Critical Thinking is a new column that analyzes academic writing on comics and art.“The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and his Legacy”
Disability Studies Quarterly Vol. 34 No. 4
Written by Sonya Freeman Loftis
Edited by Bruce Henderson
Published by Ohio State University Libraries
Dec 2014
The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture
Written by Samatha Baskind
Published by Penn State University Press
Feb 2018
The Politics of Collecting: Race and Aestheticization of Property
Written by Eunsong Kim
Published by Duke University Press
Aug 2024
I have a problem, and it is comics. All roads lead to sequential art. This is an admission of bias, I suppose, that I have comics on the brain, that I will find a way to relate art to comics always and no matter what. And so, while reading an essay on disability rep and modern adaptations of classic lit by Sonya Freeman Loftis– The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and his Legacy– I’m not thinking about the World’s Greatest Detective (1887). I’m thinking about the World’s Greatest Detective (1939). Loftis’ concern is the science of Arthur Conan Doyle’s age, character legacy preservation severing context, and the bias it comes from/contributes to. The danger of performing clinical diagnosis on a serial character, Loftis warns, is reducing an identity from a lived experience to a stereotype. Unfortunately, that reminds me of comics, too.
Doyle’s Detective is an archaic, pseudo-scientific literary exploration of how crime is related to deviance. And look, I don’t know if we’re at a point in comics’ history where superheroes are the most popular they’ve ever been, but I am confident that we’ve reached a high-water mark for using superheroes to try to understand power, force, and responsibility. While Doyle’s “bad people do bad things and that’s crime” approach does feel like it’s casting a sidelong glance towards supervillains, my interest is in what a faulty dynamic that criminalizes identities says about justice.
Whose justice we’re talking about becomes complicated over the decades, as superheroes shift culturally from protectors to pioneers. Samantha Baskind’s The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture has much to teach about this, where comics and genre fiction fit into the overall cultural consumption of art and how it shapes subsequent stories of resistance. I found Rod Serling’s struggle with relevance evocative of comics, masking civil rights stories with fantasy trappings to keep censors from robbing them of their meaning. The same with how those who followed in his popular success produced popularly acceptable stories, dressing fiction in historic locations and populating it with historic figures to make the past the story you want it to be.
Batman’s characteristics as inheritance from Holmes presents an opportunity to explore the relationship between deviance and control under an authoritarian regime. The Politics of Collecting is about the relationship between conceptual art and scientific management, highlighting the amoral values that art empowers when combined with capitalism (once again, not a book about comics). Eunsong Kim’s observations on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s dehumanization of those who work for the benefit of those who command production is the same philosophical model that divides world leaders from developing nations, and why Batman is money but Bill Finger died broke. Doyle’s criminals being the kind of person who breaks the law instead of a product of an inequitable society keeps the society in place. Are we reconciling the meaning of heroism with the atrocities of the state, or aren’t we? Fellow cantankerous bearded comics wizard Alan Moore recently said that comics never really grew up, they came to meet the sophistication of their readers. When your superhero fights regular people on the street, it’s criminal not to consider it.
Two hundred years since the age of Holmes and practically a century of Batman later, if we wish to see speculative fiction stories as relevant, we are forced to compare the world they portray to our own. Do this and it is clear that the Detective resides in a fantasy world; what that fantasy is matters.
Batman and Joker, Holmes and Moriarty, Watson and criminalized identity:
The characteristics of the World’s Greatest Detective established by Sherlock Holmes and interpolated into Batman are also the behaviors that gained Holmes a contemporary reputation of having autism. Loftis goes on to write about the problems that are inherent in trying to derive authentic representation from character canon, but first she dives into how the source material from Doyle is itself skewed by the author’s anachronistic perspective. That Holmes is viewed through Doyle’s lens of late nineteenth century medical pseudo-science is separated from their narrative when adapted, but not changed in nature, besides becoming the characteristics that identify an icon. A contemporary autism diagnosis of Sherlock Holmes feels accurate when your criteria is a clinical checklist of symptoms. Does that make it an accurate portrayal of identity?
Furthermore, the reader’s picture of Holmes doesn’t come from observing his actions, but a secondary account, Dr. Watson’s. Trying to parse out an objective picture of Holmes from treating Watson’s stories as a subjective retelling, I don’t think it’s possible. From Watson’s perspective, Holmes is different. All his observations are made in light of this difference, in conversation with it. Because of this, we’re only given the behavior that Watson can pair with his diagnosis, while leaving other behaviors out. The Holmes we are shown is reduced already, a character in a story about another man.
