Words of Wisdom

I came across the above strip on Les Daniels’ Batman: The Complete History (1999). It was originally published on December 16, 1970, by the Ledger Syndicate. The syndicated strip was then being written by E. Nelson Bridwell, who had taken it over from Whitney Ellsworth, who, in turn, had been scripting it from its inception in 1966. Daniels contrasts the politics of the strip with the opposite bent then being infused in the Batman and Green Arrow comic books by Denny O’Neil. It marks a split that seems to be quite raw and bleeding today, after we’ve witnessed all the excesses of this our year of 2020. Yet, despite the savage behavior of some bad cops (every large corporation is bound to have a few rotten apples) Bridwell’s assertion does sound… well, sound.

That same split was made evident a while later on the pages of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #100, when under editor Murray Boltinoff, writer Bob Haney and artist Jim Aparo had the Green Arrow kill a drug-dealer with an arrow through the heart, something a lot more akin to the recent TV incarnation of the character in ARROW (2012-2020), than to the O’Neill scripted vigilante of GREEN LANTERN/GREEN ARROW. As was made clear in the pages of that book where after accidentally offing a thug that was trying to kill him, O’Neill sent the Arrow on a months-long downer of a spiritual journey in search of forgiveness. It was O’Neill’s clear response to Haney’s unapologetically stance before the reader’s controversy over his story.

Of course, this was the time when EASY RIDER (1969) and DIRTY HARRY (1971) represented the opposite extremes of American society. The above strip, as well as the stories I’ve just mentioned, were part of the time’s dialectic, and a clear example of how the same comic book characters were sufficiently plastic to accommodate such those two such extremes views. Just like the Classic gods of yore, it is that plasticity what makes super-heroes such endurable myths for these technological times of ours.

Although Daniels doesn’t mention it, there’s another aspect that stroke me as quite illustrative of the times. And that’s the way as just as the comic books were adopting the EASY RIDER code of thought, the newspaper strip went along with the DIRTY HARRY ethic. After all, it was in the Sixties that comic books became quite popular in Colleges all across the country, just at the same time as Marcusian politics and Gramschian radicalism. Newspapers carrying the strips, on the other hand, were read mainly by blue and white-collar workers, whose low and middle-class world-view was necessarily more pragmatic and reality-anchored, thus favoring the tough-guy approach. In a way, it’s more or less the same dichotomy patent on the famous quote usually attributed to Clemanceau: Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head. Comic books can have heart, and head, often, but not always, at the same time.