The Greg Hatcher Legacy Files #220: ‘Escaping This Week’

[Greg posted this on 17 January 2015, and the Wayback Machine link is … here, but as of this morning, it’s not working. It shows a message saying that Comics Should Be Good is offline for maintenance, and I’m a bit worried about that, because it’s been that way for a week, and I hope it will come back at some point! (I don’t know what that message means, as CSBG is not being maintained, as it’s not around any longer.) So, no view of the comments for this post, sadly. When something like this comes up, in which Greg mentions James Bond, I do wish we could get his take on the latest Bond news, for instance. It was always fun to get Greg’s take on things! And, of course, this is a timely column, as God knows we can all use a distraction from the real world right about now!!!! Pick up your favorite escapist literature and enjoy!]

In all the years I’ve been embroiled with adventure fiction and comics and pulps and so on, whether it’s just reading it or writing about it or creating my own, there’s always been a contingent of folks sneering at the stuff. One of the pejoratives they hurl, over and over, is this — “It’s just escapism.”

I never understood that, even as a kid. My response then and now is Um … yeah. I know. So what? That’s the whole POINT.

If I wanted real life, good God, Julie and I have all the real life we can handle already; money stuff, health issues, bad news from both family and friends. Real life right now is such that the moments we can steal for leisure are few and far between. I guarantee you, we’re not going to spend those moments wallowing in some critically-acclaimed fictional version of the same kind of drudgery. Screw real life. We need a break. We are looking to get out.

I’ve written before about how the more creators try to inject ‘realism’ into superhero adventure, the more fragile they actually are making it, and I don’t really want to go over all that again. What I did want to do is go back and look at some of my favorite ‘escapist’ stories, just for the fun of it. Why did some particular characters hit me so hard? Was it just right-time-right-place or was there something else going on? What is it about those particular stories that gets the job done?

The first fictional character that really grabbed me was Batman. From when I was a child of five, enraptured by the first episode of the 1966 television show, I was absolutely all the way in. And I pretty much have stayed a Bat-guy ever since. With only a couple of years off in the early 1980s, I’d been buying the regular books all the way up through Night of the Owls and I’m still picking up the occasional novel or trade paperback collection. (And, of course, I’m still in for Batman ’66.) Almost fifty years. Something must’ve stuck. What was it that grabbed me about the Caped Crusader from day one?

I can tell you what it WASN’T — “realism.” That’s pretty much the last thing I want in any superhero story, and despite the fact that the character of Batman is often trotted out as an example of a ‘realistic’ superhero, the truth of the matter is that the more realistic you make a Batman story, the worse it gets, and the more it tempts the audience to start poking holes in it.

What I loved as a kid and what I’m still drawn to as an adult is the unrealistic part. I grew up in a world that was hugely unfair, run by crooks and liars, and if I’m truthful it feels like I’m still living there now. Originally, I just loved the idea of a guy who put on a mask and cape and went out to give the bullies what was coming to them. A guy who made wrong things right when no one else could. There were a lot of people in my life that deserved a beat-down and then to be hauled away in cuffs and it wasn’t happening, so at least getting to see it in comics and on TV was satisfying. And it still is, if I’m honest.

I don’t mean revenge — the reason I like Batman Begins the best of all the Nolan Batman movies is because it’s the one that draws the clearest line about the difference between the two. I love the bit at the end where Rachel is apologizing to Bruce for the things she said to him about vengeance and he replies, “But true things.” That moment really resonates with me.

It’s about justice and fairness for Bruce now, that’s what he had to learn. (It’s also the reason the two sequels that followed that movie don’t work nearly as well, because it seems like he promptly forgot all about that lesson.)

So one piece of the appeal of my favorite ‘escapist’ fiction is the righting of wrongs, seeing justice done. Batman hit me the hardest there because he’s all about being REACTIVE, he’s not like Superman or the Flash or any of those guys that suited up and fought crime because they felt like they ought to. If his parents hadn’t been killed, Batman probably wouldn’t be Batman. The anger and the need to DO something that fueled young Bruce is something I immediately understood, and it’s hugely appealing when your own life feels so arbitrary and unfair and you can’t do anything about it. When you’re in Batman’s world, life is still crappy but action is being taken to remedy it and you know you’re on the winning side. That’s hugely comforting.

I have a whole laundry list of stuff I want to see in a Batman story beyond that, believe me, but the core of it, the thing that makes it an escape for me, is what I just told you. Everything else is a bonus.

Sometimes, though, the escape isn’t just thematic — i.e., visiting a world where justice is done despite tremendous odds against it. Sometimes I just want to be someplace ELSE.

That’s what I like about sword and sorcery fiction, whether it’s Robert E. Howard or Ray Harryhausen. The story is incidental; the appeal is just getting to spend time in the world that is SO NOT this one.

That’s probably why I tend to revisit John Carter of Mars more than Tarzan of the Apes, too, come to think of it. Edgar Rice Burroughs went back to the same basic romance plot a lot, and his heroes were mostly cut from the same cloth, but his world-building was spectacular.