To Watson, Holmes was a savant. Holmes’ superhuman skills came at the cost of other attributes found in balance within common men. The World’s Greatest Detective’s fixation on crime superseding his interest in social grace or sexual satisfaction were seen by the experts of Watson and Doyle’s age as a zero-sum exchange; intellect given in overabundance meant reduced emotional capacity. His capacity to solve crime was not only a difference but a deviance. Not only is Batman frequently in conflict with his friends, lovers, peers, and colleagues over his dedication to the pursuit of justice over all else, he is self-aware of his disregard for social connection, constructing a false playboy persona to keep his vigilante identity better hidden. Bruce Wayne’s status as celebrity bachelor, possessor of a luxury lifestyle the everyday citizen only dreams of, is a smokescreen.
Depending on the Detective, of course; there are nearly as many takes on Holmes and Batman over the years as there have been years. And the reader is tasked with reconciling them. Different vibes from different sources offer a contradictory, complex consensus on the character, what they would or wouldn’t do, what makes the Detective different from Superman or Donald Duck. Representation is complicated. Intersectional representation will always be highly contradictory, as truth and justice require individual context. The clash of purposeful writing and multiple personas across many mediums creates an illusion of life. But the returns on using comics to prove who someone is are negligible.
The criminalized connection between those who value intellectual pursuits and deviant behavior as the inspiration for a comic about justice- that’s drifted further and further into militarized authoritarianism- on the other hand, I can go quite a ways with that. Batman as a criminal who fights crime is a fantasy in which criminal behavior is portrayed not as a reaction to inequity of resources, but as a trait found in a type of person. The Detective that functions as a shield protecting citizens from criminals ends up serving the state and not the people.
The Joker is the Moriarty figure to Batman’s Holmes. The World’s Greatest Detective has a criminal mind superior to any rogue he squares up against. He can envision any and every scenario conceivable and deduce a way to thwart it. The Joker argues, sometimes directly, that the Detective is still a criminal despite the sincerity of his intentions. There’s probably a whole other essay that could be written on the rise of the Joker over the years as an explicit, “truth teller” Moriarty figure, whose interest is showing the Detective the hypocrisy of being a superhero in a world where the institutions have failed. Batman was closer to Holmes at the start, feared by the police for his skill and ruthlessness, but what’s normal for the police has become such a garish nightmare over the decades that Batman’s brutality is no longer comparatively excessive. And still, the famous Frank Miller scene where Batman snaps the gun at the hilt to signify the difference between what he does and those he fights echoes the idea that Holmes could but chooses not to be Moriarty. As Batman and violence are normalized, his continued presence in domestic conflict- as opposed to the international conflation of soldiers and heroes- drove a wedge between vigilantes and protectors like Superman. The difference ties back to the psychology of Doyle and his era, criminals and citizens.
The criminals who faced the World’s Greatest Detective are seen as a type of person, rather than the product of social anomie. That is, society teaches us what to value but denies us equitable access; people will find ways outside what is socially acceptable to obtain what they need but cannot achieve through acceptable means. Addressing need places the responsibility of ending crime on the society that creates the need. The pseudo-science at the turn of the previous century Doyle occupied wasn’t having that. Criminals were people who were different, who committed crimes because there was something wrong with them.
Coincidentally an improbably common thing in Gotham City. Many of the criminals in Holmes’ cases have a fascination that consumes them, realigning their moral compass so that pursuit of their intellectual fixation justifies (to them) their criminal behavior. Batman’s operatic foes take this a step further, creating a criminal identity based on their passion. Mr. Freeze studies cryogenics, Posion Ivy studies botany, Two Face passes the bar exam. The World’s Greatest Detective studies crime. In another uncanny coincidence, the pursuit of knowledge being viewed as eccentric, criminal behavior suits societies that sustain a state of manufactured need. Batman’s outlaw efforts to better protect society ensure he will never be allowed to be a part of it.
Superman notions and comic book politics:
Maintaining a difference between criminals and citizens is fundamental to controlling both. Doyle’s criminal behavior is linked to being different- a normal citizen doesn’t break the law- and so eccentric interests, ardent passions, “out of the ordinary” behaviors are othered and criminalized. The Detective and his vigilante ilk make the division between obedience and allowance visible by breaking the law to better fight crime, so the consequences must be explicit when (and if) they come. Time moves forward. The saviors have become settlers; the iconography of protecting the innocent is rewritten as the pioneer guarding his stake. A protector and paternalist justification of exploitation, the marginalized ask who the superhero serves. As comics attempt to set Batman in the same world as his readers, the role of violence to perpetuate the state demands to be addressed.
