This was the second of two blogs I intended to write on the appearance of the Dollmaker and his assistants Orifice and Matilda in the most recent issue of Detective Comics. This more or less occurred to me recently when we were discussing here what age of comics we are heading into if the golden age was up until the late 1950s or 1960s and the silver age was since then. Really in my mind what defines the different ages is the presence of new dominant themes into comics. The golden age started as a hodgepodge mixture of whatever worked, but with the focus on science fiction the silver age became a lot more defined by the scientific achievements of its characters (impossible as some of them are) as characters were blasted into space for their adventures as often as staying on Earth. What I would consider to be the modern age started after Crisis on Infinite Earths (or even earlier in terms of Marvel) in what could be seen as an attempt to make heroes more realistic and more human. In terms of general trends though these are only the most obvious, and really comics are always quick to jump on the bandwagon of what is popular in modern culture. For instance, the threat of nuclear weapons found itself into many golden age comics, while the silver age had separate instances of the popularity of martial arts characters and bionics characters after they found success elsewhere.
So with the introduction of torture porn like characters in Batman, does this mean that whatever comic book age we are based in will be defined by this type of grittier type of violence (or in terms of Matilda a sort of mixture of sexuality and horror violence)? Most likely not. The thing is that although comics do try to jump on the bandwagon of what looks good in other genres, that they rarely translate well to the pages of comic books. Martial arts based characters were popular for a while, but comic book choreography can not compare to that in movies. The same goes for bionics, whereas they look impressive on film where they make characters look better than those around them, in comics bionics characters don’t seem even very powerful by comparison. The same will likely hold true with any infusion of torture porn into comics. While the general sense of spookiness and gore might translate a little, it will never be as effective as in a movie with the sense of dread displayed by the characters and even such subtle things as the music used to create atmosphere (though in terms of the design of a Rude Goldberg machine for torture, comics might have the advantage here.) It should be noted that I am not much of a fan of torture porn or splatter movies, and I think in this sense that I am lucky because any attempt to inject them into the comic book medium will invariably end in failure.
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