On The Batman in Detective Comics #475, by Englehart, Rogers, Austin and Oda

       

The creative team behind The Laughing Fish wanted us to have to work to focus on the figure of The Batman on the splash page of 1978's  Detective Comics #475. The whole composition of this spectacular, complex, and yet subtly disorientating full page shot is designed to constantly tug the reader’s gaze away from the sight of the Dark Knight. Where we might expect The Batman to serve as the focal point of the shot, here's he's been pushed by Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin up into the top right of the frame, where he seems to have only just intruded into the scene. In a page that's layered with meticulously detailed aspects of Gotham's skyline as seen from street level, there's a great deal other than the man in the super-suit that's been placed to catch the eye and hold the attention. Up there, at the periphery of our vision, The Batman seems almost irrelevant where both the city and the on-coming storm are concerned, a distinctly human presence in what's quite rightly being made to seem an unlikely and surprising situation.

After all, folks simply don't dress up in costumes and lean out across the rooftops of buildings as if they're considering leaping into the air. If they're shown doing so, it should all seem to be the remarkable business it is.

       

It's an impression that's intensified as the eye is dragged horizontally away from the superhero by Ben Oda's captions. His text boxes carry the reader downwards, hugging the left-hand side of the page until they take a right turning at the base of the side. That results in the captions, the logo, the Bob Kane credit box and the title all serving in combination as the two legs of a right triangle, the hypotenuse of which is suggested by the lightning bolt at the top of the page. Everything within that triangular arrangement demands our attention, while all that's excluded from it seems to exist far above our heads and on the edge of our sight. It's an arrangement which creates a tension between the human interest in the scene and the eye-directing design elements on the page, and it creates the impression that we're struggling to see this Batman as he goes about his perilous business far, far above the heads of everyday folks.

Only when the reader has been guided all the way round to the bottom-right corner does the positioning of the credit box offer the option of either an undisturbed journey upwards towards Bruce Wayne, or an exit in the direction of the next page. Yet even then, there's a sense in which the reader is being asked to work in order to travel the empty distance of brick work of windows upwards towards the crime-fighter's thought bubbles. 

The Batman's world, it seems, is one that's very much divorced from ours.

       

At each step of the eye's journey down to the title line of The Laughing Fish, specific aspects of the design carry our attention briefly in the direction of the costumed crimefighter before others immediately drag it away again. The hotel flag bearing the label of Gotham City points vaguely towards Bruce Wayne, but its billowing fabric simultaneously works in combination with the direction of the lightning bolt to push us towards the second and third captions instead. Similarly, the Batman's silhouette placed under the focal point of the yellow text box suggests that we ought to be returning to his figure again, but the tilting vertical lines of the building upon which it's projected haul the eye away rather than towards the superhero. Wherever we look, we're presented with the competing attractions of the modern city, with an overwhelming mash-up of buildings representing the ambitions and compromises of a host of different periods. All of this sends the eye flitting briefly upwards and then back down again to what counter-intuitively feels like more pressing matters. In doing so, what all concerned achieve is the impression that The Batman's a sight unexpectedly glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. What we might otherwise take for granted here becomes a remarkable and somehow unexpected event which only a citizen's craned neck can help catch sight of.

The sight of a superhero on a rooftop is here taken out of its familiar, spectacle-draining, interest-neutering context, and suddenly, the very fact that a man in a costume is standing on the edge of a three story building becomes surprising and compelling.

How did he get up there? What's he doing? Doesn't he realise that that's dangerous? How can he possibly hope to leap from there and survive?

        

       

When the reader does finally focus on the title-character himself rather the design and the distracting details of the shot, what's remarkable is how purposeful and yet vulnerable he appears. Confident and calculating, yes, but hardly the kind of frame-commanding indomitable hero that's even now typical in the super-book. This is a particularly human Batman, weighing up how he's going to travel across the not-inconsiderable challenges posed by the canyons and sheer-faced peaks of Gotham's vertiginous skyline. The artists have  ingeniously played with the perspective and the framing of the scene, intensifying the sense of a subtly bewildering world. Everything here is made to tilt to one side, but our sense of how odd and perplexing this apparently typical city is is increased by the fact that the block upon which The Batman stands is apparently inclining far less to the right than its fellows. The buildings at the left of the frame seem almost to be lurching inwards, while the skyscrapers which serves as the spine running down the page from top to base feel as if they're straining not to tip any further in the same direction. Even when the eye does rest on The Batman, the effect of the guilefully. subtly addled world behind him creates a sense of intimidation and anxiety.

