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Batman the New Dennis The Menace?

gattino

gattino

Justified & Ancient
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Jul 30, 2003
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I previously started a thread about the extraordinary coincidence of 2 comic strip characters of naughty kids in stripey jerseys, each with the name Dennis The Menace appearing for the first time on opposite sides of the Atlantic within days of each other back inthe 1950s.

No explanation beyond random chance coincidence has ever been established.

I'm wondering - if there's any process at work at all - if something similar can be said of the image sent into the letters page of this month's FT by one Alistair Moffat of Halifax (perhaps he's reading this and can elaborate on it). It's the cover of a 1934 British "boy's story paper" called the Ranger.

Alistair mentions the 1939 first appearance of Batman in his letter, but only in terms of winged characters regularly appearing in british comic strips prior to his creation. He doesn't appear to make a direct connection between the image and story he describes (the vampire of the title is, he tells us, a scientist with anti gravity machine and bat suit) and the creation of Batman across the ocean 5 years later. Yet not only the general conceit but the specific covers of both publications strike me as having an astonishing similarity. Try googling the Ranger and you'll almost certainly not find it...so if there is a direct influence, beyond coincidence, then its presumably a previously unknown one. See what you think.....Remember Batman - USA 1939, The Ranger issue UK 1934. Surely the chances of the American author/artist (Bob Kane and Bill Finger) having ever seen the throwaway british rag and stealing the image 5 years later are terribly small.


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Ooo! That's nice detective work. (pardon the pun). I wonder if they know about the Ranger cover??
 
The first thing I thought when I saw The Ranger cover (bet it didn't sell too well in some parts of Glasgow!) was Mothman!
 
That was actually why the image was sent in to the FT...the suggestion it looked like the descriptions of Mothman. He also included a 50s horror comic cover with what looks exactly like the drawings of the Chupacabras.
 
I like the way the house in the bottom corner is so nervous it's clenching the teeth!

That's (not really) ignoring the really huge eyes the guy has. Frankly. I can't see how he would have an alter-ego named anything other than 'Big Eyes'.

Which is a bit of a giveaway in the crime-fighting biz.
 
That observation - the assumption he's a crime fighter - has just inspired a remarkable realisation in me.

But first.. I emailed the chap behind the blog which suggested Bob Kane, Batman's creator, was an ideas/image thief. He was impressed by the find but suggested coincidence as, according to him, if Kane had been influenced the image would have been a lot more similar. Ie he'd have swiped it wholesale.

But moving on to my world-shattering nobel prize winning insight: Firstly to quote the letter in the FT: "In the years preceding the launch of Bob Kane's Batman comic book character in 1939, British story paper covers often featured 'winged humans'; among them the "Human Bat" (Jack's Paper, november 1922) the 'Flying Boy' (The Modern Boy, Oct 1932) and 'The Bird Man' (The Modern Boy, June 1936) (..........)
In the story itself however, the 'vampire bat' turns out to be an ageing scientist who utilises and anti-gravity machine in conjunction with a bat suit and a blowpipe with which he shoots poison at his victims."


The first thing that hit me is that its pure assumption that these "story papers" are what we'd think of as comic books. Perhaps they were all text with the odd illustration. Perhaps someone can say. The second is that with his blowpipe and victims the vampire is clearly not a hero! And similar as their names are to "batman", the human bat and the bird man presuambly weren't either (?). But collectively it perhaps suggests a popular theme and concept doing the rounds at the time the surely had some direct influence on the IDEA of batman, on his actual creation regardless of the visual illustration.

If so, then Bruce Wayne's ultimate origins couldn't be more Fortean: the description of the "vampire"...the red eyed gravity defying mad scientist in a cape terrorising london...has been stolen lock, stock and barrel from popular contemporary explanations for the victorian bogeyman Spring-Heeled Jack! Last seen in the early 1900s he'd have been the bogeyman of any '30s artist/writer's childhood.

Is Spring Heeled Jack the ultimate inspiration for Batman? (Posing it like a question makes me sound like one of those poorly reviewd books about Templars in the back of the FT).
 
Standard comic book histories trace a lot of influences, potential influences, cognates, etc. of the Batman, including pulp heroes like The Shadow and Mary Roberts Rinehart's mystery novel The Bat. The superhero Batman character with the playboy secret ID, the faithful butler, the high-tech gadgets, and the special relationship with the police department is a distinctive character. The imagery with which he is presented fits in with established cultural tropes. Everything goes into the primordial soup of the cultural imagination, and individual works appear from it through the medium of the artists' (for Bob Kane did not act alone in creating Batman) imaginations.

As for similarity in cover - comic book covers deal in similar poses and compositions repeatedly. How else are you going to depict a dramatic figure explicitly compared to a bat in the story, seriously? Certain arrangements of figures are repeated so often they become cliche and inspire parody; they can even be made to parody themselves simply by piling on the examples. Display enough pictures of one character standing in the foreground holding the limp form of another, connected character and looking anguished (the standard cover for a Death of So-and-So issue), and it becomes ridiculous. I bet a short image search could turn up dozens of similar pictures of batlike figures, showing pulp characters, vampires, gothic villains, bat-human monsters, etc.
 
Story papers often featured a mix of content. Some were full of text stories with occasional illustration and others were arranged almost like a comic page - in panels but with the text running at the bottom of the panel - Black Bob of the Dandy followed this format. Others featured traditional comic strips.
 
Hi, happy to clear up a few points; firstly, the British ‘Story papers’ I refer to are the comic-sized magazines published weekly or monthly for a (mainly) juvenile readership in the mid-war years. Generally, these contained several serialised stories and were often set in boarding schools (although the far-flung corners of the British Empire, ‘Lost Continents’ and even Outer Space featured on occasion). Themes ranged from sport to crime and adventure and were text-based with a few accompanying black and white illustrations. This type of paper had it's roots in the Victorian 'penny dreadfuls' and they were popular in Britain before the import of US Pulp mags and the rise of popularity of the comic book from the early 1940s onwards.

Although ‘super-heroes’ characters weren't used in these papers (detective heroes were popular, however, especially 'boy detectives'), they shared common themes with those dealt with in the later comics.

For example, the theme of ‘winged’ or flying humans was a popular one (see link to scan below of the Human Bat in Jack's Paper from 1922) although these were normally individuals with a scientific bent or inventors who created apparatus with which to fly and NOT super-heroes in the comic-book sense. My own view is in concurrence with yours in that the Ranger image did not influence the slightly later (and more fully formed/refined) Batman character. Alhough they are very similar in many respects, the theme was a popular one at the time and it is inevitable that there would be characters created independently that bore some resemblance to each other. I suppose one could also speculate that the theme itself drew from an archetype or meme of winged humans that is now fully embedded in the collective unconsciousness; Batman, perhaps, is the most recognisable form of the manifestation of this archetype and I included mention of it in the letter simply to provide some context datewise. Your further observation that these types of image can appear independently in comics would support the theory of archetypes in this case.

The main point of my letter, however, was to draw attention to the remarkable similarity between the Ranger cover figure and the reports of Mothman in the 1960s. Coincidence? Perhaps. Further evidence that both were informed by the same archetype? Maybe. Whatever the cause/effect, it is fascinating to see similar images cropping up especially when the general opinion is that an earlier one did not influence the later one.

http://i1093.photobucket.com/albums/i422/DollyMoffatt/21stNov1922.jpg
 
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