The Gil Kane Punch of the Week 16: What I Need to Be a Man

Because my last post has proven to be one of the more popular entries I've done, perhaps because it captures the Nazi zeitgeist that is sweeping the nation right now, I'm taking this week's punch from the same Howard Chaykin/Gil Kane story, "Flyer," from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight 26 (Jan. 1992).



Kane really goes nuts with the unconventional panel layouts in this story, which can also make scanning the images a challenge.

I had some concern that this may not even be a punch (in fact, the entire story has many more great kicks than it does good punches), but I concluded that the motion lines seem more lined up with a punch than a kick, though Curt has definitely left the ground to take this shot. I would be glad to field opposing arguments in the comments.

Also, I want to take a moment to praise Steve Oliff's coloring on this story. In particular, I love the blues he uses on Batman's cape and cowl.

Remember that Time that Batman Almost Fathered the Master Race?

In doing the extensive research required to bring you the weekly Gil Kane punch, I often have to read through Gil Kane stories that are surprisingly punch-free, or, at the very least, light on the distinctive punches that I need. Nonetheless, this research often bears fruit in other ways, as when I recently re-read one of my all-time favorite Batman stories: "Flyer" from Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight 24-26 (1991-92), written by Howard Chaykin, drawn by Gil Kane.

When this story first came out, I had already been a long-time fan of Howard Chaykin's work, especially American Flagg!, which I read when it was first published, despite the fact that I was probably way too young to read it. Needless to say, I was excited to see Chaykin's take on Batman. And this is definitely a Howard Chaykin Batman comic.

"Flyer" opens with an apparently naked Bruce Wayne meditating in the Batcave, when Alfred interrupts to inform him that meditation time is over. The story takes place 18 months after Bruce first appeared as Batman, and Alfred is still treating this like a phase his employer will soon be over. Alfred asks, "Isn't it really time to put away the horned hat, the music hall suit, and get down to some serious heir making?" As we'll see, there is a nice little bit of foreshadowing in Alfred's question. Also, I like that Alfred wants to see Bruce Wayne make some babies.

Bruce blows off Alfred and heads off on patrol instead. After stopping the mugging of a husband, wife, and young son that look oddly familiar, Batman is attacked by a strange, mechanized flying man. Batman defeats him, and in a pretty stupid move, he takes the flyer to the Batcave for study. There, Batman administers sodium pentothal in order to get this guy's story.

It turns out that the flyer is Curtis Eisenmann, whose parents were an American Army officer and the daughter of a Nazi rocket scientist. Anyone who has ever read anything by Howard Chaykin will know that he's got a real thing for Nazi women, so when he introduces Brigit Eisenmann, we have a pretty good idea where this is going.

After her own father died in American custody, she continued his scientific research for the American space program, which was one of the few areas of employment available to Nazi immigrants in postwar America, and thus, there weren't a lot of "Nazis are stealing our jobs" protests at the time.

Being a Nazi and all, Brigit Eisenmann turns out to be a pretty terrible mother. She treats her son like some kind of genetic mistake, so in order to prove himself to her, he becomes a helicopter pilot for the Gotham City police department (huh?).

He has the bad luck to be on the job the night the Gotham PD goes after Batman, as seen in Batman: Year One. The swarm of bats Batman calls up cause Curt's helicopter to crash, leaving him maimed and barely alive. His mother, always ready to to make lemonade out of her worthless failure of a son, decides to use him for her latest cybernetic experiments, and she commands him to capture Batman, with the promise that once he proves himself to her, she will work to make him normal again.

At this point, with all this exposition out of the way, the story moves into batshit crazy Howard Chaykin territory. You see, Brigit Eisenmann has been watching reports of Batman on TV, and these reports have been stirring up feelings in her that she hasn't felt in years.

So, she plans to capture Batman in order to rape him and then breed the perfect Aryan human.

You know, there are many times I say to myself, "They don't make Batman stories like this anymore," but that's mainly in nostalgic reference to Bob Haney Brave and the Bold stories or great Denny O'Neil stories where Batman clocks a bunch of thugs with a bag full of ocelots. This is the only time I've said it in reference to a story where Batman is threatened with rape.

"Mrs. Eisenmann, are you trying to seduce me?"

And, to make matters worse, Mrs. Eisenmann totally fails at the dirty talk.

Clearly she's out of practice, but to be fair, that incest shit used to knock 'em dead back in the Fatherland.

With her efforts to arouse him yielding no results, she decides to get rough.

