#comics lit

Silver Age DC comics had a tradition of printing what they called “Imaginary Stories.” These would be issues that took place outside of the normal continuity of events and could diverge wildly from the status quo present throughout the rest of the book. Often these would be used to tell stories where Superman finally gave up his secret identity and married one of his various gal-pals, or stories set in the future starring the characters’ children. There was a recurring feature where Alfred would write Batman fanfic about Bruce Wayne getting married to Kathy Kane and having a kid who became the Robin to Dick Grayson’s Batman. Sit with that for a moment.

Bruce Wayne regularly came home to find his trusted manservant, confidante, and surrogate father writing RPF about him and a woman who was later retconned into being his aunt. This fanfiction, if it ever saw the light of day, would reveal his secret identity to the world and compromise his whole crimefighting operation. Everyone he knew and loved would be violently murdered by clowns or penguins and the ensuing gang war would be apocalyptically destructive and absolutely ridiculous. Batman is completely fine with this. The Silver Age was a wild time.

I generally don’t talk about these Imaginary Stories because I’m interested in continuity and character development, and these stories rank slightly below “it was all just a dream” in those areas. But they do present some unique qualities that are worth celebrating. If you assume that the characters are the same and it’s only their situation that has changed, an imaginary story can reveal what a character might do in a scenario that is otherwise alien to them. More importantly, they can actually tell a complete story with an ending, something that’s anathema to the practice of cranking these things out on a monthly basis and never have Lois figure out how Clark Kent’s glasses work.

So we’re going to look at a story that’s often considered one of the best Imaginary Stories in the Imaginary Canon. The Death of Superman (Not that one). This story begins with Lex Luthor discovering a strange, glowing rock in the prison rock pile. He starts a fight in order to get put on hard labor, in order to examine the rock, which he determines to be a meteor. Surprisingly, this magic space rock is not a new flavor of Kryptonite, but a substance called “Element Z.” Begging the prison warden for use of the laboratory facilities for 24 hours, Lex uses the Element Z to… cure cancer? No, no, this can’t be right. Where’s the evil scheme? It’s not a Superman comic unless Lex Luthor has an evil scheme!

Surprisingly, Lex is on the level, as his cancer cure works instantly and permanently. Superman, wanting to believe in the goodness of his former friend, goes to work facilitating everything Lex needs to completely eradicate cancer, gathering enough space rocks to fill a school bus and even speaking on his nemesis’ behalf to the parole board. Lex in turn invites Superman back to his evil lair to smash up all his crime statues, and the two share a good laugh about all the absurd ways that Lex tried to destroy him. It’s rather sweet to see them talk like this, and you can tell that there is still a friendship buried underneath decades of giant robot fights and hair angst.

Luthor may be a hero now, but his underworld contacts think he’s betrayed them and try to have him rubbed out. However, Lex Luthor has taken Jimmy Olsen’s place as Superman’s Best Friend, symbolized by Superman giving him a fancy new signal watch. Superman gets so overwhelmed by having to save Luthor’s life every single day that he builds him an impenetrable space laboratory to do his work unmolested. If he did need help, all Lex would have to do is send a distress flare and Superman would be there instantaneously.

All is well until Luthor calls for aid, and Superman comes rushing to his rescue. Luthor reassures him that everything is fine… but not for you! Luthor turns on the Kryptonite rays and straps Superman to a lab table to be slowly irradiated to death. The whole thing, curing cancer, becoming a hero to mankind, alienating all of his criminal contacts, all of that were just steps in his plan to finally murder Superman. He even kidnapped all of Superman’s supporting cast just so they could watch him die. Lex Luthor got the kind of life that any normal man would dream of and all of it was just a diversion to lower Superman’s guard. Nobody on Julius Schwartz’s green earth has ever hated like Lex Luthor hates Superman.

If this was an ordinary story, this is where we would reveal that Superman secretly always knew that Luthor’s plan was a trap, and he had some escape plan ready to pull out of his bright red trunks. Luthor even comments on this, that he checks to make sure Superman isn’t just playing dead or secretly replaced by a robot or is just three fifth-dimensional imps in a trenchcoat. They don’t even call Supergirl for help, which would actually be a non-bullshit escape from this deathtrap.

But no, Superman is not only merely dead, he is really, most sincerely, dead. They have a funeral and everything with him lying in state in a glass coffin like he’s Vladimir Lenin. This is one of the few times that other superheroes even appear in a Superman comic, but here it really sells how impactful this event must be for the entire world. Hell, it’s so impactful that we actually get to see people who aren’t white!

