Movement in a Static Medium Jasmina Ouhri
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Ouhri 1 Sidekicks Grow Sideways: Movement in a Static Medium Jasmina Ouhri Honors Thesis, Spring 2012 Director: Kenneth Kidd Reader: Terry Harpold Figure 1. From All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder (2008) by Frank Miller and Jim Lee. © DC Comics. Batman and Dick Grayson in the Bat cave after Dick’s parents are murdered. “From its earliest days, the modern comic has grappled with the problem of showing motion in a static medium,” Scott McCloud writes in Understanding Comics (110). In the panel shown above (Fig. 1), artist Jim Lee uses what McCloud calls multiple images of a figure to convey movement: Robin-to-be Dick Grayson vaults backward to stand in front of Batman, leaving behind transparent images of himself that show the path of motion he has taken. Although this technique may be used to depict any character’s motion, artists most often use it to show acrobatic movements like those used by Batman’s Robins. Taking a cue from this Ouhri 2 technique’s depiction of multiple images of Robin integrated into a series, my paper will examine the role of the child sidekick in superhero comic book narratives, more specifically that of the Robin characters in the DC Comics universe. While the final figure in this progression of images is opaque, indicating permanence or unchangeability, the images leading up to it are transparent and ghost-like, indicating when and where the figure was still in motion, still capable of change. The child Robin occupies a similar conceptual space of potential for the adult Batman. I will argue that the child Robins, experiencing traumas similar to the one that catalyzes Bruce Wayne’s transformation into a vigilante, represent past versions of Batman, versions that can escape the adult hero’s bleak fate. The long-established dichotomy between Robin and Batman—young and old, cheerful and grim, bright and dark—emphasizes this potential. The child sidekick as an afterimage left behind by the opaque figure of the hero signifies not only the child the adult hero was but the child the hero might have been but did not become. This paper will use Kathryn Bond Stockton’s concept of “sideways growth” to inspect expansions of narrative and possibility enabled by the differences that separate child sidekick from adult hero. Cultivating character traits and hero identities separate from those of the adult hero, the child sidekick provides a “what if” for his or her adult counterpart. The parallel Earths of DC’s multiverse play a similar role, allowing writers to explore the “what ifs” of canonical continuity, which is bound by certain rules and limitations. Batman cannot be a vampire within monthly comic continuity, for example, as he becomes in the 1991 Elseworlds graphic novel Batman and Dracula: Red Rain, nor can the members of the Justice League be evil, as they are in 1964’s “Crisis on Earth-Three!” Much as the multiple images of a moving figure are forced to converge in the final opaque figure, however, these alternate narratives have been repeatedly pared away to fit DC’s Ouhri 3 linear continuity. DC’s 2011 “New 52” reboot, for example, restarted fifty-two of the publisher’s comic book series at Issue #1, eliminating numerous titles and characters and modifying those that remained—in several cases, the reboot revisited and substantially revised the characters’ backstories.1 Unlike those of many of these characters, the backstories of Batman and his Robins have remained largely intact, a singularity which may be due to the unique role the Robins play not only for Batman but for readers. In Boy and Girl Wonders: Robin in Cultural Context, Mary Borsellino traces various appropriations of the character in popular culture, noting that Robin’s numerous, and often contradictory, incarnations allow the character to appeal to both mainstream and marginalized audiences. Robin, then, may remain relevant and present—if multiple and inconstant—as a result of his ability to change. Robin as Child Batman’s Robin was the first sidekick to grace superhero comic books. Influenced by Dick Tracy’s Junior, Robin debuted in Batman’s Detective Comics #38 in 1940, almost exactly a year after Batman’s first appearance in the same title. Although the details of Robin’s origin story—and the child characters serving as Robin—have changed multiple times since the character’s creation, the sidekick’s stark contrast with Batman has remained constant. He (or she) provides youth and naiveté to Batman’s age and experience, cheer to his grimness, and bright yellow, red, and green to Batman’s black and gray. Early Batman writer James Robinson 1 Within the Batfamily, for example, Gail Simone’s Batgirl removes Barbara Gordon from the wheelchair she has occupied since the Joker shot and paralyzed her in Alan Moore’s 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke. Although