Embedded Files
Originally published at www.wizarduniverse.com - May 5th 2007
SUMMER PREVIEW: BATMAN
Cor blimey, sacre bleu and ay caramba! Writer Grant Morrison takes us on a world tour of Bat-wannabes
By Chris Ward
Pretend all you want that a French ex-convict Batman or a mustachioed Latin American impostor called Bat-Hombre never existed. But the strange truth is that many of these Batman understudies—or “Batmen of All Nations”—joined together to form a Club of Heroes in 1955’s Detective Comics #215 in all their stereotype-driven glory. Leave it to writer Grant Morrison and artist J.H. Williams III to dig up these D-list relics—and create spanking new send-ups with “Chief-Man-of-Bats” and “Wingman”—and give them a unique, if unexpected, A-list story in a three-issue arc beginning in June’s Batman #667.
“When I got the chance to do Batman, I thought, ‘I’ve gotta bring them back, because they’re so ridiculous, but they all give a reflection of how Batman could have gone if he’d gone really wrong,’” Morrison laughs. When the group gets together at the island home of the mysterious millionaire who financed their formation, a spate of murders rocks the Club to its core. “Who was this millionaire? Why did we never hear much about this guy again? Why did he want his own superhero team? Why was he bankrolling these guys?” Morrison asks. “There’s all these unanswered questions I thought would make a really good story. They wind up on this island, and one by one, they all start getting bumped off, [and] it’s done really dead serious. As stupid as they are, I wanted to do them in such a way that they were like real characters.”
Hold onto your El Gauchos, because we got Morrison to give you a world tour of where these Bat-foreigners have been—and where he’s taking them next!
THE KNIGHT AND THE SQUIRE
“The Knight and Squire, originally, were a couple of crimefighters from a small English village. And you can imagine how much crime there would be in a sleepy English village. [Laughs] They fight crime on bicycles they call ‘War Horses,’ and the church bell would ring whenever some felon was on the loose. I’m thinking, ‘How often did that bell ring? And was there a robbery at the tea shop by guys like the Joker or the Killer Croc?’ So the idea in itself was kind of nuts. But my idea was that the dad—the original Knight—is dead, and the son—the original Squire—is the new Knight. He’s this really troubled individual, a young guy who saw his father die and blames himself. So he kind of goes crazy and blows the family fortune on drugs and prostitutes. [Laughs] Imagine Bruce Wayne losing it. It’s this young guy who’s the Robin figure, an upstanding young crimefighter, and when everything goes wrong, he’s left with a castle. So what would you do? [Laughs] He’s a guy who’s really f---ed up badly, but he’s been found by a working-class family, and the young girl from that family has become the new Squire and they’ve gotten cleaned up and into the crimefighting game again. So he’s a slightly tragic figure.”
EL GAUCHO
"El Gaucho is from Argentina. He was pretty weird from the start, with the whole Gaucho hat and the national dress from Argentina that he fights crime in. But he’s a big street fighter now. He’s actually taken it seriously, and he’s now a respected crimefighter in his native Argentina. He’s never going to make it onto the Justice League, but he’s done okay.”
THE MUSKETEER“As his name suggests, he looks like one of the four Musketeers. We’ve slightly updated his costume—they’ve all gone through a few changes. The idea is that he killed a bad guy on a rooftop, just plunged his rapier through his heart by mistake, and then was sent to prison. He’s in there with all the guys he sent to prison himself. [Laughs] It’s a hellish ordeal. But, in the end, he writes a book and there’s a big movie deal coming up, so he’s now living the high life and doesn’t want to get involved again in the world of crimefighting. He thanks his lucky stars he ever heard of the idea of Batman, because even though it led him to hell and back, now he’s profiting from it.”
THE LEGIONARY“He’s the Italian guy who’s gone the way of Diego Maradoa, the [real-world] soccer player, who’s the guy I kind of based him on. He was really super-athletic at the peak of his game in the ’90s, and then he got into eating lots and lots of pizza. The Legionary is now way past his crimefighting days, but he’s a fun guy. He likes to eat and drink and make merry.”
CHIEF MAN-OF-BATS
“He’s got a son named Little Raven, who is now called Raven and wants to be taken seriously as a superhero. They’re kind of homemade superheroes. It’s the idea of a couple of guys on a reservation who have seen Batman and Robin and decide they can do their own version of that—you know, have their own cave. So they’re kind of the bargain-basement version of Batman and Robin. But, again, that’s pretty cool. They’ve developed their own crimefighting methods and they work on a very, very small scale. And his native villain is some guy named Black Elk who runs a grocery store. [Laughs]”
THE RANGER
“He’s the Australian guy, and crime is bad there. He used to wear a sort of boy-scout suit, so all the criminals have been mocking him all these years, calling him a homosexual and various other names. In Australian dialect, of course. So he’s gone really hardcore now. He wears a heavy-duty helmet and carries a gun because he’s realized he can’t do anything like Batman does.”
WINGMAN
“Wingman was the guy that Batman trained as a partner one time, and Robin got really upset because he thought he’d been replaced in Batman’s affections. [Laughs] This guy was a young Swedish athlete who was trained to be the Batman of Sweden. He was basically an apprentice to Batman, but now he doesn’t want that, necessarily, because he’s got his own thing going in Sweden that’s really good. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with Batman. So he says stuff like, ‘I came up with the whole Wingman crimefighting process years before anyone had ever heard of Batman.’ He’s totally, completely denying his influences. He’s into high-tech gimmicks and gizmos. He’s a kind of James Bond version of Batman. And he has a big, big chip on his shoulder.”
BAT-HOMBRE
[Editor’s note: Bat-Hombre was not part of the Club of Heroes—he appeared separately in Batman #56 (1949).] “Bat-Hombre was a fake, actually. I really wanted to use Bat-Hombre, because, I mean, who can go wrong? He was in a story called ‘Ride, Bat-Hombre, Ride!’ [Laughs] But he was actually an outlaw pretending to be Bat-Hombre in order to thwart an Argentinean minister or something like that. [Laughs]. But Batman does take on the Bat-Hombre guys—you see, I’ve done my research on this stuff. Bat-Hombre was actually actually working for ‘El Papagayo,’ the Parrot. [Laughs] I read the entire history of the guy!”
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