Lex Luthor and his criminal companions are celebrating their victory, talking about selling commemorative superman death statues, when Superman himself bursts through the wall and starts wrecking shit from beyond the grave. This lasts just long enough for Luthor to absolutely shit himself, and then “Superman” tears off his costume to reveal Supergirl in disguise. She formally reveals herself to the general public, and carts Luthor off to the shrunken city of Kandor to be tried for murder by a Kryptonian court. Luthor, however, has a cunning plan: he pleads guilty to all charges.

The judge immediately sentences him to imprisonment in the Phantom Zone, which is when Lex springs the second part of his plan. If they will commute his sentence, he offers to use his massive science brain to invent an embiggening ray that will permanently embiggen Kandor. And you want to be big, don’t you, tiny little bottle city? You wanna be the big, big men, don’t you, little men? The judge’s immediate response is “fuck that and fuck you.” The Judge completely rejects Luthor’s deal, and outright says that he is the greatest villain since Adolf Eichmann. This comic came out in 1961, as Eichmann was being tried for Nazi war crimes in Israel, making this a shockingly dark reference to drop into a Superman comic.

The story ends with Supergirl taking up Superman’s mantle as the protector of the Earth, signalling the end of one story but the dawn of another. Although this story is just imaginary, a fiction within a fiction, it’s become a keystone in the character of Lex Luthor, showing just how far he will go and how much he will sacrifice for the sake of finally seeing the light fade from Superman’s eyes. We also get to see how much Superman means to the Earth, with the story slowing down for several pages to show expressions of grief from all over the world. It’s a very somber moment that you don’t often get in comics of this era.

On the other hand, we don’t ever get any acknowledgment of Superman’s identity as Clark Kent. If anyone ever found out after his death that Superman and Clark Kent were the same, we don’t see it. I would have loved to see Lois having to accept that the milquetoast smallville coward she so often looked down on was the same person she so passionately admired. Maybe as soon as they found out he was secretly Clark Kent, everyone who ever met him was like “yeah, that explains everything.”

"By now, the COVID-19 pandemic should have shown us that we’re supposed to rise to the occasion by meeting needs, not fall in line behind fascist incursions. The same forces that encouraged us to sacrifice the disabled, poor, and unhoused to a distorted idea of “natural selection” now instruct us to ignore the genocide of Palestinians. The same forces that pushed conspiratorial misinformation about public health and vaccination want us to give up on practicing collectivity. It’s connected because if we cannot be relentless in our determination to interrupt what’s unfolding before us, then we risk it becoming a disturbing norm. It cannot be overstated that this situation and the fight in front of us are unprecedented." -William C. Anderson / Building Resistance ...

Below, a playlist by Anderson, that I've been enjoying all day:

The next link is one of the single most comprehensive & useful COVID-organzing resources I've found. It's especially relevant for facilitating conversation that builds community without compromising safety and COVID-consciousness.

And now, here's a lovely fire cider recipe and some herbacious knowledge from my friends @ Plants & Poetry

and here's one of my favorite poems of June Jordan's, performed by herself. It feels freshly applicable as we live thru this tyrannical history on repeat:

Another one from the offshoot archive, this 2021 interview with Sylvia Wynter still resonates:

"The cure is that we must enact a transformation of the whole entire society, or else something else will come up. We run into difficulties because of this president who doesn’t believe in science of course, but we must also remember that what is required is a new science. The science we do have has led us to this point, you see!" - Sylvia Wynter

And that transformation, transcendence, healing all of it... it begins with acceptance and adaptation, within me. We are our own first community.

I call up all these things, about healing and transcendence because what else is resilience and resistance building if not adapting internally and externally in ways that promote and create safe and symbiotic living.

This next conversation is more personal. Tony & I joined Keith Hayden on his show The Digital Novelist. I also low key love being referred to as a "power couple" not gonna lie :)

It's one of the favorite (recorded) conversations I've had this year about all the connections in education, comic books, art, censorship, living these times, and the healing power of creative writing. We also discuss @fionastaples and her incredible art:

If you're keen, the anthology we're discussing / it is for sale here. If you want to read it without buying, we'd deeply appreciate putting in a request with your local library.

Word of mouth is how independent artists like us build community and make our living.