So let’s do that. If we’re going to stop criminal behavior, punishing criminals is too late. Addressing the cause, on the other hand, removes what triggers the behavior. Batman the vigilante is kind of tragic, the good he does fighting to protect people perpetuates a system that will continue to put people in danger. Batman as a consequence of crime is harmful to society as long as he’s penalizing those who steal bread but does nothing about those in power to profit from hunger. As a mansion-dwelling white man aristocrat product of generational wealth who spends National Budget amounts of money in depressingly National Budget percentages (re: almost entirely squandered on weapons), one could see arguing that Batman allows crime to happen because he’s driven to physically assault the underprivileged “bad guys.”
Nor is the charity the answer. Charity keeps the structure in place as well as Batman, choosing to ignore the source of disparity and instead address its effect on select individuals. And it is given with disproportionate proximity to wealth, where organizations that are part of the existent structure do better than orgs whose values and goals are different from those of owners and managers. The most in need also need advocates, people who have enough security themselves to navigate institutional red tape. Charity is those who are withholding your self-determination deciding whether or not to grant you agency. To be empowered this way is still dehumanizing. Every person should be able to decide what they need for themselves, and not have to make due with what they’re allotted from a prejudiced system. The paternalist savior figure maintains the machinery of oppression.
Baskind connects Jon Bogdanove to George Caleb Bingham in her chapter on Joe Kubert and different representations of the Warsaw Ghetto in comic books (Bogdanove and Louise Simonson did a WWII fantasy issue in Man of Steel). Superman was once a Moses figure, protecting the innocent and freeing them from tyranny. He possessed the power and the compassion to do good. As America emerged as a major power in the postwar period, dropping bombs around the globe in the name of freedom, the iconography of Moses leading the oppressed out of bondage patriotically transferred its power to Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap. The wealthy deciding who will benefit from charity and settler colonists “discovering” natural resources are both empowered by the same authority. The superhero protects members of society and punishes criminals.
So Batman the domestic force is a little bit Detective, a little bit cowboy. The cowboy lived the same contradictory life as the vigilante, he has the regional survival skills that keep the townspeople safe from the indigenous freedom fighters they’ve displaced. Skilled like the enemy, he learned from them, from connecting with them over shared interests and passions, because he respected their community and their traditions. And because he is too much like them, so capable of understanding tradition he has surpassed it, and not enough like us, he is unfit to be a member of our society. Forced to ride off into the sunset instead of settling down on the ranch. The cowboy’s actions are condoned, but not enough to be decriminalized.
Maybe superhero stories fail to modernize in a satisfying way because the cowboy and the Detective in their roots are both ahistoric theories about societal sophistication over criminalized identities. When the titular protagonist of Ben Edlund‘s satire The Tick is presented with the opportunity to stop crime in the city completely, he balks: “I’m a super-hero! I don’t want to stop crime. I just want to fight it!!” The problem with Batman assaulting the desperate and the Wayne Foundation’s unlimited returns funding every organization that applies is one so simple it’s lanced in a throwaway gag thirty-five years ago. It would appear that people have moved on from wondering who superheroes protect. Internet devotees are all too familiar with the discussions surrounding the Wayne family’s money management. Yet “the Batman discourse” interests me because I see a demand for accountability in comics recognizing the gap between the America comic book readers live in and the idea of it that appears in most American comic books. Many communities saw themselves denied the guarantees and protections that citizenship in the country they were born in was supposed to provide. So keepers of the peace were simultaneously enforcing oppression. At trail, real life Black Panther Bobby Seale said this of the legal system, before being bound and gagged in court, and later sent to prison for being in contempt: “This [is a] racist and fascist administrative government with its Superman notions and comic book politics. We’re hip to the fact that Superman never saved no Black people.”
I think it’s important to recognize that comics don’t exist in a vacuum for their readers. Regardless of what was or wasn’t written into Superman, while he was doing his thing at DC, the world outside was happening. If we are considering who Superman is, or Batman, Holmes, or the World’s Greatest Detective, there’s more to think about than the text alone, the story arcs in publishing order. Our perception of characters culturally can come to create a dialog that creative decisions are made in relation to. In the case of the Detective, the division between who is protected and who is penalized is a core feature. Again- it’s hard not to see a connection between police and the military being used to secure property rather than protect people and superheroes being an extension of that authoritarian power when the chairman of the board is out there using his condoned superiority to put folks with no option but to steal in the hospital instead of meeting their needs.
