Got Batman? – A Call for Accessibility

If You Know You Know… If You Don’t You Don’t

There is a famous adage that knowledge is power, and while a bit cliché I do think that there is at least some truth to it. There is a reason those in power often withhold education completely or begin to censor materials. Ignorance allows them to maintain their power and control and is the reason why accessibility is so important. While I don’t think the lack of access to a Batman comic book is going to be the deciding factor in causing or preventing a revolution, that doesn’t make it any less essential.

Whether you like it or not, Batman is a part of our history and our cultural consciousness. He does a lot! Many see him as modern mythology or as an American God. To others, he is a hero and the epitome of masculinity. It’s almost a natural response even to those who don’t know much about the character. If you try to control what Batman is, who he can become, and what others think of him, you are now trying to control a whole host of ideas. In this scenario, you are trying to define who can and can’t be heroic, masculine, etc.

As Glen Weldon illustrates beautifully in The Caped Crusade, there is a large subset of the fandom that tries to keep Batman in the direction of “dark, gritty, noir” character and denies other interpretations of him (Weldon 2016). Which is fine if it’s just a matter of personal preference. Where it becomes problematic is when you are trying to tightly control the way the character is seen and portrayed in perpetuity. The recent documentary Icons Unearthed: Batman provides an excellent example of this.

As I mentioned in cannabis post, Michael Uslan strongly believes that the only “correct” Batman is one who is dark and gritty. He hated the 1960s TV show so much that it became his life journey to create a dark Batman movie.* When his dream finally came to fruition in the late 1980s and he found himself in a position of power as executive producer of the 1989 film, he tried to guide Tim Burton’s conception of the character towards his own. In the Icons Unearthed documentary, Uslan discusses giving Burton a handful of comic books to “educate” the director on Batman (Volk-Weiss 2024). In the comments section on the March 21 Facebook post where Uslan shared the documentary with his followers, someone asked for the specific issues he gave Burton. He gave this list in his response: “Tec 27-38; Batman 1; Tec 439; a run of O’Neil and Adams; a run of Engelhart and Rogers” (Uslan 2024). My Bat-senses immediately began to tingle. 

What’s in a Recommendation?

To the uninitiated, these are all books considered good examples of the “darker” interpretation of Batman. In Detective Comics (Tec) #27-37 Batman is a solo hero who wields a gun and battles vampires. Then we get the first two appearances of Robin (Tec #28 and Batman #1) in 1940… and he then skips 30 years to O’Neil and Adams and ignores the most recent decade before they began the movie. In other words, he skipped about 40 years of Batman history. This is problematic.

I don’t necessarily take issue with the quality of the books he selected. They are all great comics that are near and dear to me. What I take issue with is the “expert” on the set deliberately cherry-picking material to push his version of “truth.” Look, I get that Burton is a busy creative guy, and even at that time there were an overwhelming number of Batman comics that would have taken a good chunk of time to get through. But not even a small representative sample of one or two stories from each decade? I guess we can’t include any material that could introduce ideas of (gasp) campiness!

Keep in mind that the above scenario was at a time before many older comics would have been readily available in original or reprint. DCs first major attempt at compiling reprints after the “Giant” comics was the DC Archives Collection which didn’t have its first volume out until 1989, or the year of the film. The microfiche discussed earlier weren’t produced until the ’90s, and public libraries would not be able to provide a sample from all eras since they barely collected anything. Burton would have had to track down and purchase the copies himself or request time in the DC library containing copies of all comic books since the company’s beginnings. He most certainly would have been able to get access (assuming he knew of its existence), but he probably left it to his team of experts to curate a representative sample.

No Accessibility = Control

This also has a large ripple effect. It’s not just the director Tim Burton and his perception that this effects, but the public at large. Batman was a major motion picture and introduced millions to the character and/or became their definitive version of the character. In this sense, the movie is therefore a yardstick for the ideas discussed above like masculinity. Yes, the movie that came out is great and I love it, but I sometimes wonder what it would have been without someone tightly controlling what gets read behind the scenes.

Accessibility is massively important. If you don’t know about something, it can’t enter the discussion. It can’t influence peoples’ thoughts, ideas, and life. It becomes a forgotten part of history. When you take a class in many subjects such as music history at the university level, you primarily learn about a handful of males in the European tradition. But are they the only composers in the world? In Europe? Of course not. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s sister Nannerl was a musician and composer as well but eventually forced to give up music because… well, she was a woman. When curricula were put together for music history courses, only the boy Mozart was selected. So, people learned about him and grew to see his music as valuable. When these students would go on to teach music, they only mentioned boy Mozart… in perpetuity until most people today only know about Wolfgang Mozart and nobody has heard of Nannerl or her music. In part because the men didn’t care, and nobody has bothered to make it accessible since.

In a similar vein, Schneider discusses this in reference to scholarly discussion of homosexuality in Batman comic books. He notes that early writings on the topic seem to be centered on a small handful of issues—what was most available. However, with the increase in reprints, this dearth of materials to pull from and therefore the scholarship has improved (Schneider and Palmer 2016). In extreme scenarios, control of the accessibility of materials can be called censorship: controlling what people see and think to support your own personal narrative and bias.

Cataloguing and Changes in Meaning

It’s ironic how in my accessibility journey, I am constantly finding barriers to accessibility. This considering my relatively privileged position, one that a younger me would have envied: I am within reach of our nation’s second largest library system (behind the Library of Congress). In other words, I have access to technology and resources that smaller libraries do not have the space or funding for (microform being a good example). Despite this, it is still difficult to find or see even a copy of these materials in their original unedited form. 