Yes, Chaykin actually has her say, "Lie back and enjoy it."

Wait a minute! What did that next issue box say?

Oh, man.


That being said, this story does provide us with one of the great lines in Batman history:

Instead of getting down to business, however, Brigit proceeds to torture Batman in order to make him more compliant. It seems that this is her version of foreplay.

Batman's been crucified and electrified, but he still manages to come up with just the right thing to say.

Also, I love Batman's narration on this next page.

Of course Bruce Wayne likes his women a little crazy, but he draws the line at Nazis.

Curt, who feels neglected because his mother is devoting so much attention to her new beau, enters the torture chamber and decides to get all Oedipal up in this place.


Anyway, Batman proves to be more of a man than the Eisenmann family can handle, and he escapes as Curt self-destructs, taking his mother with him. Batman decides, at this point, that his caped-crusading days are no longer fun, and he goes off to compose his letter to Penthouse Forum, from which we get this story's narration.


By the way, Batman, what's you're favorite Rolling Stones song?

Really, I figured you'd be more of a Let It Bleed man.

The Day Job: Keeping up with Chop-Chop

As I mentioned last week, posting has been light on this blog as I've been working on a conference paper on racial caricatures in comics from the Golden Age to the present, focusing particularly on Asian caricatures that inform Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel, American Born Chinese. Part of my work on this project over the last few days has involved reading through my collection of Blackhawk comics and picking out images of the Blackhawks' Chinese mascot, Chop-Chop, to use in the PowerPoint presentation that will be accompanying the paper. This whole process, as you can imagine, is making me feel a little unclean.

Chop-Chop first appeared in Military Comics 3 as comedy relief in the otherwise pretty somber Blackhawk feature that began in Military Comics 1. Here's the first panel in which the character appeared:

From the beginning, Chop-Chop was depicted as a foul-mouthed Chinaman (actually, Dude, the preferred nomenclature is "Asian") who was prone to violence, usually with a sharp object of some kind.

He even had his own tagline, which he used with great frequency whenever Chop-Chop faced adversity or any kind of obstacle: "Chop-Chop been double-clossed!"

There were a lot of such stereotypes used throughout World War II and the Korean War, but I'm using Chop-Chop in this paper because he's representative of a lot of stereotypical images in comics, and he gained a lot of traction as a popular character in the series. Even from his first appearance, he was being used as part of the publicity for the Blackhawk feature:

By the 1950s, Chop-Chop would graduate to his own feature in the regular Blackhawk comic, which kicked up the caricature even further:

The Blackhawk series survived both World War II and the Korean War, and the 1960s run, where the team goes from being high-flying adventurers to a low-rent superhero group, needs a whole series of posts to discuss (these issues, written by Bob Haney, are flat out nuts, and it's one of my strongest desires that DC produces a Showcase edition of them). Blackhawk was also revived a few times as a war book. The series was revived in 1982 by Mark Evanier and Dan Spiegle because Steven Spielberg bought the film rights to the comic (which would you rather have: Spielberg's Blackhawk or Schindler's List? I know exactly where I stand on that question.) Evanier and Spiegle's run in the 80s is plain fantastic, but it's proven really difficult for me to get a complete run of it. Some issues feature "Detached Service Diary" backup stories that feature some great art by Howard Chaykin, Alex Toth, and others.

Evanier and Spiegle made some changes to the Chop-Chop character, giving him a less caricatured appearance and avoiding the accented speech patterns, but they did keep the costume and made him a martial arts expert.

A few years later, in an underrated revival by Howard Chaykin (and later Marty Pasko and Rich Burchett), "Chop-Chop" was renamed Weng Chan, and the series frequently commented on the racism of the "Chop-Chop" nickname, including a metatextual scene in the Pasko/Burchett run where Weng complains about his depiction in the Blackhawk comic book (if I remember correctly).

The Chaykin prestige-format miniseries is great, typical Chaykin work from that period following American Flagg! and his Shadow revival. I remember at the time that it got a lot of criticism for its graphic sexuality and the strong liberties he took with the revamp. And like a lot of Chaykin's work, it has a complex narrative that requires the reader's complete attention, as well as considerable historical knowledge of its wartime mileau. However, as a long-time, devoted Howard Chaykin fan, I have a hard time being objective or critical about his work, even when it should challenge some of my stronger feelings about gender issues.

I feel that this post is setting up more posts that I'll probably do down the line on the Bob Haney Blackhawk series and on Howard Chaykin, among other things.

Update: More on Chop-Chop here.