The Syncretism of DC Comics

In religion, the term syncretism refers to the amalgamation of different religious traditions, or possibly the absorption of one faith’s traditions into another. It’s how, for example, the mythology of Greek gods expanded to incorporate other cultures’ deities, either as aspects of that established pantheon or as new members of it.

Some of the pagan traditions that early Christianity syncretically absorbed in its spread across Europe still define how we celebrate Easter and Christmas. Christian missionaries tended to build churches on ground that previous religions already considered sacred, which is why we have the French locale of Saint-Michel-Mont-Mercure (Saint Michael/Mount Mercury) and an English cathedral right beside the hot springs at Bath.

Of the two major US publishers of superhero comics, Marvel has resisted syncretism but DC has grown through it. In nearly every decade since it was founded, DC has absorbed a publishing competitor, not just taking over its past publications but eventually bringing its characters into the “DC Universe.”

Indeed, this pattern was built into the company’s operations soon after it introduced the first comics superhero, Superman. What we now call “Golden Age DC” consisted of three comics companies with overlapping ownership: National Allied Publications, Detective Comics, and and All-American Publications. The last operated out of separate offices, but in mid-1940 its heroes started appearing alongside some of the other companies’ in All Star Comics. In 1946 National/DC bought out All-American, obtaining complete ownership of the Flash, Wonder Woman, the Spectre, the Sandman, Hawkman, and other trademarks.

Superhero stories went into a decline in the following decade, but DC was able to maintain sales of Superman, Batman and Robin, Wonder Woman, and a few backup characters. Other companies stopped publishing in the genre, or publishing altogether. In some cases, DC stepped in to buy their trademarks.

Eventually, superhero stories became popular again, along with the idea that all of a company’s heroes operated in the same universe and could meet, fight, and then go after common foes. In 1961 editor Julius Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox created parallel universes, which gave DC room for all the heroes it had accumulated over the years.

At first DC editors confined each parent company’s legacy mostly to one version of Earth. Thus, Fawcett Comics’s Captain Marvel and his family and villains were on Earth-S or Earth-5; Quality Comics’s Freedom Fighters were on Earth-X. But then the Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries of 1985-86 ended with all those different realities being amalgamated into one common history and reality—full syncretism at last!

Here’s DC’s acquisition timeline and how it incorporated its new intellectual properties:

• Quality Comics acquired 1956, Blackhawk kept in publication, Plastic Man syncretized in 1966, Quality’s other superheroes syncretized in 1973.
• Fawcett Comics’s Captain Marvel and family licensed and syncretized in 1972, acquired outright in 1991.
• Charlton Comics’s “action heroes” acquired in 1983, syncretized in 1986.
• Milestone Comics partnered from its start in 1993, Static and others syncretized starting in 2009.
• Wildstorm Comics acquired in 1999, some characters syncretized in 2011.

In 2006 DC tried splitting up its heroes into separate universes again, with fifty-two realities promised (though not all explored). The “New 52” of 2011 cut back on that scheme, but there are at least a handful of alternate universes in the company’s comics today, and since characters can (with effort) cross over, it’s all one reality.

TOMORROW: The problems with superhero syncretism.

When Batman and Robin Went Sci-Fi

“The Isle That Time Forgot,” from Batman, #10, is one of the first Batman stories that definitely borrowed from science fiction. Earlier tales of the Caped Crusader had touched on the fantastic, but through the genres of Gothic horror and even fairy tales rather than science-inspired tropes.

That story from April-May 1942 showed the Dynamic Duo landing Dick’s new miniature batplane on an island that appears—to the Boy Wonder at least—to be infested with living dinosaurs. Robin keeps saying he’s seen the giant creatures; Batman keeps telling him to stop talking nonsense. (More specifically, he snaps, “Don’t get gay!”) As shown above, Robin also falls down a bit. I’m not spoiling a good story when I ***SPOILER*** this one: there really are dinosaurs on the island, but they’re mechanical.

In Batman, #24 (Aug-Sept 1944), the Dynamic Duo had their first real time-travel adventure. That is, if we accept that Prof. Carter Nichols could actually send Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson back to ancient Rome through nothing but hypnosis. That story has lately been credited to Dr. Joe Samachson. The Nichols character appeared in several more Batman time-travel adventures as recently as this decade’s “Time and the Batman.”

Joseph Greene is credited with scripting “The Year 3000” in Batman, #26 (Dec 1944–Jan 1945). This is an unabashedly futuristic adventure featuring Bruce Wayne’s distant descendant (and his young pal Ricky!) fighting an invasion from Saturn.

Finally, Batman, #41 (June-July 1947), went all out with Batman and Robin running into real extraterrestrial visitors, and on the cover yet. Gardner Fox is usually credited with writing “Batman, Interplanetary Policeman!” He wrote some of the earliest Batman scripts and continued to work for DC Comics until 1968.

Thus, within a decade of his invention, Batman was involved in science-fiction adventures on top of his usual crime-fighting. The idea of Batman in space is usually associated with the “Silver Age” of DC Comics, starting in 1956. And indeed Pat Curley at Silver Age Comics has mapped the peak of stories in which Batman and Robin meet aliens (not including Superman himself) as from 1958 to 1963. But the tradition goes back to the 1940s.

At that peak time, Julius Schwartz was reinventing DC’s superhero universe with new sci-fi versions of old trademarks like the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom. Superman editor Mort Weisinger was reportedly leaning on Batman editor Jack Schiff to shift toward science fiction. When Schwartz took over the Batman books in 1964 with the “New Look,” he reversed course back to goofy crime stories, but he also integrated Batman and Robin into the larger, now sci-fi-driven DC Universe.

