Batman comics have borrowed and blended different storytelling traditions from the get-go, but never was this more apparent than in the Silver Age, when writers constantly pillaged all sorts of books, films, and trends for inspiration (as opposed to more recent comics, which mostly pillage other comics).
With that in mind, today I want to zoom in on ‘Zero Hour for Earth!’ (Batman #167, cover-dated November 1964), penned by Bill Finger (one of the original co-creators of the Dark Knight), drawn by Sheldon Moldoff (and not by Batman’s other co-creator, Bob Kane, even though he signed the work), and inked by Joe Giella (the defining inkerof the New Look era).
Back then, Batman issues used to feature at least a couple of tales, but this yarn takes up the full issue and boy does Finger pull out all the stops… Anticipating the blockbuster-like approach Bob Haney would later develop in The Brave and the Bold, this is a relentless read where, after watching the death of an Interpol agent, the Dynamic Duo chase both an international crime syndicate called Hydra *and* an unrelated megalomaniac villain trying to start World War III.
Part of Finger’s strategy to keep the story moving is to constantly adjust what kind of story it is. At first, we get the classic Batman & Robin formula in which the characters have to decipher puzzle-like clues that lead them on a breadcrumb trail from one place to another. You even get one of those ‘editor’s notes’ giving readers further interesting information, unrelated to the plot…
Who said comics aren’t educational?
So, early on, despite the foreign setting, ‘Zero Hour for Earth!’ still reads like a fairly conventional superhero comic. The fact that the villainous organization is called Hydra – a name that sounds evil and goes back to ancient mythology as filtered by pop culture – is a typical comic-book move (Marvel introduced its own villainous organization called Hydra a year later). It also allows Batman to utter this great line: ‘I intend to become a modern-day Hercules – and put an end to the hydra of crime!’
Then again, as pointed out by reader Edward Pachico on the letters’ page a few issues later, nobody appears to have given the reference more than a superficial thought… But that’s ok, because this provides editor Julie Schwarz with the chance to pun about it:
Batman #170
To be sure, when you’re dealing with the classic Dynamic Duo formula, you can often draw a straight line back to old-school detective fiction. While solving pre-set clues (usually requiring knowledge of random encyclopedic factoids and word-association skills) makes Batman cases feel like children’s games, our hero also gets to stake his claim as World’s Greatest Detective by applying observational and deductive reasoning throughout the story.
Passages like the one below aren’t particularly sophisticated (Bill Finger is no Conan Doyle or Ellery Queen), but the sheer recurrence of such tiny bits helps sell the cool idea that the Caped Crusader is always switched on and efficiently interpreting the world around him with detail and insight…
The fact that the two sequences I’ve shown you so far are set in the Netherlands and in Greece, respectively, should give you a hint about the other type of story woven into the narrative. In addition to everything else, ‘Zero Hour for Earth!’ is a tale of international intrigue reminiscent, to some degree, of those old Hitchcock thrillers where local landmarks were prominently integrated into set pieces (including Dutch windmills in Foreign Correspondent, which is probably the film closest in spirit to this comic).
The genre hybrid doesn’t feel awkward at all. Elements of cloak & dagger – such as secret codes and disguises – seem right at home in the playful reality of the Caped Crusader, where hiding a message by punching it in braille into the rim of a hat isn’t more preposterous than any of Batman’s usual gimmicks.
I swear the scene above is ripped straight from an old movie I’ve seen, but I can’t quite place it at the moment… Although the exotic dancer/secret agent figure is surely a nod to Mata Hari on some degree.
And yet, of course, by 1964 espionage had gained a new major connotation. It’s hard not to think of James Bond, not only because the Dynamic Duo’s globetrotting escapades keep taking them back and forth throughout Europe and Asia, but also because the central plot is as Bond as it gets – basically, the villain is trying to pit international powers against each other in order to take over the world!
I’m not the biggest fan of Sheldon Moldoff, but I admit that his work here – no doubt helped by Joe Giella’s inks – occasionally captures that luscious exoticism of the 007 pictures. I particularly appreciate the slick use of silhouettes in this sequence, first to highlight Batman & Robin and then to camouflage the Batplane:
It’s not just me. The intertextual link was fairly obvious – and, already at the time, reader Leonard J. Tirado picked up on it as well:
Batman #170
The comparison to Eric Ambler and Graham Greene is, needless to say, pretty out there. Those authors excelled at atmospheric authenticity and complex psychology, whereas Bill Finger is all about crisp, fat-free narrative and momentum, moving the plot at such a lightning pace that you hardly have time to settle into any particular situation (much less consider its logic or lack thereof).
Still, it’s true that Ian Fleming isn’t the only discernable influence here. I also see in ‘Zero Hour for Earth!’ the likes of Tintin and the sort of pulpy adventures and serials that later inspired Indiana Jones, especially when the Dynamic Duo find themselves in the jungle among some boobytrapped ancient ruins…
No holds are barred in this comic. Yes, the barrage of undeveloped ideas can make our enjoyment feel rushed – but it also generates an enjoyable rush. It’s A.D.D. fun!
