Doc Savage, The Batman, The Spirit, Wildcat, The Avenger, Black Canary get own universe

[Doc Beechler (mod-MD)]

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=23294

OK...after reading this, I'm pretty excited...

[Doctor Hmmm?]

Hmmm ... Maybe.

I love the fact that The Batman isn't just carrying guns. He's got .45s! Under his cape! Completely unlike any pulp characters I've ever heard of.

Ahem.

[Kent Allard]

Superheroes carrying guns? For shame

[Mark Stanislawski]

Why not just use The Shadow? Or does DC no longer own the rights and that's why they are using Batman.

[Dagwan]

I think they're using Batman because without him sales will suck. Big-time suck.

---

"You've got the brain of a four-year-old boy, and I'll bet he was glad to get rid of it." -Groucho Marx

Check out the Secret Headquarters (my store) website! It's a pretty lame website, but I did it myself, so tough noogies

Listen to WOXY.com, it's the future of rock-n-roll!

---

[Figserello]

Dagwan said:

I think they're using Batman because without him sales will suck. Big-time suck.

---

That, and Batman does straddle the line between pulp hero and superhero. Its the pulp elements that make him stand out as a modern hero.

Its an interesting experiment to see how a 'pulp' Batman would look if produced today.

The Wednesday Comics Batman was a beautifully put together comic, so this could be good. Still, don't like to see a Batman packing heat. The Shadow, sure, but not Batman.

[Luke Blanchard]

The statement that Batman was often seen using guns in the Golden and Silver Ages is an error. Very early on he used guns in a couple of stories, was depicted wearing one on the cover of Detective Comics #33, and used machine guns mounted on his batplane to kill Hugo Strange's monsters in Batman #1. After this the convention became that he doesn't use guns, although I don't know I've seen a story stressing this. When Julie Schwartz took over he and his collaborators didn't know this was the tradition, so they had him use a gun in one of their first stories. Negative reader reaction taught them it was a mistake.

[Figserello]

Possibly losing the guns was part of the same approach to the character that brought in Robin after a year? less? Batman's world became less grim and and more cheerful?

Some sensibility that the stories were primarily for children and couldn't be too violent/graphic?

The idea that children's stories had to be sanitized was probably quite a recent thing even then, but it seems to have taken hold quickly in the comics.

I'm not the only person that thinks that on an artistic level, Batman's aversion to guns makes him a more psychologically interesting, fully rounded and sympathetic character. The readers knew more than the writers in the Scwartz instance you cite.

A gun-happy killer is a completely different character to the Bruce we know and love, and one that's harder to keep on the road.

It took one of the industry's top talents working at the top of his game to make the Punisher a viable ongoing character, and the character seems to have run out of steam within ten years of Ennis' revamp, judging by what Marvel is doing with him now.

[Luke Blanchard]

Batman's world remained fairly dark for a while after Robin arrived. It was probably more a matter of whom they wanted Batman to be.

The tabloid "Famous 1st Edition" reprint of Batman #1 in the 70s has a text piece signed by Carmine Infantino about Bill Finger, who had died recently. According to it, the Strange story in Batman #1 was "originally intended for the issue of Detective Comics which, instead, brought Robin to the public for the first time. The story was saved for Batman #1-and the reaction was not a good one. This marked one of the few times Batman was shown using a gun-and he even had some mounted in his Batplane. The readers didn't like their hero going around killing people. Bill got the message; Batman has since strenuously avoided the use of firearms."

[Figserello]

Thanks for the extended answer.

Sometimes the judgement of 'plain folks' is impeccable!

Whole theses could be written about Batman's relationship to guns.

This was all in the run-up to WW2, no?

[Luke Blanchard]

Batman debuted in 1939, and received his own title the following year.

The action in the strip would've been quite different if he'd used guns. In the Golden Age non-powered masked crimefighters were a dime a dozen, and I don't have time right now to check how many of the others beat him into print. (I know the Phantom and the Crimson Avenger did: the Phantom debuted in the newspapers in 1936, the Crimson Avenger a few issues before Batman in Detective Comics #20.) It might be possible to show the combination of acrobatics and fisticuffs Batman uses originated with his feature. Certainly Robin was the first costumed kid sidekick.

[ClarkKent_DC]

I've seen a few stories over the years stressing the point that Batman doesn't use guns. It kind of went from simply not writing stories with Batman using guns to a story or two where he would use a gun, but not on people (I recall an early '70s issue of Batman where he was on a boat and had to chase some sharks away, so he fired on them with a rifle), to one story from the '80s that went too far, as I saw it:

Batman was in disguise as a police officer, and was surreptitiously interrogating someone at the target range. Said person offered him a pistol so he could practice, and he got a thoroughly surprised and disgusted look on his face, and the narrative caption told us he has "a psychological inability to fire a weapon" (emphasis from the original story, as I recall). So he took his nightstick and threw that at the target, proclaiming that he was an old-school cop and today's young whippersnappers don't know how to do things the old ways.

Yeah, right.

Fortunately, there was another story from the 00s, as I recall, that put Batman in the position of having to take out a sniper, so he fired on said sniper's weapon with a rifle. He made it clear that he was disgusted at having to be in that position, but it was also clear that he was an expert marksman -- after all, no matter what they show you in the movies, it ain't that easy to shoot a weapon out of someone's hands, especially without shooting the person holding it, too -- who chooses not to use guns. Fine by me.



Luke Blanchard said:

The statement that Batman was often seen using guns in the Golden and Silver Ages is an error. Very early on he used guns in a couple of stories, was depicted wearing one on the cover of Detective Comics #33, and used machine guns mounted on his batplane to kill Hugo Strange's monsters in Batman #1. After this the convention became that he doesn't use guns, although I don't know I've seen a story stressing this. When Julie Schwartz took over he and his collaborators didn't know this was the tradition, so they had him use a gun in one of their first stories. Negative reader reaction taught them it was a mistake.

[Luke Blanchard]

I meant any Golden Age story. In "Batman for a Night!" in Detective Comics #417 (1971) a reporter talks Batman letting him take his place as Batman. Fighting some crooks, he grabs a gun and tells them to freeze. This instantly tells them he isn't the real Batman, and they lose all fear of him. Batman saves him, and then tells him off for dirtying Batman's hand with a gun.