grave digger

I just want to give fatson lots of kisses and burgers ;-; 💕💕💕💕💕💕

AWWWW

Finally (considering I've owned the book it's reprinted in for nine years) read Andy Medhurst's 1991 essay, "Batman, Deviance and Camp," reprinted in The Superhero Reader. Overall, I think it's a really interesting read, especially the way it breaks down the 1966 TV show in relation to camp as a concept, camp media at the time, Seduction Of The Innocent, and the comics of the 1960s.

That said, I (unsurprisingly) found myself disappointed by his comments on Jason Todd.

For those who haven't read the essay, the basis is a gay reading of Batman and Robin and how different media pushes back against those readings (ex. the introduction of Betty and Kathy Kane; the 1989 Batman film, etc) or leans in (ex. the 1960s TV show). It is not interested in saying "Batman and Robin are canonically banging behind the scenes" but it is strongly in favor of that potential reading and the subtext therein. Specifically, it goes against the idea that in order to refute the homophobic comments of Batman in Seduction Of The Innocent, one must overcorrect to emphasize how straight they are because them being read as queer shouldn't be a negative.

So onto what he says about Jason:

"It's intriguing to speculate how much latent (or blatant) homophobia lay behind that vote. Did the fans decide to kill off Jason Todd so as to redeem Batman for unproblematic heterosexuality? Impossible to say. There are other factors to take into account, such as Jason's apparent failure to live up to the expectations of what a Robin should be like. The sequence of issues in which Jason/Robin died, A Death In The Family, is worth looking at in some detail, however, in order to see whether the camp connotations of Bruce and Dick had been fully purged. The depressing answer is they had. [...] Whether one chooses to read Robin as Batman's ward (official answer), son (approved fantasy) or lover (forbidden fantasy), the sense of loss at his death is bound to be devastating. Batman finds Robin's body and, in the time-honored tradition of Hollywood cinema, is at least able to give him a loving embrace. Good guys hug their dead buddies; only queers smooch when still alive." (The Superhero Reader 248)

Let's look at what I've bolded there. By Medhurst's own admission, he's decently well-read but not a completionist of Batman comics and media. I think it's reasonable to assume based on his comments on Jason (as well as one or two other comments in the essay) he's not read through the full Batman 80s run or Jason's run there specifically (1983-1988). Which is a missed opportunity.

If he had, I think there's a lot that could have been added. Jason is explicitly Bruce's son in the comics. There is the full custody battle ending with his adoption in Doug Moench's run as well as comments about "a son not always [being] born of the father" from earlier than the adoption (Detective Comics 533). This is explicitly different from Dick Grayson, ward, son, or lover. It would have been really interesting to see if Medhurst would have considered that change for the new Robin -- who, despite being far from a Dick Grayson clone, is designed to be recognizably similar and bringing back the role of Robin to Batman's side -- to be an example of re-heterosexualization for Batman's character. If the dynamic between Batman and Robin becomes explicitly, textually father-son, it removes the homoerotic subtext.

And there is a lot of added heterosexuality in the 80s comics. Moench's run gives Bruce a lot of love interests, all women such as Vicki Vale, Nocturna, Catwoman, and Julia Pennyworth. Considering Medhurst's comment about Vicki Vale's role as love interest in the 1989 film, I don't think he'd encountered that in the comics. But that's present.

And if you read the comments from comics creators at the time, they all are so mad about the camp of the 1960s show and want to move further and further away from it. I can think of some comments from The New Teen Titans's George Pérez off the top of my head as well as Stephen King's introduction to Batman 400, which called it "unpleasantly campy" (Introduction to Batman 400). King especially seemed to yearn for a shadowy camp-free Batman of yore that never truly existed (Introduction to Batman 400).

Was the change to make Batman and Robin father-son implicitly a way to shift from the unclear, undefinable, perhaps even queer relationship it had been before? Was supporting that shift with an added focus on love interests an intentional ploy?

Who's to say?

I also find it so interesting the way Medhurst considers the 1980s comics to have been stripped completely of their campyness because he was writing in the early 90s. Just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait. In comparison to the modern comic, the 80s still have their zip of the absurd and bizarre. That makes the essay feel like a portent of things to come, darkening the stories, making Batman more macho and less emotional, simplifying Dick and his relationship eventually to be simple, unambiguous father and son. Re-heterosexualization.

Obligatory end note to say, I love the 1980s comics, Jason is my favorite Robin -- hell, Moench is my favorite Batman writer! -- and I personally do not read Dick and Bruce as having a romantic or erotic relationship. But I think that readings exploring the camp of the comics and the show, the reason Batman was cited in Seduction Of The Innocent -- to use queer historian Rictor Norton's approach: where there's smoke, there's fire! -- the overcorrecting away from the concept of the sheer potential of being read as queer, and the re-heterosexualization as he refers to it, is all important. These readings and unpacking the shifting ways the characters are written and why and how that ties into queerness and fannish interpretation is important. And the timing of the essay is illuminating in the context of modern comics.