The Bizarre Story Of Batman: Odyssey

As a writer, Neal Adams is a good artist. When you look at "Batman: Odyssey" that way, it almost begins to make sense. What if Adams thought of a bunch of cool stuff to draw and then failed to connect it all into a narrative?

"Batman: Odyssey" has more intersecting timelines than "Pulp Fiction," with no indication of which one we're in any moment, and half of them are Batman telling an unseen listener a story about a story he told Robin, which contains other stories inside that.

Every first draft seems to have gone straight to print. One character's name might be Blades or Irons, depending on what page you're reading. Beyond that, the characters refer to a tribe of underground dwellers as trolls and gnomes interchangeably — which gets even more confusing when a totally separate tribe of gnomes shows up. As Hudson and Wolkin point out, the first- and third-person narrators seem to be arguing with each other: "This is unusual for Batman." "This isn't unusual ... for me."

On a sentence-to-sentence to level, the writing's even more bizarre. Here are a few standouts, and rest assured, only some of them make any more sense in context: "For television? Yes. Yes." "Watch yer drivin', ya foul-breathed kite-lizard." "Sworn to secrecy! Such a thing! Such an octopus of a thing!" and "Aquict yourself, you kung fu movie guru," from Killer Croc, who has apparently bought a word-a-day calendar. A subterranean gnome uses Stephen Colbert's catchphrase, "truthiness."

"I'm sorry ... for the lameness of my words," Batman narrates in the penultimate issue. Too little, too late, Bats.

The Nude Bruce scenes alone may have inspired some comic shop owners to hide "Batman: Odyssey" in the adults-only section. However, quite a few other sequences make the series even filthier than most of the books you'd find there — all seemingly obliviously. 

First, Alfred makes the universal hand gesture for sex while asking Bruce, "Do you know what this is?" Bruce responds, "I have a suspicion." Us dirty-minded readers' suspicions, on the other hand, turn out to be wrong since Alfred explains he's playing the world's smallest violin. We may have to question if Alfred's really the man of culture he claims to be if he thinks that's how you play the violin.

In Part 6, Sensei is testing his mettle on a safe. Over four increasingly sweaty panels, the Sensei describes how "The blood flows outward and back again. ... Binding ... Dis-weighting ... lubricating ... feel... Apply pressure, up, then down. And down again. Now. Umphh. Ahh. Slowly ... slowly ..."

Then, in Part 10, Robin rides a pterodactyl — as you do. When he finally gets his reins on it, he says, in a line that's inexplicable in more ways than one, "This is a lead-pipe cinch. I feel like I'm riding my old egg-cream buddy Man-Bat." Beyond the obvious questions of just what a teenager is doing using musty old phrases like "lead-pipe cinch" and "egg-cream," it also raises some very serious questions about just what kind of "riding" Robin and Man-Bat were doing.

The series of seemingly random events presented in "Batman: Odyssey" become even stranger when the rest of the DC Universe gets involved. In Part 1, Batman and Robin continue their discussion on gun ethics while Man-Bat flies Robin around the room, delivers a cryptic message, and disappears.

In Part 4, Batman is on a boat fighting Ra's al Ghul's bodyguard Ubu, when suddenly a stingray appears on deck and takes Ubu out of commission (don't worry, we'll get into that). When Batman demands, "Who. Did. This?" continuing after an interruption from Talia, "Shut up! Who?" Aquaman casually saunters up to take credit. Batman dives overboard. Aquaman follows and tells Batman to stay out of his territory by summoning a whale, which somehow sneaks up on the World's Greatest Detective so badly it startles him into thinking, "A whale? A whale? A whale?!!!" And then Aquaman's never seen again.

Deadman has a larger role, no doubt, because Adams' run on the character was one of his biggest early hits. However, he shows up without any more explanation than Aquaman and spends most of his time in Part 1 without interacting with the plot except to kvetch about Batman. Deadman's ghostly powers mean he needs to inhabit someone else's body every time he does interact with the story, except when they're underground, for some reason, meaning we get a couple of issues of Batman running around with the Joker.

The best comics tap into the seemingly endless reserves of our childhood imaginations, such as "flying" from the jungle gym to the swingset to the slide with a blanket as a cape. The worst never progress beyond simple kid logic with their endless goalpost-moving. "I shot you with my laser!" "Nuh-uh, I'm wearing my laser-proof vest." "Nuh-uh, I have an armor-piercing laser." "Nuh-uh," and so on. Guess which one "Batman: Odyssey" has more of?

