Detective Comics #590 (1937)
So I've been reading a lot of Batman and Detective Comics lately, and I stumbled onto this absolute gem (/s). Content warning for racism, Islamophobia and Orientalism.
The issue opens with Batman doing what Batman does best: beating up petty criminals like back-alley drug dealers and jewelry store robbers, the usual. We all know jewelry store owners' property must be protected at all costs, of course.
While he's busy stopping a mugging, though, he completely misses two Muslim Marxist men walking into a Vietnam veterans' club in Gotham and opening fire. They kill seven people, wound thirteen more, then commit suicide with cyanide pills.
Yes, you read that correctly. Muslim Marxist terrorists shoot up a Vietnam veterans' club while shouting both "For the glory of the revolution!" and "Allah Akbar!"
Batman naturally wants to track down whoever supplied them with the weapons. The supplier turns out to be Abu Hassan, a diplomat with diplomatic immunity. And where is this diplomat from? The People's Republic of Syraq, a fictional Arab country whose name is literally a mash-up of Syria and Iraq.
Incidentally, this story came out just one month before The Diplomat's Son, where a man from a fictional South American country assaults a woman but can't be arrested because his father is an ambassador. Then, just four months later, A Death in the Family has the Joker become Iran's ambassador to the U.N., giving him diplomatic immunity from prosecution.
Anyway, Bruce decides he doesn't particularly care about annoying little technicalities like international law. Someone has to get justice for those poor American Vietnam veterans. And by "justice," he mostly means retribution.
So he follows Hassan to London, arriving just in time for Guy Fawkes Night. At the Syraq embassy, Hassan is busy calling his London agents, using quotations from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation and adaptation of Persian poetry attributed to Omar Khayyám) as passwords to apparently kick off some sinister master plan. Batman breaks into the embassy, beats up the guards, and confronts Hassan.
There's also, for absolutely no subtle reason whatsoever, a painting of a hammer and sickle hanging in Hassan's room. Just in case you didn't get that he is a Marxist / communist.
Hassan pulls a sword. They fight. Batman wins, obviously. Before losing, Hassan explains that his terrorism is simply a response to western imperialism and that terrorism is the only weapon available to oppressed peoples.
Then, because comic book villains apparently can't resist exposition, he tells Batman that suicide bombers are already on their way to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
Batman suddenly gets jumped by a guy who walked into the room without him noticing while he was busy talking to Hassan. During the ensuing struggle, Hassan gets accidentally kicked out of the window by the guy Batman is fighting, falls onto the embassy's barbed-wire fence, and dies impaled.
Remember when Batman just didn't really care if people died because of him? Yeah. Apparently the no-kill rule doesn't apply if you only kill someone indirectly.
The police arrive, see the dead ambassador, and naturally don't believe Batman when he warns them that Parliament is about to be attacked. After all, it's Guy Fawkes Night. So Batman hijacks a car and drives there himself. Hassan's men try to enter the Parliament, firing their weapons while the narration helpfully informs us that Allah has promised martyr's paradise to every soldier who dies for the jihad. Batman rams them with the stolen car, dives clear at the last second, and accidentally detonates their bomb early. Conveniently, nobody seems to die except the terrorists themselves.
An injured Bruce Wayne returns to his hotel suite and throws his costume into a street bonfire so London's authorities won't connect him to the incident. He reflects that Hassan and his followers deserved to die, but maybe Hassan wasn't entirely wrong about Western imperialism. Watching the batsuit burn, he wonders: "Could it be true? Could my country - my America - be so guilty? There has to be an answer, but I don't know it."
Looking back over the issue, what's striking is how it packages so many geopolitical anxieties of the late 1980s into a single story. Batman isn't fighting ordinary criminals, he's fighting Muslim Marxist terrorists who shot Vietnam veterans before attempting to blow up the British Houses of Parliament on Guy Fawkes Night. Wow.
I do not see these choices as accidental. For me, the killing of Vietnam veterans symbolizes a USAmerican fear that imperialized countries, having defeated their imperial victimizers, would retaliate against them. The bombing of Parliament represents the fear of Western democratic institutions themselves being attacked, destabilized, or corrupted by foreign enemies. Abu Hassan isn't really a character so much as a political collage: an Arab diplomat, a Marxist, a Muslim, an anti-imperialist, and a terrorist all rolled into one. Syraq itself isn't really a country but a repository for every fear Western audiences were encouraged to associate with the Middle East in the late 1980s. In that sense, the story reflects a broader Orientalist and Islamophobic tendency to collapse a wide range of political movements, cultures, and national identities into a single threatening image of the "foreign enemy."
In my opinion, this comic issue also reflects a broader political idea that often appears in Batman comics: that ordinary legal institutions are too limited to deal with "extraordinary" threats. Gotham's police and the FBI are unable to pursue Hassan because of diplomatic immunity, making the law itself appear less like a safeguard and more like an obstacle. Meanwhile, the London police are portrayed as ineffective and slow to catch up. The day has to be saved by Batman.
Although nominally a vigilante operating outside the law, Batman is consistently portrayed in the comics as an extension of state power rather than its opponent. He does not reject the authority of the state, rather, he steps in when its institutions are supposedly too restricted to act. His violations of international law in this issue (storming an embassy, assaulting diplomatic personnel, indirectly causing an ambassador's death, and carrying out a counterterrorism operation on British soil) are treated as morally justified because they are committed in defense of the existing order and against enemies the story presents as unquestionably evil. The implication is that threats like terrorism are so exceptional that they require someone willing to operate outside normal legal boundaries. This echoes real-world arguments for expanding state power in the name of counterterrorism: when faced with a sufficiently dangerous enemy, legal restrictions and procedures are treated as "luxuries" that can no longer be afforded.
The story also relies on a familiar storytelling convention. Hassan's critique of Western imperialism isn't dismissed outright, and Batman ultimately concedes that there may be some truth to it. The problem isn't the critique but the method. Hassan and his followers are depicted committing spectacular acts of violence, ensuring that regardless of the validity of their analysis, their politics become inseparable from their perceived brutality. It's a common way for pop culture stories to acknowledge structural injustice while reaffirming that radical or revolutionary attempts to fight back are ultimately excessive and morally unacceptable.
In a way, the story becomes a form of moral self-reassurance for both the author and the reader. The ending reads like an imperial core citizen trying to justify their bigoted beliefs while managing their guilt: yes, maybe the people we are dehumanizing are right about some things, but surely their actions are much worse than anything the imperial core has ever done or could ever do and their methods are too violent, too barbaric, too extreme for them to ever present a serious moral or political alternative. Because if that isn't true, if the people resisting imperial power are not somehow worse than the system they oppose, the conclusion becomes much harder to accept and live with.