The Playful, The Daring, The Batman, The Gothic
This piece on Klaus Janson, Grant Morrison, and Steve Buccellato’s Batman comic, Gothic, was written around 2019. Then rewritten slightly in 2020. And, allowed to lie fallow for a variety of reasons including I forget to submit it and I forgot I wrote it and then I got nervous and overthought things.
Lucky you, today you get to read it!
It is good for me to be nervous. My angle was that the comic is and is not what Grant Morrison, themself, has proclaimed or perhaps hoped for. And, that this is good. My approach was articulate but in an occluded fashion. It is a pretentious walk through a garden of pretense, about being pretentious. About reaching into the dark to see, maybe, what will grab back.
The Playful, The Daring, The Batman, The Gothic
What if I messed up? What if I got my research confused or misattribute something? What kind of historian am I? Or, critic?
If some soul appears and presents clearly gay characters in a Batman comic before this one, I am interested. I will, of course, acquiesce, because why would you not?
Ah! But, see, that has been a problem for me before.
December 24, 2020! A piece of mine appeared, explaining a position that a refusal to hold Talia Head, daughter of Ra’s al Ghul, guilty for her in-world crimes and misdeeds specifically because she is a young woman and somebody’s daughter, is sexist. Appropriately titled, Talia al Ghul: Somebody’s Daughter, it netted me one of the worst spam-attack pile ones I have experienced through social media. They went at me. I was a racist, a bastard, a whore, a whoremonger, a devil, a dick. I was the worst. I was terrible! And, someone noted that I was, in their opinion, wrong to hold Talia accountable for her earliest war crimes because she had some plausible deniability, in that she may not have fully grasped what she was doing, and I said, Alright, okeh, that’s fair.
And, they blew up worse. I was changing my mind a day after an article’s release!?! Where was my integrity? The integrity I had as a racist, asshole whoremonger, mind, in their assessment. (This was super fun times.)
I think that person, even though I blocked them for other things, had a point. I conceded the point. Why would you not? What kind of integrity is that?
But, once burned, twice bitten. As they say.
Did I want to bring up gay characters in Gothic when they suffer terrible fates? Kill your gays is not just a catchy song. It is a bit like celebrating the first time a comic had a female protagonist but she ends up in a refrigerator and her male costar takes over. At least, it could be.
Articles, essays, summaries are dangerous, and plenty of people will take a summary as law, too, without ever touching the comic, or letting it override the comic that read. Did I want that on my head?
So, I let this thing go to rest. Put baby to bed.
Thing is, I like Gothic. I like that it was, on paper, going to be a traditional, normal Batman comic. That Grant Morrison intended to put away fancy old quotes and allusions, to put away ornate artistry or trying too much, and do this straight story. And, it is a comic, then, at once high and low art, camp and straight, horror, comedy, human legend and superhero fantasy.
I like that Klaus Janson pulls out every artistic trick and with Buccellato, rolls them around on each other til you can barely tell what technique is used where. It is all apiece. A glorious piece!
This is smart shit!
And, I love that the death trap is absurd. It is not in line with the Batman comics of the era, but it is straight – straight out of the 1960s tv show!
That’s amazing.
You should give it a read.
