Bat-session: Towards a Batmanology

There’s A Batman For That

I know, I know, far from being unique, it’s quite cliché, but in an attempt to present my approach and positionality at the outset of this blog: I love Batman! Scratch that. As my husband will attest, I am obsessed with Batman. He is so fascinating to me. One of the things that makes Batman so great is that Batman has such a long history and has been popular for so long that he can be found in just about… well anything. And I like it all. No, really! Campy Batman. Serious Batman. Zebra Batman. Parodies of Batman. Musty niche novels made and sold on the cheap. All of it.

I make it an exercise to see the good in everything Batman I consume—something I may often forget to do in other areas of my life. Even if I don’t end up enjoying the content as much as I had hoped, I’m still glad I picked it up. When people create things, they are essentially putting their own humanity into it, and I think that’s beautiful. I’m not saying that we should force ourselves to like everything. What I am saying is that even in something we absolutely hate, we can surely find something that we enjoyed. Even a minor detail. Or perhaps something that made you think, that made you change your perspective a bit. Why did they create it in that way? What are the forces at play in this creation (e.g., time, editorial pressures)? And why did you receive it in the way that you did?

Batman dominates my everyday thoughts and media consumption habits—sometimes exclusively. While I will occasionally find myself watching/reading/listening to/playing other things, it’s few and far between. In a sense, being a bit of a ride-or-die for the character and his surrounding universe. Letting the character guide my consumption instead of something like the DC brand, superheroes in general, a genre like film, a specific author, the latest fads, algorithms, or recommendations from others provides a sometimes-unique perspective. It actively forces me to engage with new creators, new ideas, new forms and formats, new mediums, new technologies that I otherwise would have never picked up. Or engage with the niche item that isn’t really in the zeitgeist.

If you are a Batman fan (even one who ventures elsewhere), there is never a dull (or free) moment. There is a Batman for every mood and personality. Want something positive and cheery? Maybe some 50s comics, Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2008-2011) animated series, or the 60s live action Batman series will do. Exhausted and just want to lay on the couch, close your eyes and listen? There are some audio dramas on Max and Spotify and even some older ones that can be found on YouTube. (For those unfamiliar, a decent list of official Batman media can be found here. These and others will be discussed more in-depth in future posts.)  Want to feel countercultural and maybe fight “the man?” Perhaps some fan fiction or a fan-made short film will quench that desire. Or you could always just daydream stories for your head canon.

This long list of “texts” and the complex interweaving of their narratives has been discussed by various academics under multiple labels: multiplicity of identity (Brown 2019, 33), the Batman matrix (Brooker 2012, 153), Batman as myth/metatext or folk culture (Brooker 2012, 154), and Batman the Idea (Weldon 2016, 284). These terms mostly reference the various fictional stories/narratives of Batman (whether official or not) or Batman as a character. In other words, there is the Batman of Batman: The Animated Series, the Batman of Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, and the Batman of the fan fiction comic The Deal (Bayliss 2013). These are influenced by and may one day influence other Batmen and/or be referenced by or “meet” a newer Batman. This is of course not even touching on the impact it has on you and your current and future perception of the character and his stories.

Gotta Know It All

Not only do I like to consume, enjoy, and contemplate/react personally to official and unofficial Batman media of all kinds, but I also like to see how other people react to things, from critics and newspaper journalists to academics, from other fans and experts to the person who has no knowledge of Batman. I like to see the products Batman iconography is slapped onto. I like to see random images of Batman plastered onto some building, billboard, or t-shirt while watching the news. It’s all interesting and worthy of examination. Nothing is off limits if it has any relation to Batman.

Study of this kind of non-narrative Bat-content has been conducted steadily since the groundbreaking academic text The Many Lives of the Batman, released at the height of Batmania following the release of the 1989 Tim Burton film. This book looks outside the narrative aspect and examines production, commercial/corporate aspects, fandom, as well as personal views and accounts (Pearson and Uricchio 2023). Other studies have only piled up since then.

This plethora of material while at times overwhelming, it also keeps things fresh and interesting, maintaining my interest in the character over short, medium, and long periods of time. It’s also personally appealing because in many ways, I am a completionist/perfectionist. It lets me get my obsessive-compulsive side out. A collector of knowledge, if you will, because my small apartment can only fit so many of the physical objects. So, I want to know everything about everything… which of course is impossible for anything. Even something as “focused” as just one character—though admittedly in this case one of the world’s largest franchises. However, that doesn’t stop me from trying…

Batman as Cipher

All this boils down to Batman being a singular character that provides a lens or a case in which to see/study just about anything from any angle or angles one might want. As noted above, a good number of academic studies have provided us with new terminology and lenses to utilize in discussion of Batman. While I agree with them and I find them personally enjoyable and useful lenses, I have yet to find one that might fit any individual’s views of Batman as well as my all-encompassing needs. 