First, when Batman discovers a bomb on a train in Part 1, he has to open the detonator to make sure the button can't be "un-pressed." Then in Part 2, we see Batman get shot. A lot. All through a hilarious full-page montage as his body's whipped back and forth, blood flying everywhere. But he's fine, of course. He's Batman. When you're Batman, you can reveal you have a completely invisible bulletproof shield you've never used before just because you've been written into a corner.

By Part 6, he discovers that Dr. Slattern has built himself a futuristic suit out of all the confiscated weapons at Arkham and now insists on being called Trigger. Trigger thinks he has Batman on the ropes when he shoots him full of darts from a giant stun gun. Batman hardly seems to notice, only saying, "Massive charge. Suppose I reverse that charge." And then he does, sending all the electricity back to Trigger. How? No explanation is given, which, as Hudson and Dworkin observe, might as well be the motto of the whole series.

To you or me, Batman's underground adventures might all seem like classic comic book silliness. But to Neal Adams, it's a profound revelation that proves everything we know is wrong. For decades, he's been beating the drum for his "expanding earth" theory, one he insists the scientific establishment is hiding from you, as opposed to the more likely possibility they dismissed it as pointless nonsense. 

Adams, of course, is an artist, not a scientist, and his explanation of Wired's description of his revelation inspired by the Pangaea theory makes that abundantly clear: "Put yourself in my place. You listen to this and as an artist you try to visualize it. And it occurs to you that this is totally wrong." Wired paraphrased Adams' theory as such: "The whole arrangement — with the übercontinent Pangaea on one side of the globe and empty ocean on the other — looked lopsided."

That was the dubious beginning of a lifelong obsession that he believes disproved plate tectonics, relativity, and nearly every pillar of science you could name. Faced with the law of conservation of matter, he simply invented "prime matter." And if you think that sounds grandiose, listen to this: "I want to see antigravity. I want to see intergalactic communication. If I'm right, those things will happen." 

We doubt Adams actually believes the expanding earth is full of cavemen and dinosaurs, but he still gives Bok and Primus a few pages in Part 7 to lecture all of us just in case he wins some comic-book-reading converts.

Adams has been making comics for a long time, and it's frequently said that we need to deal with older people's prejudices with the knowledge they were raised in another time. Unfortunately, that doesn't quite explain a lot of what goes in "Batman: Odyssey," which might have turned heads in his grandfather's time. There are an awful lot of Asian villains who could have stepped right out of the pages of "Fu Manchu" and not too many other Asian characters other than the ever-ambivalent Talia.

Speaking of Talia, Batman and Bok's quest to retrieve her and Bok's wife Tatsinda isn't necessarily sexist, but the sheer amount of times they refer to them as "our women" makes it hard to call it anything else.

Then there are the trolls. Oh, the trolls. Hudson and Wolkin give a lengthy list of the racial stereotypes the loc-wearing, dark-skinned creatures embody: They accept worthless trinkets as valuable currency. They're cannibals, but they'll bow and flatter if you beat some sense into them. Robin, Champion of Justice, openly advocates for their genocide. To that, we can add that their wide mouths, sharp teeth, and bug eyes look uncomfortably like old-time racist caricatures. 

Just so no one feels left out, there's El Maniaco from Part One, back when "Odyssey" was a book about Batman investigating a robbery and flashing back to his first adventure. He's a Mexican, well, maniac, who wears an indigenous-style headband, hasn't shaved or cut his hair in months and is drawn with a set of yellow teeth the size of bowling balls.

So, how do you wrap all this up? The same way you start it: with total incomprehensibility. In Part 10, Deadman beats the snot out of the gnomes for "the Key to the Nile." We never learn what the key is, just that it's real important.

By Part 12, the "Exposition Hostage" correctly points out that there are a lot of holes in Batman's story. So, first, we get a flashback to some indeterminate point earlier on and learn Batman descended even further into the earth and used the key to unlock a door to — something. Before he can get that far, he has to fight a cyclops. A psychic cyclops, who Batman defeats with the old joke about the "henway." Also, Adams' colorists Moose Baumann and Cory Adams fill in the cyclops' teeth with photos of real, rotten chompers, which doesn't have anything to do with the plot. It's just gross, is all.

Anyway, Batman returns to Arkham for his final showdown with Sensei and resolves the running debate over whether he's capable of killing by shooting the ever-loving living heck out of Sensei, sending guts flying everywhere.

Or not. Whatever was behind that door, it lets Batman reincarnate the Sensei as a baby to see if he can make a fresh start. Then the "Exposition Hostage" is revealed as Clark Kent, and what started as a Batman comic ends with a big hero shot of Superman. Sure, why not. Makes as much sense as anything else.