Puckett, K., Parobeck, M., Burchett, R. and Taylor, R. (1994) The Batman Adventures, #16, 'The Killing Book' (New York: D.C. Comics,10, 1)
In the early 1960s, a group of young British film scholars founded the journal Movie, challenging the prevalent assumption that Hollywood ‘product’ was inherently conservative and aesthetically bankrupt. Artistic achievement is not always a casualty of the culture industry, an axiom equally applicable to the medium of comics. In validating its worth to the academy, comics scholarship often privileges the experimental and the abstruse, works that challenge the formal limitations of the medium. This article is a small move in the other direction.
Licensed comics, those oft-derided afterthoughts in a film or television programme’s marketing strategy, are rarely lauded or studied. A representative judgement on the sub-genre can be found in The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels, which describes the majority as ‘relatively unremarkable and of little interest to anyone other than die-hard fanboys looking to fill the gaps between TV seasons with peripheral stories of their favourite screen characters’ (Fingeroth 2008: 269). This may explain why somebody would buy a licensed comic; it offers little insight into the creative decisions behind such artefacts.
The Batman Adventures is a rich and provocative licensed title, not despite but because of its form. Initially running 36 issues between 1992-1995, the comic was a tie-in to Warner Bros.’ popular Saturday morning cartoon Batman: the Animated Series. I will not attempt to chart the complex iterations of the DC Animated Universe here – suffice it to say that The Batman Adventures‘ visual style and story material were closely aligned to the parent programme, so much so that the comic was rebranded The Batman and Robin Adventures for a second 1995-1997 run, reflecting onscreen alterations.
This need not be a negative – one of the great pleasures of the run lies in its expansion of the cartoon’s world, deepening our understanding of central characters like Rupert Thorne, and peripheral ones, like Summer Gleeson. Accompanying this attention to the animated series’ diegesis is a loving regard for the long history of the Batman character as the distillation of decades’ worth of creators.
At the Animation Explosion 2011 conference, I argued that the success of both cartoon and tie-in comic lies in the confidence with which they address a wide audience. The Batman Adventures‘ letters pages attest to this, balanced between missives from the pre-pubescent and miniature essays from seasoned fans disenchanted with the contemporary Knightfall continuity. I am interested here in the sophistication of that address, using ‘The Killing Book’ (# 16) as an exemplar of the autonomy, and self-reflection, of this comic series.
One is struck immediately by the playfulness of this process. Consider the boldness of the issue’s cover, illustrating not a scene from within the comic, but rather acting as a first panel, leading into page one. On the cover, Batman discovers a ticking bomb, with a message from the Joker; on page one, the bomb explodes. Typical of writer Kelley Puckett‘s wit is the pun on the term ‘splash page‘, evoked as Batman hurtles toward a body of water. With characteristic humour and economy, ‘The Killing Book’ announces that the comic medium itself will be the subject of its story.
The Batman Adventures split each issue into three acts, evoking the television format of narrative interrupted by advert breaks. Puckett’s act titles riff on popular culture; in ‘The Killing Book’ (a title that nods to Alan Moore), they are ‘Seduction of the Innocent‘, ‘How to Draw Comics: the Joker Way‘ and ‘Comics and Sequential Death‘. However, crucially, the sophistication of these references to comics culture do not hinder an understanding of the plot: they enrich it.
Indeed, the meta-textuality of the comic’s story (in which the Joker kidnaps a comic penciller, so that he might detail his exploits) explicitly raises the question of creating for a wide range of readers. And in having the Joker communicate with Batman through a comic book, ‘The Killing Book’ acknowledges the multi-layered meaning permitted by the remit of the licensed comic.
Puckett, K., Parobeck, M., Burchett, R. and Taylor, R. (1994) The Batman Adventures, #16, 'The Killing Book' (New York: D.C. Comics, 3, 3-4)
Admittedly, this winning parody of the creative process is at times incomprehensible to the casual reader. Firing the Gotham Adventures creative team, the editor Patterson (a caricature of Batman Adventures editor Scott Peterson, via Perry White) takes on young penciller Anthony Baldwin in their place.
“But I just draw! I can’t write,” protests Baldwin. Slapping his head, Patterson mutters to himself, “Write?! It’s a comic book! Crazy kids…” In the letters page for a later issue (#20), Peterson reveals that the Gotham Adventures team represent penciller Mike Parobeck’s approximation of the comic’s creators.
However, even this in-joke offers a nice rebuttal to the idea that The Batman Adventures is ‘just’ a kid’s comic. When the Joker kidnaps Baldwin, fresh pages are sent through to Patterson the editor who (naturally) is so morally bankrupt as to continue printing them. In parodying commerciality, ‘The Killing Book’ neatly elides it.
Puckett, K., Parobeck, M., Burchett, R. and Taylor, R. (1994) The Batman Adventures, #16, 'The Killing Book' (New York: D.C. Comics, 13)
Page 13 represents the comic’s most explicit mise en abyme. The page that we hold depicts Batman’s point-of-view, rendering the act of reading a comic. On that page-within-a-page, the Joker challenges his intended audience (Batman) to read intently, that is, to decipher the Morse code message inscribed by the penciller (Baldwin).
But this rendering also performs a function for another audience (we, the readers), playing to a necessary convention (setting up the concluding battle between the Batman and Joker, in which the former prevails). The convention is commercially dictated – implied in the Joker’s use of ad-speak (“Be there… or else”) – but that does not make it inherently less valuable. We are not just looking at a rendering of a comic page; this is a page by Anthony Baldwin, who draws remarkably like Mike Parobeck.
At the story’s end, Batman donates copies of ‘The Killing Book’ to Arkham Asylum as part of a “literacy campaign”, amusing every inmate but the Joker. The action of the comic has become a comic, one that aligns Batman with us as consumers. And while this takes place within the pages of a cartoon tie-in (or rather, because it does), ‘The Killing Book’ attests to the versatility of the comics medium. It recognises the potential for artistic excellence in even the most commercial of products, a testament to the worth of the licensed children’s comic.
REFERENCES
Fingeroth, D. (2008) The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels (London: Rough Guides)
The Batman Adventures 16 (1994), ‘The Killing Book’ (New York: DC Comics)
The Batman Adventures 20 (1994), ‘Smells Like Black Sunday’ (New York: DC Comics)