To a lesser extent, that’s what I like about the classic pulp heroes as well. Doc Savage and the Shadow and the Spider all allegedly are operating in the real world, but the real 1930s looks nothing like the one depicted in those tales.

For that matter, that was the thing that made Ian Fleming’s James Bond stand out from other thrillers of the day — the sheer audacity of the world he created for James Bond to live in. Fleming had zero interest in writing about actual espionage. The James Bond novels are heroic fantasy in spy-fiction drag. That’s why the best ones are stories with huge megalomaniacal villains bent on world conquest from a secret island base or the top of an Alp.

The thing Ian Fleming did with James Bond that none of his imitators ever managed, including all the guys that have tried to do new Bond novels in his wake, was to re-interpret real life through the lens of a boy’s daydream adventure. Fleming would do something relatively mundane like travel to New York or Las Vegas or Jamaica, and then rewrite the experience into something exotic. Sometimes he’d do it even in the pages of a travel article, one suspects just to keep himself awake. (This is actually the origin of “007 in New York,” a throwaway piece Fleming originally did for the Herald-Tribune.)

As long as I’m talking about the classic pulps and similar stories, there’s another component that makes those stories such a tremendous comfort in times of stress — it’s a thrill ride, but a thrill ride with a guaranteed safe landing.

Most of the time actions have consequences, but never in the world of pulp fiction. For the Spider, especially, realism is just plain off the table. Any one of the apocalyptic disasters visited upon Manhattan by the guys the Spider went up against would have crippled the city, they’d be years cleaning up the collateral damage.

But Richard Wentworth handled it monthly. Sure, he’d probably have to wrap a shoulder wound or something, but that was it; he was back the next issue in fine shape and raring to go up against a new villain. Taking it to the brink, then pulling you back to safety at the last minute — that was the genius move that pulp writers depended on to sell their wares. It still works … you see it a lot in action movies these days, especially in stuff like the TAKEN movies with Liam Neeson.

The assurance that no matter what else happens, the hero’s probably going to triumph and everyone will be okay in the end is probably the strongest element to any piece of escape fiction and when it’s not there, we often feel betrayed. (I know people who simply won’t try a new book or movie at all unless they’re assured of a happy ending.) I don’t demand it from fiction myself … I adore the Planet of the Apes franchise and those stories usually end on a downer. In fact, tacking a happy ending on to appease people is the biggest complaint film aficionados have about the original release of Blade Runner. But on the other hand, neither Blade Runner or Planet of the Apes are technically escapism in my book; those aren’t the movies I pull out when I just want to relax.

So these are my preferred ingredients for adventure fiction to be a pure vacation from reality:

A hero seeing that justice is done

… but with a safe landing at the end.

Put all those things together and you have what Julie and I have been relaxing with lately. On television, we’ve been re-watching Eureka. Damn but that was a fun show. We’ve also been revisiting Leverage.

You could argue that Leverage was often based on real cons happening to real people, and the setting isn’t terribly exotic, but I maintain that the milieu of the show — what executive producer John Rogers called “Crime World” — has only a passing relationship with our real one. As for the predatory corporate types that made up most of the villains, well, the total lack of ‘realism’ of them always getting their comeuppance and going to prison kind of speaks for itself.

In books I’ve been rereading Sherlock Holmes pastiches. Partly because I have been working on Holmes projects of my own, but mostly just because I like Sherlock Holmes. Lately I’ve been revisiting the ones I have here that are looser and more fun. Frank Thomas did a couple that I liked back when I was in high school, The Golden Bird and The Sacred Sword.

As these efforts go, the Thomas books have more in common with the movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce than with the literary Holmes and Watson as depicted by Conan Doyle, but I like them. I’d thought those two books were all there were but I recently discovered that Thomas did quite a few more, and all of them available for pennies. So I’m kind of working my way through those.

Amusing trivial aside about Frank Thomas — he was the actor that played Tom Corbett Space Cadet. You just never know who’s going to turn out to be a Sherlockian.

And in comics? Well, that’s been my favorite place to hide out from real life for years, and as luck would have it, not too long ago, this arrived.

I said back when it came out that the Tales of the Batman: Archie Goodwin hardcover was my desert island Batman book. Well, this is the other one. Tales of the Batman: Len Wein collects every Batman story Wein ever scripted, including a couple of team-up stories … but more importantly for me, it’s got the entirety of “Bat-Murderer,” “Moon of the Wolf,” the two-parter with Clayface illustrated by Marshall Rogers, and Untold Legend of the Batman. That in itself would satisfy me … but the great bonus for me was discovering over a hundred more pages of stories I’d never seen, most of which appeared during the early 1980s when I was out of comics. It’s just awesome stuff and I’m wallowing in it. In our current situation I’d never be able to afford this, even with the deep discount I got on it … but I’d pre-ordered it and prepaid for it almost a year ago. And boy, has it helped out the last couple of weeks to come home and hang out with groovy Bronze Age Batman for a while.

So there you go. Full circle. Somehow I always end up back at Batman.

Feel free to sound off about your favorite go-to escapist stuff in the comments. As for me, I think I’m off to go fire up something like The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and I’ll see you back here next week.