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Crossing the Line with Big Bang Comics

Image Comics, although a onetime pioneer in whatever comprised the "New Comics" of the early 1990s, found a market some might not have predicted: the hard-core retro comics fan interested in material that one might place in a comics canon as the key defining pieces of various comics eras, particularly the Silver Age.

Currently, Image's title Big Bang Comics deals in the balance of that company's derivative and retro material. Previously, through the post-Moore Supreme and through the ill-fated 1963 project, Image had other channels for Silver Age tributes, but the fracture of Image foreclosed both channels for derivative material.

While Big Bang Comics deals in themed pieces not particularly tied to specific earlier comics, including the one-page humor vignette typical of sixties comics (from a day where comics took themselves less seriously), one feature in the book, as evidenced in issue #31, raises some questions about the role and limits of derivative comics.

The Knight Watchman / Kid Galahad feature, consciously owing to the mid-to-late-fifties Batman franchise, seems to push derivative comics into a territory of the aesthetically questionable, not from lack of quality, but from lack of originality.

The Source

Comics consumers who read Batman through the seventies would probably remember, either through originals or through the numerous reprints that persisted into the Ford presidency, the Batman stories from Dick Sprang's tenure on the title. One might particularly remember that phase of these works where Batman frequently encountered and utilized the odd, yet ever-present, giant objects that infested such stories. Batman's giant penny stands as the most recognizable piece from these stories.

One can note that such stories became iconic by the wide reach of references to them, from Jon Bogdonove's one-panel Sprang tribute in a Superman story during the Zero Hour crossover event to an early-eighties issue of Captain America where Batman analog Nighthawk appears and fights villains among the prerequisite giant objects.

Until O'Neil and Adams redefined the character at the end of the sixties - attempting to return the character to his broody roots while simultaneously attempting to bring the aesthetic standards of Batman stories into the modern (for 1969) day - one might not have seen a more recognizable chapter of Batman's history than what we might (with some caution) define as the Age of Sprang.

In spite of all subsequent attempts to take Batman more seriously, to improve his intellectual credibility, to make him more "adult," and to generally force a superhero from 1939 to perform up to Year 2000 standards, something about Sprang's version connects to the notion of the Good Old Days of Batman. Even the most vehement reformers of the franchise seem to accept this.

The Output

Here, however, we lack some of the things that readers find in the Alan Moore Supreme stories that dragged Supreme into the remembered Weisinger-era Superman mythos. Moore, after all, took liberties with the material that such material itself suggested. He veered off on dangerous but seemingly pre-fated tangents that the concepts implied, but period editorial standards forbade. For instance, Moore had the gumption to follow the consequences of Supreme's dog, Radar, acting a bit too much like a dog embued with super-powers, and created a recent sequence in Supreme where hero and dog had to contain an epidemic of super-puppies spawned by a super-speed sex binge by the Hound Supreme.

Big Bang Comics, in its Knight Watchman / Galahad segments, takes no such liberties with the source material, nor explores questions that the comics of the day dared not. It confines itself to creating stories similar to the source material and attempting to deliver them in a plausible period style.

That it does so more credibly than (say) DC's recent Silver Age event does somewhat commend the talent involved. Yet it fails to live up to the potential of previous Image Comics attempts at retro tribute pieces; the excellent, never-completed 1963 miniseries managed to capture the tone and feel of source material without the necessity of a one-to-one mapping of characters, concepts, and stories to items published previously.

Knight Watchman doesn't exist as a pastiche of themed period characters in the way that 1963's Fury represented a fusion of Daredevil and Spider-Man. One can tell, quite clearly, that we have an imitation Batman here, with a costume so similar that one may goggle in disbelief that DC hasn't dragged Image into court about it; equivalent similarities, after all, managed to get Rob Liefeld sued only a few years previously when he created a derivative character based on Marvel's Captain America. Nor do supporting characters represent more than a simple variation of the originals; Knight-Sprite maps to Bat-Mite and Galahad maps to Robin simply and directly.

Take some white-out and a couple of pens to a Knight Watchman story and you would have a Batman story in a style of the Sprang era.

Moving Past Tributes

At this point I must plead innocence against suspicions that aesthetic distaste motivates the criticism here. This approach to Dick Sprang-era Batman comics actually entertained me a great deal; I liked the feel of the art; where the art failed to please me, it at the same time failed to handle elements as well as Sprang had under similar compositional constraints.

I accuse no one here of lack of talent. If DC Comics ever chose to create a miniseries attempting to recreate the mid-to-late fifties feel of Batman books, the talent already exists, pre-trained, in the creative team behind the Knight Watchman stories in Big Bang Comics.

Art frequently comes to this question, if one watches it long enough. The balance between Originality (capitalized as a Virtue) and recognizable schools or Forms frequently perplexes many talents. Should a band always perform new material? Should a painter work in a style or invent a new one? Does innovation justify itself, or must other virtues validate it?

Wherever one stands on the axis between Innovation and Standards, probably most observers will agree that a work that contains next to nothing original lacks a necessary component for worthwhile art. As much as I enjoyed seeing the late Dick Sprang receive tribute here, I may note with some concern that I couldn't find any outright reference to the man by name (unlike, say, Kesel-Grummett Superboy comics that list Jack Kirby on the credits page years after his death), nor anything in the story to show that it managed to find something new in old material.

As such, I have to rate such pieces as excellent pieces of mimesis, without having an answer to the question of whether such derivative pieces fall under the blanket of Art-with-a-capital A.

And therefore I have to place this book in the Guilty Pleasures section of my reading tastes.

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Email the author at ouzomandias@mailexcite.com.

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