‘Meet the Professor Who’s Going to Teach a College Course All About Batman’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
I often think about this quote from High Fidelity:
I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like. Books, records, films—these things matter.
These things matter. High or low, mainstream or obscure, it matters what we like because we like it in the first place. The pursuit of understanding what we like doesn’t have a fixed end point. It’s about process, not product, and that is often clearest to me when art that’s considered low brow, or childish, is put under the same microscope reserved for Great Literature™.
There’s usually some tension and pushback when pop culture finds a home in academia. Particularly when we’re talking about genres and mediums that are so easily pigeonholed as uncultured or unserious—comics, anime, superheroes, cartoons.
That artists have to continue to justify the careful and close study of any and all art forms is frustrating, to say the least. Some rise to that defense better than others, and I can think of no better recent example than Baltimore poet Steven Leyva. Leyva is going to teach an undergraduate-level class titled ‘The Evolution of Batman’ at the University of Baltimore and in his interview with io9, he goes into detail about why such a class is valuable.
Even if you’re not deep into Batman canon (that would include me), this interview is compelling because it is animated with an attention to character, narrative, and story that writers of any genre should find valuable.
Take, for example, Spider-Man. Here’s a character where we’ve got lots of movies, lots of media, you know, cartoons, video games. But he’s always presented in the same way. They share some similarity. In fact, they’re both orphans. Obviously, Peter Parker’s not rich, but the way you see Spider-Man is always as a guilt-ridden teenager or young adult.
And yeah, it’s just very different for Batman. He seems to have greater boundaries. So part of the reason of why to teach the class, is because here’s a figure who seems to be able to say something and comment on society, but also reflect society in a recursive relationship. He also has a very broad aesthetic, so we can talk about many [artistic] disciplines and different kinds of social concerns and what media does with them within a single course.
Even more important, perhaps, is when Leyva discusses the why in terms of the context surrounding this particular pursuit of knowledge:
I teach at an urban, small university in Baltimore. Our population reflects the demographics of the city, which is to say we’re about 60 percent African American. I don’t think that only institutions with much broader funding and endowments should be the only place where this type of class should be taught. I think students who grew up the way that I grew up—relatively poor, but curious—they should have the space to say, “The things that I am interested in, people might marginalize me and say, ‘those are just hobbies.’” Those can be areas of deep, academic study and, you know, frankly people can make jobs out of them. Right? I mean, you probably know this writing for Rise of the Black Panther as well. So, that’s some of the thinking there.
And in that vein, the following quote is something I keep rereading, over and over:
Ultimately, one of the reasons I wanted to teach this class is because I was convinced by Weldon saying Batman is not a figure of fear or revenge, but hope. Everything about his storytelling, almost everything resets, right? Like, no matter what the trauma, the mission can help us reset. He essentially says “never again” in that childlike oath that he makes to himself. It’s an optimistic oath. It’s a child’s oath, for sure. It’s free of the knowing cynicism that creeps in with adulthood. But that one is important.
In a time where, as a black man in America, I feel like every day I’m under assault. How useless, how Sisyphean is it to say “never again”? We just had a shooting down the road [in Annapolis]. And I’m thinking, how many times are we going to say “never again.” But the oath is important, because what is left if that goes? If it isn’t for the striving? And here’s a character that—even in the broad ways in which he can be presented—embodies that. You know? It is essentially Camus. Camus’ idea is “You have to imagine Sisyphus happy.” That’s the way Batman works.
Books, records, films—these things matter.