Bi-curious beefcake Batman busted—battle brewing!
ABOVE: detail from Mark Chamberlain’s Untitled, one of a series of watercolors featuring the Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder dabbling in the love that dare not squeak its name, much to the displeasure of D.C. Comics.
There was always something swishy about Batman and Robin—New York painter Mark Chamberlain has just taken it to its obvious extreme. Chelsea gallery owner Kathleen Cullen received a cease-and-desist order from D.C. Comics (the owners of Batman® and all Batmaniana™) after opening a show of Chamberlain’s homoerotic watercolors featuring the Dark Knight and the Boy Wonder cuddling, kissing, and posing with their Bat-units out. Cullen is supposed to take down the paintings and turn over the invoices for the pieces she’s already sold so that D.C. can track down the happy new owners (for what nefarious purposes one can only speculate).
Most instances we’ve seen of this story have treated it either as a total fluff piece or as a grave gay-rights/visibility issue, which completely misses the point: this story is about the commercial rights of intellectual property owners slopping over—in reality, aggressively expanding—into areas of legitimate artistic perspective on popular culture. This is an already vast and ever-expanding problem for artists of all kinds, who are discovering that they can depict any kind of grotesque sexual act, religious desecration, or horrific violence, but can’t paint a picture of a guy with pointy ears and a cape without lawyering up. Luckily, the people at Stay Free! magazine are on the ball.