Dark Knight descends on home turf

Batman's Scottish roots are impeccable, so his visit to Glasgow seems appropriate, writes Stephen McGinty

FROM the attic bedroom of my childhood, with the Velux windows tilted up, you could gaze out over the tiled roofs of the terraced houses across the street.

My dream was to one day glimpse Batman perched among the terracotta chimney pots and television aerials, with his dark cape streaming behind, animated by a gusty Glasgow gale. The cowled crime-fighter, it seemed to me, would be quite content among the grid-system and gargoyle pediments of my home town: Gotham on the Clyde.

Thirty years on, my wish will come true and without even the involvement of Jim'll Fix It. For five nights next August the Big Red Shed, or the city's SECC to use its Sunday name, will play host to Batman Live, a theatrical extravaganza that promises to bring the audience inside the comic strip frame and face-to-face with the Batman's lantern jaw, the Joker's green-tinged quiff, the garbage-strewn streets of Gotham, the cells of Arkham Asylum and all perfumed by the diesel fumes of a real-life Batmobile.

To me, the Dark Knight's arrival will have the bitter-sweet feel of a homecoming. For while the 'blue remembered hills' of our childhood are a landscape to which we cannot return, the fact remains that Batman over the past 25 years has largely been shaped by two remarkable Scottish writers: Alan Grant and Grant Morrison.

It's now 71 years since Bob Kane and Bill Finger created the masked vigilante who appeared in Detective Comics #27 in May 1939. Mr Finger devised his secret identity, Bruce Wayne, and was inspired by Scots history as he explained: "Bruce Wayne's first name came from Robert Bruce, the Scottish patriot. Bruce, being a playboy, was a man of gentry. I searched for a name that would suggest colonialism... I tried Adams, Hancock... then I thought Mad Anthony Wayne."

At DC Comics, publisher of Batman, hundreds of writers would go on to guide Batman through his adventures in Gotham, an alter ego for New York. Perhaps the most high-profile was Frank Miller who took the character through the heart of darkness in The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and gave it a gritty rinse in Batman: Year One (1986). Far from the campery of the original 1960s television series, Miller returned the character to the grim city streets.

If Miller explored the violence on the streets, Morrison picked at the psychology of a man who wore a cape and mask with ideas that didn't always delight his paymasters. When he wrote his graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on a Serious Earth (1989) in which Batman is pushed to the brink of madness by the Joker he was forced to re-write scenes by Warner Brothers, who owned DC Comics and were about to release Tim Burton's Batman. In the original script Morrison had The Joker capering in a basque, however the film executives were concerned lest comic fans picture Jack Nicholson as a transvestite. Yet since 2006 he has written a number of monthly Batman titles, including one, Batman RIP, where he killed off Bruce Wayne.

Yet among my favourite Batman stories were those written by Alan Grant, who once studied divinity at St Andrews University, and apprenticed with DC Thomson, before going on to be, with John Wagner, the main engine behind Judge Dredd and 2000AD.

As the writing duo, Wagner & Grant, both men were brought in to revamp Detective Comics, one of two Batman titles, DC Comics published in the 1980s and which was then flagging and in danger of cancellation. They did a test run of two issues, during which they introduced The Ventriloquist, a blank-faced psychopath who directs his rage through a foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping puppet, but at the time comic was selling just 70,000 copies, not enough to earn a monthly royalty, so the only payment was the script fee.

John Wagner dropped out after just seven issues, but Grant was a huge fan of the character and happy to stay on. It was a shrewd move. A year later Tim Burton's movie Batman was released and monthly sales skyrocketed to 650,000 per month, bestowing on Grant monthly royalties cheques scattered with zeros. Today the grand house he and his wife enjoy outside the Borders village of Moniaive is known as the house Batman bought.

For a decade Grant wrote scripts of a consistently high quality, many illustrated by Norm Breyfogle, one of my favourite artists, who portrayed the character with a cape as long and as jagged as night.

So what is the appeal of Batman and why do I imagine him growling with a Scots accent? The appeal is simple: he's a self-made man.

While he may have inherited his wealth, the skills he has developed are the result of dedication and perseverance, what I'd like to consider as Scottish traits. He didn't find himself cast out from an alien world with the powers of a god (Superman) or was the victim of a radioactive spider (Spiderman), instead he's an ordinary man who made himself super.

In 1998 he finally visited Scotland in Batman: The Scottish Connection in which Alan Grant and the Glaswegian artist Frank Quitely had him battle on the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and visit Rosslyn Chapel. Frankly, I was disappointed, he really should have been swinging from the great cranes along the Clyde or hunching over the stone statues on the roof of the Kelvin Grove art gallery. (It also stretched his secret identity to breaking point, what with both Bruce Wayne and Batman appearing in Scotland at the same time, but that's a minor quibble.)

The news that Batman is finally coming to Glasgow would, a few decades ago have rendered me catatonic with excitement, but now it is hard to escape superheroes who appear to have punched through the comic strip panels, hurled away their word balloons and successfully invaded popular culture. This year it seems almost every movie is based on a comic book with Thor and Captain America coming to a cinema screen near you.

Yet the geek in me believes we are fast reaching saturation point. In a recent edition of Vogue (the American edition, much classier), I came upon the pictures from a recent fashion bash in New York which was styled on a superhero theme and had supermodels and fashion writers extolling the virtues of their favourite comic-book character. When Anna Wintour starts regaling us about superheroes it's time for the backlash to begin.

The comic book should never be too cool. It's at its best when mocked and derided and will only topple off any pedestal on to which it is raised. The brilliance of the spotlight focused on comics will lead to burn-out. Comics, like Batman himself, thrive best in the shadows to which, I hope, they will soon return.