As BlueSky grows as a social media platform, users are discovering some old warhorses. For some reason Scott Peterson’s posting of Denny O’Neil’s Batman bible from January 1989 was going around recently. Peterson was O’Neil’s assistant in the Bat office for many years, and had an electronic copy of the bible which he was able to retrieve from long ago software and post for all to see.
It’s a lovely document, reflecting the person who wrote it, and the care with which he oversaw his duties. O’Neil wrote some of the greatest Batman stories, and was one of the best comics editors ever, and generally one of the titans of our industry. Here’s the opening:
A BRIEF BATBIBLE: NOTES ON THE DARK NIGHT DETECTIVE
What This Is
Herewith, in brief, everything the present editor thinks new writers and artists need to know to do basic Batman stories. The continuity is, perforce, always changing, but the backstory, props, locales and major characters are graven in stone, at least until the next editor ungraves them. So, while you should check with the one of the editorial staff on current stuff, what follows should give you what you need to know about the history and milieu and, to use a very fancy word, the mythos.
Who He is
Bruce Wayne, son of Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Wayne. Age: early 30s. Heir to a large fortune estimated at nearly 500 million dollars.
Wayne money is old money. The family has been in Gotham since Colonial times. there are large plots of prime, downtown acreage estate that belong to the estate. Income from these alone would provide Bruce with a handsome living, but he also profits from Wayne Industries and Wayne tech, private-sector firms that specialize in cutting-edge practical applications of research.
Bruce is handsome, and he can be charming, and he projects intelligence. But he also seems unfocused. Those who know him privately lament that he’s never found himself, never quite grown up, has never even wondered what his potential might be, much less how to realize it. It is known that he spent his adolescence and early manhood drifting around the world, auditing university classes here and there, occasionally even enrolling for a semester, without ever getting close to a degree. He was the quintessential dilettante and shrewd Gothamites feel he still is. His only real talent, they say, is in hiring exactly the right people to manage his various enterprises.
He is not married. He’s been seen with dozens of attractive females, but he’s never had a serious affair. He favors women who, like himself, are underachievers. It is assumed that he has occasional flings–the phrase “one night stand” comes to mind–but his dates tend neither to confirm or deny the assumption. If they ever compared experiences, they’d learn that an evening with Bruce is always the same: dinner, a show or an appearance at some social or charity affair, and early leave-taking, a plea of illness or a busy tomorrow, a quick kiss on the cheek with a promise to call, and a silent telephone thereafter.
There’s much more about the Batcave, the supporting cast, and really anything you would need to know if you were sitting down to write a Bat-story in 1989 and beyond. (I would love to see the art that went with the Bible, but you can supply your own favorites.)
As Peterson notes, 1989 was the year the first Tim Burton/Michael Keaton Batman film opened, blasting the character into the zeitgeist as never before. The film – and contemporary Batman stories – were definitely inflected by Frank Miller’s Dark Knight a few years before, which itself was a radical reimagination of a character that had by then already been around for more than 40 years.
Today, Batman is pushing 90 – he debuted in 1939 – but still popular and still ready for new versions, as the success of Absolute Batman has shown. I’ve mentioned this here many times, but popular superheroes are among the longest running serialized characters in recorded human history. The other main competition is comic strips. According to Wikipedia, these are the longest running comic strips:
- The Katzenjammer Kids (1897–2006; 109 years)
- Gasoline Alley (1918–present)
- Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (1918–present)
- Barney Google and Snuffy Smith (1919–present)
- Thimble Theater/Popeye (1919–present)
- Blondie (1930–present)
- Dick Tracy (1931–present)
- Alley Oop (1932–present)
- Bringing Up Father (1913–2000; 87 years)
- Little Orphan Annie (1924–2010; 86 years)
(I should also mention soap operas which are, incredibly, still running. General Hospital is still going, 61 years after it debuted. The UK’s Coronation Street is even older, having debuted in 1960.)
It’s not too surprising that comics comprise two of the three decades long forms of serialized storytelling: the characters don’t age. Of course, everything around them changes and dies. You might be shocked to find that Alley Oop is still running, More likely you don’t know what Alley Oop is: the ongoing humorous adventures of a caveman clad in a fur loincloth. The strip was created by VT Hamlin, who drew it for 40 years. Today Joey Alison Sayers and artist Jonathan Lemon put out the strip which reportedly runs in 600 newspapers. I find the notion that there are still 600 newspapers around to run Alley Oop more surprising than the strip still being around.
But back to the bible. Series bibles were usually created for animated series, but occasionally for comics. As with Denny’s example, they were a style guide to lay down the rules of the characters’ world, how the characters interacted, their backgrounds – what you would need to know to write them. I would say the two best bibles I’ve ever read were Greg Weisman’s for Gargoyles and the bible that was created for the Milestone universe back in the day. Both were full of detail and imagination, top flight world building.
Of course, Denny’s 1989 thoughts on Batman are very outdated – with 36 more years of stories and the rise of key characters like Damian Wayne (introduced in 1987 as non-canon but foregrounded by Grant Morrison), the mythology adapts and evolves, as it should.
