If You Mite

 At long last, the Snyder Cut is here.

Three and a half years after Justice League fizzled at the theaters, HBO Max last month released director Zack Snyder’s full, four-hour vision of superheroes, swagger and CGI. Snyder, who left production midway through following his daughter’s suicide, and his legion of fans watched helplessly as Warner Brothers and fill-in director Joss Whedon reshot and recut his would-be masterpiece into incoherence. Now, thanks to years of fan pleading and petitioning—as well as alleged death threats and Elmo-booing—we all can watch the first cinematic meet-up of DC Comics’ legendary heroes just as the original director intended.

It’s either a triumph of fan passion and creative freedom over corporate studio fecklessness, or acquiescence to an entitled, aggrieved and toxic sector of fandom, driven to extremes to protect a brawny, excessively masculine ideal of superheroes. Or, possibly, both.

But for Batman, at least, this is nothing new. For years, the character has had a fruitful yet rocky relationship with his protective fans, mirroring his own iron grip on Gotham. As chronicled in Glen Weldon’s The Caped Crusade, Batman, perhaps more than any other superhero, has seen his evolution guided by fans asserting ownership and beating back what they view as misguided direction from his publishers—often demanding that yet another shade of black be added to the pallet. 

These are the people who brought back the Caped Crusader from oblivion or (real) cancellation countless times. Who kept the Dark Knight from drifting into parody or silliness, and who kept his memory alive in the early days of comic-cons and fan-made magazines. Who, panicked that Michael Keaton would be the second coming of Adam West when news of the actor’s casting broke in 1988, sent in 50,000 letters to Warner Brothers, putting the studio into crisis mode and reportedly tanking its parent company’s stock price.

This brutal back-and-forth between Batman and his admirers is so strong, it even worked its way into the pages of the comic itself. While Batman fans may feel empowered, they’re outmatched by his self-proclaimed biggest fan in the D.C. Universe, an imp-like magical creature from another dimension who wreaks havoc around the Caped Crusader whenever he appears.

Fan might, meet Bat-Mite—a curious relic from Batman’s outrageous years, that has persisted through the years. Maybe just because he’s funny, or maybe because he captures a certain key dynamic in the Caped Crusader’s public conception.

Conceived by Batman co-creator Bill Finger, Bat-Mite debuted in 1959, midway through the Silver Age’s era of bright, goofy sci-fi. The diminutive, pointy-eared, round-faced Mite evokes a Keebler elf who’s helped himself to a few too many of the cookies. His short height, though, doesn’t hinder him too much, as he normally appears floating and can apparently appear or disappear at will wherever he pleases.

Bat-Mite was just one of several mischievous extra-dimensional beings who debuted in this period, always attached to a superhero, emulating the trickster of ancient myth. The Martian Manhunter had the alien Zook, Aquaman had the water sprite Qwsp. Bat-Mite can often seem like a mirror image of Mister Mxyzptlk, an Elmer Fudd-like fairy bent on vexing Superman, with similar mystical powers over reality. The key difference is that while Mxyzptlk is trying to be a pest, Bat-Mite is actually an enthusiastic Batman fan. He watched him from afar, created his own Batman costume, and hopes to get in on the thrill of crimefighting--whether Batman agrees or not.

In their first "adventure," Bat-Mite nearly crushes Batman with a giant sphinx, while trying to block criminals from escaping. In later stories, he accidentally gets Batgirl kidnapped and endows Batman’s faithful dog, Ace the Bat-Hound, with fire breath and other deadly powers. 

Maybe there’s a hint of irony with the original Bat-Mite. It’s hard not to smirk when Batman chastises him—"Crime-fighting isn’t fun...it’s serious business!" But in its early days, Bat-Mite was overall an earnest, if light-hearted, character. He was yet another bizarre Batman antagonist from a time when the relentless demand for new characters and stories month after month produced some truly mind-boggling issues. 

This is especially true for his television debut in the 1977 New Adventures of Batman, a Saturday morning cartoon from the rotoscope era that will forever mar the Mite in most fans’ memories. Drawn to be gnat-like, he utters his signature catchphrase, "I just wanna help," after predictably hindering the protagonists week after week.

You might think Batman’s ensuing darker period would have killed Bat-Mite off for good, and he’d be one of the countless "can you believe Batman had this?" items from the past. But Batman was also entering a more self-referential phase, becoming not just a thing but a thing about itself. In this world Bat-Mite has potential, not only as a fourth-wall breaker but as a connective tissue for the mythology’s transformations.

What is reality, after all, if not another dimension?

