer Koslov (aka the Hammer) and is forced to face his insecurities.
Bob Haney’s script is full of hardboiled lines and his usual anything-goes attitude, adding a whole espionage subplot just for the hell of it. Moreover, having set the main story in Vienna, Haney can’t resist throwing a couple of winks to the brilliant film noir The Third Man, including a key exchange at Prater’s Ferris wheel. In contrast to Orson Welles and his witty cuckoo clock speech, though, the Dark Knight has a blunter approach when he wants to be persuasive:
The Brave and the Bold #88
Regardless, the most obvious parallel that comes to mind when reading this story today is with Rocky IV (made fifteen years later). Like the brutal Rocky Balboa vs Ivan Drago match, the fight between Grant and Koslov is a blatant Cold War allegory, athletically illustrated by Irv Novick’s pencils and Mike Esposito’s inks:
The Brave and the Bold #88
Batman and Wildcat teamed up again a bunch of times after this story and, of course, Bob Haney always made a point of including at least one slugfest to show off Ted Grant’s boxing skills. The most memorable one took place in ‘May the Best Man Die!’ (The Brave and the Bold #118), a tale packed with hard-hitting fights, brought to life by Jim Aparo’s muscular art. At one point, the Joker – aka the ‘Grinning Jackal of Crime’ – forced Grant and the Caped Crusader to box with deadly metal gloves by threatening to kill a puppy that had the cure for a rare tropical disease affecting 600 prison inmates. (Don’t ask.) This was such a great visual that it was revisited in Batman/Wildcat – an uninspired mini-series written by Chuck Dixon and Beau Smith.
Wildcat has actually popped up in quite a few other Batman comics over the years. For instance, he has teamed up with Tim Drake (Robin #31) and it has been retroactively established that Ted Grant was the one who taught Selina Kyle how to fight (in Catwoman: Her Sister’s Keeper). And not just her:
Catwoman (v2) #20
Moreover, while 1997’s Batman/Wildcat isn’t worth your time, the Catwoman/Wildcat mini Dixon and Smith did the following year does hit all the right notes. With lively art by Sergio Cariello and Tom Palmer, this blood-splattered comic has the Dixon-Smith duo channeling their inner Garth Ennis as they throw the titular characters into a slapstick romp about a failed heist targeting the payouts of a major fight in Las Vegas. The script gives Wildcat a suitably rugged voice (‘The man upstairs must still like me. He keeps makin’ my knuckles just a little harder than the punks’ jaws.’), which plays very nicely against Selina’s smart-ass style.
Catwoman/Wildcat #1
But what about boxing in Gotham City itself? Well, the city is bound to have an eccentric relationship with sports – after all, this is a city where watching a hockey game at the stadium means you may end up gassed and robbed by a gang patterning its crimes after the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (as shown in Detective Comics #368). Needless to say, boxing is no exception when it comes to Gotham’s vices… As early as 1941, ‘Suicide Beat!’ (Batman #6) gave us a glimpse of an underworld with seedy gangsters fixing fights. We saw a little more of it in ‘The Park Avenue Kid’ (Detective Comics #174), an odd little tale in which Bruce Wayne temporarily became a prizefighter (admittedly, this was a bit goofy, but still not as goofy as the boxing scene in Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights!).
Curiously, another comic where we get a close look at Gotham’s typically corrupt boxing milieu is the surprisingly good Batman versus Predator (well, perhaps not that surprising considering that it was written by Dave Gibbons, who has penned his share of cool Batman yarns, namely a World’s Finest mini-series and the amusing short story ‘The Black and White Bandit’). One of the most accomplished entries in the whole Predator franchise, this 1991 crossover sees the titular monster applying strange alien logic in order to hunt down Gotham’s strongest contenders. He starts out with the city’s boxers, attacking the home of the most recent heavyweight champion, which leads to a callback to the franchise’s most famous R-rated line:
Batman versus Predator #1
That said, if you really want a proper boxing saga set in Gotham City, then you’ll have to pick up the two awesome issues I’ll be discussing next week…