Daily Batman: Batman begins

This advertisement for Detective Comics No. 27, the debut of Batman, was featured in Action Comics No. 12 in 1939. The character grew so popular that one year later he got his own title.

Batman begins. April 1939. Action comics.

Girls like a boy in a cape.

I just find it interesting that Action sold DC ad space. I mean, I guess, thinking about it, like, why not? They probably weren’t worried about competition, and comics likely still felt like a who-knows-where-this-is-going gambit. Action ruled the roost with Superman, basically starting it all. Originally just to move toy catalogs, novelty companies would include little gimicky “Adventures Of ___” strips to entice boys to pick up the next catalog and beg their Depression era single mothers to buy them all the lovely needful things inside.

Aw. Boys’ own title. Advertisement for Batman No. 1. April 25, 1940. DC.

For an actual factual account of all this, try something like The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. But my heart belongs to the historically accurate (mainly) work of fiction, Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon. Oh, and Steranko’s History of Comics (foreword by Fellini). I’ll try to schedule something for later today to prove how rad Steranko is. Let them blow ya mind.

Daily Batman: Everybody sucks for Batman today

In Batman No. 303, Batman gets a nasty crack on the noggin and mistakenly believes that Batman is his secret identity, while Bruce Wayne is the Dark Knight. Malarkey ensues.

via.

Having been chased by gawking crowds for the crime of trying to eat a hot dog, resulting in a cop warning him that Batman wouldn’t like it if he knew some schmuck was impersonating him, the dejected and confused Caped Crusader wanders afield of his usual holding patterns. Wandering the streets, he finds himself looking for friends in a love-in-ing little bed of flower children, who he pretty much promptly discounts as viable companions.

Ibid.

But if you’re feeling left out because you’re not a hippie, don’t worry — the writers take time to throw out a bash on Comic-Con goers, too. Everybody sucks! Why are you wasting Batman’s time?? Kill yourself.

Fight Club Friday: From the annals of XKCD by way of Big Ben

Big ups to my old friendoh for bringing this XKCD comic to my attention.

Daily Batman: Phantasma-Gorey

Art by Jesse E. Larson.

Daily Batman: Talk nerdy to me, Darth Vader edition

via.

“I am your father.”

“My parents are deaaaaaad!”

Origin of the “My parents are deeaaaaaaad!” joke.

Referenced previously on this journal here, here, here, and here.

Did You Know? Darth Vader, the only man I’ve ever loved, was rated by the A.F.I. as the #3 Greatest Villain of All Time. That is very significant to me because of the high regard in which I hold the A.F.I.’s vital, meticulously reasoned “top” lists. I give them nearly the weight of the breathtakingly judicious Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Where is my mind.

In case your sarcasm early-warning systems are offline for routine maintenance today, I’m being a brat because I think #3 is weaksauce. When was the last time you saw a little kid dressing up as Hannibal Lecter for Halloween? Or Norman Bates? When was the last time everyone, everywhere, age 4 to 70, understood exactly who you meant when you made a breathing sound into your hands for Hannibal and Norman the way they do for Vader? Never is the answer. Never.

All my love to the #1 and #2 villains, but … I just don’t know. Maybe I should do a villain series … something like “Baby, You’re No Good” — oh, this idea has legs. Catch you on the flip, I got thoughts to jot!

Advice: Eff the ineffable and See you on the flip!

Still phoning it in. This post is originally from last year, but I took out the stuff about the Wonder Woman project (later aborted because when it comes to her I’ve got the attention span of a baby gnat). This year I’m needing to let go of my anxiety about a job with an amazing non-profit for which I interviewed last Friday and I Really, Really, Really want. So the advice still stands!

via.

“Let’s think the unthinkable, let’s do the undoable, let’s prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.”

(Douglas Adams.)

Let go and get in that “jump!” frame of mind. Eff the ineffable, indeed, and don’t let all the shit that doesn’t matter get in the way of the shit that does.

Happy Fourth of July — ‘scuse me while I slap on my Wonder Woman wunderoos and conquer the world! Scheduling a Daily Batman, maybe a Girl of Summer and then I will catch you on the flip.

Daily Batman: We hold these truths to be self-evident

via Comically Vintage on the tumblr.

Don’t listen to the crackpots, kids.

Daily Batman: Take time to make time

If you make your own fun then you’re never bored.

Daily Batman: A colorless female brain

Barbara Gordon prepares to go from librarian to Batgirl. I’d be more interested in the opposite direction, but to each their own.