Superman the Moses figure becoming Uncle Sam makes his violence like the military’s- valorous. Batman’s domestic violence, not on outsiders but used against Americans, is separate and conditional compared to Superman, despite them both being pioneers. Batman isn’t a truly cowboy story, anyway, he’s the World’s Greatest Detective. Superman is the guy wise and powerful enough to “protect” the whole world. Batman is a story about being able to determine who merits protection.
Diagnosis and division:
That brings us back to Loftis, on autism and avatars. The insurmountable shortcomings of diagnosing the behaviors of and extracting an identity from fictitious accounts of a character. Bruce Wayne is not a real person. He has no life but what has been written for him. You can’t observe his behavior because it doesn’t exist outside of what the creators of the comic have already “observed” (and isolated to construct a narrative). Different creators’ differing accounts might present the illusion of the contradictory choices real life forces us to reconcile, but the composite figure whom they collectively illustrate exists solely in the mind of the reader. Batman is a trans-media cultural consensus, a justifiable claim based on record. Not a person. The characteristics of the World’s Greatest Detective were incorporated into his story by literary adaptation.
Which is a secondary account to begin with! The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are “written” by Watson; not Holmes’ lived reality at all but set as an 1800s doctor’s perspective. Holmes’ life is already interpreted through the lens of Watson’s (mis)diagnosis in the source material. We only see the side of Holmes that Watson chose to record. The limitation is doubled, the author recording the actions of the hero to service their narrative, and the narrator being a disciple of pseudo-science. Yet the characteristics that they describe have become the traits of the World’s Greatest Detective.
An objective diagnosis of Batman is impossible because he is an adaptation that connects to its source through those traits. Watson has a construction- a condition, savant- which he believes Holmes to be, and records the behavior that support his deductions. These characteristics are inherited by Batman to adhere to World’s Greatest Detective identity; Batman satisfies contemporary diagnosis not because of who he is or the decisions he makes, but because the inclusion of pathologized characteristics is essential to the adaptation. The Detective is confined to a space smaller than life. What does this reduce an identity to? Loftis warns us that characters with labels based on satisfying stereotypes will be used as exemplars to represent the group that the stereotypes are formed about. Instead of identity being described by a lived experience, it’s an outsider’s projection, defined by difference.
The authority that Watson has to know Holmes better than himself comes from the same source that crosses the Cumberland Gap with Daniel Boone, can be found in the trans-media aspects of Batman in addition to the elements of Doyle’s legacy. Kim’s book on museums and conceptual art connects Taylorist “scientific” (it isn’t) organization- a practice of industry that divides labor and management, built on the model of chattel slavery- directly to the commodified arts deskilling its practitioners. Owners who know how to do it, workers who follow instructions. The intellectual property is more important than the execution of concept, or even who executes it. The auteur is credited for the idea the comic carries out, at the expense of all the other creators being seen as collaborators in service to the vision. A problem in comics that goes way back. And I’m running out of different ways to say this: the authority is the social construct of whiteness. The ability to declare something that belongs to someone else as yours is the essence of whiteness. They’re always discovering things. You don’t have to be Batman to do comics about him- of course white guys are qualified to write about identities they have no personal perspective on.
The Final Problem:
Let’s engage in another thought experiment, where you take pieces of a thing away and replace them with different ones, and with time what you call it remains the same but what you perceive it as shifts. Comics characters are such an aggregation. The individual and collective consensus of who Batman is, what he would do, what would make his actions out of character, the ancient ship has become a curse, an endless contest between familiarity and innovation. Creators are restrained by audience expectations. The stories they tell have to recognizably embody the brand but satisfyingly body the anticipation of the over-familiar reader. And it works, they adhere to canon and Batman remains recognizably iconic. Retaining Holmes’ behavior without any of Watson’s contextualizing creates an illusion of objectivity- one that will seem to confirm the legitimacy of similar stereotypes.
People beg a much more interesting question than what continuity allows. How much can I change, take away and replace, and still remain myself, imagines the self as static. Being alive means to constantly grow and change. The you in the past shouldn’t be the you of your future. Or maybe it’s time that reveals what your core values really are.
