“ If rebellion against the Comics Code took the form of these devastating, coded analyses of America’s psychosexual temperature, it was only to be expected. Squeezed down and controlled by conformity cops, comic-book creators chose the Hermetic route. Transforming their insights and rage into fables for children, the debts to the queer underground and the echoes of the narcotic, psychedelic visions of Ginsberg and Burroughs are still hard to miss.
Imagine the tight-lipped, plausible Batman played by Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan’s twenty-first-century movie series facing some of the adversaries encountered by fifties Batman: a Rainbow Batman, a Zebra Batman, a Creature from Dimension X that resembled a one-eyed testicle on stalk-like legs. With titles including “The Jungle Batman,” “The Merman Batman” (“YES, ROBIN. I’VE BECOME A HUMAN FISH”), “The Valley of Giant Bees” (“ROBIN! HE’S BEEN CAPTURED AND MADE A JESTER IN THE COURT OF THE QUEEN BEE!”), and “Batman Becomes Bat-Baby,” it was an anything-goes atmosphere. And there’s more where they came from : a whole decade’s worth of unfiltered madness as DC writers used every trick in the book to keep Batman away from the crime-haunted streets where he belonged.
Weisinger’s fluid bodies, his foregrounding of intense emotions, laid the groundwork for the Silver Age of comics and the arrival of a jet-powered, supersonic LSD consciousness that would turn the world’s largest-ever collection of young people into self-proclaimed superhumans overnight.
But before that, and for the therapy to be successful, the process of miniaturization, compression, and self-annihilation had to be completed. A collapsing star, a black hole, was created, from which only A God could escape, or an idea. Not even light can escape from a black hole. The event horizon marks the limit of human science, not human imagination.
Along came The Flash, who could run faster than the speed of light.
Things began to melt.
Things began to stream.
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