Daily Batman: the illusion that we’re not alone

We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.

(Orson Welles.)

Daily Batman: Pulled by unseen forces

via.

Schnitzt einer eine Marionette, wo man den Strick hereinhängen sieht, an dem sie gezerrt wird.

We are only puppets, our dangling strings pulled by unseen forces.

(Karl Georg Büchner, Dantons Tod. Act II, Scene 3. 1835).

Daily Batman: Angels with dirty faces

“Angels with dirty faces,” by JKB Fletcher, via.

I’ve loved him since we were kids, six years old. We worked together, fought together, stole together. Oh, I’m not blaming Rocky for what he is today. But for the grace of God, there walk I. I’d do anything for him, Laury. Anything in the world to help him. I’d give my life if I thought it would do any good, but it wouldn’t. You see Laury, there’s all those other kids, hundreds of them, in the streets and bad environment, whom I don’t want to see grow up like Rocky did. I can’t sacrifice them for Rocky. You see, Laury, they have lives too. I can’t throw them away. I can’t.

(Father Jerry, Angels With Dirty Faces (Michael Curtiz, 1938).)

Perhaps all you know of the movie Angels With Dirty Faces is the clips of the faux gangster movie Angels With Filthy Souls featured in Home Alone (I have talked to people who seem to think these are the same film, when in fact the latter does not exist), but Angels With Dirty Faces is beautiful and important and complex and funny and heartrending and I highly recommend it, and if you do watch it and come back here and say otherwise I will slap you in the kisser because it is you who are the “filthy animal.”

Daily Batman: Batman-Superman adventures

Said it before. Saying it again. Superman can be a real dick.

Flashback Friday: Bookfoolery: If I never sleep again until the end of my days, at least I will die well-read

This post originally appeared on June 24, 2010 at 6:26 p.m.

Maybe “well” is subjective …

If anyone but my Asia Argento plays Lisbeth Salander in an English-speaking adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I will put my hand through a blender. I pictured her the entire time I was reading.

Finished Girl With the Dragon Tattoo over a sleepless night that lead to one uneasy stretch of light snooze cut short by sudden bouts of vomiting. I found it very absorbing — the book, not the violent gut spasms from who-knows-what combination of stress and inattentively poor personal care — but it caromed briefly in to a few areas for which I was not wild. Still it all hung together in the end and I recommend it without reservation. Then I ended up reading a particularly pulpy and breezy Ross Macdonald mystery from the 70’s whose title I have already forgotten even though it kept me company for several hours.

See? Lots of people have insomnia and go on to have perfectly normal Summers! The Shining (Kubrick, 1980).

I only remember that I’d picked it up a few months back along with a couple 70’s editions of Zane Grey at my preferred comic store, which, besides selling comics and related games and accessories, also carries a small inventory of used, cheapo books and spotty collections of memorabilia depending on what luckless local nerds have either died or lost enough money to place their treasures in hock. I snatched up the Greys and this Macdonald book a few months ago because I dug the kind of blocky-schlocky look to the lines of the cover art.

The Underground Man — that’s right. Decent enough title, I guess.

The phrase “blew my mind” was used repeatedly in the book to refer to literally taking too much acid and suffering brain damage and prolonged schizophrenic episodes triggered by hallucinations, which usage I thought was a handy demonstration of the evolution of slang — in the book it was suggestive of overdose and possible fatality, but you can see how it developed over time the more benign definition it has now in the sense of changing one’s worldview in a feller-than-the-usual-pace-of-educational swoop, while still somewhat referencing the phrase’s original intent.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968). He swar to gar for all his life that whole sequences of this film were not planned to look like an acid trip, to which anyone who has ever done acid says, “Sure.”

The Macdonald book wasn’t the worst thing ever and some of the slangy shenanigans and quaintly dated rough talk in it wet my palate for some Hammett. I never re-read Red Harvest until October (red HARVEST, get it?) but I also brought down with me from Portland The Dain Curse and the Op’s short-story collection and could give one of those a spin. Think that’s what I’ll do tonight.

Actually maybe Hammett is only the appetizer. Know what? I think I will try to squeeze in L.A. Confidential before I have to pick up Tommyknockers. I usually, though not maniacally, like to read that closer to Christmastime because of the whole Bloody Christmas scandal that sparks so much of the action, but I’ve been self-auditing through all these long sick waking nights, and by setting this bookfoolery in to print I have come to see that I’ve got some really fucked-up and compulsive reading habits which are even perhaps the least of my worries and so I feel like rebelling against myself in this small thing to test the waters of making Change happen. I’m going to do this because I can.

