Spotlight on Slam Bradley

Posted on January 25, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

The Dark Knight isn’t the only detective in Batman comics. In fact, having finally read last year’s six-part mini-series Gotham City: Year One, my mind has been on the astounding significance gained by one of the oldest detectives around: Slam Bradley.

Commissioned by Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson and developed by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (the duo that created Superman), this character made his debut back in 1937, in the very first issue of Detective Comics – in a dreadfully racist ‘yellow peril’ yarn – and kept a regular presence in that anthology for the first 152 issues, until 1949.

Detective Comics #2

Originally based in Cleveland and, later, Manhattan, Slam Bradley embodied his era’s dominant conception of manliness – he was strong, sharp, and attractive to the dames (even though this latter aspect was eventually downplayed).

Nevertheless, his feature was one of the cartooniest in the early years of Detective Comics (albeit not as much as Batman’s, of course). Bradley even got a cute goofy – and bewilderingly horny – sidekick, Shorty Morgan, who worked with him in his Wide-Awake Detective Agency…

Detective Comics #59

The thing is that, while the character of Slam Bradley himself was played straight as a tough-as-nails sleuth, the tone of his escapades was quite light-hearted. Tales like ‘The Hollywood Murders,’ ‘The Mystery of the Unfortunate Teddy Bear,’ ‘The Case of the Deceased Ham,’ or ‘X Marked the Spot at the Tee!’ fused proper mystery plots with proper comedy, thus belonging to a long lineage of similar hybrids ranging from old movies like The Murderer Lives at Number 21 or The Thin Man (and its absurdly titled sequels) all the way to hilarious novels like Eduardo Mendoza’s The Mystery of the Enchanted Crypt, not to mention Rian Johnson’s recent throwbacks in Glass Onion and the very neat show Poker Face. In comics, the absolute masters of this quirky subgenre are John Allison and Max Sarin (who struck gold once again with last year’s The Great British Bump-Off).

Detective Comics #92

Not that all of Bradley’s cases were necessarily comedic mysteries… A number of them were just straight-up two-fisted action yarns, including plenty of fight scenes and deathtraps that wouldn’t look out of place on a Dynamic Duo story. The twist-filled ‘Slam Bradley in the Stratosphere’ (Detective Comics #18) is pulp adventure at its purest!

It was thrills rather than cerebral games what got highlighted in the lovely splashes that introduced each story’s premise, especially once Howard Sherman took over the pencils in the 1940s:

Detective Comics #97

And, just like with Golden Age Batman comics, the title splashes were often used to teasingly evoke rather than to accurately depict – they frequently translated the story’s key elements into symbols, creating surrealist compositions (complemented with plentiful puns):

Detective Comics #91

Although he basically disappeared for over three decades, Slam Bradley was such a staple of the initial era of Detective Comics that it’s no wonder creators brought him back for anniversary issues and special occasions.

In the 1980s, when American comics were becoming increasingly self-referential and prone to explore their own history (because a new generation of lifelong fans had taken over the industry, because the direct market had developed more of a niche specialized audience with easier access to back issues, or just because postmodernism was generally expanding in the cultural zeitgeist…), Bradley repapered twice, both times in commemorative tales. The first time was for a big team-up of sleuths in Detective Comics #500 (courtesy of Len Wein and Jim Aparo), where he got some of that story’s best lines…

Detective Comics #500

The other time was for Detective Comics’ fiftieth anniversary, in 1987, which featured the awesome tale ‘The Doomsday Book.’ Scripted by Mike W. Barr – one of comics’ greatest mystery writers – that tale paid tribute to various traditions of detective fiction, with Slam Bradley’s demeanour and dialogue patterns evoking the writings of Dashiel Hammett (‘When a man’s client is kidnapped, he’s supposed to do something about it.’)

Seeing the hard-hitting Bradley interact with outlandish characters far out of his element – like Batman, Robin, and the Elongated Man – was one of the many, many cool things in that classic issue:

Detective Comics #572

What’s more, Slam Bradley even got a small character arc in ‘The Doomsday Book.’ Slam started the story as a burned out detective who felt old and, after meeting a still fresh Sherlock Holmes, he ended up with a renewed conviction that he still had much to look forward to. This, I assume, was Mike Barr’s metafictional comment about Detective Comics’ own longevity.

Bradley no doubt represented the series’ evolution. He had apparently moved to Gotham City a while back (signalling the shift in Detective Comics’ primary location) and his reality had become substantially grimmer, in contrast to the lighter misadventures he used to have alongside his old partner:

Detective Comics #572

(Shorty Morgan wasn’t just gone, he was ‘slain by pushers’ – welcome to the eighties!)

It would take until 2001 for Slam Bradley to return, but this time he came for a longer stay. His character type fit in like a glove within the works of Ed Brubaker and Darwyn Cooke, who were heavily inspired by vintage crime fiction and who fully injected their influences into Batman comics…

Detective Comics #760

Brubaker and Cooke revived Slam Bradley in Detective Comics’ backup feature ‘Trail of the Catwoman,’ where Slam was hired by Gotham’s mayor to find Selina Kyle (who was presumed dead at the time). It was essentially a housecleaning job, streamlining Selina’s post-Crisis continuity, but these two outstanding creators still managed to pull it off as a satisfying hardboiled tale, precisely by telling it from the POV of an engaging outside investigator (i.e. Bradley).

‘Trail’ would prove to be the start of a whole new era in which Slam Bradley became a regular supporting character in Catwoman’s corner of Batman comics. Crucially, the tale established quite a nice rapport between Slam and Selina:

Detective Comics #762

Like Selina, the two creators had clearly found a guy they dug. ‘Trail of the Catwoman’ took place between the pages of Darwyn Cooke’s knockout graphic novel Selina’s Big Score, where Slam Bradley also played a key role. A few years later, Cooke used him to provide the framing story in Solo #10.

Likewise, Ed Brubaker made Slam Bradley a regular player in his acclaimed run on Catwoman. As I’ve mentioned before, Brubaker enjoys revisiting – and reimagining – the genre stuff he consumed when he was younger, so keeping Bradley around allowed him to juxtapose the ‘voice’ of older crime fiction with 21st-century modernity:

Catwoman Secret Files and Origins #1

More than a mere pastiche or empty exercise in self-reflexivity, musings like the one above helped flesh out Slam Bradley to unprecedented degrees. He gained a more complex personality than the brawling detective of the 1930s-40s. For one thing, he grew in love with Selina Kyle and became jealous of both Bruce Wayne and Batman (with whom he got into a fistfight over her… Bad call!).

