#gutters

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.