Armavirumque, Feb 17, 2006 05:21 PM

A bat hits the caves

by Stefan Beck

Well, it’s Friday afternoon, ladies and gentlemen--and that means it’s time for some lowbrow fun. I’ve got one foot out the door, but I thought I’d take a moment to salute a real American hero: Batman artist Frank Miller. Bear with me. Just recently, Douglas Murray wrote:

We’re now five years into a war, and no major Western studio has yet made a film in which a Muslim is a bad guy. In fact they’ve yet to even give us a film in which the good guys win and the bad guys get beaten up. The present war’s movies range from Kingdom of Heaven ("there are a lot of fundamentalists about, Christians are the worst") to Munich ("if someone hits you and you’re a Jew, stay perfectly still") and Flightplan ("if you’re on a hijacked plane, odds are these days that the flight-crew, not Islamists, are to blame").

Frank Miller has had enough of this shilly-shallying--and so his Batman is taking the fight to our real enemies.

"Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a piece of propaganda," he said. "Superman punched out Hitler. So did Captain America. That’s one of the things they’re there for.

"These are our folk heroes. I just think it’s silly to have Batman out chasing the Riddler when you’ve got al-Qaida out there."

Comparing Batman to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character - a lone urban hero fighting a crime wave - Miller said: "Batman kicks al-Qaida’s ass ... I wish the entertainers of our time had the spine and the focus of the ones who faced down Hitler."

In the book, Holy Terror, Batman is "a reminder to people who seem to have forgotten who we’re up against", the author said.

Batman v. Osama? That’s a cartoon fight to look forward to.