Here's one more mood music playlist.

I made this one, it's my current soundtrack for calibrating and centering:

That's all I've got for now.

Stay Safe Out There

Superman has had a long and storied history with death. We all remember that time in the 90s, when he died for realsies and then four other dudes showed up claiming to be him. Ever since, the Death of Superman has been a canon event in Superman media. At least six different TV shows and movies have had Superman bite the big one in a glorious final battle against some rampaging monster, only to return from the grave and feed our nation’s endless hunger for a version of Jesus Christ that we can put on lunchboxes.

While most of these stories are about Superman’s death in battle, very few are about how Superman deals with the knowledge of his own mortality. Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman is perhaps the most well-regarded of these works, but that is quite squarely a postmodern look back at the Silver Age, looking back through decades of hindsight and reinvention. To truly appreciate that — which we won’t be looking at for approximately a million years and a day — we have to see how the Silver Age itself handled that weighty topic.

Superman helps a space capsule from colliding with a Kryptonite meteor. When it lands on earth, Jimmy Olsen attempts to open it and discover what’s inside, only for Superman to reveal that this capsule contains a sample of the deadly Kryptonian pathogen “Virus X,” for which there was no known cure. Superman quickly buries it deep in the earth, but he feels his power draining and knows that it’s too late for him. The doctor is unable to even diagnose the virus, let alone treat it, but based on his degrading condition, he gives Superman 30 days to live.

The first thing I noted was that the inciting incident doesn’t come from Superman fighting any of his usual foes, but in attempting to prevent an accident. Superman in this era is primarily somebody who saves lives and works for the greater good of humanity, rather than somebody who fights criminals and punches giant monsters. Even as he’s dying, Superman doesn’t even think about punching Lex Luthor or putting baddies into the Phantom Zone, because he knows that the greatest good he can do is to help people to live better lives.

The next thing I noted is that Superman is not taking this news well. Unable to even face his friends, he flies away from civilization and broods atop a storm-rocked mountaintop. He’s so distraught by the news that he’s turning into Batman. However, he’s not thinking of his own end, but of what this will mean for his plans for the future, how his death will leave the earth unprotected, and how he can’t even say goodbye to his cousin, Supergirl, without exposing her to the same deadly virus that has doomed him.

With time running out, Superman begins work on a massive irrigation project that will ensure humanity has enough food and arable land to survive into the coming generations. A sudden attack of Virus X hits him, and he is forced to use his robots to construct a lead-glass isolation chamber so that he can speak to Supergirl and impart his last wishes onto her. While Superman may have tried to do everything himself, Supergirl knows that all of Superman’s friends and loved ones would drop everything to help, and so she assembles Krypto, the robots, the Atlanteans, the Kandorians, and the Legion of Super-Heroes to help make his last wish a reality.

With all his work underway, Jimmy and Lois, who had been standing vigil in Superman’s time of weakness, return to Metropolis to recuperate. Superman, feeling what could be his last surge of strength, goes on a final pilgrimage to his hometown of Smallville, reminiscing on the simple life he shared with Ma and Pa Kent, his relationships with the women he’s loved and who loved him, and his friendship with Batman, to whom he can’t even bring himself to divulge his fate. His last act is to carve a message to humanity onto the moon, revealing his secret identity to the world.

However, Supergirl and Brainiac 5 have been working behind the scenes to cure Superman, despite the hopelessness of their task. Despite having a 12th-level intellect, whatever the fuck that means, and the resources of the 30th century, Brainy is unable to find anything on Earth that could cure Superman. Supergirl realizes that if there’s nothing on Earth, then there might be a cure on Krypton. She travels back through time to before Krypton’s destruction, because back in the Silver Age you could just do shit like that, and she discovers that not only was there a cure, but they had already used it on the Virus X. The sample in the case was harmless!

Superman then asks the very pointed question “If there was no Virus, what am I dying of?” That’s when a ghost appears. Mon-El, Superboy’s ghost boyfriend, telepathically contacts Saturn Girl from the Phantom Zone. He was the only one who noticed that there had been a shard of Kryptonite lodged in Jimmy’s camera ever since the start of the issue, and that little green rock was what was slowly killing Superman the whole time. He had been trying to tell people about it for a whole month but everyone was so preoccupied with Superman’s impending death that they couldn’t hear him.