Slam and Selina even developed a beautifully melancholic and precarious relationship, laden with realistic and recognizable insecurities… This tough he-man thus revealed a whole new layer of inner vulnerability:

Catwoman (v2) #17

Visually, Slam Bradley’s rugged, square-jawed PI always brought to my mind Dick Tracy, especially in the context of Catwoman’s stylized art in this era…

But then Paul Gulacy came in as artist and drastically changed the series’ aesthetics into more photorealistic designs – it was as if everyone had suddenly been recast mid-season. Typically drawing on influences from cinema, Gulacy turned Slam Bradley into Robert Mitchum (who had not only played a private eye in the amazing film noir Out of the Past, but had also gone on to play an ageing Phillip Marlowe in the 1970s’ adaptations of Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep).

Further shaking things up, Catwoman introduced Slam’s son – a young cop named Sam with a chip on his shoulder:

Catwoman (v3) #29

Regardless of changing looks, in the early 2000s Slam Bradley had become a recognizable character once again, at least among a certain kind of mid-level fan. What’s more, he was now a bona fide Gothamite. He popped up in Gotham Central #26-27 and was seriously tortured by Black Mask in Catwoman #51. In 2014, Adam Hughes included Slam in a short story he did for Batman Black & White (v2) #6 and, five years later, the character lent his gravitas to yet another cool commemorative tale, Scott Snyder’s and Greg Capullo’s ‘Batman’s Longest Case,’ in Detective Comics #1000.

Given all this background, it makes sense that Tom King chose Slam Bradley as the protagonist of Gotham City: Year One, a noirish mystery yarn revealing/retconning the origin of Gotham’s fall from grace into urban chaos two generations ago (in the early 1960s). Bradley feels right at home in this type of story and the fact that he inaugurated Batman’s ‘home’ (he was right there at the beginning of Detective Comics, whereas the Caped Crusader only made his debut in issue #27) adds the sort of subtext King is usually fond of.

Slam Bradley’s advanced age – both as a character (he’s 94 in present day continuity) and as an intellectual property (created 87 years ago) – lends resonance to the tale’s theme of reconsidering the past, exposing how one’s clean, nostalgic era of safety and prosperity can be someone else’s dirty, traumatic nightmare of police brutality and systemic inequality. The notion of a black community starkly marginalised from the wealthier side of town plays a central role in Gotham City: Year One, which makes it even more pertinent to use Slam as a bridge between the two worlds, given the character’s historical links to racism in comics and in his wider branch of macho adventure narratives. The book is full of brutal situations, even if the swear words are replaced by symbols (because language is apparently the greatest taboo). In particular, there is an emphasis on the issue of racist violence and torture (the reason Bradley quit the force), which may be a way for Tom King to work through his own seven-year stint at the CIA’s counterterrorism operations in the early 2000s.

Before delving further into the books’ themes (including a couple of *major* spoilers), let us consider the dazzling artwork:

Gotham City: Year One #2

Penciller Phil Hester, inked by Eric Gapstur, pushes his typically blocky, angular figure work to Frank Miller-esque levels, which colorist Jordie Bellaire superbly builds on to create a series of mesmerizing visuals (like the orange squares in the panels above, translating the city lights through the window of a moving car). The black & white in the penultimate panel evokes classic film noir and the PI with the broken nose evokes Chinatown, perhaps filtered through Miller’s Sin City. Although you can’t see it in this scan, letterer Clayton Cowles joins the game by presenting Slam Bradley’s narration as torn pieces of typewritten paper…

Tom King’s script takes intertextuality even further. Besides doing the usual trick of naming Gotham’s streets and locations after real-world Batman creators (‘Went to the old Austin junk between Aparo and Grant.’), thus inscribing the comics’ past into the city’s toponomy, King also adds some significant twists to the franchise’s mythology, including: 1) Slam Bradley’s mother is black; 2) he is probably Bruce Wayne’s biological grandfather.

The first of these twists wouldn’t be all that remarkable, except for the fact that race and genes occupy such a vital place in US culture. I suppose it inserts Bradley into yet another subset of crime fiction, namely all those great gritty novels about the African-American experience, like Chester Himes’ Harlem Detectives series or J.F. Burke’s Sam Kelly trilogy, not to mention Gil Scott-Heron’s The Vulture. What makes this revelation more meaningful is the articulation to the second twist, since it means that Bruce Wayne has black ancestry, which can be seen as ironic given that he is often presented as a bastion of white privilege.

The second piece of revisionism works better on a meta level than on a diegetic one. Thematically, it recasts Batman as a direct descendent of a hardboiled private eye (again, one who kicked off Detective Comics). And while Gotham City: Year One tarnishes the legacy of the Wayne surname – and even of the Batcave, as it was previously used to collect sexual trophies – the series arguably makes Bruce himself a more romantic hero: rather than just a product of the elites, his history is now linked to the downtrodden masses.

In turn, the detective skills of both Slam Bradley and the Dark Knight don’t come off well, since neither of them appears to even consider the possibility that they’re related – but hey, I guess we all have our blind spots. Their failure to explicitly acknowledge what’s at stake may be just an editorial strategy to preserve ambiguity (so that DC doesn’t have to commit to this story’s implications in the future), even though the likely link between the two characters is pretty much telegraphed to the readers (Cowles even highlights the word ‘grandfather’ through bold and italics, in the final page).

Tom King is an intelligent writer, but it seems he just can’t help himself. He manages to add a connection to the Joker’s origin and, just before the series is over, he closes the larger narrative even more tightly, making Slam responsible not only for Bruce’s birth, but also for the very creation of Batman… at least according to the oddly prescient (and sexist) perspective of Bruce’s grandma:

Gotham City: Year One #6

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (22 January 2024)

Posted on January 22, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

This is what the inside of my head looks like:

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Gotham Calling’s 120 Cold War movies – part 10

Posted on January 18, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

The previous post in Gotham Calling’s tour of Cold War cinema had plenty of films about the conflict’s expansion to the Third World. Today’s installment extends the same motif, but it also gradually engages with one of the consequences of these new fronts, namely the collapse of détente and the re-escalation of the nuclear threat, especially after Ronald Reagan came to power. Once again, these are pessimistic times and you can see it on the screen.