Still, the longevity of these characters is very much tied up in the comic book format itself. And that format has had its ups and downs and now stands at a crossroads. The comic book was way UP in 2024 (yay Absolute and Ultimate!) but now facing a real challenge again with Diamond’s impending break-up. And getting new readers for these long running stories is a real task, as the various stunts and reboots and rebrands of Marvel and Dc over the last 25 years shows.
I would love to see American comics come up with something more like the manga method: a single creator comes up with a story and then draws it for the next 10/20/30 or even 40 years. For instance, One Piece debuted in 1997 and since then Eiichiro Oda has drawn 110 volumes, with tons of shocks and evolutions along the way. The story is drawing to a close, though, and Oda has even taken a few breaks from the grueling schedule.
It’s hard to imagine an American cartoonists achieving anything like this. The main reason is simple: it just doesn’t pay enough. Comic strip cartoonists were able to continue telling their tales because newspaper strips were wildly popular in their day and wildly profitable. Jim Davis is worth some $800 million today due to the heyday of Garfield and its continued licensing and merchandising. Popular comics strip artists were millionaires or multi millionaires in their day, and sitting down to draw four panels a day is pretty good work to have a crack at that much money. Japan’s most popular mangaka are also well compensated: Oda makes an estimated $23 million a year from his creation. This kind of money allows them to hire assistants and form studios to make turning out such a high volume of work possible. (I won’t get into the sweatshop aspects of this system:it isn’t great, but it’s how the sausage is made.)
There’s just no comparable payout for American comic book creators. I’m not sure what the longest running current comic books are, but Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo and Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon spring to mind, and while I doubt either of them are financially struggling, you’re unlikely to see them on the lists of highest paid entertainers any time soon.
The other reason that American comics don’t really have a path forward for a One Piece-like achievement is just that comics have turned away from the idea of recognizable characters that we visit each day, week or month to high-concept single stories. That’s partly because of The Big Lie – stories must be optimized for media adaptation – but also, creators don’t seem to want to be tied down to one creation for a lengthy amount of time. At least in PRINTED comics. There are lots and lots of long running webcomics, but that’s kind of a whole ‘nother story.
Anyway, go and read Denny O’Neil’s Bat bible. It’s kind of a butterfly in amber: a great read on its own, a valuable glimpse into the mind of one of the best to ever do it, and a look into one of the greatest comics character of all time.
The other key thing preventing an “American One Piece” is access. If you want to read One Piece in Japan, you can grab an issue of Weekly Shonen Jump which is sold wherever magazines are sold; pharmacies, grocery stores, newsstands, etc. Yes, purists can also “trade wait” for the manga volume, but they can easily grab a chapter and go if they don’t want to wait for months. U.S. newsstands ditched comics in the mid-90s and even if they hadn’t, the market likely would not have sustained enough volume to maintain them into the 2000s anyway. The only American publisher that didn’t abandon those markets was Archie, and digests of the red-dweeb can still be found in occasional chain retailers like Rite Aid or CVS, or a few rare newsstands. In theory Marvel and DC could have tried to follow suit with more mature digest or magazine anthology formats, but never chose to and now it is much too late. The habit would never stick. DC is trying with some Dollar Tree style offerings, but those are just spare reprints of overstock.
One Piece readers don’t need to find one of a diminishing group of retail shops, most of whom are owned by incompetent or disinterested gatekeepers who almost never advertise, order it three months in advance, and then continue to do so every month because the retailer’s profits are so threadbare that he or she cannot just “blindly” order another issue of something that sold before; they need to account for each one with no margin for error.
Digital comics can get around this, but it still becomes a matter of recognition and getting income from it, since most people don’t like paywalls and a website needs a certain number of hits for advertisements.
So an American One Piece would need:
– A creator who has at least some name recognition who can write and draw the series, at least initially, and who also has the resources to survive doing so
– A concept and character who immediately captures the public imagination
– An ability to get this story into so many places that readers find it almost too easy to find chapters; online, retail shops, grocery stores, etc. Most of the infrastructure for this either does not exist or hasn’t existed in about 30 years.
– An audience willing to commit to such a series in high volumes and pay actual real money for it on a steady, consistent basis.
– A country where, let’s be honest, enough people have disposable income and aren’t so worried about being destroyed by a soulless economic system, an Orange Monster or one of his loyalists that they’re willing to spare this kind of money on a weekly or monthly basis, at a time when even going to a movie more than once a month or season is beyond them.
I mean, Japan isn’t perfect but it isn’t a festering cesspool of fascist nonsense like the U.S. is right now. It would require a lot of things going right and many of them would be outside the comic industry’s control. It is nice to dream and I do admire the time of detailed character Bibles and editors who profoundly cared about and “got” their characters.
In addition to soap operas, I’d also add pro wrestling as a consistent narrative going back to at least 1905 with the invention of the World Title. It’s a very different art form now, but the basics of a champion and a challenger remains and the stories of each and the lineage of the championship has a (winding) through line to the present day. It’s a tossup on which has been broadcasted longer, pro wrestling or soap operas, going back to the radio days.
I think the Webcomic + Merch (+ Patreon) model would be the only likely path, rather than printed periodicals. Order of the Stick is one good example that has been doing it for 20+ years.
AMRG, I don’t share your negative view of comics shop owners. In my experience, there are a few stinkers (sometimes literally alas) but most of them are incredibly dedicated, passionate advocates for not only comics, but reading, pop culture and community.
Love and Rockets
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