Was Silver Age Superman a manipulative dick as much of a dick as ppl say he was or was it just the covers exaggerating things?
So my understanding of what was actually going on there was that someone would come up with a provocative insane cover of Superman behaving like a maniac (torturing his supporting cast, conquering the world, having a secret family he abandoned, etc.) or else being subject to some equally bizarre situation, and then it would be left to the interior writers and artists to cobble together some sequence of events by which the events depicted on the cover could come to pass/ secretly have been part of a clever plan the entire time. Sometimes they found semi plausible ways he could have done these things under duress but rather predictably there wasn’t always a way to do this gracefully so he frequently does come off as batshit insane. Other times he’s possessed by a djinn or something
Detective Comics #275. Zebra Batman. I don't even know what more needs to be said. But I'm going to say it anyway and you can't stop me. Welcome to the Gutters.
Zebra Batman. This is a story about Batman, a man who is a bat, who is now a zebra. And we're terrified of him. Of him being a zebra. Nature's greatest monster. Bat Zebraman. Oh lawd, he zebrin'.
In seriousness, this goofy-ass numbledegook is hilarious on it's face. At the time, it was no doubt meant to be bizarre and out of character for Batman, and as he's become darker and self-serious over the years, it's become even more bizarre and out of character. But when you look at the actual story of the issue, it is a very telling look at the storytelling priorities of the comics industry at the time.
As we've talked about before, the cover is the selling point of a comic, it has to be flashy and attention-grabbing as well as indicative of the contents of the issue (optionally). DC had a practice of commissioning the cover art first and then telling writers to make a story based off of it. However, that was Mort Weisinger's signature move, and he rarely worked on the Batman comics, and he wasn't responsible for this, so I can't say for certain if that's what's going on.
The story, which runs for 12 pages, is about a criminal named Zebra-Man who has the ability to control magnetic force. You know, like a zebra. His costume is actually meant to represent the magnetic fields generated by an electromagnet, which isn't bad for a costume design, and it does some cool spooky stuff around the face. But overall it does a 0% job of actually explaining what this guy's powers actually are. This is by design.
The lure of the cover isn't "Batman has magnet powers," it's "something weird happened to Batman." It's designed to tell you as little about the story as possible and make you want to find out what's going on. Batman's job on the cover is to look and act weird, without revealing how or why this has happened, and so they created this persona of Zebra-Man because it is a blank slate. It explains nothing, and it makes the reader want to read it.
Batman doesn't get hit with the zebra rays until 2/3 of the way through the book, and then he does become a menace - in his own imagination. To use the universal mad libs storytelling formula, Star Wars, this is like if Luke Skywalker didn't even learn about the force until the 90 minute mark and then had a fun dream sequence about how cool it would be to be a Jedi.
This story is designed to give the illusion of tension and a threat. Batman fighting a magnetic villain and getting weird magnetic powers that ruin his life could be an interesting story. But they don't have the room to explore that. It's only 12 pages long. They need several pages to explain the concept behind the bizarre dilemma that Batman is getting himself into, but they only need those pages because they made it so bizarre in order to create the situation on the cover.
If this comic was about, say, Doctor Polaris, a Green Lantern villain from 1963, you could shave off a lot of pages. Everything about him says that this guy is a magnet man, from his name to his insignia, to the thingies on his head that look like the prongs of a horseshoe magnet. If he showed up and fought Batman, everyone would know that he was gonna magnet Batman's face to death. It would be understandable that he could hit Batman with a big science ray that could make him magnetically charged.
Then you could have room to actually tell a story about Batman being some kind of Magnetic Menace, even in just 12 pages. But, as before, Batman being a magnet man isn't as distinctive an image as Batman being a weird zebra guy with powers that are an incredible leap in logic from what they represent. And that's the thing here, superhero comics are a visual medium and they are incredibly visually representative. This is why you have iconic characters who are foils to one another that have unique and contrasting designs.
Let's look at this picture of Superman and Batman and you can immediately tell they're very different people. The colors of their costumes. Their poses. Their facial expressions. Everything says that Batman is a closed off, serious person, and Superman is an open, friendly, person. But also, the designs of their costumes and their practicalities are very similar. showing that they have a lot in common. This is superhero design 101, but it's not just simple, it's foundational. The entire industry is based on these design principles, and these design principles are also storytelling principles.
So, let's go back to this cover. What does it tell you? What information does it convey? Surprisingly, it does tell you something. You look at the streetlight getting ripped out of the ground and the car being blown back, it does say that Batman is exerting some kind of force from his body. It doesn't say that it's magnetic, of course, just that something is happening. But otherwise, it tells you nothing. Batman being a Zebra-man doesn't illustrate what effect he's having. Batman becoming a Zebra-man doesn't occur until the third act of the story. Batman being a menace is just a dream sequence about how much it would suck to be a Zebra-man. This cover, this ridiculous, superdickery, narratively bankrupt buffoonery is everything that is wrong with DC comics in the silver age.
Again, I am not trying to be negative. Any negativity is 100% organically grown, fair trade, free-range, crumudgeonity. But I do think it is important that we look at stuff like this and see how it affects the genre of superhero comics both as a literary constraint and as a historical indicator of trends. Covers in the DC style, in my opinion, prove a hindrance to the creation of good comic stories, as they needlessly handcuff the creators to an existing marketing framework. It's the same thing as cartoons in the 1980s needing to write plots around whichever action figure is releasing that month. Creators need to be able to tell stories that interest them, and to do that they need freedom.
Also, while these kinds of covers didn't ever hurt the sales of Batman or Superman, in 1961, Marvel Comics would launch their new superhero universe. They had a narrative and design philosophy that was far more freeing to the creator as well as straightforward in their storytelling. If you picked up a Marvel comic, you had a good idea of what you were getting right from the cover. If you picked up a DC comic, you could find out that the story you saw was all a joke played on the reader, or a character's full-length dream sequence, or a so-called "imaginary story" that would be completely detached from the reality of the series at large. This, among other factors, would lead to Marvel absolutely eating DC's lunch.
Okay but I cannot stop thinking about the possibility of like. The main gang somehow stumbling upon the bizarre comic covers from the silver age, either as out of context photos or just Mxy giving them access to the actual comic covers
BONUS: Mxy handing the group a copy of “Joker’s Comedy of Errors” and letting them die of laughter
I love when superheroes steal clothes off of clotheslines. Imagine watching the news and seeing CCTV footage of Superman in your favorite hoodie a week after you "misplaced it."
