Gotham’s 31 Most Wanted - Number 17
Welcome back to Gotham’s 31 Most Wanted! Each day of January, I’m counting down my Top 31 Favorite Batman Villains of all time! If you think werewolves are scary, check out today’s villain! Number 17 is…Man-Bat.
Dr. Kirk Langstrom is a character with one fundamental problem: practically all of his stories are the exact same thing. Originally conceived in the Bronze Age, Langstrom is a scientist hoping to cure deafness. To that end, he begins creating a serum using DNA from a bat, so that he can offer humans the ability to have echolocation – a weird solution, but a solution, nonetheless. Something goes wrong, however, and when Langstrom tries the serum on himself (in some retellings, he, himself, is going deaf), he transforms into a half-man, half-vampire-bat monster and begins to lose his sense of humanity. Time and time again, this basic setup has essentially been done. Basically every take on Man-Bat outside of comics tells the same tale with some variations, and nearly every time Kirk Langstrom pops up in comics, he seems to have one of two uses: either as a plot device, where his chemicals are being used by another villain, or somehow, for some reason, reverting to his Man-Bat state – sometimes by accident, sometimes by choice. A few times new things have been done with the character, but not very often. This fundamental issue is the main reason the character doesn’t make it higher on my list, but to be fair, the basic setup is so good, it’s hard to think of where else you COULD take. First of all, I love the fact that this character is so deliberately a parallel to Batman himself: not only is his name essentially the same thing in reverse, but while Batman is a man who dresses like a bat, but still has full control of his mental faculties, emotions, and physical capabilities…Kirk Langstrom is a man who physically changes into the same creature, and LOSES all that human element, and has to be brought back down to ground level again. Ironically, other media I think has, in some ways, handled this character better than in comics. True, many of them follow the same patterns, but they’ve also found ways to toy with Langstrom that the comics haven’t. In “The Batman,” the character was actually made into a far less sympathetic antagonist, as his cure for deafness was revealed to be a sham, and while he had very few appearances, this did leave room for him to appear more often if desired, and with more variety. Since there was no struggle for humanity really needed, you could treat him more as a horror-film-type monster/villain and play with him that way. Admittedly, some would argue that a more complex and tragic character is more compelling, and…YES, I AGREE. But the point still stands: it’s a method of getting around that. On the opposite side of the fence, there was the version in the short-lived show “Beware the Batman.” In that series, Man-Bat starts out as a villain, running through the motions, but eventually becomes an ally and more of an anti-hero, which has been handled in the comics from time to time, too. Outside of comics, this was likely my favorite take on the character. While he may be an antagonist who suffers from “same story, different words”-itis, Man-Bat is still a great character on a conceptual level, and it’s no wonder he keeps popping up again and again as a result. The chances are high that Gotham will never see the end of Kirk Langstrom and his curious experiments…for better or worse. We’re nearly halfway done! The countdown continues tomorrow, where I’ll be covering my 16th Favorite Batman Villain. HINT: He Truly Has a Strange Mind.
