Batman comics of the early days (circa 1940-60) recurringly featured giant-sized everyday objects, usually business-related. Villains had a habit of establishing hideouts in the factories of companies that had inexplicably found a market for giant functional versions of their usual products, whether those be cash registers, adding machines, globes, record players, coins . . . or typewriters. As well as providing uniquely interactive backdrops for fight scenes, these objects often served as villains’ death traps (the elaborate torture device that grants the hero time to escape).

Just as often, though, the object was militarized to the heroes’ advantage – carriage return becomes battering ram, typebars become crowbars – and concurrently caused anyone who touched it to come down with a severe case of Ponty Pool– and The Shining-esque glossolalia. Batman and Robin start speaking in puns and using performative language, narrating their own actions (“X marks the spot!”), blurring the line between lip-smacks and onomatopoeic pun/ches.

Or, in the 1970s issue that includes a nostalgic throwback to the Big Object days, the fight between Batman and the villain Deadshot across the keyboard of an IBM Selectric is translated into the limit of their self-expression as comic-book icons: their trade name, “DC,” brand synergizing with Selectric: it’s electric! Surfing across the keyboard, Deadshot then either completes this peripatetic concrete love poem to DC Comics, or defiles it with nonsense: “DCH9!:”. Batman threatens to write him out of the story faster-than-the-eye-can-see: “I’ll jump down and write you a letter!” (in a line that makes one wonder whether he’s threatening to write an angry letter to the editor or just wants to be pen pals). As he says earlier, “Give it up, Deadshot! This isn’t between just us twoanymore!” hence acknowledging the presence of D(i)C(tator) and/or (type)writer.

It’s the typewriter, naturally, after which this Big Object trope is now named: the “Giant Typewriter,” like the Big Dumb Object of science fiction or the derogatory sense of the term “Chinese Typewriter.” It’s the unwieldy, too-complex contraption that flagrantly contradicts rational engineering and cost-benefit analysis. (See the estimated cost of building the Death Star.) Its true purpose is solely to fascinate, intimidate, be incomprehensible: in short, to be other; hence its association, as here, with the Villain.

The real is the nitty-gritty mechanics of how such an object would actually work (like the cost-benefit math to a math-phobe); the imaginary is its glossy black boxiness, or if there is no black box, our refusal to try to understand what the mass of blinking buttons on the Star Trek control panel actually does (and the writer’s refusal to explain — and our refusal to care once we do understand what they are: Big and Dumb); the symbolic is its classification as other.

In the case of the Batman objects, though, they’re not truly other (they’re not the imperial Death Star, the Great Wall of China, or the impenetrable black box of 2001: A Space Odyssey), rather they’re uncanny. Like the grotesque worlds of sensational travel and explorer narratives beginning from Gulliver’s Travels, the familiar is magnified or miniaturized as a means of othering that familiarity, only to reflect it back to us unfamiliarly. In other words, as Batman and Robin’s performance poetry would seem to run in hand with, these Giant Typewriter battle-surfaces are abstract art objects, defamiliarizing (perhaps more so now, to us). Batman and Robin go native, xeno-glossy, in the presence of them, and weaponize them no differently than the Bad Guys do. In that sense, these early comics prefigure Alan Moore’s mature 1980s Batman comic The Killing Joke, which deconstructs the master-slave dialectic between Batman and Joker, rationality and irrationality. These giant objects represent moments in which (to reference an image from Moore’s comic) the beam of dividing light disappears: both between Good and Bad and between text and material context (the two, apparently, are aligned) as the writer writes about what’s on his desk, has his characters dance glitchy poems across it, and renders his own typewriter as the weapon – truth, the Big Other – to be fought with and fought over: to itself be othered.

In another sense, though, these are just little dumb comics with Big Dumb Uncanny Objects in them. These are decidedly discursively different from Big Dumb Uncanny Objects That Sometimes Get Called “(sm)Art.”

As it so happens, Bill Finger, the creator of the Giant Typewriter trope, reportedly wasn’t making this stuff up (or rather, was not so lost for ideas as to write about his typewriter): he was influenced by such (sm)art objects, or at least by the dumb billboard-esque equivalents of them (like Lard Lad’s giant donut).

In reference to one modern such object, incidentally related to the typewriter – Claes Oldenburg’s Typewriter Eraser – Bill Brown muses about its double-remove from an order of familiarity: not only is it useless,* being giant, but young viewers won’t even know what it’s a giant version of, such that “this abandoned object attains a new stature precisely because it has no life outside the boundary of art – no life, that is, within our everyday lives” (p.15). If we were to find that giant typewriter eraser in an old Batman comic, however (“Don’t make me erase you to the death, Deadshot!”), would the unexpected context of an old comic book place it at yet another remove, or would it just be kind of laughably cheesy/donutty nostalgic kitsch? How is it that Big Dumb Uncanny Objects (or even, perhaps, just Big Dumb Objects) can serve as well for the scene for a 1950s Batman comic-book battle, a sculptural billboard for a donut shop (real or cartoon), and as 1999 art outside the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.? By re-reading, albeit with at least some of our age’s inevitable irony, the Giant Typewriters of Batman as materialist Art, it would seem I’m merely elevating them into the art gallery, as it were, of this context-mixing blog post…

* “useless” is always a highly qualified term, of course. This is also another way in which the Big Objects of Batman are peculiar, though: they’re actually functional.

Sources

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28:1 (2001), 1-22.

Comic Treadmill

Oz and Ends

 

— Kevin Kvas