In fairness, Fleming himself owed a debt to this strand of wild adventure fiction. Hell, in Dr. No the villain’s lair is also disguised by nature and superstition.
And, again, the scene where the Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder have to save the world by stopping the launch of a nuclear missile from an underground bunker (with eccentric decoration) would not look out of place on your average James Bond mission…
The thing is that saving the world isn’t the final climax of the story!
‘Zero Hour for Earth!’ is not a Bond venture after all. It is a Batman comic, goddamn it, which means that the worst villainy of all is urban crime, including larceny. So, after the Dynamic Duo have prevented nuclear war, the story shifts to traditional crime fiction as they move on to the more important business of preventing a bank heist:
This action-packed scene is STILL not the end of it!
Returning to Bond-like thrills, we then get a heart-racing chase scene that anticipates the one in the movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by a few years *and* a nod to real-world Cold War geopolitics:
Bill Finger packs so much into these 24 pages… Today, the same basic plot would take at least six issues (twelve if written by Brian Michael Bendis) – and perhaps we might gain in terms of atmosphere and characterization, but we would surely miss in terms of breathless energy and a sense of excitement that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
That said, the most dated aspect of ‘Zero Hour for Earth!’ are the visuals. With minor tweaks, I can see Finger’s tale getting repurposed even today, as some creators continue to defy writing-for-the-trade decompression. Put a kickass artist on it and you could still get one hell a comic out of this script!
And yet, I don’t want to undersell the artwork too much. Ghosting for Bob Kane and aping his iconic style, Sheldon Moldoff can be a bit stiff, but his craftsman-like clarity and simplicity have their own appeal. For every crude panel, you often get another one that actually contains quite enjoyable and inventive imagery (like some of the ones I chose for this post). Thus, even after the ski-chase climax, Moldoff and Giella still give us a few lovely panels rendered in impressive detail… because this comic is all about surprising readers until the very last page!
October’s first reminder that comic books can be awesome is a tribute to the voluptuous femmes fatales who were all over the covers of Golden Age comics:
The second post in this 12-part series about Cold War cinema focuses on the early 1950s, when the conflict reached its first peak, in Europe as well as in Asia. The films below are all profoundly shaped by the booming ideological rivalry and/or high-pitched security-driven mentality, but it’s fun to see how they approach these through a wide variety of stories and tones while focusing on such disparate fronts as the arms race, espionage, border division, hot wars, consumer diplomacy, financial aid, and full-on propaganda.
11. Seven Days to Noon(UK, 1950)
There’s an absorbingly gritty, semi-documentary feel to Seven Days to Noon, a taut thriller about the Scotland Yard running against the clock to stop a nuclear scientist from blowing up London. The fear that atomic power could be turned against the West is becoming increasingly palpable.
12. Peking Express (USA, 1951)
Take the train-bound intrigue of Berlin Express, have Joseph Cotton play the idealist American abroad like he did in The Third Man (here he’s a well-meaning doctor of the recently created World Health Organization), and set the whole thing in communist China… As an old-school adventure piece, Peking Express is serviceable enough, but its presence on this list is as a masterful lesson in Hollywood’s ability to recycle material into new geopolitical contexts, in this case updating proven formulas (this is the second remake of 1932’s Shanghai Express) to sensationalize the establishment of the PRC regime, back when it was still excluded from the United Nations (and therefore at odds with the WHO, which gives the film an extra layer of resonance when seen now). This one even has characters discussing Marxism and democracy in-between love scenes and gunfights, making it yet another representative of the HUAC era, which isn’t to say that things don’t get muddier along the way (the commies may not be the main villains after all!), culminating in a blaze of bullets where practically everyone is firing at each other.
13. The Steel Helmet(USA, 1951)
There aren’t all that many great Korean War movies. Less than a year into the conflict, though, Sam Fuller knocked out this incredible ragtag ‘lost patrol’ type of yarn. Shot in ten days, on a shoestring budget, with UCLA students as extras, The Steel Helmet wears a passionate sense of urgency on its sleeve and it packs one hell of a punch thanks to Fuller’s unmistakable instinct for tabloid filmmaking.