91. Apocalypse Now (USA, 1979)

It took a few years for Hollywood to dare imagine the battlefields of the Vietnam War, an event whose scars on the US were literal (thousands of dead, maimed, and traumatized soldiers), social (deeply divided public opinion, with massive anti-war protests and a flourishing counterculture), national (large-scale military defeat and ethical loss of the heroic image earned in WWII), and geopolitical (discrediting the ‘domino theory’ that had justified fighting Vietnamese revolutionaries in the first place). When the gates opened, though, they flooded cinema with countless war movies, including a bunch of highly regarded masterpieces chronicling the American experience of the conflict (albeit with little to say about the Vietnamese perspective), from The Deer Hunter to Full Metal Jacket. None of them, however, had an impact comparable to Apocalypse Now’s immersive, psychologically haunting river journey towards Cambodia, politically ambiguous as it is (2001’s Redux version added a bit more historical context). Despite the fact that Francis Ford Coppola shot the whole thing like a trippy spectacle full of grotesqueries – or, more likely, precisely because of this – the film has firmly established much of the imagery, soundtrack, and lingo associated with this conflict ever since (‘Charlie don’t surf!’).

92. The Life of Brian (UK, 1979)

Along with spy thrillers and science fiction, sword & sandal epics were the other big genre that loudly splattered Cold War rhetoric across the screen, staging spectacular revolts against the state tyranny of ancient Roman and Egyptian dictators who opposed religious freedom, ranging from Cecil B. DeMille’s bluntly anti-communist biblical blockbusters to the leftist revisionism of Spartacus (a production that ended up playing a significant role in ending the Hollywood blacklist). I left out those movies as too allegorical (even though Ten Commandments opens with DeMille directly explaining the themes to the audience), but I can’t resist including the more openly anachronistic The Life of Brian, which mercilessly mocks that strain of religious cinema (and religion itself) as well as Middle Eastern conflicts and the sort of New Left terrorism seen in La chinoise. Indeed, even though it’s set in the 1st century, Monty Python’s classic comedy – about a man born in the stable next door to Jesus Christ’s – did much to popularize a very contemporary take on revolutionary politics… At the time, it pissed off conservatives, but nowadays its iconoclastic resonance has probably shifted, as the film memorably makes fun of radical movements (‘Judean People’s Front?! We’re the People’s Front of Judea!’), anti-imperialism (‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’), and identity politics (‘I’m not oppressing you, Stan. You haven’t got a womb.’).

93. Escape from New York (USA, 1981)

The first of two 1981 dystopias that instantly defined pop culture’s vision of a hellish future, Escape from New York is set in 1997, when not only has the Cold War turned hot, but the whole of NYC has become a huge maximum security prison populated by gangs and madmen. This is where the hilariously badass inmate Snake Plissken is assigned with a mission that may make or break world peace… Yep, although made in the USA, this movie feels straight out of a 2000 AD comic!

94. The Road Warrior, aka Mad Max 2 (Australia, 1981)

A little over two decades after On the Beach, we get another tale about the aftermath of nuclear war set in Australia… and this time with even more car action! Probably the most influential post-apocalyptic movie ever, The Road Warrior revolutionized the subgenre by approaching it as a neo-western (complete with gay biker punks in lieu of Indians) where scavengers fight to the death for petrol in a lawless wasteland. Besides spawning a whole sub-industry of schlocky Italian B-movies (I have a special fondness for The New Barbarians/Warriors of the Wasteland), The Road Warrior got a sort of sequel (the continuity in this series has always been pretty loose) a few years later, Mad Max beyond Thunderdome, which was almost as iconic and arguably even weirder, but nevertheless similar in style, so I’m keeping that one off the list to make room for more diverse material… And yes, these films weren’t the first to relocate western tropes to a dystopic future, but none of what came before had a comparable impact. (That said, I’m pretty sure 1975’s The Ultimate Warrior did inspire the most infamous scene from Batman’s ‘Ten Nights of the Beast.’)

95. First Blood (USA, 1982)

The ultimate Vietnam-War-comes-home movie (an omnipresent theme from the very first scene), First Blood is both a raw, exhilarating action fest (with traces of horror in the forest sequences) and a shockingly powerful dramatization of a fucked up generation of drafted men taught to kill and sent abroad to inflict and suffer violence, only to come back to a society that despised them. The film is less balanced than the source novel, but it’s even farther apart from the jingoistic, militaristic sequels – those who only know the latter will no doubt be surprised by the politics of this first Rambo picture, with its ferocious indictment of homegrown small-town intolerance, of a despotic and sadistic police force, and of the traumatic impact of war.

96. Born in Flames (USA, 1983)

As mentioned in a previous post, along with all the dystopias where the Cold War just escalated until breaking point, there were also films that imagined alternative futures where political confrontation evolved in more original ways. The starting point for the punk feminist sci-fi/agitprop Born in Flames is that a ‘war of liberation’ turned the US into a socialist democracy ten years ago, but women and minorities continue to (literary) fight for their rights. Writer-director-producer Lizzie Borden delivers a guerrilla filmmaking tour de force as well as well as an inventive revolutionary polemic with an ending that has only grown in shock value… and an awesome soundtrack!

97. Under Fire (USA, 1983)

The Nicaraguan Revolution as seen from the perspective of three US journalists deciding how neutral they can remain. Yes, this is one of those Hollywood dramas where bloody real-world conflicts are put in the service of stories mostly focused on the problems of white North-American leads (which, I suppose, is itself symptomatic of the kind of Cold War mindset that saw much of the globe as supporting players in Washington’s crusade). That said, on top of being intelligently written and acted, Under Fire does convey a compelling, Graham Greene-esque sense of place and history. Plus, it’s hard not to see in this liberal film looking back at 1979 a response to the counter-revolutionary US policy towards Nicaragua implemented in the meantime, by the Reagan Administration.

