Cookbook Survivor Resolution/Re-Read (Gotham Adventures #23)
Sunday's Child Is Putting Two Entries Together
So on the soup, here’s how it came out.
To be honest, as I got started, I wasn’t paying much attention to Kafka’s recipe. In fact, I came across a recipe from Melissa Clark at the New York Times that was a “smoky chowder” started with bacon and with some smoked paprika in the broth and I decided that was what I was shooting for instead.
So some rendered bacon fat and flour combined with simple onion and green garlic start and a couple of sweet bell peppers chopped, then with frozen lobster broth, wine, and some whole milk to make the full soup. I put in five or six flakes of my smoked hot chile powder I made this last summer and that was enough to give it some serious heat along with the smoked paprika. It came out really well.
Since it was so far off the book’s recipe, I’m going to call a mulligan on the book itself. I’ll give it another working-over soon.
One thing that did put me off about Kafka’s recipe and made me want to think differently is that it started with clam juice (along with some cooked fresh clams). I’m all for cooking some clams or mussels and using the broth, but commercially available clam juice is really disgusting, I think. I’ve always been curious about why there are almost no commercially available fish broths and my guess has simply been that a good one is delicate and may not survive canning or preservation. But maybe it’s just that there’s no market for them. Our local fishmonger does have frozen broth—fish broth or lobster broth freezes fine—but I think theirs is so weak-tasting that I don’t generally buy it.
On to this week’s Re-Read. I know I’ve been in a Batman-themed rut but I will beg your indulgence on just one more: Gotham Adventures #23.
The comics that were adapted from the famous Batman animated series of the 1990s were generally excellent during an era when superhero comics were dominated by steroidal male characters carrying huge guns and wearing pouches everywhere and women with improbable anatomy perpetually twisting so that their asses and breasts could be facing towards the reader.
It was a bad time but these comics were an island of clever, gentle single-issue storytelling with clean art styles that reproduced the look of the animated series.
This issue featured the character Ra’s al-Ghul as the main villain. I really don’t care for the character. He was consciously created as an attempt to rip off the extraordinarily racist pulp villain Fu Manchu by shaking off the overt racism. (Marvel Comics just went ahead and used Fu Manchu directly until they decided not to repay for the rights to the character.) There were a few things to like about the character—he quickly deduced Batman’s true identity and whenever he was involved in a story, it did get the characters out of Gotham and mixed things up a bit.
His motivations were a bit fuzzy to start other than trying to secure Batman as a husband for his daughter Talia (also very much taken from the Fu Manchu template) and being in charge of a global criminal organization, but over time Ra’s al-Ghul developed into a radical environmentalist who was constantly scheming to kill off most of humanity in order to save the planet from overpopulation and industrial degradation. This of course did not stop him from setting up elaborate bases or fortresses in otherwise pristine wildernesses and doubtless polluting them heavily in the process, but hey, maybe he bought some carbon offsets.
That thought, at any rate, actually does come into this issue and it’s why it’s so clever. Comic-book supervillains are only rarely allowed to recognize the perversity of their methods in relationship to their ostensible motivations. There was a great issue of The Flash quite a while ago where Wally West goes to hang out with his Rogues’ Gallery (well, really his uncle Barry’s Rogues’ Gallery originally) at a small convention at a cheap hotel. There’s a certain amount of chaos but it’s mostly from one or two of them getting drunk rather than a standard fight. It ends though with Captain Cold reflecting on how idiotic it is that this group of men and women who have invented devices of enormous commercial value use them primarily to rob banks, which always ends with them being defeated and sent to prison.
This issue of Gotham Adventures allows Ra’s a similar kind of epiphany. Normally he drives straight at an exotic, complex scheme for killing millions or billions of people and generally comes within a hair’s breadth of succeeding, only to be foiled by Batman at the last second. Like most such villains, he then moves on to another scheme, even when what he was trying the first time is perfectly reproducible. But in this issue, Ra’s puts both legal and illegal pressure on a big group of wealthy investors in order to buy up about 25% of the global fossil fuel industry from them at firesale prices.
Mostly he just intimidates them, so Batman’s got nothing to go on in terms of saying that Ra’s did anything overtly illegal. (He does find in the end that there are three guys being held prisoner by Ra’s, but when rescued they say they were just hanging out there because they’re intimidated too.) So what fiendish thing is this genocidal villain going to do with those fossil fuel facilities?
Nothing. That’s the point. As he says to Batman, he’s just going to leave it in the ground. He’s going to shut the plants down, refuse to sell the reserves, essentially try to stop the industry legally to the extent that he can. Not only will that dramatically cut extraction, he reasons, but the dramatic spike in oil prices will cause global chaos and possibly spur a radical shift to renewables.
It’s a brilliant plan. The guy has a global organization and vast wealth. Why’s he been messing around with lasers and bioweapons and so on? Buy up the oil companies and shut them down legally. It puts Batman in a hilarious position: what, he’s going to fight so that the oil companies keep destroying the planet? To keep fossil fuels cheap through government subsidies? And the story just kind of leaves it there, which is also fun. (E.g., we don’t find out in the end that Ra’s has his standard genocidal plan so that Batman can go ahead and punch him into submission, and he apparently doesn’t have to somehow give all the oil back to the former owners.)
It kind of makes me want to see more stories like this, where the ostensible antagonist or villain ends up revealing just how much the heroes are the protectors of a status quo that is itself worse than anything the villain has in mind. (That’s a staple trope of villain speeches, sure, but comics usually go out of their way to demonstrate that the villain is factually wrong in saying so.)