The Killing Joke remains part of the New 52 continuity, it is thus far unclear whether Barbara’s years as Oracle or Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown’s runs as Batgirl following Barbara’s paralysis also remain canonical. Meanwhile, The Flash stars Barry Allen rather than Wally West, who became the series’ title character in 1986. The reboot also separates several very long-established couples, including Barry and Iris West and Superman’s Clark Kent and Lois Lane, both of whom were married in pre-New 52 continuity but are shown in their New 52 incarnations as mere acquaintances. Ouhri 4 writes that Robin’s youth and inexperience “enrich[ed] the dialogue, [providing] someone Batman could talk to” (Batman Archives, Vol. 3). Prior to Robin’s appearance, writers resorted to having Batman narrate his own actions to the reader via thought bubbles or speaking aloud to himself (Fig. 2)—not exactly stealthy behavior for a crime fighter. As a younger character still learning the ropes of crime fighting, however, Robin provides a better justification within the story for Batman’s explanations of his actions aloud for the reader’s benefit. The young sidekick’s arrival also expanded Detective Comics’ readership. In “Robin: Innocent Bystander,” Jack Black points out that heroes like Superman and Batman, while exciting, were adults, which may have made their adventures less appealing to child readers. “[I]f kids could see someone their own age having exciting adventures alongside the hero,” Black writes, “the stories would prove to be more interesting for them” (122). The strategy of using a child sidekick to reach younger audiences caught on: Bucky and Speedy, for example, appeared alongside Captain America and Green Arrow, respectively, in 1941, providing characters in those heroes’ series with whom child readers could identify and thus feel invested in the stories’ action. Child readers are not the only ones who identify with the child sidekick, however. The adult superhero does as well, and nowhere is this more evident than in Batman’s relationship with his first Robin, the circus acrobat Dick Grayson. Ouhri 5 As a young boy, Bruce Wayne famously witnesses the death of his parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne, when a mugger shoots them. Years later, Bruce attends a circus performance at which two circus acrobats fall to their deaths from sabotaged equipment as their son, Dick, watches.2 Bruce watches Dick watch his parents die, becoming a spectator to the repetition of his own trauma. The other child characters that later take on the Robin mantle are similarly connected to childhood traumas resembling Bruce’s formative moment: Batman finds the second Robin, soon-to-be-orphaned Jason Todd, in the alley where Thomas and Martha were murdered, while the third Robin, Tim Drake, grows up as the only son of a wealthy Gotham family not unlike the Waynes and loses both of his parents to murder. Black reads Bruce’s assumption of the Batmantle as less an attempt to protect Gotham than an attempt to protect his own childhood self; by preventing others from suffering the violence he witnessed, he can rewrite his own trauma. His adoption and training of the Robins derives from the same motive. The Robins’ significance to the Batman narrative and to Bruce himself lies in how Bruce may be able to alter the trajectories of their lives from that of his own. While neither Bruce nor Batman can protect Dick from losing his parents as Bruce did, Bruce gives Dick a closure that is missing in many versions of his origin myth: the apprehension of his parents’ murderer. Dick’s story thus attains a stability that Bruce’s story, even continued into his superhero adulthood, lacks. Black identifies Nightwing (Fig. 3), Dick’s 2 The manner of the Graysons’ death varies somewhat; in Miller’s All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder (2008), for example, the man contracted to kill them shoots them during their performance rather than sabotaging their equipment. Ouhri 6 playful adult hero persona, as proof of Batman’s success in rewriting his own trauma through Dick’s version of the origin myth: “Batman had seen Dick Grayson’s Robin as a reflection of himself, and so was able to, in effect, change his own history. Dick didn’t become as dark as Bruce had” (123). Beginning, by way of original trauma, as a version of Bruce but deviating from Bruce’s path to become a hero different from Batman, Dick exhibits a development not unlike the “sideways growth” identified by Stockton in The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Stockton formulates the concept in relation to queer children in fiction but extends it to all children, attributing it to the delay within which children are contained: the defined period of childhood that in late modernity is held clearly apart from the open-ended period of adulthood.