98. WarGames (USA, 1983)

Trying to hack the latest computer game, a teenager stumbles into a military AI program and accidentally kicks off World War III. This is the kind of 1980s’ fun, smart teen adventure celebrating consumerism in the guise of rebellion that was later emulated by Stranger Things – and while the dated technology now lends it a retroactive/nostalgic charm, it also works as an efficient sci-fi thriller engaging with classic themes of the genre (human vs artificial intelligence) along with more topical issues about whether a nuclear war is winnable and whether game theory can prevent or escalate conflict (sure enough, just a few months after the film’s premiere, NATO’s Able Archer war game was apparently misinterpreted by the Soviets and brought the world once again to the brink of thermonuclear war).

99. Nineteen Eighty-Four (UK, 1984)

For the purposes of this list, you might think earlier adaptations of George Orwell’s dystopia would be more interesting, as they played up the obvious parallels with Stalinism (especially the 1956 version, secretly funded by the CIA). Yet this is my favorite take on the material: like Moore & O’Neill in The Black Dossier, writer-director Michael Radford returned 1984 to 1948, complete with postwar rubble and food rationing, resulting in an impressively grimy, rusty-looking, and significantly faithful – despite the somewhat ambiguous closing shots – rendition of the source novel (itself a foundational Cold War text). Sure, the notion that a continuous state of war empowers authorities to control and oppress citizens was still topical in the eighties, but, more than just another allegory about – existing or potential – totalitarianism, this Nineteen Eighty-Four feels like a period piece set in a retro-futuristic alt history where Orwell’s specific nightmares of atomic conflict and rise of authoritarian rule in Britain did immediately take place (which, in turn, perfectly suits the theme of mass media controlling the past).

100. Red Dawn (USA, 1984)

A different type of dystopia. The opening text offers a right-wing nightmare scenario: ‘Cuba and Nicaragua reach troop strength goals of 500,000. El Salvador and Honduras fall. – Green Party gains control of West German parliament. Demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil. – Mexico plunged into revolution. – NATO dissolves. United States stands alone.’ After this, Red Dawn doesn’t waste much more time establishing its preposterous premise: the Soviets, Cubans, and Nicaraguans invade the US, so the North Americans get to demagogically play the underdog as a group of high-school teenagers engage in guerrilla warfare against the occupiers, turning the nightmare into a libertarian wet dream. If I didn’t know about John Milius’s fascistic politics, I’d assume he had written and directed this schlockfest as a deranged parody of US jingoism and Cold War alarmism… Regardless, the film never fails to make me laugh! (This ridiculous tale of small-town armed resistance remains the ultimate wish-fulfilment fantasy of alt-right militias, having even led to an uninspired Obama-era remake, with North Korea as the new villain).

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (15 January 2024)

Posted on January 15, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Don’t you just love close-ups?

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Ty Templeton’s playful Batman

Posted on January 11, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Last month/year, I addressed how Ty Templeton wrote what I consider to be a quintessential take on Batman comics. Today, I want to focus on a specific aspect of Templeton’s scripts, namely their sense of humor.

Harley Quinn and Batman

If I had to put my finger on why Ty Templeton’s comics resonated so much with me that they made me want to read as much as possible about these characters (and largely devote a weekly blog to this type of stuff), I guess at least part of the answer lies in their unapologetically fun – and funny! – approach to the Caped Crusader’s misadventures.

One of the many things Ty the Guy ‘got’ about the franchise is that, at its best, there is a droll dimension to the whole thing. And no, I don’t just mean the tradition of having the Dynamic Duo make puns while they kick their opponents’ butts. You don’t have to play it for laughs in a campy way, like in the 1960s’ TV series, and you don’t even have to have Batman himself cracking jokes – just let the absurdist elements breathe. Ultimately, Batman doesn’t have to be goofy: it’s enough for him to be awesome, because his over-the-top awesomeness can be a joke in itself… 

JLA Annual #2

If anything, the Dark Knight’s stoic, no-nonsense attitude makes him the perfect straight man against whom to play off Gotham’s ludicrous world and twisted characters such as Harley Quinn (who started out as a rambunctious parody of toxic relations and domestic abuse). Aware of this, Ty Templeton not only supplied the likes of Quinn and the Riddler with amusing voices (full of wordplay and offbeat personality traits), but he also made the most out of their exchanges with the supposedly hyper-rational Caped Crusader, creating a chuckles-inducing contrast.

Now, I’m not saying it was merely the inherent surrealism of Batman’s world that brought out Templeton’s whimsical tendencies. Most of his other works tend to be comedies, all the way back to his breakout strip Stig’s Inferno (a madcap update of Dante’s The Divine Comedy). One of Templeton’s earliest gigs for DC, back in the late 1980s, was to write and draw humorous origin tales for Z-listers like Bouncing Boy and the League of Substitute Heroes (Secret Origins #37 and #49).

In both drawing and writing style, Ty the Guy has clearly been influenced by Harvey Kurtzman. While this influence is more blatant in his wacky Simpsons comics, I’d argue you can also discern it in more tongue-in-cheek works, like the one-shot Dark Claw Adventures, which pits an amalgam of Batman and Wolverine against cyber-ninja assassins!

Yet nowhere did Templeton come closer to MAD-like shenanigans than in the short story ‘Batsman,’ a deliberately silly affair where the central joke is that a flock of bats – and not just one – flew through Bruce Wayne’s window, so his costume is now adorned with cumbersome extra bats… The whole thing seems like a direct tribute to Kurtzman, illustrated by Marie Severin (who used to work with Kurtzman back in the day) and packed with just his type of zany dialogue and plentiful sight gags informed by pop culture (including, among others, appropriate riffs on the Adam West TV series):

Batman: Black & White, vol.2

The last couple of examples were not from the regular Batman Adventures line, although things got quite raucous over there as well, especially when Ty Templeton returned after a lengthy hiatus, with 2017’s mini-series Harley Quinn and Batman (a tie-in prequel to that year’s animated movie Batman and Harley Quinn, done in a similar irreverent spirit).

Way before that gig, though, his regular Batman scripts had already been pretty witty. Plus, as I mentioned last time, Templeton and artist Rick Burchett (whose cartoony pencils sometimes veered towards the manic energy of a Max Sarin or even a José Luis Munuera) were not afraid to experiment with the medium’s language, even as they sought to keep Adventures as reader-friendly as possible. This tendency was occasionally put in the service of laughs, like when Harley Quinn’s attempts to cheer up the Joker were rendered in the form of a ‘musical’ montage:

Batman & Robin Adventures #18

To be fair, in emphasizing comedy and zesty action, Ty Templeton was pretty much following the tone set by Kelley Puckett’s original scripts for Batman Adventures (some of which had been illustrated by Templeton himself) – a tone that would then be further pursued in Scott Peterson’s cool run after Ty the Guy left Gotham Adventures.