Last time, we talked about one of the silliest issues in the entire print run of Batman comics. Now we’re doing the same thing, but (affectionate)! The Polka-Dot Man, known in this issue as “Mr. Polka-Dot” is one of those supervillains that you wonder how anybody could ever have taken seriously, but despite being outlandishly laughable for a hero as grim and self-serious as Batman, he’s nevertheless become a symbol of everything that was fun about the Silver Age of comics. The character has appeared less than 20 times in actual DC canon, but he’s made nigh-endless appearances in spin-offs, cartoons, and video games. He made a live-action appearance in James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, and it was wildly regarded as a sign that Gunn understood what made the DC Universe unique as a creative endeavor.

Batman has a whole minor staple of villains that are impossible to be taken seriously. Calendar Man. Killer Moth. Kite Man. King Tut. Egghead. Condiment King. So many others and only one of them was deliberately created as a joke. More serious Batman stories will shy away from these characters, or reinvent them as far more legitimate foes, and occasionally they will lean in to their silly concepts to highlight the inherent absurdity of the DC Universe. I find that Polka-Dot Man is an interesting case story in how and why these silly creations work, and why they stick in the mind with a fond nostalgia instead of cringing embarrassment.

I think the first place to look is the character’s design. A man who bases his whole supervillain career on textile patterns is going to require those elements to be prominent in his design. The man isn’t called Tasteful Plaid man, or Captain Seersucker. So we have the requisite Polkaed Dots, plus the comic book shorthand of a mask and a pair of trunks. The underwear-on-the-outside look is just something that we all have to agree is a part of the whole visual language. It’s no less silly than a cape, and we wouldn’t take away Batman’s cape. Of note is that the dots on his costume are not in any kind of pattern, but cover his body in random colors and sizes like he went sprinting through a paintball tournament.

I think his face is really special. The Dick Sprang-style art tends towards blocky faces with wide mouths and big rows of pearly white teeth, and when they smile it makes them look almost deranged. This combined with his mask, which has goggles designed to look like two black polka-dots, but comes off looking more like the empty eyes of a skull. Looking into those inky voids, I begin to feel that he’s not just deranged, he is absolutely unhinged. Reading this, I’m more scared of him than I am of the Joker, which is still not a high bar to clear in this era.

Polka-Dot Man’s powers are just as unhinged as his appearance. Each of his polka-dots is a different gadget, and when he pulls them off his suit they can transform into anything that could be reasonably represented as a circle. He can make a buzzsaw, he can make a flying saucer, he can make a bubble, he can make the goddamn sun. This (opens thesaurus) preposterous man can replicate the powers of a green lantern and he uses it to fuel his obsession with objectively the worst fashion choice you can make.

The comic makes a smart move of having Polka-Dot Man’s goons ask how his dots work, but he never gives them a straight answer. The characters are there to guide the audience, and if they express confusion, then the reader knows that they should also be confused. If they express confusion that goes unanswered, the reader’s confusion only grows in response. This makes the Polka-Dot man feel even more like an enigma. This is emphasized because we never get a name or any kind of motivation for this costumed weirdo. He’s just a guy who loves crime, loves polka-dots, and loves doing crime with polka-dots, and everything else is just madness.

The most surprising thing about this comic is that Polka-Dot Man is shockingly competent. He does an unstoppable series of crimes at Gotham City’s many, many, many dot-related businesses, and Batman and Robin are constantly on the back foot. The Dynamic Duo is forced to split up and stake out two different places, which leads Robin to try to take out the whole gang on his own. He gets captured, and Polka-Dot Man uses him to lure Batman into some kind of polka-dot themed death trap or some shit. He forces Robin to write a letter, and mails it to him in an envelope which he deliberately smeared with a tiny smudge of mud that he knows Batman will find and identify, because of him being the World’s Greatest Detective and all.

In order to clue Batman in about the death trap, Robin has to create an even more subtle hint to tweak Batman’s detective senses. Because this whole dang thing is about dots, Robin uses some dots of his own. He pokes tiny holes in the paper to create a hidden message in braille. Batman and Robin of course know braille by heart, why wouldn’t they? This is a surprising degree of competency all around, I’m used to the solutions to these riddles being nonsense. It probably would have been more effective if we had got a better look at it, but there is enough to see that something is happening.