"To me, one of the fun things about Bat-Mite is that it does take us back to where Batman was a remarkably different character than he is now," said Dan Jurgens, author of a Bat-Mite series in 2015. "Superman hasn't changed as much over the years. If you think of Batman as the way he's become, this creature of the night, Bat-Mite signifies something that is as different from that as it could possibly be."

Bat-Mite occasionally popped from the pages to berate the writers and artists for leaving him out. A blood-thirsty, amped-up version returned in two Alan Grant stories, where he may or may not have been a drug-induced hallucination of Bob Overdog, an ill-fated Gotham lowlife. Other versions, real and imagined, have shown up from time to time in the years since.

His main purpose is to allow writers a chance to stand outside the DC Universe and admire its sheer complexity, built up over years of myth-making and genre-shifting. Or to just laugh a bit.

"Part of what has happened in comics—and Batman symbolizes this as much as anyone does—we've gotten so much more serious about what these things are," Jurgens said. "By doing Bat-Mite, you end up poking a little fun at Batman, but somewhat at ourselves as an industry."

Bat-Mite is both an example of Batman’s earnest, goofy past and also a winking mockery of it, and is capable of becoming a satire of the whole Batman mythology while blurring the lines between readers, creators, and Batman himself.

"Modern mainstream comics have a lot of nostalgia baked into them, decades of continuity made by fans-turned-pros creating more and more connections in the various texts," comics writer Evan Dorkin wrote to me in an email. "The geeks have inherited the movie industry, and the world."

Dorkin wrote one of Bat-Mite’s most epic appearances in the 2000 Superman and Batman: World's Funnest, where Mite and Mxyzptlk get into a world-busting brawl, tearing through all of the DC Universe’s realities, from the Silver Age to the gritty noir cityscape of "The Dark Knight Returns." The issue includes pages drawn by many of the most famed artists in comics, including Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Alex Ross and Frank Miller himself.

Another version of Bat-Mite shows up, sort of, in Grant Morrison’s mind-bending, engrossing, infuriating 2006-2013 Batman series, in which the Scottish writer attempted to consolidate all of the eras and styles of Batman into a single character. As Batman loses his identity while warding off psychic manipulation by a dark, mysterious cabal, "Bat Might" appears in a Jiminy Cricket role, claiming to be, simultaneously, a 5th-dimensional creature and the "last fading echo of the voice of reason" in Batman’s subconscious.

"Of course, if Bat-Mite has always been part of Batman's subconscious, then it's a little telling that Bruce needed to create his own biggest fan from another dimension,” wrote Cody Walker, in The Anatomy of Zur-en-Arrh, a dissection of Morrison's work.

As fans battle amongst themselves about what Batman really is—a fun-loving astronaut, a dark warrior, or some point on the spectrum in between—Bat-Mite can become a literal embodiment of this struggle. For instance, last year in the annual issue of Batman/Superman, the Mite and Mxyzptlk use their powers to try to pit Batman and Superman together--a not-so-veiled jab at the 2016 movie Batman v. Superman, as well as the desires of countless fans and studios to see the two titans clash whether it makes logical sense or not.

Today, Bat-Mite is probably best-known to fans from the 2008 animated show Batman: The Brave and the Bold, where he is delightfully voiced by Paul Reubens of Pee-Wee Herman fame, and functions as not only an antagonist but an unofficial narrator. While he initially defends the show’s lighter tone--"Batman’s rich history allows him to be interpreted in a multitude of ways," he tells fellow extra-dimensional Batfans—he eventually sours, voicing all-too-familiar fan complaints. "I want the moody loner Batman!" he yells at the TV. He intentionally sabotages the show with his powers to accelerate its cancellation, only to see it replaced with—the horror—a Batgirl show.

And, by nixing the only show that would include magical Silver Age beings, he accidentally erases himself from existence. That’s a level of fourth-wall-breaking that Deadpool can only imagine.

"Looking at it in hindsight, through the lens of modern fandom, it does seem to make sense that Bat-Mite's love for his favorite superhero makes life difficult for the object of his devotion," Dorkin said. "There's the strain of modern uber-fan that professes their devotion to DC and Marvel but makes life difficult for the people working on the characters they supposedly love."

Bat-Mite is so intertwined with Batman and Gotham’s history, one wonders why he spends so little time back home in his own dimension. More to the point, why would someone with near-omnipotent powers, able to go to any part of creation he so desires, become so enthralled with a mere mortal, setting himself up for constant disappointment?

Maybe it’s the nature of fandom itself, just as today’s comics fans find ways to cast themselves as aggrieved outsiders no matter how dominant the superhero genre becomes in our culture. 

Being a fan means becoming both more and less than yourself, the biggest thrill of all.