Yet Templeton brough in his own particular sensibilities. Above all, this included a knack for slapstick parody of media and celebrity culture, a vein that he also explored in the Vertigo graphic novel Bigg Time and in 1999’s Plastic Man Special (which includes, among other things, a sidesplitting interview with the director of the fictitious Plastic Man: The Movie), not to mention his Howard the Duck mini-series (set in the aftermath of Marvel’s Civil War crossover).

Howard the Duck (v4) #2

Media satire is a key running theme throughout Templeton’s Batman work.

The hilarious ‘Round Robin’ (Batman & Robin Adventures #6) pokes fun at the sensationalist fake news of National Enquirer-style tabloids, as the National Insider publishes a story about Robin getting fired and then dozens of annoying kids start harassing the Caped Crusader to be his new sidekick, constantly getting in his way. In ‘Crocodile Tears’ (Batman & Robin Adventures #23), Killer Croc develops a crush on reporter Summer Gleason after watching her trash the Dynamic Duo on the air, unaware that she is just cynically following a ratings-chasing agenda (‘It’s just TV. It’s not like it really means anything to anybody.’). The premise of ‘Mightier Than the Sword’ (Gotham Adventures #10) is that Harley Quinn is planning to write a tell-all autobiography about her years with the Joker, which seriously pisses off the Clown Prince of Crime, who breaks out of Arkham and goes after her… so Harley’s editor arranges for her to write the book in a hotel specialized in persecuted authors (one of her neighbors is Salman Rushdie).

The latter story got a sequel, ‘Masks of Love: A Harley Quinn Romance’ (Gotham Adventures #14), where Harley pulled off a series of crimes as publicity stunts to drum up sales for a cheesy – and by all accounts atrociously written – romance novel she had just published (a roman a clef in which she apparently has a torrid affair with Batman!). Besides once again mocking the ruthless tactics of commercialized spectacle, this is just the sort of story I love about Joker and Harley Quinn, with crime and mayhem deriving from these psychopaths’ petty motivations and lopsided logic (something that is taken to an even more darkly comedic extreme in ‘My Boyfriend’s Back,’ from Batman Adventures (v2) #3).

Plus, we get this priceless moment:

Gotham Adventures #14

Ty Templeton’s villains are media-savvy, often incorporating – and even weaponizing – mass communication into their schemes (albeit in a very ‘90s, pre-social media age). For instance, in Gotham Adventures #31, when the Joker causes a city-wide electronic blackout by kidnapping (and jokerizing) a bunch of scientists, he makes sure to leave living witnesses and even informs the GCPD where to find them ‘so they could recover and go on the talk shows.’ The main joke in that issue is that, as citizens keep speculating about the cause of the blackout (the commies? the Mob? an alien-government conspiracy?), the Joker grows increasingly frustrated with his lack of credit and desperately tries to reassert his reputation – which, ironically, he finds quite hard to do precisely because the blackout means that mass media are not working.

Templeton added a slight political edge to his satire in ‘Knightmare’ (Batman & Robin Adventures #13), where the Scarecrow sought to ‘unite’ America by hacking into a Beatles reunion concert:

Batman & Robin Adventures #13

The source of humor here is that the Scarecrow and his henchmen aren’t the only obstacles in the Dynamic Duo’s way… Once again, there is also a slimy TV executive who seems willing to take any risk just to get high ratings!

That said, Ty Templeton’s playful gaze isn’t just directed outwards. Templeton can be quite self-reflexive about comedy itself and, crucially, he also doesn’t spare the subworld of comic books and fan culture. For example, his work on 1993’s Mad-Dog was a parody of Silver Age superheroes that gradually morphed into a bonkers spoof of early Image comics (weirdly, though, not everyone involved with the project was in on the joke). It seems that, for Ty the Guy, both creators and fans should be able to laugh at the medium they love…

Plastic Man Special

That’s Ty Templeton himself in the panel on the right, reading his own comic and about to be beaten up by angry geeks (‘As they pummeled their fists upon my helplessly out-of-shape writer’s body, I still couldn’t bring myself to fight back against them… for each one represented a potential four-cent royalty if they bought the Batman title I work on.’)

This scene is followed by another Kurtzman-esque parody, this time of all the major crossovers of the 1980s and ‘90s, titled ‘The Age of Infinite Clones Saga, starring Plastic Man and Plastic Man Blue – Chapter One Million: Onslaught of the Secret Genesis War Agenda’ (drawn by Rick Burchett as a pastiche of this era’s exaggerated art style).

And yes, it totally opens with a riff on Knightfall:

Plastic Man Special

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (8 January 2024)

Posted on January 8, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

This year’s second reminder that comic book covers can be awesome…

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Gotham Calling’s 120 Cold War movies – part 9

Posted on January 3, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

This is the latest installment of Gotham Calling’s 12-part journey through Cold War cinema (if you’re only joining us now, you can find the previous installments here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). It’s also probably the most eclectic of the lot, both in terms of international scope and in terms of sheer range of styles, including various independent productions.

If there is one common element is that by the time we reach the 1970s films generally become way more crowded, dirtier, and revolted against the world that the Cold War has created. For all the talk of superpower détente and Eurocommunism (with some Western European communist parties rejecting the USSR’s model and embracing moderate social democracy), these are angry times, as Vietnam, Watergate, and authoritarian/revolutionary/counter-revolutionary politics linger in the background of practically every one of these films.

81. Planet of the Apes (USA, 1968)

Charlton Heston plays a misanthropic astronaut who both regains and re-loses faith in humanity when he finds himself stranded on a planet ruled by chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. Cold War themes (especially McCarthyism) are all over the unapologetically pulpy Planet of the Apes, but they reach a peak in the deservedly iconic ending.

82. The Joke (Czechoslovakia, 1969)

Through flashbacks, we come to know the story of a man punished back in his student days for a jokey remark on a postcard… and his present-day revenge plot. Although completed already after Warsaw Pact troops had crushed Czechoslovakia’s process of liberalization, The Joke is a clear product of the ‘Prague Spring’ that preceded the 1968 invasion, offering a scathing look at hardline communists and the regime they put in place, with occasional touches of black comedy. Based on a Milan Kundera novel, the critique isn’t subtle, but the central performances are generally understated and the direction quite enthralling, with acidic irony provided by clever cross-cutting between eras.