Through all this, Polka-Dot Man has been talking about his master plan that will finally get him respect in the underworld. Normally I wouldn’t spoil that because it’s not worth it, but you have to see this shit. His whole plan was that if he did enough dot crimes in just the right pattern, you could draw lines and connect them to make a stick figure. Not even like a good stick figure. This is what it’s all been about, folks. Polka-Dot Man is shockingly brilliant at pulling off an extraordinarily dumb plan.

The Legion of Super-Heroes has been a recurring feature in Superboy stories since 1958, but they quickly began to eclipse the Boy of Steel in popularity. There were a lot of reasons, but I think that it’s just that a bunch of people each with one superpower is fundamentally more interesting to read than one guy with all the superpowers. Each one has one thing they can do that nobody else can, and they can develop complicated interpersonal relationships, meaning that they have to team up to solve problems bigger than any one of them, and it can create fun and sexy dynamics amongst themselves. Superboy might be a far more iconic character, but a good team lineup makes the storytelling machine go brrr.

Superboy #98 introduces Ultra Boy, a long-standing member of the Legion of Super-Heroes, but it plays sneaky by not telling you that. Two dudes in fancy costumes show up in Smallville and, after communicating with a talking spotlight, they embark on a mission to uncover Superboy’s secret identity. Ultra Boy’s only displayed power in this issue is “Penetra-Vision,” which works just like Superboy’s X-Ray vision, except that it can see through lead. Okay dude, if that’s what you want to base your whole superhero persona on. Go off, space king.

Ultra Boy enrolls in Smallville High under an assumed name and immediately asks the first person he sees if they know Superboy’s secret identity. As it happens, the person he asks just happens to be Pete Ross, who does know Superboy’s secret, but doesn’t even let Superboy know. Having Ultra Boy just straight up ask him about his deepest, darkest secret throws him off his game and makes him nervous, and Ultra Boy is able to determine that he’s lying by X-Ray penetrating his heart. He starts investigating Pete Ross to try and uncover his secret.

As with so many of these Superboy stories, the subtext is as gay as a deceased Senator from South Carolina, and is slightly worse at hiding it. Superboy never lets Lana or Lois or any of the girls he is supposedly attracted to find out about his secret. About this aspect of his identity that he keeps hidden. Meanwhile, if there’s another boy, like Pete, he’s allowed to find out about this secret part of Superboy’s life, but he has to keep his knowledge secret, because it would be bad for his friend if this secret were revealed. The only people that Superboy can fully trust with his secret are other people who have the same secret, whether that’s aliens like Mon-El or Ultra Boy, or humans like Batman. I can’t prove that this was in any way intentional, but so many Silver Age Superboy stories use superpowers and secret identities as a metaphor for being a gay man in the compulsorily heterosexual society that was America in the 1960s.

Anyway, most of the issue is about a game of Super-Powered Among Us, as Superboy and Ultra Boy are each trying to uncover each other’s superhero identity without revealing their own. The only real hint Superboy has is that Ultra Boy’s Penetra-Vision is able to melt lead, which Superman’s X-Ray vision can’t. This… feels fake. I don’t have the spoons to find an example of Superman using his X-Ray vision to melt bullets before, but I am almost certain that it’s happened somewhere in one of the billion and three Silver Age stories. In this period, his X-Ray vision was also his heat vision, and he couldn’t see through lead, that’s an established part of his powers, but this comic seems to be conflating the inability see through lead with the inability to melt lead. Also, like, just by pure math, lead melts at 621.43°F (327.46°C), steel melts at temperatures starting at 2,500°F (1,370°C). Either somebody fucked up, or this comic proved that Superman can’t melt steel beams.

The shenanigans continue until we get to the scene captured on the cover of the issue, with Superman and Ultra Boy surreptitiously using their assorted super-eyeballs to look through each other’s clothes. I don’t even need to say anything, except “gay people can’t ever just ask each other out.” The homoerotic subtext is so blatant and yet so obfuscated that it’s approaching the level of any given episode of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Superboy thinks that Ultra Boy is going to expose him, but instead he exposes himself, blowing his own cover as a member of the Legion. Pete Ross is trapped inside of a lead bank vault that will explode if tampered with, and the only way to open it is to have some kind of magical vision power to see through lead. It seems improbable, but this kind of thing happens three times a day in Smallville. Once the crisis is over, Ultra Boy exposits about his origin, that his real name is Jo Nah, and he was eaten by a space monster that somehow gave him super voyeur powers. Superboy relates this to the biblical story of Jonah, perhaps indicating that Ultra Boy’s powers were given to him by God, or that the Bible they use in Smallville is very unorthodox.

