Warning: Spoilers Ahead for Batman/Superman #17
Meta-commentary seems to be the name of the game in Gene Luen Yang and Ivan Reis’ newly minted run on Batman/Superman, namely isolating exactly what is wrong with the superhero genre. A world-bending story-arc, “The Archive of Worlds” is set within three separate realities, with Batman/Superman #17 fittingly entitled “Worlds Collide," writer Yang is currently exploring the ethos behind The Caped Crusader and The Man of Tomorrow through a twisted Golden Age homage, revealed to be the machinations of the cinephilic, robotic villain Autuer.io. Complex yet perceptive, Yang’s take on the DC mythos ends up presenting a scathing critique of superherodom.
Since the dawn of superheroes in 1938 with Action Comics #1, caped crime fighters have gone in and out of style as the times have changed. Originally action-oriented novelties geared towards children as a colorful alternative to dime-store novels, superheroes, led by the iconic Batman and Superman, have changed to suit their culture, morphing through the campiness of the ‘60s and ‘70s to the more grim ‘80s to the bombastic ‘90s. Nevertheless, one aspect of the stories told of these heroes has remained the same: the sterling moralism of these worlds where good always prevails. As commentary Yang is presenting superheroes as what they have become: the product of a bygone era that is too obsessed with "safe" morality to tell piercing, hard-hitting stories.
In Batman/Superman #17, the “mainstream” Bats and Supes encounter the sinister Autuer.io onboard a hijacked satellite, revealing him to be a film-obsessed neurotic who demands “drama, awe and fear” from his action-tales of woe. The story then shifts to an alternate world called “The World of the Dark Knight,” in which a dimension-displaced Superman and Lois Lane team up with Batman and Robin to get to the bottom of what has gone wrong in their respective timelines, not knowing that both are a product of Autuer.io’s obsession with fiction. Both of these worlds (as presented in Batman/Superman #16), play heavily on the traditional “Golden Age” motifs of the characters, presenting Batman as a stalwart detective and Superman as a flawless boy scout, and it is these versions of the characters whom Autuer.io feels exemplify his perfect drama.
What Yang seems to be implying is that, from a fundamental standpoint, these heroes have become stagnant forces in the culture-at-large because their publisher, DC Comics, refuses to allow them to evolve beyond their origins. Even though the days of the comics code are long behind them, Batman and Superman both suffer due to their inherent limitations as symbols of a moral code from an era nearly a century gone. Writers of these stories often must rely on hackneyed formulaic plot devices, paper tiger villains, and convoluted "reality" elements to tell their stories simply because they cannot portray these characters in any other light than the simplistic moralist traditions of the early 20th Century.
Yang depicts the world-shaping villain Autuer.io as symbolic of this oppressive atmosphere: a “director” who is so fixated on capturing a depiction of “perfect” drama that his stories never move beyond the most basic plot elements and also a villain who uses “deus ex machina” devices to solve any and all possible problems, such as when he summons a Kryptonite bracelet from his film world to stop Superman. By the same token, how different is Autuer.io from an audience who believes any tragedy or act of destruction and evil can be made right or solved simply by an opposing force of good, no matter the harm? This isn’t just a problem with superheroes, it’s a problem with simplistic moralism in general as a storytelling discipline, Yang implies, and it’s one that needs to be addressed.
Can Batman and Superman combat the weight of an earlier age? Batman/Superman #17 is on sale now wherever comic books are sold.