My enthusiam for Smallville dipped when I found out they were having an episode that featured Clark Kent’s dog, Krypto. Niki’s tripled.
The other day I mentioned that Batman had a crime-fighting dog, but I didn’t know what breed it was and I couldn’t recall its name. Named Ace, he was originally a German Shepherd and later on has been portrayed as a Great Dane.
This has brought back memories that I thought were gone forever. There was a super-horse (Comet), Beppo (a Kryptonian monkey who stowed away in Kal-El’s rocket unnoticed) and Supergirl’s pet, Streaky the Supercat.
The highlight of this trip down repressed memory lane was discovering a narrative titled Postmodernism and the Batman Phenomenon, which explores the evolution of the Batman mythos and how it has been a reflection of the general culture or American society. It shows how the four Batman movies of varying quality had their parallels in the decades of Batman lore that came before them and how McCarthyism and Dr. Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent attacked the comic industry and drove the plot lines over the edge:
He felt that three men (Batman, Robin, and their butler, Alfred) living alone in a beautiful manor where fresh flowers were placed daily in vases was the dream home of homosexuals. Batman writers had purposefully stayed away from romantic or sexual adventures or innuendoes to keep the comic kid friendly, but had inadvertently left themselves open to this attack. The editorial staff at the time attempted to combat this by requiring the addition of more bat-characters (Batwoman and Batgirl) to add a feeling of “family” instead of the isolation of the Dynamic Duo. They also made the authors kill off Alfred in favor of a housekeeper named Aunt Harriet. They even went so far as creating a bat-hound, the perfect bat-family crime fighting dog.
Same Bat-time. Same Bat-kennel.
Brian Alvey 