Synchronicity — just dug out Red Harvest and the quote on the front cover is from Ross Macdonald, the author whose pulp I read this morning. Wild way that the universe is telling me I’m on the right track? or subconscious self-affirmation from whatever part of my brain has been looking at that (quite kickass) Red Harvest cover for the last four years?

I can’t say for sure. Either way, tell that girl from Canada that it ain’t ironic.

Take-two Tuesday — Daily Batman: Enter the Bookworm and Up With Love plus Surprise Connections and Zodiac-quackery

This post originally appeared on January 5, 2010 at 8:05 pm.

Roddy McDowall and Francine York, Batman, “The Bookworm Turns,” Season 1, Episode 29. Original airdate April 20, 1966. Well, that’s inauspicious. Shit.

I hate to come off as a down-at-the-mouth grump on the topic of love. I am a romantic. Here is the Bookworm and his lady, the lovely librarian Miss Lydia Limpet, and may I add that I rooted like gangbusters for this pair to win?

via Batman villains database — I love clunky contraptions on men’s heads. I find it so fucking cute. I really do.

In fact, I remember pretty strongly wanting him for myself (girls like a boy who reads!), but I rightly understood Miss Limpet having him was almost the same thing. Later, when I figured out he was in Planet of the Apes, I was even more impressed, but, being a fickle little girl, I soon made way for other crushes, like Matthew Broderick and the Great Mouse Detective — shut up, because that could work — to the point that, when I stayed at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona several years back and was given the “Roddy McDowall room,” I merely remarked that I’d “once thought he was cute,” and meant nothing more by it.

Interestingly, after his role as the Bookworm in the live-action television series, McDowall continued to wreak villainy in the DC world. He voiced Jarvis Tetch/the Mad Hatter for both Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures, as well as performing him in a brief cameo for the late ’90s animated Superman.

In the original television series, the Mad Hatter was played by David Wayne. More on the Mad Hatter another day cause he was really depressed as a character and had some killer-great deadpan lines, even though no one matches King Tut in my estimation for the male villains’ comedic value. But back to love, because that is what I’m trying to prove is probably more important than trivial details of cartoons and old lunchbox-selling serials.

No, I can’t stop talking about it. Okay, because I’m looking at his page on the imdb to make sure I had the dates and titles right and it ends up Roddy McDowall was also the Breadmaster on Edlund’s masterwork The Tick, which is of grave emotional significance to me, and, moreover, had cameos on Darkwing Duck, Quantum Leap, and mother-effing Gargoyles. Also, he was monumentally in to photography and experimental camerawork. So, holy hell, I was smart to have a crush on him as a kid and now I’m going to have to get back to Roddy McDowall another day; he’s obviously been far more of an important thread in my life than I ever could have possibly understood … y’all please excuse me because Roddy McDowall has just now blown my mind.

Finally, according to authorities on these matters, the Catwoman outfit regularly worn by Julie Newmar appears to have been “upcycled” and worn by Francine York (who played librarian Miss Limpet on Batman) for the Lost In Space episode “The Colonists.” Also, in looking for pictures of her, I stumbled across a page where a woman had collected a bunch of pictures of famous Virgo women and though I always claim to put almost zero stock in that stuff, I have to say that they/we all have the faces of birdlike closet freaks who are too shy to smile with our lips parted but rock straight-up crazy do-me eyes despite our distrust of other people — to say nothing of the number of patron saints in her gallery of too-close-to-home horror. Good thing I think that’s largely bunk, or the unnerving similarities might have me concerned that my chakras weren’t aligned with the downward dog position of my chi and I’d have to bury a peeled potato under a full moon or some shit.

Truly the end of this post. Moving on for my own sake.

Daily Batman: Bat tat, too

It happens: “Friends without benefits” edition

via.

Happens all the time.

Flashback Friday — Daily Batman: Everyone carries a shadow

This post originally appeared on Aug 27, 2010 at 11:26 a.m.

Art by Zbigniew Goik on the behance network.

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.

(Carl Gustav Jung. “Psychology and Religion.” The Terry Lectures, 1937.)

Daily Batman: Breaking up is hard to do

via.

Do not question why Batman has so many Linda Ronstadt records.

Daily Batman: Lois, this IS my Batman glass

Lois, this is my Batman glass.

Taken by me, like, a minute ago.

Special thanks to pandaeraser for making my Batman bloody beer possible. Muah!

(The title is a reference to a previous Daily Batman.)