14. Europe ’51(Italy, 1952)
Back to Italy! In the forceful melodrama Europe ‘51, we follow the postwar ideological turmoil through the eyes of a grieving mother searching for meaning among the capitalist bourgeoisie, communist ideas, and religion. By this stage, the Cold War has become such a hegemonic status quo than trying to find a place beyond it is perceived as a sort of insanity…
15. The Magnetic Monster(USA, 1953)
Despite the ‘monster’ in the title, don’t expect anyone in a rubber suit. The threat is actually an expanding radioactive isotope releasing an intense magnetic energy, with ever more devastating effects. What elevates this B-movie is its idiosyncratic approach to the genre: the first of a trilogy featuring the Office of Scientific Investigation (OSI), a fictional science-based version of the FBI (instead of G-Men, their agents are A-Men, because of the link to atomic energy), The Magnetic Monster is shot like an episode of Dragnet, presenting their investigation in a hardboiled, no-nonsense tone even as the premise becomes more fantastical and the stakes more world-shattering. In other words, not only do we get a story about nuclear research and danger, but we also get a dramatization of the protective role of the federal and military authorities.
16. The Man Between (UK, 1953)
Carol Reed’s thematic follow-up to The Third Man has a less sophisticated script, but the elegant cinematography and location shooting generate a truly immersive atmosphere, engrossingly portraying divided (if pre-Wall) Berlin and culminating in an impressive couple-on-the-run sequence (which is more reminiscent of Reed’s bleak IRA drama Odd Man Out). More than the films’ quality, though, the most interesting comparison to The Third Man concerns the ideological shift in emphasis, as pointed out by Tony Shaw in his book British Cinema and the Cold War: if, in the former movie, the Soviets ‘constituted only one threatening element that was far outweighed by the post-war racketeering of a distinctly non-political nature’ (as the criminal Harry Lime manipulated the system for his own purposes), in The Man Between ‘the communists are undoubtedly the main cause of Berlin’s instability’ (now they’re the ones blackmailing a smuggler).
17. Pickup on South Street (USA, 1953)
New York’s criminal underworld joins the Cold War. Like I mentioned last timeI brought up Pickup on South Street, Sam Fuller’s walloping film noir features three of my favorite lowlifes in cinema, who find themselves way in over their heads when one of them inadvertently picks a wallet with top-secret government information…
18. Roman Holiday (USA, 1953)
Without much external context, the Cold War’s link to this endearing romantic comedy may appear mostly allegorical, as an American journalist shows a European princess a good time in Rome, symbolizing the US role in fostering the Old Continent’s freedom, happiness, and integration (while indirectly promoting tourism and, thus, consumer diplomacy). If you bear in mind that Roman Holiday was anonymously scripted by the blacklisted Donald Trumbo, however, its themes of trust and loyalty gain a whole other resonance against the unspoken backdrop of McCarthyism… And yet, ironically, the end-result was such a utopic advertisement for capitalism (anticipating the ‘economic miracle,’ this Italy is a world away from the Rome of Bicycle Thieves) that the US Intelligence Agency selected it as a priority export to the Eastern Bloc – and it did make it to Soviet screens due to the subsequent ‘thaw’ of the Khrushchev era.
19. Welcome Mr Marshall!(Spain, 1953)
A genuinely hilarious satire, made in the Franco dictatorship, Welcome Mr Marshall! chronicles a poor village’s attempt to impress the Americans when it turns out Spain might be included in the Marshall Plan after all.
20. Animal Farm(UK/USA, 1954)
What better way to wrap up this second post than with animated anti-Soviet propaganda commissioned by the CIA with the aim of showing viewers of all ages the degeneration of the USSR. Besides the object’s overall bizarreness, this screen adaptation of Animal Farm is especially fascinating when you consider the precise changes from George Orwell’s book.
This week we’re back to spotlighting comic book covers in Gotham Calling.
I’m quite fascinated by the work of Joe Simon on the covers of Dick Tracy back in the early 1950s, when monthly issues collected Chester Gould’s iconic daily newspaper strips about a tough, square-jawed police inspector’s crusade against organized crime.
Because I first encountered Dick Tracy as a kid-friendly cartoon show and, later, as a surreal comedy film (where Al Pacino played his funniest gangster outside of Donnie Brasco, if not Scarface), for a long time I associated it with a relatively light, whimsical take on the crime genre, somewhere between Will Eisner’s The Spirit and Golden Age Batman comics. This means that, when I finally came across the original Dick Tracy stories, I was shocked and amused by how unabashedly sadistic they turned out to be.
I now realize that cruelty was as much a trademark of the series as the gadgets, the silly names, and the goofy-looking villains (Pearshape, Flaptop, Pruneface…). This spirit was certainly kept in 2018, when Dick Tracy was rebooted in the IDW mini-series Dead or Alive. Although superficially set in the present, that series emulated the original’s idiosyncratic brand of pulp, courtesy of a team of wonderful creators whose work had always seemed heavily inspired by Chester Gould’s comics in the first place (Rich Tommaso along with Lee, Michael, and Laura Allred).
