Eight years old in the late 1950's, I hope to find friends by starting a Batman Fan Club. My sister Bridey will assist me. I am obsessed with the Golden Age Batman, before I was born, the Bob Kane original begun in 1939, (THE BAT-MAN), gleaned from an archival collection at the library: a haunted orphan Batman, battling gangsters, twisted villains and Axis agents with hats. Kane's rigid drawing and Bill Finger's pulpy stories carve out jagged, expressionist adventures with a style, as one writer said, more Cabinet of Doctor Caligari than Casablanca.

 

No one I know has the same obsession, but perhaps news of my fan-club, like a bat-darkened sky heralding the end of the world, will beguile other like-minded bat cognoscenti to join. But my Batman is long gone. Even in the 1940's Kane could not keep up with the growing demand, and over time collaborators inking his rough pencils with a more dynamic, naturalistic look may create "better drawing" but lose Kane's raw power.

 

I know finding others who understand is a dim hope. Batman's decline has been further hastened by a senate-led "study" exposing the corrupting influence of comics on innocent children, leading to the Comics Code of 1954 that eviscerates the lurid and gory glory of EC horror comics, and scours Batman's DC and other brands squeaky-clean and dead, like washing out a trash-talking mouth with lye.

 

Though DC has long mandated no guns and killing by Batman (after earlier issues featured him handily dispatching criminals off of rooftops, machine-gunned and even hanged), the Code finds a different threat: covert homosexuality and pederasty in the Batman and Robin relationship. DC bends over backwards (and performs rubber-limbed contortions) to eliminate any doubt of the duo's wholesome manliness, and through the next decade saddles the characters with an extended heterosexual "family" of cute supporting characters, (women friends, friends, girlfriends, a Rin-Tin-Tin type dog named Ace). Even Alfred the Butler is replaced by a doting aunt to de-gay the Bat Cave.

 

To underscore that Crime Does Not Pay and is not glamourous or fun, (the other fixations of the Code), Batman's deadly enemies become buffoons and effete tricksters, or ill-conceived aliens, interdimensional monsters, robots and grotesque living cartoons, (none of them presumably capable of inspiring a life of crime).  And what was up with evil? Batman's arch enemies were now irritating at best, but in the old versions they came after me at night. I could smell the rot in The Scarecrow's breath, like the airless loft in our garage in summer, when something gassed out a long busy death in the walls.

 

Now Batman is stricken with a tiresome array of transformations, into a giant, a baby, zebra-striped, invisible, winged, reversed, radioactive, (but never a woman, or gay, or black). Then the cross-overs into clunky and crowded Justice League imbroglios, and the coup de grace of the camp TV series. My interest is later revived by the low budget '40's movie serials making the college theater circuit in the late '60's, (to a stoned audience ecstatically cheering the homosexual implications), and then Frank Miller and Tim Burton's bleak reprisals in the 1980's, and, perhaps truest of all, the animated series in the early 1990's. (What is to come with Christopher Nolan and Joaquin Phoenix is beyond imagining).

 

But at nine in Columbus, Ohio, I am marooned in the wrong time and place, a despairing loner paralyzed with shyness, and a sister who can't help but destroy me with a look. We rehearse again and again. My duties are simple enough: I am to bang the gavel (or is it a hammer? A meat tenderizer?) and announce to the empty wooden and metal chairs assembled on our side porch, "The Batman Fan Club will now come to order."

 

My sister says, "Go on. Say it:  'The Batman Fan Club will now come to order.'"

 

I say, "The Batman Club…"

 

"No. You have to stand up. Stand up and say it louder. Say it right. Hammer the table first, and then say, 'The Batman Fan Club will now come to order."

 

I stand and say, "The Batman Club…"

 

"No! Stand. Hammer. Say: 'The Batman Fan Club Will Now Come to Order'!"

 

"The Fanman…the Bat.."

 

"You're not trying! Bang the gavel first, and then say, 'THE BATMAN FAN CLUB WILL NOW COME TO ORDER'!"

 

I bang too hard. The hammer, or meat tenderizer, breaks. We both collapse into laughter, but my sister quickly sobers and resumes icy control.

 

"Come on! You have to treat this seriously! Make it a real club, or the members won't want to stay! 'The Batman Fan Club…'"

 

I try, but the situation, the everything. All of it telegraphs the message: forget it. It's all useless.
 

"Come on!" My sister pleads. "You're not trying! Stand up!"
 

Facing my sister, I am like the rest of the 1950's, as limp and spineless as DC submitting to the Comics Code, or the era's music studios buckling under "novelty" production from Mitch Miller, or Congress crumbling to Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and Richard Nixon. Collapsing before bullying and lies sums up the country, and my childhood, reaching an apotheosis a few years later when I let a seething adult sitting behind me my little brother at the Clinton Theater grab us and haul us up to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance before the movie starts. (Yes, that was once the norm). In one moment, the sanctity of my favorite refuge is violated forever, and I've failed to protect myself or my brother in a fatal way. Everything crashes.

 

Eisenhower has a second term, and a major recession hits. Suddenly, no one likes Ike. There is record unemployment that topples my father's white-collar job, driving him door to door selling encyclopedias, and pots and pans. By 1957, the great post-war boom is already over, for good. Everything is too late. There are strange forces at play, unseen and pulsating like the approaching foot prints of the invisible Monster from the Id in Forbidden Planet from 1956, (a sui generis masterpiece that seems to have been made almost by mistake and fiat under the tight fist of MGM). The studio, and the larger world resolves that there will be no more such "mistakes," and I wander, bereft, a pawn in a cosmic game like Bob Kane's visual device on cover art, of Batman and Robin scurrying under gigantic renderings of The Joker, Two-Face, or The Penguin.

 

I retreat to some fantasy time and place, somewhere between 1930's movies on TV, to late 50's science fiction movies at the ratty neighborhood theater. Even that is taken away in that Pledge of Allegiance moment. (The rage and humiliation of being bullied and lied to will be triggered again and again, reaching another kind of apotheosis during the Trump years).

My sister sighs and abandons me on the porch. I slump to the floor and stare at the empty chairs.  

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