Several months ago, Comixology had a great sale on Batman comics. I hadn’t ever read much of The Dark Knight, so I decided to spring and get a few collections. First, however, I consulted with my good friend and comics expert, Joseph Darowski, who teaches English and Pop Culture classes at BYU Idaho. Given my limited budget and the collections that were on sale, Joe recommended that I pick up The Long Halloween, The Dark Knight Returns, and The Court of Owls.
I started with The Long Halloween, and at first it took me a while to get into it. The art is highly stylized, and (as is often the case with comics) it was hard to jump right in. But later things started to pick up and once I got hooked I was able to finish it pretty quickly. Next I read The Dark Knight Returns. Again, I had a hard time with the stylized artwork, and I found both Frank Miller’s prose and the layout to be quite jarring. I would say that for me DKR was fine but not great. Now I am reading The Court of Owls, and in my mind it’s the best of the three. Greg Capullo’s art is much more down my alley, and Scott Snyder’s tone is perfect.
Then somewhere in the middle of all of this reading, I came across this article about “Batman’s Traumatic Origins” by Richard A. Warshack, and it impressed me for a couple of reasons. First of all was the close reading. Warshack is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and he obviously knows his psychiatry. But he is also an excellent reader of literature and art. I wrote recently about how I feel like as a literature professor I (like many of my colleagues) tend to slip away from close reading in favor of theory, and when I read Warshack’s article I thought: “I hope my students can have these kinds of thoughts about the media they consume after having been in my class.” Maybe they won’t write them up and publish them in The Atlantic, but hopefully they will connect the stuff they read and watch to the world they live in.
Anyway, reading Warshack’s article, along with all of these Batman comics, has got me thinking about what I like about Batman, especially considering the fact that because they are so dark I don’t necessarily enjoy reading Batman comics as much as some of the lighter stuff from Marvel. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I like Batman because of what he teaches me about teaching.
First of all, Batman, when done right, is first and foremost a detective. Detective Comics had existed for a couple of years before Batman appeared in 1939. But once he came on the scene, Batman, also known as “The World’s Greatest Detective,” was the face of that series. After a several mergers, the Superman and Batman titles came to be housed under the same publishing roof — first called Superman-DC and then later simply as DC.
Why does any of this matter? I believe (and I often talk to my students about this) that detective fiction is many times a metaphor for artistic interpretation. The murder — macabre as it may sound — is a work of art designed to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. A good detective can only find the killer after they have placed the murder in context and found motive or meaning behind it, and the only way they can do that is by paying close attention to all of the clues. Batman is fine as a superhero, but for me he is great because of his detective abilities. I prefer far more the scenes in The Long Halloween or The Court of Owls where Batman is analyzing things in his lab and trying to piece together a mystery than I do those in The Dark Knight Returns where he is duking it out with Superman. I love using the art-as-crime metaphor with my students because I think that they get it. It isn’t hard to get them to pay attention to details and then to sift through the details to find out what is important if they feel like they are “literary detectives.”
Secondly, as Warshack points out in his article, Batman is important because of his traumatic origins. I suppose the same could be said for many superheroes, but few of them are tormented like Batman. Perhaps this is another reason I like Court of Owls, in which we get more insight into Bruce Wayne’s childhood — including the fruitless search for the Court of Owls that was his first case. But what does trauma have to do with teaching? I believe that one critical element in teaching is compassion. Sometimes, in the confines of the classroom, I can forget that we are all damaged goods. Like Bruce Wayne, we all carry around a ton of emotional baggage. It’s easy to try to pretend that none of that exists, but I think that I am a better teacher when I realize not just that I’ve got stuff going on in my own life but my students do in theirs.
Along with trauma comes the idea of vulnerability — perhaps Batman’s most endearing trait. He is very smart and strong and a good fighter (and he has a ton of money), but he has no special mutation, no healing factor, no spider sense, no invulnerability. He feels every blow and he carries the scars of every encounter. (I wrote a bit about this on my other blog a few weeks ago). When Batman enters any engagement he has no assurance that things will turn out well. Knowing this helps me to remember my own vulnerability. After teaching the same class a couple of times and receiving good feedback from students, I think it is easy to start to feel like I have all of the answers. When I start to feel like that, I need to take a step back and realize that I am Batman, not Superman. I have been given not just a great privilege as a teacher but a huge responsibility, and I owe it to myself and my students to prepare carefully and to approach class humbly.
So while Batman is still not my favorite comic to read (The X-Men will probably always hold that place in my heart), I must admit that these three classic Batman titles have reminded me of some important just some of the reasons he has been such a huge success for so many decades.