In turn, while Michael Avon Oeming’s Dick Tracy: Forever began by returning the characters to their initial historical setting, for the most part that series substantially toned down the nastiness. Oeming’s artwork – colored by Taki Soma – looked absolutely lovely and the storytelling was pretty ambitious (gradually moving from a pastiche of Sunday strips into cyberpunk metafiction), but the result nevertheless felt somewhat sanitized and defanged in comparison to pre-Code comics…
As you can see above and below, the old comics pushed the contrast between colorful, naïve aesthetics and a committedly hardboiled tone to outrageous extremes. They’re full of blood, death, and torture, but there is also a cartoony edge to them, both in the caricatural character designs and in the overblown situations they depict.
Moreover, if there is one thing Joe Simon knew how to do was how to put together a striking layout (after all, he co-designed, with Jack Kirby, the mythical cover of Captain America Comics #1!). His covers for Dick Tracy are incredible pieces of storytelling, framing dynamic compositions with interlocked actions at multiple levels (usually playing with the foreground and background) so as to conjure up an elaborate scene – hell, almost an entire story – from a single image.
Whether showing the titular protagonist getting viciously attacked or featuring him mercilessly inflicting pain on outlaws, the covers drawn by Joe Simon (ghosting for Gould) aren’t mocking film noir or distorting old Dick Tracy comics – they ARE old Dick Tracy comics (even if the strip had been around for over twenty years by the time these specific collections came out). They’re also not spoofing police brutality or the panic over racketeering, since the series seems very clearly on the side of authority. In fact, Simon’s covers do perfect justice to the stories inside. And yet, retroactively, they came off as misleadingly iconoclastic in my eyes – their violence not only perversely thrilling, but comically grotesque.
Here are a few more bombastic examples that made me feel this way:
This past year was especially irregular in terms of posting because I had more classes than usual, but I’ve finally found a way to turn this in the blog’s favor. One of my courses looked at how popular culture imagined the Cold War as it unfolded, so I spent much of the year watching, rewatching, discussing, and thinking about films from that era… And so, since I like to celebrate Gotham Calling’s landmarks with longer listicles or compilations, this time I’m providing a selection of 120 movies made both during and about the Cold War.
I’m working on a longer project about this but, for now, I’ll just share a preliminary list (spread over twelve biweekly posts). It is hardly exhaustive or balanced: there is way more West than East and most productions are from the United States and Europe despite the fact that the Cold War affected culture all over the globe…
In other words, many key episodes and features of the Cold War are missing, as are plenty of ‘iconic’ movies that I don’t find as appealing as the ones below. Still, if you binge-watch all of the ones I selected, especially in chronological order, you’re bound to get quite an immersive – and, I hope, occasionally surprising – experience and come out of it with a wider understanding of how the Cold War was visualized at the time.
As for the selection criteria, the main thing was whether I found a film both genuinely entertaining and interesting in terms of what it suggests about the Cold War (i.e. propaganda is a feature, not a bug). My definition of the Cold War is quite broad, ranging from the arms race and proxy conflicts to the sheer competition between capitalist and socialist models of modernity.
That said, I had to limit the list somehow – so, while there are some allegories in there, I privileged films where the references to the conflict were relatively textual (and not just in the subtext). By themselves, archetypical metaphors and themes such as space exploration, alien invasions, secret government programmes, and brainwashing weren’t enough to automatically merit inclusion… although you will certainly find at least one instance of each of these elements on the list.
The end result is pretty eclectic, which suits the spirit of Gotham Calling. Some entries are stirring pieces of filmmaking and storytelling by themselves, others are fascinating specifically because of their production context. And while they’re all fiction, contrary to this blog’s primary focus not all of them fall into what is conventionally designated as ‘genre fiction.’ That category can sometimes be useful to quickly identify stories that are shamelessly formulaic and unpretentious (like Batman comics), but it can also prove limited and misleading… After all, let’s face it, classical dramas and comedies are themselves genres with their own formulas, traditions, subgenres (e.g., family drama, slapstick comedy…), and popular appeal.
In this case, I’m approaching Cold War cinema as a genre in itself, i.e. as a set of recurrent themes, tropes, and imagery that may draw common interest in all of these – otherwise quite varied – films.
1. Berlin Express(USA, 1948)
Berlin Express is a very fun Hitchcock-like thriller, despite being depressingly set in bombed-out Germany, where a group of men – and a woman – from the USA, UK, France, and USSR come together… and the Cold War doesn’t yet seem inevitable. Like some of the movies below, it was filmed against the backdrop of actual German rubble, thus capturing the materiality of the place at that moment in history, even while absorbing it into an unabashedly artificial narrative.
2. Bicycle Thieves(Italy, 1948)
If you want to get a sense of the reasoning for the Marshall Plan and for the United States’ interference in Italy’s 1948 elections (i.e. why Washington thought communism had a chance in Western Europe), there are worse places to look for it than in the neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves, whose depiction of Rome’s poverty-stricken lives stands in stark contrast to the escapist glamour of American cultural imperialism (as reflected in the street posters, which play a key role in the plot).
