Ten Thoughts About The Return of Bruce Wayne #2
June 2nd, 2010 by Esther Inglis-Arkell | Tags: Batman, bruce wayne, DC comics, grant morrisonSpoilers below the cut.
1. Frazer Irving’s art really works with this issue. The deep, saturated browns and blue-greens, the way of drawing character’s faces in a non-comic-book way that still emphasizes both their personalities and their moods, the otherworldly look of the whatever-it-was in the end of the universe scenes; they all add up to a fantastic look for the book.
2. Bruce the Puritan is way scarier than Bruce the Batman. In these scenes he plays the good guy, and he’s still frightening.
3. Even in that hat.
4. I’m not particularly fond of the Innocent Nature-Loving Witch brought down by the Male Puritan Douchebags story, though. Don’t get me wrong, the Puritans were patriarchal religious nutbags, but the actual story of the witch trials is way more complicated, and cool, than this. The accused witches were often outsiders, but as far as I’ve read the first wave of witch trials in Salem were made by young female accusers. More interestingly, they were made by young, female, poor accusers against rich people. The young girls used religious extremism in order to claw for power when they had none.
5. I do feel bad for that poor lady who killed her husband, though. Going up against Puritan Batman is upsetting. I guess she shouldn’t have messed with his bats.
6. The Time Traveling Superheroes seemed a little more integrated into this story than they wer in the first. I can understand it. The first book was, after all, an introduction.
7. That could be because of the reveal of Bruce Wayne as the Archivist at the end of the universe, which ties them into his story, instead of just making them skim the surface.
8. The other reveal, of Nathaniel Wayne as the Grand High Witch Hunter at the end, with the witch cursing him and all of his kin, was another really good moment.
9. Although, when you consider that, by cursing all of his kin, she pretty much cursed herself to be hanged as well, that witch really screwed herself over. That was Greek-style ironic tragedy right there.
10. Hurray! Pirates are next!
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I’m not particularly fond of the Innocent Nature-Loving Witch brought down by the Male Puritan Douchebags story, though. Don’t get me wrong, the Puritans were patriarchal religious nutbags, but the actual story of the witch trials is way more complicated, and cool, than this. The accused witches were often outsiders, but as far as I’ve read the first wave of witch trials in Salem were made by young female accusers. More interestingly, they were made by young, female, poor accusers against rich people. The young girls used religious extremism in order to claw for power when they had none.
Salem was a special case when it came to witch trials even at the time so it’s hard to use it as a guide to how things usually worked. But the Salem girls weren’t iirc particularly poor or from unrespected families.
When it comes to regular witch trials from what I’ve read–and I’m not claiming to be an expert here at all–but the impression I get is that it’s simply something we can’t understand not being in that society. It was a specific thing that they knew when they saw, tied into their obsessions that aren’t our obsessions.
The most common accusers were middle aged women and young adult men. And if there was one thing one thing that seemed to make you the most vulnerable for accusation was not having enough children–not always an outsider. Sorry, I know this is off-topic, but I remember reading about these things and getting the strong impression that pretty much everything we modern people think fueled witchcraft accusations would make an actual Puritan confused.
Actually, in all too many cases the cause of the witch trials was all too tragically understandable – the people being accused of practicing witchcraft were only “guilty” of belonging to the wrong denomination of Christianity.
There’s an excellent book about this that I picked up in Scotland titled The Deil’s Ain, which I recommend picking up if you’re interested in the subject and if it’s still in print.