Let me use Brooker’s myth/folk culture as an example. As much as I love mushy ideas of Batman as this amazingly heroic and inspiring mythological figure that anyone can look up to… this is not the case for everyone. Much (but not all) mythology is religious and inspiring (heroic) in nature, or at the very least elemental stories with a message. Many see Batman in this light for sure, but some still see him as just meaningless fluff for kids. He is also perceived by others as a villain, just some rich guy that doesn’t follow the rules like the rest of us who feels entitled to be overly aggressive. Myth also connotes something not of this world. However, the reason many relate to Batman is his humanity and how in many respects he is real, like the comic in your hand or the dialogue with him in your head.

The folk part presumes that he is working for or of the common “folk” or known/loved by everyone. But he is often found doing what many may perceive as merely preserving the status quo, the sizable pocketbooks of Warner Bros. Discovery executives and even his earliest adventures can be seen as evidence of this. A consumer product in and of itself has a financial barrier, making him NOT for the folk in the eyes of many (yet). A snobby artist might even say Batman isn’t culture at all, or a layperson may barely have a conception of him. But all of this is a part of Batman’s story.

A term that I like a bit better and seems to contain both the fictional and the “real world” approaches, all the contradictions and perspectives, is cipher. In Soul of The Dark Knight, Alex M. Wainer mentions this term in reference to the character Bruce Wayne being a cipher, a blank slate, for Batman to then be pasted onto (Wainer 2004, 58). But I would argue that this concept is true of every aspect of the dual Bruce Wayne/Batman character, its surrounding universe, and its interaction with our world.

Except for a few minor “requirements” like some kind of bat-themed outfit, the character is essentially a blank, a non-entity. Increasingly, even in the fictional world more and more of the elements previously thought of as “required” for the character to be Batman have begun to fall apart. For example, the mainline comics and more recently the Absolute Batman line has examined a poor Batman. Once thought an essential element, Batman is still Batman even without being rich. So, with very little required of him, Batman reflects the creators, the audience, the era, the culture… he is whatever we want him to be.

When I am reading or watching anything, I am viewing things from my personal viewpoint, my lived experience. The amazing mix of identities, interests, cultural conditionings, upbringing, ideas, yearnings, knowledge etc. that are a part of my mental makeup. While we may have some overlap, there will never be two people who view things in the same exact way. This is additive too: if I see a Batman commercial or read another person’s perspective, how I view the next Batman thing I see or rewatch may be different than if I had not watched the commercial or read the article.

In this way, Batman takes on and is an expression of someone’s collective lived experience, their positionality from a specific moment in time, or something specific someone wants to convey or sell. Because we as humans are meaning makers, people put their views, opinions, hopes, desires, political leanings, etc. onto him. I can see Batman as a reflection of my own and/or humanity’s best qualities while McDonald’s can make him into their Big Mac salesman. Even watching the McDonald’s advertisement, I may see things in it that McDonald’s didn’t intend and may even disagree with… but does that make it invalid? I don’t think so. The cipher conception of Batman is all encompassing. It can cover the official Batman texts, the fan written texts, opinion pieces, academic analyses, fan disagreements, someone who barely has a concept of what/who Batman is, and even a plastic Batman toy picked up on the shore 500 years in the future and seen as some random meaningless object. Batman as cipher can take it all.

Batmanology—The Study of Batman

To my giddy excitement, this means that the study of Batman—what I might call Batmanology—is highly interdisciplinary. As Pearson and Uricchio phrase it: “the character constitutes a complex cultural phenomenon that unpacks on many levels” (Pearson and Uricchio 2023, 17). Therefore, this blog looks at Batman through a wide variety of fields, media, topics, etc. including but not limited to:

Not only these ideas in isolation, but also their interplay and the “overall picture” (nothing is in a bubble). For example: the philosophy of pop culture, the history of comic books, the censorship of new and developing technologies… I could go on forever.

With all of that said, this blog is just one more added to the millions of other Batman and other pop culture blogs. I am not a professional writer. I am not an expert, and I certainly don’t know everything. This blog is nothing special, nor are my thoughts any more or less valid than anyone else’s. At the end of the day, this is just a way to keep track of or journal my ongoing Batman studies. A way to write about random things that pop into my head, organize my questions, thoughts, thoughts on others’ thoughts (sometimes obscure and/or forgotten) down in writing. By sharing it on this blog, I hope that it might be found organically (sans algorithm) by someone they resonate with. Or at least someone that can appreciate them 50 years down the road on the Wayback Machine (if it still exists). 

Just call me The Lavender Bat, your resident Batmanologist. I hope you’ll join me in my studies.