3. A Foreign Affair(USA, 1948)
An absolutely scathing satire of the Allied occupation of Germany. Hopping from political screwball comedy to romance to musical to social drama to noirish spy thriller and back again, A Foreign Affair embodies the abrasive energy with which, along with the military, Hollywood also traveled to war-torn Europe to rebuild its imaginary. (Although Italian neorealism powerfully filmed the same locations and similar situations in Germany Year Zero, its sombre approach to the literal and moral ruins of post-fascist Berlin strikes me as more contemplative of the past than of the future… and therefore less indicative of the looming Cold War compared to the ‘anything goes’ attitude of A Foreign Affair.)
4. Krakatit (Czechoslovakia, 1948)
A nightmare on screen. Blending gothic horror with science fiction, Krakatit inaugurates the apocalyptic angst of the atomic arms race (even though it was made back when the United States still had a nuclear monopoly) through the bewildering saga of a man who discovers a powerful explosive and desperately tries to prevent its weaponization. The expressionistic lighting and unsettling camerawork, along with surrealist, steam-of-consciousness storytelling, deliberately emulate a feverish hallucination.
5. Passport to Pimlico(UK, 1949)
In Passport to Pimlico, a London area suddenly declares independence from the United Kingdom, leading to an original – and quite funny – take on postwar rationing, the Berlin airlift, and decolonization.
6. The Third Man (UK/USA, 1949)
The greatest film noir ever (as repeatedly stated at Gotham Calling), The Third Man is a mystery set – and shot – in occupied Austria, where, once again, the main tension is not so much between East and West as between the United States and Europe.
7. Tokyo Joe(USA, 1949)
In turn, Tokyo Joe tends to be remembered – when it’s remembered at all – as little more than a competent noiry crime drama (with a touch of Caniff-esque aerial adventure), albeit elevated by Humphrey Bogart’s world-weary charisma. From a Cold War perspective, though, this depiction of occupied Japan provides a remarkably neat counterpart to all those movies about postwar Europe, begging for a comparison of their plain similarities and sharp contrasts.
8. The Woman on Pier 13, aka I Married a Communist(USA, 1949)
If Tokyo Joe has been ignored, this home front noir has been utterly reviled. The tragic tale of a San Francisco shipping executive getting blackmailed by the US Communist Party (practically indistinguishable from an organized crime racket), The Woman on Pier 13 is often maligned – and mocked – as an epitome of hysterical Red Scare propaganda. While that’s not entirely unfair when it comes to the production’s spirit, interestingly the result is more ideologically jumbled (as compellingly argued by Robert Miklitsch). It’s also a pretty stylish affair, with plenty of hardboiled dialogue, white-knuckle action, and stunning chiaroscuro cinematography. (The corruption of dockworkers’ unions was soon to be the object of a much more – deservedly – acclaimed picture, On the Waterfront, but the anti-communism in that one is largely subtext, implicitly justifying director Elia Kazan’s decision to denounce fellow leftists to the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
9. The Big Lift(USA, 1950)
The flip side of A Foreign Affair is this slickly crafted semi-documentary dramatizing the conflicted re-establishment of relations with (some) Germans: written during the Berlin Blockade and shot on location immediately afterwards, with the collaboration and supervision of the United States’ military, The Big Lift ostensibly presents a more benign view of the American forces (between this and 1948’s The Search, Montgomery Cliff started his film career as the friendly face of uniformed compassion for Europe…). Yet the final product is itself engagingly multi-layered, resorting to various clever and amusing strategies to convey – and even, to some extent, problematize – western discourse about this inaugural event of the Cold War.
10. Destination Moon (USA, 1950)
Despite a few precedents, Destination Moon is the epic that truly kicked off the cinematic space race, anticipating future technology through hard science fiction while channelling the politics of its day in the form of jingoistic warnings against a foreign enemy, not to mention a staunch commitment to the superiority of corporate capitalism. What a time capsule!
Political thrillers are one of my favorite genres. I crave witty, cunning characters and intricate plots that combine micro and macro scales while turning the political process into thrilling suspense and clever maneuvers, both because it’s a way to reflect about norms and institutions and because of the appealing fantasy for every nerd (like me) that rhetoric can be a powerful weapon.
In the 21st century, we’ve been spoiled for this genre, in part due to The West Wing’s success and influence. Not all of the recent entries were as well-written as Aaron Sorkin’s seminal TV show, but plenty of them were, from the Nordic hit Borgen (whose latest season is a fascinating treaty on colonialism) to this year’s The Diplomat, not to mention acclaimed dramatizations of lobbying on the big screen, such as Miss Sloane and Thank You for Smoking. Crucially, the sharp satire of Armando Iannucci’s films (In the Loop, The Death of Stalin) and shows (The Thick of It, Veep) has paved the way for the corporate black comedy of Jesse Armstrong’s Succession (which dabbed into high politics a number of times, especially towards the end of the final season) as well as the more lighthearted EU sitcom Parlement. Iannucci’s work actually joins a long lineage of superb takes on the genre by British television, which probably hit the peak of cynicism back in the 1980s with the spy series The Sandbaggers and the sitcom Yes, Minister. In turn, Dahvi Waller’s Mrs. America revisited the 1970s’ political scene in the US with an original perspective that made it one of the most enjoyable shows I binged during the early pandemic.
