The Versatility Of The Batman

A Batman story can be:

a detective story;
action-adventure;
science fiction, eg, alien invasion or technological innovation;
fantasy, eg, ghosts or demons;
horror, eg, vampires or serial killers;
social realism, eg, street crime or urban decay;
a psychological study of the title character or of one of his opponents;
romance, with, eg, Wayne's original fiancee, Selina Kyle or Talia;
super heroes, eg, guest starring Superman;
alternative reality fiction, eg, Gotham By Gaslight where the Batman was around at the same time as the Ripper;
humour, with, eg, the Penguin or the Riddler treated as comical rather than horrific.

It can address any age range from children looking at pictures and learning to read ("Batman is chasing the Penguin") to entirely mature content:

Selina Kyle as a prostitute with an under age partner in Batman: Year One;
a mass murder in a pornographic cinema in The Dark Knight Returns;
"Some crimes frighten even the Batman" advertising Batman: Night Cries, about child abuse.

Like many characters, the Batman has become multi-media but his two main media remain graphic novels and feature films.

Poul Anderson On Comics

Poul Anderson wrote many works of fiction in prose but not in the visual media of cinema or comic books. I have found three references to comics in his novels.

(i) In There Will Be Time, time traveller Jack Havig comments that, despite Superman's telephone kiosk, the most convenient place in a modern city for a time traveller to disappear is a public toilet cubicle.

Greek dramatists sometimes commented on and corrected errors or implausibilities in the works of their predecessors. In this vein, in the first Superman film, Clark Kent, responding to an emergency, approaches a public telephone that is not even enclosed in a kiosk, realises that it would afford him no privacy for a costume change and instead uses a revolving door at super speed.

Thus, the film, like Anderson, commented on a familiar scene from earlier Superman comics.

(ii) In Operation Luna (New York, 2000), Steve Matuchek remarks:

"It's only comic-book heroes and their ilk who bounce directly from one brush with death to the next, wisecracking along the way. Real humans react to such things." (pp. 158-159)

Yes, real humans in real life and in realistically written novels or comics. There is nothing in the latter medium that obliges that it be written unrealistically.

(iii) Matuchek also speaks against vigilantism even if conducted in "...comic-book costumes" (p. 140). Right. Again, comics comment on earlier comics. Frank Miller's Batman is a vigilante wanted for assault, breaking and entering, child endangerment and, when the Joker's dead body has been found, murder. In Alan Moore's Watchmen, the public demonstrates and the police strike ("Badges, not Masks") until anonymous vigilantism is banned. In Garth Ennis' The Boys, superheroes are untrained and get a lot of people killed on 9/11. So the critique of comic book implausibilities is conducted in comics.

I would like to see high quality film and graphic adaptations of Anderson's works.

Watchmen And The Dark Knight

Neither of these DC Comics graphic novels influenced the other but, because both reflected the current state of comics in relation to the real world, they developed some parallels.

(i) The Dark Knight Returns is set in a near future where there is a danger of nuclear war. Watchmen is set in an alternative present with nuclear war imminent.

(ii) Each has a US President who is known to us: Reagan in Knight; Nixon in Watchmen. (Near the end of Watchmen, a headline raises the spectre of "RR" as President but a character ridicules the idea of a cowboy actor in the White House. They refer, of course, to Robert Redford.)

(iii) In both, independently operating costumed crime fighters are banned although a masked vigilante defies the ban and a powerful superhero works for the US government.

(iv) In both, the ban is expressed by a diagonal red line across the image of a crime fighter. (In the DC cross-over series, Legends, a temporary ban was expressed in the same way. Super-powered mutants were persecuted in the Marvel Universe.)

(v) In both, a powerful superhero leaves Earth.

(vi) Because both involve a character falling from a skyscraper, they both raise the question of whether such a person would lose consciousness before reaching the ground.

(vii) Watchmen involves an attack on New York; Knight involves an attempt to destroy the Twin Towers of Gotham City: Two Face's clue is that his next target will be twice as big as you can possibly imagine...