83. Z (France/Algeria, 1969)

Z’s thinly fictionalized account of the growing strength of anti-communist military officers in Greece is a testament to the power of cinema, as director Costa-Gravas turns detailed, often technical discussions into an engrossingly gritty, dynamic, and spellbinding political thriller.

84. Bananas (USA, 1971)

An absurdist parody about a doofus from New York who inadvertently gets embroiled in a Latin American revolution, Bananas now feels like an odd fossil not only from the Cold War, but from a seemingly distant era when Woody Allen was widely beloved, artistically daring, anarchically political, and very funny. Like all of his early slapstick farces (i.e., pre-Annie Hall), this is pretty much a naughty live-action cartoon where the laughs are quite hit-and-miss – and while there aren’t as many hits as in some of the others, it picks up momentum in the final stretch. In any case, the refreshingly carefree way Allen turns Che, Castro, Hoover, Third World repression, CIA-backed conflicts, and the trial of the Chicago 7 into silly surrealism (much like he did with the Nixon administration in the TV mockumentary Men of Crisis: The Harvey Wallinger Story, pulled from the schedule at the last moment by a fearful PBS) earns Bananas a place on this list, despite the occasional cringe. (Bananas also features Sylvester Stallone’s first appearance on the list… Needless to say, you will see him again!)

85. Punishment Park (USA, 1971)

In response to the escalating anti-Vietnam War protests, President Nixon decrees a state of emergency based on the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950, enabling the federal authorities to round up members of the counterculture and send them off to the desert where they serve as practice for the police and the National Guard. Set in a (slightly) alternate history but shot in an impressive cinéma vérité style (complete with long stretches of improvisation by non-professional actors), Punishment Park is another amazing fake documentary by Peter Watkins, this time encapsulating the political polarization in the US.

86. State of Siege (France/Italy/West Germany, 1972)

Tupamaros’ kidnapping of the Brazilian consul in Uruguay and of an official of the US Agency for International Development serves as a springboard to expose the CIA’s dirty history of backing anticommunist coups and violent repression across Latin America. Despite the overlapping topic, tone-wise this is the flipside of Bananas. More concerned with conveying macro-structures than with zooming in on individual psychologies, State of Siege is shot in the same dry, procedural style as Z – in fact, once again, this could’ve succumbed under the exposition-heavy polemic format were it not for Costa-Gravas’ absolutely gripping direction. (In turn, David Miller’s attempt to do a Costa-Gravas-like semi-documentary thriller about the JFK assassination, 1973’s Executive Action, sorely lacked this directorial verve.)

87. The Crazies (USA, 1973)

Young George Romero had a keen instinct for socio-politically charged horror. In The Crazies, he tapped into the era’s paranoia about government cover-ups, had the arms race literally drive people insane (and/or make them sound insane, thus furthering the motif from Europe ’51 and The Spies), and made small-town America a target for the kind of military intervention deployed abroad. Shot with hand-held camera immediacy (back before this became a cliché) and lots of shouting, the result is a phenomenal, intensely disturbing, and frenzied ride of a movie.

88. The Spook Who Sat by the Door (USA, 1973)

There aren’t many blaxploitation movies about the Cold War, but boy does The Spook Who Sat by the Door make up for the rest of the lot. In the satirical first act, the CIA reluctantly agrees to train a black man as part of a cynical PR campaign. Then, in the incendiary rest of the film, he repurposes the company’s playbook of dirty tricks to kickstart an insurrection at home, trying to force the US authorities to choose between fighting African Americans at home or the commies overseas! Apparently, the result was so controversial that the movie was suppressed for years, although it eventually resurfaced and gained a new recognition.

89. The Front (USA, 1976)

This dramatization of the 1950s’ blacklist made such an impression on me when I was a teen that I still appreciate it despite the didacticism and liberal sentimentality, especially two unforgettable performances: Woody Allen as a despicable yet charming lumpen and Zero Mostel as a star comedian falling from grace, the latter’s eager overacting heartbreakingly hiding a crushed soul. The film fulfills two functions on this list. First, since those involved in the production had themselves been blacklisted (including Mostel), there is an autobiographical layer that makes this an authentic-ringing document of the McCarthyist era, for once zooming in on the less glamorous milieu of New York network television rather than on Hollywood. Secondly, The Front shows how far the US had come since the ‘50s: the so-called Cold War consensus – and the blacklist itself – now such a thing of the past that the HUAC’s tactics could be exposed directly, albeit timidly… This is still a rather understated, personal account of an impactful systemic issue, perhaps out of fear/awareness that the American public wasn’t yet interested in fully confronting the sins of the recent past, hence the choice of using Allen’s selfish schmo as the POV character (which actually makes the movie both more interesting and wryly amusing, giving us an ambiguous, flawed protagonist rather than a romanticized victim).

90. Illustrious Corpses (Italy/France, 1976)

The investigation of a judge’s murder takes a police inspector, slowly but surely, into a tour of conspiracy theories against the backdrop of Italy’s ‘years of lead’ (when the far-left Red Brigades waged a campaign of armed struggle) and ‘historic compromise’ (when the reformed Communist Party made an alliance with the right-wing Christian Democracy). Very deliberately paced and mostly shot through wide angles that underscore the characters’ relative smallness and vulnerability to larger forces at play, Illustrious Corpses is a Pakula-worthy masterwork of paranoid cinema, albeit with a fascinating Italian slant, provocatively subverting Gramsci’s famous line: ‘To tell the truth is revolutionary.’

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (1 January 2024)

Posted on January 1, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Have a Gotham 2024!

In this year’s weekly reminders that comics can be awesome, I’m going back to spotlighting ten covers every Monday. To get things started, I’ve chosen covers from very different genres (including from peaks of the medium like early 2000 AD and Son of Tomahawk), but which all nail the art of drawing the attention of potential readers, teasing our imagination through powerful – and sometimes quite experimental – images and colors:

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2023’s book of the year

Posted on December 27, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

Before delving into Gotham Calling’s pick for book of the year, I tend to briefly highlight comics that didn’t earn such dubious title because, although awesome in their own way, they’re too distant from the kind of genre narratives this blog focuses on. In 2023, it’s the case of Sammy Harkham’s Blood of the Virgin, a moving, disenchanted look at the fringes of the film industry in early 1970s’ Los Angeles, mostly seen through the eyes of a B-movie editor-turned-writer-turned-director and his frustrated wife.

