Batman

One of our cultures iconic figures is, oddly enough, Batman. I was struck by this today, for some odd reason that I can't figure. It seems that this weird comic book character simply won't go away.

The comic books of the 50s and 60s were kind of fun. Batman was an excuse for the writers to turn their imaginations loose and invent all sorts of exotic technology for the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder. It was cool to have a super hero who was just a man, no super powers or alien origin. Sort of Sherlock Holmes on steroids.

Then, in the late 60s, we had the wonderful TV series with Adam West as Batman. It is still around on TV and I urge you to watch it. It is incredibly funny and, really should have been the death knell for the whole super hero genre. The Batman TV show was high satire presented as low humor and it completely devastated the whole idea of crime fighting heroes. Or should have.

But, some things die a hard death. I never gave the character another thought until, in a relatively short period, back he came, multiple times. Alan Moore did The Killing Joke, Grant Morrison did Arkham Asylum, and Frank Miller did The Dark Knight series. They were all good efforts but, them we had the films starring at various times Michael Keeton, Val Kilmer and George Cloony. A motley bunch of movies (although I did think Danny Devito  did a great Penguin). Well, I figured that would be the end of that.

Nope. Then we had the Christian Bale version which  might have been good if only I could have understood what he was saying. Why do some actors feel that mumbling is a good technique? I will say Heath Ledger's Joker was the best; so good it seemingly was too much for the poor guy; it is not a healthy character to immerse yourself in. Well, I thought, surely that will be the end of it.

Wrong again. Ben Affleck is the latest to take a stab at it. I will not be watching. Are there simply no new ideas anywhere? Perhaps we should declare a moratorium and vow to abstain from movies sequels. And, we probably should add to that, any movie based on any super hero.

Oddly enough, I sort of like TV's Gotham, but I really question the idea of putting a program that deals explicitly with mind control experimentation (the Doctor Strange story line) on at 8 PM for the little ones to watch. Gotham is grim fare, a bit frightening in places, but, at least it's pretty well done (the ones I have seen, at least, maybe 4 total).

Alan Moore's The Watchmen  should have killed the whole super hero mythos, It was a devastating deconstruction of the whole mad genre and that should have been it but, super heroes won't go away. That must say something about the audience but, this is not a psychology blog, so, I'll leave things there