#greg hatcher

Soule Steam Feed Works & Weidmans!

There is a lot of good things about Meridian, Mississippi! The first would be the Soule Steam Feed Works Industrial Heritage Museum, the last intact steam engine factory. The second would be Weidman’s restaurant, which we heard is the oldest restaurant in the state. Both wonderful experiences I had this past February.

Soule Steam Feed Works Greg Hatcher demonstrates how this wooden model…

Comics Journalism is alive!!! Comics Should be Good and Robot 6 alums set up new shops

The revamed CBR.com phasing out its bloggy subsites, but a lot of the writers involved still have blogging in their blood. This is a calling and a curse you see. Kind of like beng a superhero. The Comics Should Be Good crew have announced they are launching their own site, Atomic Junk Shop, with Greg Hatcher, Jim Burgas, Jim MacQuarrie and many more. Details in the pr below. AND, the Robot 6 crew…

The other day, Greg Hatcher posted a spirited defense of DC Comics version of Superman from 1968 to 1983. It was towards the end of that period when I was most interested in DC Comics, and Mr Hatcher’s piece reminded me of what I liked about the version of Batman DC offered in those days: “The World’s Greatest Detective!” 

The detective angle, including lots of explicit ties to Sherlock Holmes and other pulp heroes of the early twentieth century, made sense in the days when American TV and movies were dominated by detective stories, and especially so when the character was bouncing back from the hyper-campiness associated with the 1966-1968 Batman! TV series. But it was very much there from the beginning. The World War Two era movie serials are all about Batman the gumshoe, and their villains owe an obvious debt to Dr Fu Manchu.  The goofiness that the Batman! show foregrounded and that was so big in the comic books in the 1950s and 60s, when comics were so self-consciously kids’ stuff, was also there at the beginning. Giant props and garishly costumed villains appear in some of the earliest stories, and the skyline of Gotham City the first few times it is shown grows more absurd the longer you look at it. 

Fantasy and science fiction have usually been secondary elements in live-action versions of Batman, but they are as prominent in the comics, from the beginning, as the other principal elements. Hugo Strange was one of Batman’s first adversaries, and magical and monstrous characters, ranging from Man-Bat to Gorilla Boss to Solomon Grundy, have been central to the Batman mythos ever since. 

The fourth principal element is the one that has been foremost in the Batverse since the 1980s, the brooding avenger, the Dark Knight. That’s been there from the beginning as well, ever since Bill Finger introduced Batman’s traumatic origin story, and neglecting it hollowed out the comics in the goofy years leading up to 1968. But I’d say that we’ve had way too much of it this last third of a century, and time has come to bring the other three elements back to the forefront.