“I got interested in the class element of Batman: He’s a rich man who beats up poor people. It’s quite a bizarre mission to go out at night dressed as a bat and punch the hell out of junkies. And then he goes home and lives in this mansion. There’s an aspirational quality to him—he’s an outlaw and he can buy anything. He has a new Batmobile every movie. He’s very plutonian in the sense that he’s wealthy and also in the sense that he’s sexually deviant. Gayness is built into Batman. I’m not using gay in the pejorative sense, but Batman is very, very gay. There’s just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. I think that’s why people like it. All these women fancy him and they all wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get to him. He doesn’t care—he’s more interested in hanging out with the old guy and the kid.”
It’s interesting to see the subject of Batman’s sexuality come into question as there have been numerous panels throughout the year that are almost laugh out loud in their innuendo… Leave it to Grant Morrison to raise eyebrows with his latest comments.
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Bologna!
I (thankfully) have no idea who Grant Morrison is, but it is crystal clear that he has no idea what he is talking about. This “Batman is gay” claim has been around since the 50’s (when Dr. Wertham attacked comic books), and for those who know the full history of the character, is completely ridiculous.
Typical sensationalism and cultural graverobbing by a self-important yet uniformed individual – bad form, old chap.
Actually Steve, Morrison has written a lot of the Batman titles over the years and some of the biggest story lines for the character in the last decade. Honestly, he’s an excellent comic writer but I can’t say I agree with his assessment of the Caped Crusader.
It sounds like a case where the writer applies his own particular counter-culture vision to a character without comprehending the original concepts.
A character as popular as Batman has appeared in thousands of comic book stories since his debut in Detective Comics #27 (May 1939). Writers have been stretched extremely thin to keep readers engaged month-to-month, decade-upon-decade. Sure, there have been what we today would label odd panels and storylines for Batman, but so has there been for many, many other comic book characters (most of whom have been long forgotten with the passage of time). Society was just different back then, including comic books, movies, music, etc., and many superheroes were certainly eccentric by today’s standards.
Robin (the Boy Wonder) first appeared (Detective Comics #38, April 1940) as a marketing technique (and not a boy toy) to increase circulation – and it worked. The sidekick concept was then copied by a plethora of other superheroes in the Golden Age.
BTW, as revealed in Detective Comics #33 (December 1939) and in Batman Comics #47 (June-July 1948), Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered by… a white male.
I don’t read Moderns per se, but if a writer is going to bring such a biased attitude to his script, I honestly have no desire to read his work. Think I’ll stick with the true character concepts that Bob Kane (artist, and a notorious womanizer too) and Bill Finger (writer) intended, and those stories are classics indeed. I wonder if Grant Morrison even knows who Kane and Finger are?