More recently, I was pleasingly surprised to find out Oppenheimer, after many detours, eventually settles into one hell of a political thriller about the origins of the Cold War. Christopher Nolan’s take on communism isn’t particularly sophisticated (a good joke about ‘Property is theft!’ is botched by mixing up Marx with Proudhon), but it works fine as a story about anticommunism – with the added meta-twist of assigning the cinematic Tony Stark a pivotal role in the escalation of the arms race!
The Dark Knight Returns #1
In comics, the genre is not as popular, probably because its reliance on arguments as the main driving force begs for a ‘talking heads’ format that is usually not very appealing for either readers or creators. Sure, there are remarkable exceptions. Famously, Frank Miller got away with exchanges like the one you see above by innovatively (at the time) reproducing the visual language of television debates. Abel Lanzac’s and Christophe Blain’s Weapons of Mass Diplomacy kept the artwork pleasingly dynamic and amusing even as it delved, with impressive authenticity, into the French Foreign Ministry at the dawn of the War on Terror. Also from France, The Death of Stalin started out as a comically caustic graphic novel by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin, who followed it up with Death to the Tsar, an equally loose fictionalization of the 1904 assassination of the Governor of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich. If Stalin trades on grotesque caricature, Tsar is more of a grim character piece, but they both make the intricacies of 20th-century Russian politics outrageously entertaining by shoving in as much violence as they can get away with.
For the most part, the solution has been to hybridize, merging the key features of the political thriller with the visuals and tropes of other traditions of comic book fiction without necessarily sacrificing the former’s relevance and intelligence. Thus, Greg Rucka, after doing his own spin on The Sandbaggers with Queen & Country, satisfyingly blended the genre with superheroes in his runs on Wonder Woman and Checkmate. Brian K. Vaughan and Tony Harris pulled off a similar trick in Ex Machina, albeit shifting the focus from international diplomacy to city politics.
Which brings us back to Batman comics…
Batman #602
My favorite Batman comics tend to be anchored in Gotham City and to flesh out this grim-yet-colorful place, including by paying attention to the local political scene… On the one hand, the fact that politicians have to constantly work around – and respond to – Gotham’s surreal criminals (and surreal crimefighters) can produce moments of highly creative speculative fiction, not to mention outright satire. On the other hand, the zany schemes of rogues like the Joker or Two-Face have repeatedly targeted City Hall and adjacent institutions, assigning them a key role in the plot.
Legends of the Dark Knight #68
In particular, there is a long tradition of tales revolving around electoral campaigns (a trope that Matt Reeves also worked into the 2022 movie The Batman), even though, when you think about it, it’s pretty odd that you still have candidates eager to get elected. After all, Gotham City’s politics have a preposterously high mortality rate. If you’re the mayor, you can be certain that, sooner or later, at least one goofy maniac is bound to come after you…
Detective Comics #68
Catwoman (v2) #93
… and it’s not just the mayor! Police Commissioner James Gordon can fill a whole multivolume encyclopedia with all the assassinated officials he’s seen over the years.
Batman #270
Batman #419
The answer as to why politicians would actually risk this fate must be found in another defining feature of Gotham: the entire city appears to be so shamelessly and structurally corrupt that the risk must pay off, somehow!
Consequently, at their best, Batman comics have developed running subplots that – especially when read in relative isolation – feel like veritable political thrillers as they show all the backroom deals and power games that exploit the city’s eccentric terrorism, street violence, and white-collar crime. For instance, back in the early 1980s, writers Gerry Conway and Doug Moench got a lot of mileage out of this, devoting plenty of pages of Batman and Detective Comics to the fraudulent and manipulative machinations of the incredibly shady Mayor Hamilton Hill. This was full-on political thriller territory, with constant plot twists and multiple characters pursuing their own agenda (including the Dark Knight, of course), gradually driving Hill over the edge:
Batman #378
Mayor Hamilton Hill finally fell from power in 1985, when his latest smear campaign against the Caped Crusader ultimately backfired.
Detective Comics #546
That’s right, Gotham will put up with corruption and abuse of power, but don’t mess with the Bat!