This isn’t just a matter of nostalgia, color differences, or even control of the narrative. This is also a matter of edits in reprints that could potentially change the meaning of a comic. A look at the second reprint vs. original image from last week’s article provides an example. In the reprint, Robin’s face is presented as resigned or almost bored, but in the original he is clearly angry and determined. Meanwhile his gunman has his mouth open in shock in the reprint but is barely surprised in the original. In a visual medium like comic books, the visuals are important. A slight change can impact the readings and meanings someone may take from it. Which is why in certain instances, seeing the originals is essential.

All of this is even assuming you can find what you need. Several scholars have commented on the need for increased access to metadata (Holloway, Kaiser, and Flota 2022) and flexible cataloguing (Adams and Murray 2019) of comic book collections in libraries. There are a lot of comic books out there, so sifting through it all to find something specific can be daunting. The point being that even if it is available, if you cannot find what you are looking for (including if you cannot spend much time tracking it down), it is not accessible.

In my search, I could easily find that the New York Public Library has a physical single-issue collection… but the online catalog just has a list of numbered boxes without information on what each one contains. To get this information, I had to email a librarian who then replied with a PDF document containing this information. From here I requested the boxes I wanted through email. Not the easiest most searchable experience (a long way away from metadata). This is a shame. These are a part of American (and world) culture and history. Everyone should have access to them, not just a privileged few.

They Bleached the Comics!!!

The only times I have heard of an individual with complete and unadulterated access to a full set of originals is when they can get access to the DC Library/Archives. In the preface to Volume 1 (Batman) of his seminal encyclopedia series, Michael L. Fleisher mentions his trip to the archives to create the landmark set (Fleisher 1976). Brooker also obtained access for his PhD dissertation research in the early 90s (Brooker 2001). To my knowledge however, this would not happen today. I even tried to get in touch with DC about a year ago to find out the state of the library… but they never responded. Maybe it went to spam?

DC may not deem me important enough to respond to, but I can pull together an idea. While collecting issues of Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, I leafed through the first issue from November, 1989. It was at this time that DC was finally getting serious about reprinting their older material, and an editorial section titled “Focus” laid out some of the steps they were taking to put together their “Archives” series. In it, they mention a new process they were using to recolor them, essentially bleaching everything but the black ink lines. Yes, bleaching. Perhaps the reason for the botched touch up mentioned in the last article.

This column and Fleisher mention that DC kept two copies of every issue in bound volumes. In other words, at least half of the archives have been destroyed. The other half are most likely in bad shape if not destroyed as well. Mark Waid is quoted as saying the pages were already “crumbling into dust every time we open a volume” (O’Neil and Hannigan 1989). Presumably bound together with the issues that were bleached, they also would have been affected by the handling/cutting/unbinding process. I certainly hope that they took high quality color scans of each page before they bleached them, and that they have these scans backed up somewhere safe.

A Possible Solution

All of this highlights the issue: comics were not printed to last, nobody had the foresight to preserve everything, and cataloguing is severely lacking. Even DC made a few missteps along the way. This was made ever more poignant during a recent trip to the main branch of the New York Public Library, the Schwarzman Building on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. The third floor has a rotating mini-exhibit outside of the Rose Reading Room that currently is housing a celebration of 100 years of The New Yorker Magazine. Walking through and observing some of the interesting and meticulously preserved items on display, I couldn’t help but see it as an example of what our culture values. The library seems to have copies of the magazine and peripheral materials like editorial notes, sketches, and handwritten notes from throughout its history. In other words, they saw it as inherently valuable enough from its conception. Valuable enough to collect and preserve its history.

The NYPL itself admits in a webpage that pop culture for the longest time was not seen as serious enough for collection. Although “the original NYPL Research Libraries policy was to collect representative samples of comic books and microfilm them. Emphasis was not placed on keeping original material…” I have yet to see the fruits of this labor (“Comic Books,” n.d.). The vast majority of the comic book microform collection was produced by MicroColor, NOT the library. There are three rolls—THREE ROLLS—of NYPL produced microfilm that I can find in the collection online. Unless there is a collection hidden to the public, or they trashed a substantial portion of what they once had, this is a misleading statement.

Take a second to take that in: even in the city that birthed the American comic book tradition and the superhero, their public library system didn’t see it as important to collect this history in real time. I know there are a lot of comic book titles, but can you imagine if they treated even one comic book title like the New Yorker? Now, however it’s too late. Libraries can’t afford the price tags of Golden and Silver Age books to add them to their collections. The situation isn’t going to get any easier. We can’t go back in time and have DC print more books or stop bigots from burning them. We have a limited supply, and rich collectors put them in plastic encasements that make them unreadable and hide them away from everyday people.

This is not to utterly bash the NYPL, DC, or any individual or entity. Mistakes were made, and hindsight is 20/20. But what are we going to do moving forward to preserve and make these comic books accessible in their original form? The full paper experience is of course the best scenario. Nothing can beat the tactile experience of touching and smelling the pages yourself. Being a part of this history. Of course, I understand that this may not be possible given disintegrating materials, so in the case of originals being unavailable, at the bare minimum exact facsimile copies should be made available.

The fact that these comics are scanned in microfiche shows that scanning them and making them publicly available is possible. Why can’t we make these available on an electronic system that would be either run and operated by or licensed out by DC? Libraries would then purchase the rights to use these systems, just like it does for academic journals and newspapers. If we can get just about every issue of the New York Times to be converted from microform to an electronic database, this should be possible for comic books. Who knows, the scans used for the microfiche may still be available, giving DC a head start (and hopefully they already have them scanned). If anyone from WBD/DC is reading: now would be a good time to do this, considering these comics start entering the public domain in about a decade. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but by helping us out, you’ll squeeze what you can out of it while you still can. This needs to be done now before it is no longer possible. Feel free to get in touch with me!