        

       
Matched with that is the wonderful evocation of the threat of the early evening's weather, of the storm which, as Englehart's script tells us, "refuses to break". The layers of dark, storm-bearing clouds, the flags and cape cracking in the wind, the electricity beginning to fork through the atmosphere. The more we stare at this page, the more the situation suggests a night when sane folks pull up their coat collars and head for the shelter of home as fast as possible. And yet, there's the Dark Knight, calculating how to thrust himself in a situation which we'd been more than simply keen to avoid.

Where the city-crossing superhero is usually presented in action as if leaping across streets and from building to building is no real challenge at all, here it's the perplexing and intimidating demands of all that block-hopping that are accentuated. Where the city is typically shown as a set of buildings blocks serving as a game-players board for super-heroes to bounce impressively around, here it's the most complex of systems, and that restores to the superhero comic the suggestion that super-people on roof-tops is in itself a remarkable business.

And that The Batman preparing to leap from one of those is a conspicuously beguiling event. 

       

There's absolutely nothing that's wasted or irrelevant in Rogers and Austin's work here. The Laughing Fish is a tale in which we find Wayne hesitating on the edge of a potentially life-transforming decision, caught as he is between the desire to retain his secret identity and his adoration of Silver St Cloud, whose home he'll soon be swinging towards. The decision to begin this story with The Batman preparing to leap against the direction in which such a scene is typically read leaves the character seemingly faced by a strangely disturbing challenge. The figure on the page who throws themselves into space while being shown moving from left to right is carried forward with the direction of the reader's gaze. Yet the Batman is here caught before any action occurs, and if and when he does swing over the abyss, he'll be moving in a direction which moves contrary to how we read. This suggests not speed but struggle, not achievement but conflict. We can't see where he's headed and we can't feel that he'll find it easy to achieve his way there, although we are made extremely aware of the fact that there's a long way for the character to fall so he screw up.

All of which seems to describe Bruce Wayne's personal dilemmas every bit as much as suggesting the physical challenges immediately before him.

       

By emphasising the intimidating scale of Gotham in relation to that of this transparently human Batman, Rogers and Austin  also suggest how impossible the character's stewardship of the city is. Similarly, the huge, imposing shadow of the Darknight Detective contrasts tellingly with the reality of the man in the longjohns standing on the precipice of a roof as a storm sweeps in. As those who've read Englehart's famous 1977/8 run of stories in Detective Comics will know, the writer was determined to establish that The Batman is ultimately very much a human being rather than an unassailable force of nature. (Indeed, the Joker is defeated by chance at the tale's end rather through Wayne's efforts.) That contrast between the myth of The Bat and the reality of The Batman, between the glory associated with the role and the appalling costs of assuming it, is made subtly and fascinatingly obvious here.

Finally, there's that oncoming storm. It's a classic application of the pathetic fallacy, reflecting how Bruce Wayne's life is suddenly beginning to tumble catastrophically out of his control. It's a conceit which will also serve as a spectacular backdrop and purposeful deus ex machina for the run's closing battle with the Joker, while its effects as it closes and breaks will be used to drive various members of the cast towards their individual fates.

       

The splash page of The Laughing Fish might at first appear to have a great deal in common with today's sell-it-on-the-secondary-market pin-up shots of superheroes posing before obsessively detailed cityscapes. As such, it could be argued that Rogers and Austin's curtain-opener is a proto-widescreen waste of a side, all right-angles and rendering and very little storytelling at all. Yet here the wonderfully contrived, real-world-evoking architecture suggests a battlefield that's far more dangerous and involving than the Blade Runner cliches which typically serve as the backdrop for fars too many of 2012's comic-book money-shots. There's also an exquisite attention paid by all concerned here to the specific markers of the time of day and the weather which few contemporary comics show any concern for at all beyond the broadest of gestures. In taking such care and mustering such an imaginative control of their craft, the creators show us a superhero who will have to struggle with all his might, ingenuity and experience in order to cope with the urban battlefield before him. This isn't a undefeatable superhero presented as lord of all they survey, destined to beat down all that's thrown against them. It's certainly not a member of the cape'n'chest-insignia brigade who could conceivably shake off a sword through the guts or survive the trauma of a shattered spine. Instead, Englehart, Rogers, Austin and Oda present us from the off with a Batman where the accent's upon "man" rather than "machismo". In that, he's a superhero made all the more estimable because of  how hard he has to struggle to survive, and all the more sympathetic for his inability to rise entirely above his fate.

It's remarkable how what appears to be a relatively static, story-thin shot is actually saturated with emotion, fascination and meaning.

         
.
Tomorrow, the greatest superhero comic of all time, and from more than seventy years ago, with extra-value zombies!