Hill was replaced by Mayor George P. Skowcroft, who for once was more incompetent than crooked… which was nevertheless quite unfortunate, given that he had to deal both with the multiversal cataclysm known as Crisis on Infinite Earths *and* with that time a vegetable god took revenge on Gotham for the arrest of his lover by turning the city into a jungle:
Swamp Thing (v2) #53
The latter storyline may appear to be less informed by politics than all those previous shenanigans involving Hamilton Hill. However, bear in mind that the story took place during Alan Moore’s classic run on Swamp Thing, where it closely followed the ‘American Gothic’ arc, which belongs to this whole subgenre of politically charged comics written by British creators delivering extensive tours of US social issues (similar examples are Pat Mill’s ‘The Cursed Earth’ arc on Judge Dredd and the entirety of Garth Ennis’ Preacher). In this case, when you think about it, the main villain of the piece is the judicial system’s puritanism, to the point that the tale’s resolution hinges on an exchange of legal arguments between Batman and Mayor Skowcrof.
Plus, you can tell the post-hippie anarchist Moore had a blast imagining wild nature literally destroying the urban modernity of American civilization:
Swamp Thing (v2) #53
(Yep, for all the talk about recent pop culture breaking conservatives’ brains, superhero comics have been pretty political for quite a long time…)
For a while after this, the parallel stories of Gotham’s authority figures largely disappeared from the comics. Mayors and other city officials would sometimes feature more or less prominently, but there tended to be little continuity across issues… In fact, more often than not, politicians served as cannon fodder for the villain du jour, so that their gruesome deaths practically became a running gag.
This is not to say that you didn’t have occasional moments that could fit into an episode of House of Cards or into the third season of The Wire. For instance, here is Deputy Mayor Harriman, in 1990, running a crisis meeting soon after Commissioner Gordon had a heart attack:
Detective Comics #626
Harriman sounded like a promising character, but unfortunately we didn’t see him again.
A year later, by the time the Joker took over Gotham’s computer system and demanded a ransom of one billion dollars in cash, Harriman had clearly been replaced – either that or he had drastically changed his appearance. In any case, the latest mayor didn’t last long either… Since the Caped Crusader was out of town at the time (in Rio de Janeiro), within a few pages chaos broke loose all over the city, driving yet another mayor to the brink of sanity:
Robin (v2) #3
As I’ve mentioned a bunch of times before in this blog, under the group editorship of Denny O’Neil, throughout the 1990s Gotham City became a much more cohesive setting. And, sure enough, fans actually grew familiar with the strategies and policies of successive mayors, district attorneys, and police commissioners… The campaigns and elections of 1992 and 1995 got plenty of coverage on the pages of Batman, Detective Comics, and Shadow of the Bat, sometimes unfolding in the background while the Dynamic Duo fought the Ratcatcher or Killer Croc, other times jumping to the forefront – and in any case gradually furthering the kind of worldbuilding that enabled successful crossovers where the city itself (including its administrative institutions) gained a center role, with Gotham assailed by an epidemic in Contagion and an earthquake in Cataclysm.
I loved all of this. As a teenager, I thought I was getting insight into a grown-up world: not only did my comics seem more complex, adult, and imbued with authenticity (and therefore, I assumed, sophistication), but they teased a future in which I would also come to understand and care for real-life political games. Today, revisiting these issues, I find in them fascinating insights about the past: both about my own past (seeing how they informed views and tastes I later developed, such as my passion for political thrillers) and about a political zeitgeist, as, although fictional, Gotham tales convey dated notions and buzzwords along with an occasional sense of continuity and familiarity:
Detective Comics #689
The scene above (a classic bit of Bruce Wayne manipulating those around him with his fake persona and using even his non-Batman resources to get his way) was penned by Chuck Dixon, one of the writers who felt most at home combining smart entertainment with macho fantasy, regularly churning out the comic-book equivalent of ‘90s Dad Thrillers. You can attribute this attitude to a degree of cynicism stemming from Dixon’s notoriously conservative politics, but I actually think it has more to do with his background as a genre journeyman heavily influenced by Golden Age Hollywood, where it was not unusual for stories to work on multiple levels for differently aged audiences. Dixon’s knack for figuring out the precise appeal of each type of story and thoughtfully executing the various beats with careful attention to plot, pace, and characterization was thus put in the service of narratives that openly echoed classics like Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Hell, after the quake, Dixon actually had Bruce lobby for support for Gotham in Congress, in a 3-part arc called ‘Mr. Wayne Goes to Washington.’
Batman #560
(Notice how, without calling too much attention to itself, Jim Aparo’s artwork injects dynamism into an extended dialogue scene by constantly framing it from new angles… Besides preventing visual boredom, this also helps ground the scene’s geography. Plus, because Dixon’s script set the scene in a car, you get an additional sense of action progression.)
Since even the Dark Knight can only do so much against Washington, Gotham City actually ended up cut out from federal aid for a year, during the No Man’s Land crossover event. In 2000, when Gotham was finally rebuilt, editor Denny O’Neil did an excellent job of laying out how the process would develop, politically and sociologically, with the various Batman-related series featuring tales about real estate deals, urban renewal, zoning regulations, and property disputes between the returned citizens who had left the city during NML and those who had stayed behind. Writers like Devin K. Grayson, Bronwyn Carlton, and Greg Rucka actually managed to pull off some very cool yarns that neatly combined this local politics angle with the sort of thrilling action and weird crime you’d expect from a Batman caper.