Sure, while not a genre book, this is to some degree a book about genre – not so much about the specific subgenre of gothic horror period pieces like the titular picture, but about something that’s arguably now seen as a genre in itself, namely the exploitation schlock churned out on a shoestring budget for the grindhouse theatres and drive-in circuit whose frantic production schedules and offbeat cost-saving solutions have become part of their recognizable charm (even if Blood of the Virgin makes Paul Maslansky’s Sugar Hill or Jack Hill’s The Big Bird Cage seem like big productions in comparison). That said, what makes this such a remarkable graphic novel is how far it expands beyond this milieu, lingering on the equally demanding toll of raising a baby, fleshing out flawed, multifaceted characters, capturing the outlook of a certain immigrant experience, and – in a particularly memorable chapter – somehow developing a smooth link that goes from the persecution of Jews in 1940s’ Hungary all the way to the heartbreak of a young biker thirty years later, in New Zealand.

And yet, even had I disregarded labels, my choice of favorite book this year would still end up where it did:

What if instead of one genie in one lamp granting Aladdin three wishes, there was a whole industry of licensed containers with magical wishes (technically spells) being sold and regulated? This was the quirky starting point for a brilliant trilogy of Egyptian comics that came out between 2015 and 2022, focusing on interconnected Cairo-based characters trying to purchase, formulate, or offer such wishes. This year, the comics were collected in a chunky omnibus translated into English by the author herself, Deena Mohamed, and published by Granta Books as Your Wish Is My Command (the edition I own) and by Penguin Random House under the original title, Shubeik Lubeik.

Mohamed gets a lot of mileage out of this modern fairytale premise, imagining how different types of people would use and engage with the wishes in different ways: hospitals develop magic-based medicine, universities offer Wish Studies degrees, the rich create invisible gated communities, the UN Security Council discusses peace-related wishes… There is plenty of dark humor along the way (the opening advert seems straight out of RoboCop), particularly around the notion that the wishes being traded range from powerful and reliable first-class wishes to cheap, crappy third-class wishes that often misinterpret what people actually want, Monkey Paw-style.

It’s a smart piece of speculative fiction, exploring the emotional, political, theological, and logistical implications of the commodification of supernatural wishes against the backdrop of industrial capitalism and imperialist extractivism, especially in the Middle East.

There is a blatant allegory about access to natural and economic resources in Shubeik Lubeik, but Deena Mohamed develops this alternate reality beyond narrow metaphors. For all the satirical jabs at Egypt’s class system, bureaucracy, and colonial legacy, Mohamed lets the themes emerge organically from logical deductions about how such a world would evolve. Of course there would be a whole field of philosophy theorizing about desire (hell, there already is one anyway, even without magic). And does anyone doubt there’d be abolitionists concerned with either the ethics of the users or the conditions of the djinns? It’s also not a big leap to assume governments and wealthy elites – and Global North countries – would end up monopolizing the best wishes.

A big part of the appeal is how the book grounds the fantasy into a recognizable portrait of our own world, in particular Mohamed’s authentic-looking depiction of Egyptian history and society.

Despite the high concept and elaborate world-building – expanded through amusing infographics in the interludes between chapters – what makes Shubeik Lubeik such an impactful read is how rich and diverse the core stories are, digging deep into the cast’s experiences and complex emotions while dramatizing larger themes. By zooming in on the specific challenges of fleshed out individuals dealing with this fantastical device, the book matches – and even surpasses – the humanist magic realism of other acclaimed comics, like Daytripper or The Many Deaths of Laila Starr.

Every chapter is rendered in high-contrast black & white, with a colorful framing sequence, but because Deena Mohamed is an ambitious artist as well as an accomplished fabulist, she draws each tale in a distinctive style, satisfyingly adjusting the rhythm, tone, and aesthetics to the subject matter.

The first of the three stories, set in a working-class context, follows the long-suffering Aziza, whose husband – possibly inspired by Janis Joplin – keeps wishing for a Mercedes. It’s a touching look at couple dynamics, but it also morphs into a harrowing saga about how there is only so much magic can do against poverty, red tape, and police repression. Mohamed adopts an increasingly expressionist style, including a number of minimalistic compositions that take over the pages, making them feel viscerally oppressive and laden with poignant symbolism.

If the first chapter revolves around systemic social issues, the second one feels more inward-looking, shifting the setting to the upper class while going on a lengthy journey into a student’s mental health problems. Suitably, the artwork here is much more experimental, as instead of external actions the main focus is now on the inner workings of the mind:

This chapter’s protagonist, Nour, is a privileged kid of ambiguous gender (probably non-binary, I suppose) struggling with depression. Mohamed touches on the disease’s various dimensions and conflicting interpretations of how to tackle it, but she doesn’t let Shubeik Lubkeik become a mere awareness-raising text. Rather, those dimensions and interpretations consistently inform Nour’s sinuous process of figuring out what to wish for, how to word it, and whether they actually should/deserve to use a wish at all.

The third tale is the least linear of the lot (delightfully so). It mostly deals with religion, namely by following the soul-searching quest of Shokry, a wish-seller who also happens to be a devout Muslim… and who therefore has to reconcile his actions and intentions with the fact that traditional Islam is opposed to supernatural wishes. His guilt and doubts grow particularly unbearable when a person he cares for becomes terminally ill, making him question his convictions and belief system. The narrative eventually drifts into some pretty unexpected places (there is an awesome story within the story, drawn in yet another style), although not before we get a closer look at the cultural diversity that can be found across Egypt…

If you found the panels above a bit confusing, it may be because you read them in the wrong order. Shubeik Lubeik was originally conceived and published in Arabic, which is read from right to left, and the foreign editions stick to this sequence. It’s interesting because Deena Mohamed noticeably put a lot of care into the translation, making the book as accessible as possible to an English-reading western audience, including idiomatic expressions (sometimes jarringly so, as it can occasionally ring awkward to see these characters saying they’re ‘fit as a fiddle’) and even sporadic footnotes contextualizing culturally specific phrases and customs. Nevertheless, she decided to preserve the drawings’ fluidity and thoughtfully constructed layouts by keeping the pages’ overall organization.

