This Week in Comics #1: Batman and the Outsiders #1

This week begins a new quasi-weekly feature. Much like Chris's Invincible Super-Blog and The Absorbascon I will be giving weekly reviews of the comics that I read for the week. Luckily for my wallet and my typing fingers, my usual Wednesday stack is something like .5 comics per week and the most I think that I've ever bought was something like six issues, so the reviews will be relatively light and again, quasi-weekly.

This week's purchase is DC Comics's Batman and the Outsiders #1 and comes to us from the creative mind of Chuck Dixon and the talented hands of Julian Lopez. Overall, I found this first issue to be a promising start, but a little slow. Clearly, this first storyline will go for five or six issues when it could probably be parred down to three and be more enjoyable.

The series brings back a title from the mid-1980s. The concept for the original series was that Batman had started his own super-team after his own relationship with the Justice League became strained. While the series was popular for awhile, eventually sales dropped and the title was canceled. Having read a few issues of the original, it's hard to say why the series was ever popular. While there were a few interesting characters on the team, most of them were more super-lame, then superheroes. Take for instance one of the series's more "popular" characters, Halo; Halo's powers literally consist of being schizophrenic and looking like a refugee from an Abba video. The most recent reiteration of the team previous to this new series, ended only a few months ago. This title, scripted by Judd Winnick, presented the Outsiders more as a grown up version of Teen Titans, with a good deal of the team's membership coming from that title. Think Slackers meets Mission Impossible and you'll have a good idea of what was going on.

Thankfully, this new Batman and the Outsiders is taking a much different direction. The current series is un-acknowledgedly built on the back of Wildstorm's The Authority, a titlethat featured characters remarkably like the original Justice League who pretty much extort the world's governments to be peaceful and socialistic. It was in short, a leftist's wet dream. During The Authority's original run, DC (Wildstorm's parent company) found the title's radical politics too much to bear and began censoring the title until it lost much of its audience. However, since the appearance of The Authority, DC has consistently tried to build an Authority-lite team into its mainstream books. Books which have tried the Authority-lite formula have had a hard time finding their voice. Playing within the confines of the DC Universe (DCU), these team books could never be as radical as their Wildstorm equivalents and thus the aesthetic and the supposed "bad-assness" of the series always felt hackneyed.

Luckily, Batman and the Outsiders manages to find the proper balance between the bright spandex view of reality that is the DCU and the proactive stance that was necessary for a book like The Authority to work. Chuck Dixon has managed to find the right scale. The Outsiders cannot blackmail the Russian government to relent in persecuting the Chechnyan people like The Authority, and luckily Dixon does not give us the DCU equivalent (as of yet) of having the Outsiders liberate one of DCU's many fictional third world banana republics or Eastern bloc countries. Instead, the villain here is a corporation which seems to be engaged in some highly suspect research and so Batman sends his newly formed team to investigate. It's not something the JLA would normally do as it involves some espionage and undercover work, but its also not on the same scale as The Authority and so the story does not become ridiculous or parodic. It's not too big and it's not too small. Dixon has managed to find the right niche for this incarnation of The Outsiders.

While much my interest in the book has come from Dixon's ability to blend Authority style action into the DCU mainstream, most of the discussion of this book has been focused on the book's supposed homophobia, and I think it's only fair to mention this in my own review. Feminist comics bloggers like Kalinara have criticized the first issue for its disrespect of lesbians and even relatively apolitical bloggers like Chris Sims have complained that the series seems to have a moment where things become derogatory.

Most of this controversy stems from the fact that Chuck Dixon is one of the few openly right wing comic books who has chided writers for including openly gay characters in their work. Now, most of Dixon's complaints stem from his discomfort with sexuality of any sort being openly stated in comics, but it is clear and clearly lamentable that there does seem to be a double standard at work. Much like the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, Dixon's rules about representation seem to allow for open heterosexuality without it being indecent, but homosexuality always seems to be sexual or sensual and thus a big comic no-no. This does present Dixon with a noticeable problem in writing The Outsiders because he's inheriting the title from Judd Winnick, an author has had gay-rights themed issues in other titles and has made The Outsiders at times, sexually explicit. As such, Dixon inherits a book that used to be everything he hates: it was sexually explicit (although not graphic) and it had two lesbian characters.

Now the immediate controversy at hand stems from Batman, supposedly unintentionally, goading his lesbian teammate Thunder into outing herself and her girlfriend/teammate Grace. Thunder is enraged when Batman refers to Thunder and Grace's "special" relationship. According to Batman, he only meant to say that they were good friends. Thunder is the one who misunderstands and believes that he is speaking euphemistically and thus, degradingly. Much of the criticism from Kalinara and Sims has to do whether or not Batman would know about their lesbian relationship and whether or not Batman would ever speak like this. I've come to understand that this level of nuanced true-to-character stuff will vary from writer to writer, particularly in an age when DC editing is as bad as it is. Would Batman would refer to someone as being "special" friends without understanding the implication of the word "special"? One would think that he would be quite sensitive to these type of implication given the fact that he's spent most of his adult life as a single man living with young boys and a domineering, elderly gentlemen; but I cannot say for certain whether or not Batman does know about what the word "special" implied beyond what I read in the text. Dixon's version of the character seems not to know what he was doing, even if as readers we think thinks this makes Batman an idiot and not the world's greatest detective.

Kalinara particularly criticizes Dixon for Thunder's reaction to Batman's usage of the word "special", which admittedly, does seem so over the top that it paints her as irrational. There seems to be more truth to this critique then whether or not Dixon is being true to Batman's character. Thunder does seem to be unhinged at Batman's remark, even when you do consider that she is rightfully upset that Batman is trying to fire her from the team.

However, is this as homophobic as Kalinara makes it seem? I don't think so. Or at least, I'm reluctant to say from this one issue, or rather from this one scene which consists of little more than a few panels. I'm willing to wait and see what happens over the next few issues to see whether or not Dixon's ideological biases (which I clearly do not agree with) override his ability to tell a good story. What I can say for now is that the scene is awkward and it is a blemish on what is an otherwise good story. Whether or not it is awkward because it suffers from Dixon foisting his beliefs onto the story, I am at this point, undecided. In the past I have seen Dixon portray right wingers as political nuts and I've seen him write what I thought was one of the best girl-positive series in a long time, Batgirl: Year One. I have high hopes for this series; I think it might be able to make some minor advances in the superhero genre, at least in terms of the DC mainstream. That being said, I take the critiques of Kalinara with more than a grain and salt and I do have my reservations.


Addendum: Boy, was I wrong about Dixon. As later issues showed, Dixon took a kind of sleazy interest in the sex lives of his lesbian characters. Rather than succumb to homophobia, Dixon's Outsiders read like a hastily executed frat-boy wet dream.