So how do you separate the Holmes from the Batman, how do you get Superman out of America’s Backyard? Many try to modernize these old ideas and end up inheriting an identity crisis, maintaining the locks shackled to the past. The questions raised by Bobby Seale have not been answered. After years of backsliding from empty promises, most books on social justice and reform bought to open a dialog ended up in secondhand shops. I don’t know if our reading habits can fix things, but I believe if we fix our thinking habits, we’ll better understand what we read.
Rod Serling’s approach to radical storytelling set the die for how we picture modern genre fiction and social metaphor. The Twilight Zone, of course, social stories masked by speculative fiction. Baskind’s work examining his path to the series as well as those who followed him is relevant to looking for authenticity in artists who attempt a similar approach. Following the success of his production about the resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, Serling attempted to tell another story about unjust contemporary race relations, this time inspired by the lynching of Emmett Till, and was censored. He tried to rewrite his stories with the same message while avoiding addressing tangible connection to real-world injustices and dynamics (and censorship), but found the results of such over-constructed parables too vague to say anything meaningful. Serling created programs like Twilight Zone and Night Gallery so that he could tell true stories, after abandoning “the impossible task of allegorically striking out at a social evil with a feather duster because the available symbols for allegory were too few, too far between, and too totally dissimilar to what was actually needed.”
The generation of storytellers reckoning with the Warsaw Ghetto that followed Serling had figures like Leon Uris (I can see a parallel between Uris writing Exodus and Chris Claremont’s kibbutz inspired X-Men), who shared Serling’s desire to use history to make a point, but took it into the kind of fabricated contrivance Serling found useless. Uris had, like Superman into Uncle Sam, abandoned being a refugee for being a settler, and told stories his generation wanted to hear, a redemption narrative instead of the emotional burden of survival. Uris made up scenarios- genre fiction thrills- and filled in the details with authentic historic references, named his characters after real people, or in homage to them. The good guys beat the bad guys, dressed in history, placed beside real accounts, defining the collective story.
Although art has the power to speak to us without explanation, we can’t allow that to lead us to imagining artwork as neutral. Every story is an account. If we want to understand it, part of that has to be understanding who is speaking and what they are trying to say. The first Critical Thinking, which deals with identity representation during the anonymity of comics’ golden age and comic books’ cultural split from comic strips, argues for the necessity of a heuristic analysis that looks into what influences the artist to create their work in addition to analyzing the work itself. Creators worked in different industries and brought multidisciplinary insight to the comics craft. Who they were sometimes conflicted with how they were published.
Another key to understanding meaning is placing art in cultural context. The world comes in, channeled through the artist, and goes out, connecting readers and culture through individual experience. A transactional treatment of art has the auteur possess the meaning within the piece, which the audience is granted access to. However, the experimental film director Lev Kuleshov established (a long time ago) that audiences inherently understand how images in sequence tell a story and will create their own narrative for why they follow one another, instead of acting as a blank slate on which the filmmaker’s message can be transcribed. Different aspects of characters are valued for diverse reasons, with their multiple, irreconcilable sources resonating differently across various communities. It’s more accurate to recognize Batman’s collective persona as a combination of sources than cleave to a single interpretation.
To create art and to experience it is sharing grace. Lifting the yolk of time. Once, the artist was acknowledged as being of the same cloth as the art they made, able to touch the soul. The creative is freed from the need for talent. Being the one who has the idea supersedes the ability to express it well (or the need to express it oneself). This severance of concept from the “post-studio process” of making suits transactional art, if that’s who we want deciding what art is. The second Critical Thinking dives into how creativity is a social consensus rather than a skill or a trait an artist possesses. Who decides whether it’s valuable, the reader or the company selling the comic book? What’s the appeal in a universal story if getting there means taking away all its culture?
Time’s up, y’all. Comics have been mature enough to warrant serious criticism since they distinguished themselves as an artform separate from preexisting combinations of text and image- since birth. And art that speaks to personal empowerment, but in reality does nothing but maintain the structures of oppression, is an aestheticized tool of fascism as well as content creation. It’s time to recognize these ideas and move forward with them. Look at the world right now. Bat-signal is lit. The onus is on us to step up and meet the times we’ve made. I still believe that a better understanding of art leads to a better understanding of life. Contemplating justice needs to inspire action instead of satisfaction if things are to change.
Arpad Okay has degrees in education and journalism, but writes in third person on the internet. If there are deductive flaws, they are a reflection of my work and not the source material.
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