This won’t be a big deal for those used to manga books published in the same format, but I’m not one of those, so at first I felt a bit disoriented (even when turning a page the other way around, my eye instinctively traveled to the upper-left corners). Yet, not only did I get used to it after a bit, but it somehow made the reading experience even more special and original. Sure, I realize Mohamed was just drawing the way all other artists draw in her part of the world (and in other regions, like Japan), but the choice not to flip the pages for the western editions is formally daring, making Shubeik Lubeik stand out in this publishing context… Of course, it helps that Mohamed’s storytelling is generally pretty tight and clear:

(Did you notice the kid with the three eyes? He’s clearly the result of a third-rate wish gone wrong, but he remains an extra who only shows up in these two panels, so whatever happened to him remains up to our imagination… The book is full of such intriguing details.)

Shubeik Lubeik may be Deena Mohamed’s debut graphic novel (on the heels of doing a popular webcomic about an Egyptian superhero), but she proves herself as a force to be reckoned with. In addition to a stark command of pacing, a knack for expressive cartooning, and the enviable precision of her thick lines and dark inks – especially in the monochrome chapters – Mohamed has a way of making the most out of negative space, resulting in some unforgettable splashes.

I can’t claim to spot all of Deena Mohamed’s influences, but manga and US comics are surely among them – the former most prominently in the hair-raising action scenes; the latter, for example, in the strategic use of insets and close-ups.

While borrowing ingredients from different traditions, however, Shubeik Lubeik never looks like a mere pastiche, not least because Mohamed keeps switching things around. It’s rare for more than three or four consecutive pages to share an overall design. If one page has a European-style 9-panel grid, then the next one may have a bunch of horizontal strips, or perhaps vertical panels, or offer a large spread… For instance, check out how this montage about Aziza working her ass off to earn a mountain of money gains momentum by moving from one type of layout to another:

Between such constantly evolving artwork, the plot curveballs, and the tonal shifts, I never knew what to expect when I turned a page. Hyper-dramatic pathos could be interrupted by a talking donkey, a sensitive portrayal of mundane squabbles could suddenly give way to a shocking outburst of violence… Bong Joon-ho would be proud!

That said, as long as I’m drawing comparisons to other works, there are two creators that come to mind. One of them is Craig Thompson, whose sumptuously detailed compositions and eye-popping surrealist imagery wouldn’t look out of place in Shubeik Lubeik – and not just because he also had a stab at this sort of Eastern fantasy in 2011’s Habibi (a much more uneven comic, but by all measures an astounding-looking one).

The other creator I kept thinking of was Will Eisner. Not necessarily The Spirit, but his later graphic novels, set in Dropsie Avenue, like A Life Force or A Contract with God and other tenement stories… Besides the – sometimes humorous, sometimes melodramatic – cruelty, there is the sheer, off-the-charts expressiveness of the artwork. In the image above, have a look not only at the detailed rendition of the fabrics, but also at how much of the two women’s personality is succinctly conveyed by their faces, posture, and clothing.

Similarly, in the in page below, you can find a very Eisneresque combination of squiggly panel borders and an extreme close-up to communicate a pungent state of mind:

As you can see, the effect is seriously enhanced by the placement, size, and shape of the lettering (again, much like Eisner used to do). Deena Mohamed’s translation pays close attention to this component of the comic, often drawing words in ways that, more than telling you what the characters are saying/hearing, compellingly contribute to the images’ mood and fluidity…

Moreover, like Habibi, Shubeik Lubeik borrows much of its sense of design from Arabic calligraphy. That alphabet appears to inform the curves of certain drawings and even the layout of several pacy, zig-zaggy pages.

Most notably, Deena Mohamed merges different types of scripts to illustrate the wishes (or, better yet, the djinns) themselves:

As I pointed out before, the second chapter is the most inventive in terms of comics language. If the first and third tales feature their share of big, bodacious sequences bursting with manic pencils, this section is tasked with capturing Nour’s low energy and all-consuming self-doubt, along with occasional peaks of anxiety. Mohamed does this by extensively showing us what goes on inside the protagonist’s head as well as the outside world, giving readers privileged access to Nour’s alienated perspective, the sense of isolation, and the feelings that no one else can grasp.

The challenge is to immerse us in a person’s depression in a way that still contains action and is not excessively dependent on words (after all, as much I praised the lettering, extensive blocks of text don’t always play to the medium’s strengths). Shubeik Lubeik pulls this off masterfully by acknowledging that, despite the lethargic body, Nour’s mind is actually quite restless, even if stuck in an insidious spiral. In an inspired decision, Mohamed uses a series of charts to both describe Nour’s psychological state and demonstrate the character’s self-reflexivity:

There is something in the air. Perhaps reflecting an ever-growing fixation on the price of unbridled power, consumption, and self-fulfillment, the last couple of years saw the publications of two other comics with a relatively similar premise. Paul Cornell’s and Steve Yeowell’s whimsical graphic novel Three Little Wishes is about a control-freak lawyer who gets three wishes from a fairy and obsesses about how best to use them. In turn, in Charles Soule’s and Ryan Browne’s nutty mini-series Eight Billion Genies, every person in the world suddenly gets a genie that grants them one wish each. In both cases, the result is pretty funny and more than a bit weird… and just as concerned with the ensuing practicalities and moral quandaries that could come from the massification of miracles, distinguishing between selfish and altruistic – as well as between impulsive and strategic – wishers. And while the former eventually ventures into rom-com territory and slight political satire, the latter’s scope – and artwork – becomes substantially more chaotic and large-scale (and way more informed by western pop culture than Shubeik Lubeik).

Although I’ve no qualms about recommending Three Little Wishes and Eight Billion Genies as highly enjoyable in their own right, at the end of the day I still have to go with Shubeik Lubeik for Gotham Calling’s book of the year. It’s a comic that I found constantly surprising and engaging – both visually and in terms of storytelling – and reading it made me go through a range of disparate emotions unparalleled in 2023.

Here is a glimpse into what my face probably looked like as I moved from page to page:

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (25 December 2023)

Posted on December 25, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

A Christmas reminder that comics can be awesome!

Batman #45

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