When I started this project, I didn't want to become the Angry Video Game Nerd. I'm always saying how I didn't want to become the Angry Video Game Nerd. Other people are always saying how I'm always saying that I don't want to be the Angry Video Game Nerd. But that is not out of any disrespect for the AVGN. James Rolfe, as a filmmaker, is absolutely legit, and I have nothing but respect for his work. As a critic, I want to do different things, but philosophically, I find his wisdom undeniable. Sometimes, when you take yourself back to the past, you find the shitty comics that suck ass, and all you can do is button up your white dress shirt, straighten your wire-frame glasses, stare right down the barrel of your Panasonic AG-DVX100 Camcorder and ask "What were they thinking?"

The story is a brisk ten pages, and it wastes none of them, although I can't say that it makes good use of any of them either. Batman breaks into the hideout of some mobsters and their mad scientist, Garth. Garth zaps Batman with the Baby-Rayby, and Batman just stays in it for long enough for him to turn fully back into a child. Who is Garth? Why does he have a baby gun? How does it work? What made him turn to evil? These questions and more will go completely unanswered by the narrative, bravely telling a story in which we learn absolutely nothing about any of the characters involved.

I'm not normally one to pick on a fictional child, but Batman is a fictional adult in the body of a fictional toddler, so my consistence is fictionally clear. Bat-Baby looks grotesque. Not once in any of these comic panels does he look anything like a real human child. Mostly that's just due to the uncanny valley, but these first panels where he's wearing the floppy batsuit and we can see his massive chubby baby cheeks will never fail to induce a visceral reaction in me. He looks like somebody made a racist caricature of a cabbage patch doll.

This premise raises a lot of interesting questions about Batman as a person. Famously, Batman lost his parents at a young age, and has been in a state of arrested development ever since, so how does he react to suddenly being a child again? What negative effects does having a child's body have on Batman's ability to fight crime? The answers to these questions is "Shut up and stop asking questions." Batman has all of his maturity and intelligence as an adult, and is only moderately bothered by having to sit on phone books to reach the table. Furthermore, despite having the body of a toddler, Batman is every bit as strong as an adult man, but he is all too willing to put on short pants and little dress shoes to fight crime.

The art has absolutely not improved in these next few pages. Outside of his costume, Batman looks like he has a young man's head on a child's body, and his arms and legs are disturbingly muscular. When he's in his Bitty Baby Batsuit, Batman's still got those gross sausage limbs but he's also got those weird puffy cheeks and, for some reason, full, pouty lips. He looks like he's been Weinerized. Why does he... why is that a thing? Why is any of this happening? Why do I do this to myself? I just cannot fathom the artist looking at this at any stage of the production and deciding that it looked like it was good enough to print.

Anyway, gotta move on. Batman next has to deal with the arrival of Katy Kane, who in this issue has decided that she's in love with Bruce Wayne. Bruce could do the sensible thing and have Alfred say that he's out sick with Rubella or some other pre-vaccination disease, but instead they do this convoluted scheme where they invite Katy into Wayne Manor, and then let her see the shadow of Bruce kissing some other woman, trusting that she, like the emotionally fragile lady woman-girl that she is, will turn around and run away, crying big feminine tears. Later, Bruce will explain that he wasn't seeing another woman, he was just making out licky-style with his cousin, a normal thing everyone does.

This scene is absurd on its own, but it's really just the nadir of a phenomenon endemic to Silver Age comics. The protagonist seems to be able to predict the actions of other characters as if they had nigh-omniscient prescience. Here we see Batman knowing that Kathy Kane would turn and walk away instead of angrily confronting Bruce and his lover, or indeed paying attention enough to notice that these shadows aren't moving or even making any noise because they're just a cardboard cut-out. Batman may be the world's greatest detective, but this story is treating him like the Kwisatz Haderach.

If you're in any way invested in this story, and why the hell would you be, you probably can't wait to see how Bat-Baby gets himself back to normal. So the hell would I, because this story doesn't even show us. We see Bat-Baby go off-panel, Robin mops up the thugs by himself, and then Batman pops back up, fully adultified. We don't even get to see him as a muscle-bound adult wearing tiny little baby pants. This should be the climax of the story and they don't even whiff it, because they don't even take a swing. It just soars clean through the strike zone unchallenged like Casey at the Bat.