Thus, it was only a matter of time before Dick Grayson would have a hot alien girlfriend.

“I’ll Bring Your Killer In, Batman”

Back in November I reviewed Batman: The Black Casebook, a collection of weird-ass Batman stories from the 1950s and ’60s that DC Comics published in conjunction with writer Grant Morrison’s recent riffs on that tradition.

In the same vein, DC published the collection titled The Strange Deaths of Batman to coincide with the apparent demise of Bruce Wayne in both Batman and Final Crisis. These tales depict Batman’s apparent demise from 1966 through 2001. Of course, the flagship character always survived—in some fashion.

For example, the first story shows Batman and Robin subduing a villain, and the next page shows writer Gardner Fox pondering a hypothetical: What if, instead, that villain had actually killed Batman? It’s reassuring to know that premise is imaginary because otherwise the first criminal to get the better of the Caped Crusader would have the superpower of bouncing.

The remaining stories use other storytelling mechanisms to show Batman being dead without really being dead: an explicitly imaginary story, a dream sequence, escape from being buried alive, coma with medical rescue, and so on. And there are other, contemporaneous stories that show Batman dying in Saga of the Super-Sons (Bruce Wayne was only faking!) and Justice Society, vol. 2 (okay, that Batman really did die—but he was in a whole ’nother universe so it doesn’t count).

What makes the Strange Deaths collection suitable for the weekly Robin is that the first two stories address the question many fans would naturally ask after Batman’s death: What does this mean for the Boy Wonder? Both tales show Batman’s adult colleagues gathering to mourn him, and then Dick Grayson vows revenge.

In the first tale, Robin needs only a few panels to track down the villain and subdue him. (Take that, Bouncer!) Then Gardner Fox springs a new surprise on us: the older Batman of Earth-Two moves to this hypothetical Earth-One at the urging of his grown-up partner.

Thus, back in 1966 young fans didn’t have to worry about even a hypothetical young Robin being without a mentor. As in so much series fiction, this tale shows the status quo threatened, even apparently destroyed, but then we’re back to essentially the same situation at the end.

The second story, from three years later and by much younger writer Cary Bates, takes more time and space to explore the same question.

After a villain (the Automator!) apparently disintegrates Batman, Dick Grayson takes on a whole new identity—a blond college student in a Nehru jacket named Rick Danner. Years pass. Robin starts fighting crime in a new uniform with pants and long sleeves, signaling his adulthood. Superman’s temples grow gray. Metropolis gets moving sidewalks. It must be at least 1982.

Now called “the Man of Wonder,” Robin tracks down the Automator, plus an accomplice who’s used superpowered gloves to blind Superman. Robin subdues both those criminals—only to discover that the gloved accomplice is Bruce Wayne with amnesia!

The final panel shows Robin contemplating life with a Batman who can’t remember and a Superman who can’t see—kind of like very elderly parents. Needless to say, we never see a follow-up to this less reassuring tale.

Restimulating Old Neurons with The Brave and the Bold

On a whim, I picked up my public library's copy of Mark Waid and George Pérez's The Brave and the Bold: The Lords of Luck, the first collection from DC Comics's revived team-up magazine. And I was so happy I did.

Pérez was the artist on New Teen Titans, the last comic book I read regularly as an adolescent. I'd forgotten what a pleasure it is to look at his artwork: the panels crowded with characters and emotions, the way he draws many types of faces instead of just a few, the imaginative panel shapes and transitions, the luminous clarity of line.

Having been a Marvel fanboy instead of a DC one, I'm sure I missed half of Mark Waid's in-jokes in this saga. I still don't care about the Rann-Thanagar War, and I still can't tell members of the Legion of Super-heroes one from another. But the sprawling story was great fun nonetheless.

This Brave and the Bold collection also helped me solve a mystery that had nibbled at the back of my mind for decades. One of the first comic books I can recall reading included a science-fiction story featuring three protagonists--two white men of different ages and one young white woman. Each received a medal.

In discussing their separate experiences, each described how he or she had survived because of something learned from one of the others. Thus, man #1 recalled hearing how man #2 had won some interplanetary pentathlon, and therefore pole-vaulted out of trouble. Man #2 recalled hearing how the woman had won a target-shooting contest, and so on.

I must have read that comic about thirty-five years ago, and never seen it since. I think what made it stick in my brain was how the story was obviously an artificial construction, and yet embodied what we like in a narrative. It had unity, logic, symmetry, and--dare I say it?--a moral.

Toward the end of this volume, Batman is pulled across time, and Pérez illustrated that with a montage of DC's futuristic characters. One tiny picture showed three characters--two white men and a white woman. Waid's note at the back of the book sent me to look up "Star Rovers" on Wikipedia. And sure enough, those are the adventurers I'd read about; their names are Homer Gint, Karel Sorensen, and Rick Purvis. There seem to have been all of thirteen Star Rovers tales published before 1990. Their creator, Gardner Fox, is better known for some of the early Batman, Flash, and Hawkman stories.

Further searching brought me to Mike's DC Database, and I can now identify the particular story I read as "Who Saved the Earth?", first published in Mystery in Space, #80, Dec 1962, and later reprinted. (This Brave and the Bold volume kicks off with Green Lantern contacting Batman about a "mystery in space"--now I get it.)

That Star Rovers adventure is ten pages, too short to fill a comic book, so I must have seen another story or two at the same time. But only the Space Rovers, with their interlocking tales snapping tight as a purse, stuck in my mind.