Madeleine Cookies

Here I was, en route to writing another column entirely this mid-month -- or so I thought, until about a week ago. Originally, I was going to write about the burgeoning field of online comics, and how a lot of successful offline collections of comic strips, in particular, start on the web.

This may not be news to some of you, but through the good offices of my 15 year-old son, I kept discovering new strips, and it seemed to warrant some attention here at NG.

And then I had not one, but two "madeleine cookie" moments this week, with comics arriving over the transom.

The madeleine, of course, refers to the legendary tea cake, the taste of which sparks the flood of memories that Proust uses to start the multi-volume narrative of Remembrance of Things Past -- or however the title is being more clearly translated into English these days.

I had the first such moment when a copy of the DC Showcase series arrived, in this instance the fourth volume of their Batman compilations. This particular Showcase volume gathers Batman and Detective comics from the summer of 1968 through the fall of 1969.

I was nine, going on ten, and the United States was, of course, falling apart in ways from which it has arguably never recovered.

What's a young boy to do when the world starts going kablooie? Well, start buying Batman comics, I guess. And the first one I ever bought is reproduced in this B&W, sawbuck-and-a-half edition. And by "bought," I don't mean "read," or even "given to me," but rather, the first one I can recall picking up and getting myself.

That'd be issue #204, from August of 1968: Operation Blindfold.

Written by Frank Robbins, who seemingly wrote every Bat-script in those days -- and who was the first guy I was aware of as being a "comics writer" (later, his heavily-inked artwork would start appearing on DC's pages, too) -- and boasting solid Irv Novick art on the cover and the interior, the two-parter -- it concludes in #205, Blind As...a Bat?

As you might infer from the titles, it has to do with blindness -- in this case though, not as any kind of terrifying metaphor, but rather, as part of a scheme by a villain called, well, "the Schemer," whom I didn't remember, but who has owl-like cowlicks where his sideburns should be, and indeed, an owl as a familiar.

In the tradition of many of the plotlines of the day, The Schemer is planning to hijack a large shipment of gold. That's about it, really, except what made this story transcendent -- memorable -- for me was the opening sequence in the first part, and the cover art in the second.

More specifically, the Schemer's scheme involves creating a fake "convention" of blind men -- they're all men -- who will somehow be able to move around Gotham unnoticed. In that era of transforming awareness (concurrent with the falling apart), civil rights hadn't quite found its dialogue among the disabled or physically challenged yet, and the blind guys look like Central Casting types, tapping around with canes, with "I am blind" signs around their necks, and holding tin cups for, variously, collecting coins from passers-by, or from which to vend pencils at street corners.

And the narration in the captions is in the style of the 60s Batman TV series, with an unseen announcer having an omniscient view -- or sense -- of the action, and making some creaky jokes (which the characters do, as well).

But about that artwork: The first book opens with the murder of one of the blind men; he's gunned down in cold blood as he walks down an alley. It's so stark -- more like an EC crime comic from the 50s -- that I wonder how it passed the then-prevailing comics code. Perhaps simply the lack of blood. Before he dies, the victim etches a message in the wall -- with his cane -- to Commissioner Gordon: they found out I'm Batman!

It's as slambang an opening as I've ever seen in comics, and perhaps no surprise the rest of the story, in those pre-Gaiman (see sidebar)/Moore/Vertigo-y/Dark Knight-ish days couldn't live up to those initial panels.

But some of the energy is recaptured in the cover to part two, which shows both Batman and Robin each reflected separately in another blind man's glasses -- and each with a bullet flying toward their respective faces.

Novick's art captures some of the inchoate terror hinted at in the first panels of the first part, and re-reading each issue now, I remembered how I felt then -- the kind of delightful dread at the opening, always wondering what twist would allow Batman not to be murdered after all (and for another view of that, once again, I refer you once again to the review of Gaiman's latest, on sidebar).

That was the most "madeleine cookie" aspect of the whole thing: I could clearly remember how I felt, and thought, reading the originals.

Which, in turn, has sparked some reflection on how I felt, and thought, about other things back then, and how I've changed -- or not -- since.

All from two comics whose total cost was less than a quarter!

And I still have those two issues, squirreled away somewhere in bags and boxes. Now I mostly only come across them when I move, and at that, I generally only look at the covers. So I hadn't laid eyes on them in awhile. Sometimes I would get as far as glancing at the first page or two before putting them back, when I did run across them.

But it's been decades (!) since I've read the stories cover-to-cover.

I had little or no recollection of The Schemer, or the relatively prosaic unfolding of the story -- replete with quips and Alfred's then-combover hairstyle -- but I was surprised at how vivid my recollection of my initial reaction to the artwork, and the menace of the opening frames was.

Robbins was writing his "blind" tales just before the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy that same year. Reading the comics that came after the two-parter -- for some reason, I didn't buy them all, back then, so many in the anthology were new to me -- I didn't notice they didn't grow as dark as the world did.

That would come later.

Strangely, though, there are at least two different reproduced covers (and attendant stories here) showing Batman surrounded by rebelling women -- Bat Girl and her minions in one instance, manifestations of Cat Woman in another -- so there was certainly a nascent fear of something in the late 60s air, manifested in these comics, though other recurring themes in these stories are nuclear mishaps (or in the case of one time travel tale, a future nuclear war), and the ongoing notion of identity (i.e., who is "really" who?)

Which kind of makes sense, if you're in disguise, all the time.

As for the second "madeleine" moment, evoking a time some years later (yet still some years ago), that will have to wait for a second column, probably in fall (!), since it's that time of year when I write two consecutive editions of NG, though the second July column will once again be a rumination on Comic Con, two weeks hence. Rick will then write the two August columns and I will, as we did last summer, "See you in September." Speaking of time's swift passing...

Pass the cookies.