Batman & Marvin

The builder and I were talking about our muscles. We were talking about our stomachs, and our fitness, and the things we’d given up so that we could live just that little bit longer than our fathers did. We were unimpressed by ourselves and our own efforts, but, as middle-aged blokes so often are, rather sweetly encouraging of each other, as long as no-one actually mentioned words like "encouragement" or "sweet". And my wife, who was bringing our builder his 10 o’clock cup of tea, said how she thought all this men-and-their-cholesterol talk was almost endearing, and, also, somewhat sad and silly and blokish too.



“If you keep trying hard, you’ll both get in shape.” she said, “You’ll be Batman and Marvin.”



“Who’s bloody ‘Marvin’?” asked our builder.



“You mean ‘Batman and Robin'.” I told her. “It’s not ‘Batman and Marvin’.”





And we laughed at her, because she didn't know, and she laughed at us, because we did, and though she’d probably been planning to ask which of us was going to have to be Marvin, in his little green swimming trunks, the moment passed. And then. I said it. Because. Because I had to say it.



“It’s funny that you said ‘Marvin’. Because there was a Marvin. In an old American cartoon series, ‘The Super Friends’. And Batman was in that too. So was Robin. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Robin and Wonder Woman were training a couple of American teenagers to be superheroes. They were training their dog too. So it’s strange you’d say “Marvin”.



(Now my mind’s suddenly racing so quickly that though our builder and my wife’s complete lack of interest in the Super-Friends registers with me, it doesn’t register with the talking part of me. I’m on a trivia roll, swept downwards with an avalanche of comic book detritus. Wonderfully glittering detritus. And I can’t help but be shamefully fascinated, shamefully enthused by my tumbling comic book thoughts. Shamelessly interested in Marvin and Batman.)





“I guess Marvin graduated after all. I wonder what he looks like now. He wouldn’t be much good helping Batman strike terror into the hearts of superstitious criminals if he still looked like he was too soft to be in “The Partridge Family”. Or even The Legion Of Substitute Partridge Family Members. Does he have that bloody dog with him? The one from “Super-Friends”. Wonder Dog, wasn’t he? Does the dog have to dress like Ace The Bat Dog? Does he get on with Ace? Ace would be the boss, Ace would be the alpha male. The alpha male dog.”



(And I’m laughing. And they’re sort of laughing too. Not at me, exactly. They’re far too kind for that. But it’s the baffled kind of laughter that says they like me, and they’re not going to be contemptuous, but why, why, why am I talking about this like this? That baffled, slightly wary what's-the-point and where's-this-going and when-will-you-stop-no-really sort of laughter. As if Patrick Moore had just unexpectedly turned up to help them find and save the frequency for 5-Live Sports Extra on a new digital radio, and he’s using the words ‘quasar’ and ‘dark matter’ to explain why digital doesn’t sound as good as it was promised it would. In those Patrick Moore clothes. With that monocle and that accent. Being all unnecessarily Patrick Moore.)



“Hey! Do you think that Marvin will become Batman? Surely not. No! Hah! Marvin the Dark Knight! That’s promotion! That's a career progression. That’s the benefit of a good education. A better education in The Hall Of Justice. And where’s Robin? Dead? Retired? Nightwing? Or maybe the Batman with Marvin is Robin, grown up. It's possible”





But, no, it isn't. Not if you don't understand pretty much a single word I'm talking about.



A breath. A pause, and then I’m quiet, and we’re all just a little too quiet. Not unfriendly quiet. But quieter than perfectly relaxed would be. Me quiet, builder quiet, wife quiet.



And then I just have to polish up the silver plate on my own coffin, having screwed it on so securely and polished the fake-marble tombstone too. I have to try to explain myself when it's obvious that nobody actually cares.



“So. That’s why it’s odd you said ‘Batman and Marvin.’. And not any other name. Like Melvin. That's not an important name. But Marvin. You know, there's even more than just one Marvin. There's the paranoid android too. And, er, what's he doing with Batman, ah? You know. Looking cool in a yellow cape. And green pixie boots. Big bloody pixie boots, for big bloody android feet. Well. It's the sort of thing that's get you thinking.”



But no, it isn't that, either. Of course it isn't. It's the sort of thing that gets me thinking.



Help me, somebody. Help me. Help me stop before I can't stop myself ever again. I will talk about this shit for hours and I must not talk about this shit at all. Help me.



And they do help me. They do. By being themselves. Tea is drunk. A less-than-kind, hardly-polite word is chosen to describe me, though I won’t say by whether builder or wife, and we laugh again in a way that doesn't involve frozen facial muscles or twitching fingers. And their laughter says “It doesn’t matter, but that little harmless talking-thing that just happened, that’s not going to happen again, is it?” And my laughter says to me, if not them: “This has been happening for almost 50 years now. Of course it’s going to happen again.”



Which is why I’m writing this down here. It’s like bloodletting, or sweating out a virus. I’m getting it out of my system so I never have to look at our builder and my wife and realise again that I live in a universe that in so many ways only tangentially intersects with theirs. Though I do. It’s a Phantom Zone. Or a Ditko dream dimension. A Phantom Ditko Dream Zone Dimension all my own.



And in my Phantom Zone, where the trivia never stops smashing into itself, like an infinite loop of dominoes knocking one into another and on forever, I wonder what the Hall Of Justice was really like? To walk around. What were the elevators like? How did the air smell? And the bathrooms, did they have Musak? What tunes? And who did the cleaning, because it had to have been robots, it being such a big building, and given security clearance issues for sanitation engineers where the Justice League Of America is concerned. And, you know, there are so many different types of robots. And so many different agencies to vet cleaning staff for the JLA too. I'm starting to list them all now. I'm counting them.



The dominoes are falling, click click click, even now. Forever.



But as they fall, I realise one splendid thing. My one ticket out of forever in the Phantom Zone. The mile-marker that states I’m still safely 1 760 yards from being absolutely lost, because I do know when to draw the line, even if I cut it really fine. Because I never told them how much I fancied Marvin’s sister Wendy. Lovely, lovely Wendy, with the blue, blue hair.





Oh, dear.





DC has curently two volumes of "Super-Friends" stories available, each containing a selection of absolutely charming stories from the 1970s.



.