"BATMAN’S LINE-UP OF STEREOTYPES."

§ July 15th, 2008 § Filed under Uncategorized Comments Off on "BATMAN’S LINE-UP OF STEREOTYPES."


I know I’ve been relying on the “wacky panel scans” thing over the last week, but I’ve not had the time to devote to internet shenanigans recently, so sometimes you just have to go back to the ol’ dependables.

Old Batman comics, in particular, have a certain stronger appeal to me when it comes to peculiar visuals. Not to say that, for example, Superman books didn’t have their fair share of oddities, but there’s some ineffable quality to a picture of Batman and Robin in their jungle outfits that rings a note of amusing wrongness in the viewer’s head:


And the look of the villains…I’m not even talking about the headliners, like the Joker or the Penguin, but the one-offs, the forgotten thugs and hoodlums and walk-on ne’er-do-wells…there’s a particular sense of odd beauty to them as well:


But it is hard to deny the temptation to whip out a panel from near the end of a story, leaving the uninitiated to wonder just how Batman ended up waist-deep in a mechanical sea monster’s mouth whilst wearing a kilt:


Some things, however, require neither preamble nor explanation:


Ain’t a person alive what can’t appreciate Batman’s punching justice.

images from Batman Annual #2 (1961) – reprinted from earlier sources

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