Many of these comics featured the appropriately named new mayor, Daniel Dickerson, who – even for Gotham standards – was an entertainingly dishonest and despicable dick…
Catwoman (v2) #86
Mayor Dickerson became a regular foe on the pages of Catwoman, where he got routinely humiliated and blackmailed. (And his wife Amanda turned out to be quite a character as well!)
Greg Rucka also had a field day with Dickerson in Detective Comics, where one of the running themes was the boiling resentment against those who had abandoned Gotham, epitomized by the mayor himself. Notably, Rucka showed us how the authorities dealt with all kinds of challenges of the post-No Man’s Land transition, like the fact that Poison Ivy had taken over the city’s main park and now continued to occupy it with the help of some plant creatures and a cult of teen followers:
Detective Comics #751
(I really like the subtle way the characters ‘act’ through their eyes and hands, but Shawn Martinbrough’s mise-en-scène here is much less imaginative than Aparo’s example I highlighted above… By largely falling back on a shot/reverse shot pattern, much of the scene is carried by Rucka’s dialogue. That said, I love the silent punchline in the final panel, as we can just imagine what Gordon is thinking while looking at that plant, as set up – through visuals and words – in the scan’s very first panel.)
Another writer who had fun with Mayor Dickerson was Ed Brubaker. I’m not talking about the story where Dickerson got tied to the front of a runaway train full of dynamite by the murderous anti-corruption vigilante Nicodemus (a typically uninspired creation from Brubaker’s Batman run). I mean the way Brubaker picked up where Catwoman left off and had the mayor resort to seriously sketchy – when not downright illegal – methods to go after Selina Kyle even when the rest of the world was convinced she was dead.
And sure, there is an obvious illiberal subtext in all these stories. They tapped into a general skepticism about the democratic system, with elected officials for the most part presented as spineless, evil, lying, corrupt, or, at best, short-sighted bureaucrats holding everything back through needless red tape. Then again, that charge cuts both ways, politically. If right-wing populism attacks democracy and left-wing populism attacks capitalism, recent times have made it as clear as ever how thin those dividing lines can be, as immoral businessmen and criminal politicians merge into real-life caricatures that put Gotham’s mayors to shame. Plus, the comics tend to be quite upfront about the fact that the police force is at least as corrupt as the higher-ups…
This brings us to Gotham Central (a series where the heroes are mostly honest cops, but they’re treated as the exception rather than the rule in the GCPD), in particular the brilliant arc ‘Soft Targets,’ which features what is perhaps Mayor Dickerson’s most memorable scene. I don’t know if it was Rucka or Brubaker who wrote it (or if they co-wrote it), but it’s a spot-on piece of characterization. It involves the mayor talking to the police commissioner (James Gordon’s successor) about overtime expenses. In a nifty touch, Dickerson wants to defund the police – not for ideological reasons, but because he views everything around him through a corrupt mindset all the time:
Gotham Central #12
If you know Gotham City, you won’t be surprised to find out Mayor Dickerson was soon killed by a psychopath… And you’ll probably be even less shocked to find out that his successor, Mayor Hull, turned out to be in the pocket of a sinister chemical weapons cartel.
At the end of the day, these stories fire in all directions, for entertainment’s sake. Just like even the supposedly woke MCU movies can come across as conservative, so do Batman comics play with both sides of the political field, blending a quasi-nihilistic depiction of official power with a liberal commitment to the system (which compels the Dark Knight to keep sending criminals to the police/courts/prisons even as those continuously prove fallible). Most comics don’t blame the system as much as individual figures who abuse it – like Hamilton Hill or Daniel Dickerson – so the effect is not so much an indictment of a flawed political structure but rather a romanticization of belief in its ideals no matter what (except, you know, for the part where Batman exercises unsanctioned force). The ensuing ideological mess keeps producing interesting moral dilemmas – for the characters and for the readers – embedded in seemingly simple adventures about seemingly well-defined characters.
They also sometimes remind you of seemingly simpler times. Take, for instance, the 2003 relaunch of Batman Adventures (one my top 3 favorite runs in this franchise, along with Gotham Central and Alan Grant’s and Norm Breyfogle’s stint on Detective Comics), where Oswald ‘Penguin’ Cobblepot became Gotham’s mayor. Writer Ty Templeton clearly modeled some of the Penguin’s bumbling and authoritarian demeanor on Richard Nixon (especially the resignation speech) and, I suspect, on George W. Bush (engaging in some topical parody at a time when Bush seemed like the lowest you could get). Now that Donald Trump appears poised to be re-elected, however, the Penguin’s chaotic leadership looks quite quaint in comparison with what lies ahead:
