Warner Todd Huston, and the strange sight of a conservative calling for a return to the days when comics ruined the world ...

(Above: Batman abandons his status as vigilante for work as a cheese eating surrender monkey deputy sheriff).

With the silly season well and truly in progress, it would be remiss not to remark on Tim Blair reflecting on Peter Roebuck meditating on the appointment of a Muslim, Usman Khawaja, to the Australian cricket team, in Diversity Good and Bad.

Blair is naturally agitated about any hint of prejudice in the selection of Australian teams, perhaps incapable of disremembering the good old days in relation to professionals v amateurs, Irish Catholics v Masons, Anglos v wogs, and aborigines v whites.

Really, Peter? One or two names might be helpful here. You know, of the talented Buddhists and such who’ve been denied their place in the national team due to Australian bigotry.

It is of course a profoundly stupid remark in relation to the way bigotry and prejudice works over the years, and it leads to the natural conclusion that Blair and Roebuck, both congenitally incoherent, deserve each other.

Blair of course is a regular basher of Muslims - rarely does a week go by without a snide snippet or a satirical link - and, to conform to the pre-colonial mind set, is something of a cricket fanatic, so what fun to see him suffer so in recent months. And now to have a Muslim come to the rescue of the downhearted Aussie lads ... oh dear, how he must be writhing ...

Well with that kind of intro, it's a natural segue into another cultural arena, and really the whole story is laid out with beguiling pictures in Andy Khouri's Racists Totally Freak Out Over Muslim 'Batman of Paris'.

Okay, it's a different kind of bat man, but the story's the same. It seems that DC Comics has decided that a 22 year old Algerian Muslim is a fitting character to take over the Batman franchise in Paris, and this immediately led to a freakout by one Warner Todd Huston, in Batman's Politically Correct European Vacation.

Never mind that Batman, as correctly analysed by Christopher Nolan, is a crypto fascist vigilante thug with deep Freudian and personal problems, incapable of a stable relationship, and with a most peculiar attachment to a butler and a sometimes seen, but now often invisible boy Robin.

It seems any variant, especially an Algerian with a taste for parkour, is simply not on:

Reality isn’t always very fun, granted. Because of that many people turn to comic books for a little escapism. But there’s escapism and PC indoctrination. Sadly, it appears that DC Comic’s Batman is angling for the latter and not the former. You see, Batman has decided to hire a Muslim to “save France.”

Yep, the conservative dream police are always to hand, ready to trample on any fun or any variant from the norm.

Huston seems to think it's completely impossible for a Muslim lad to be a comic book hero, in much the same way as a few might think it strange Australia now has a Muslim for a batsman.

The logic, and the incoherent rant against PCism is splendidly silly, and we'll let it speak for itself, since never has so much bile and nonsense been brought together in such an addled way to get agitated about a comic book.

Unfortunately, readers of Batman will not be helped to understand what troubles are really besetting France. In this age when Muslim youths are terrorizing the entire country, heck in this age of international Muslim terrorism assaulting the whole world, Batman’s readers will be confused by what is really going on in the world. Through it all DC makes a Muslim in France a hero when French Muslims are at the center of some of the worst violence in the country’s recent memory.

Uh huh. Heck, golly gosh, you know I was always vaguely concerned at the anti-American tone in Graham Greene's The Quiet American, but when it comes down to it, after reading this kind of Huston silliness, perhaps Greene understated the absurdly distorted way that some Americans manage to view the world. I mean take this bit of malarkey:

It has gotten so bad in France that in some parts of its cities, those parts controlled by marauding gangs of Muslim youths, whites never enter for fear of their lives. Not only that but not even police dare enter these areas. This dangerous situation does not seem anywhere near being solved. In fact, it’s just getting worse.

What? Is Paris like south central LA? Or more like the suburbs on view in Baltimore in The Wire?

It seems that Huston makes some kind of career out of checking the PC nature of comic books:

It’s PCism run amuck, for sure. But it isn’t surprising for DC, a comic book company that has a character whose creator based it on “corporate greed.” Nor is it surprising in an industry where tea party members are made the enemy of super heroes. For the character based on “corporate greed” look up DC’s Larfleeze character and see the Marvel comic Captain America issue 602 where The Captain makes Tea Partiers into an enemy to America (Marvel later apologized). For that matter, check out the words of the director of the new 2011 Captain America movie who said that his Captain America won’t be a big “flag waver.” Imagine that. Captain America not being that into America.

These few examples aren’t the only ones, either. Among many other instances, last April the venerable Archie Comics announced they were adding a gay character and back in 2007 movie makers announced that they intended to remove all mentions of the U.S. military from G.I. Joe (they later relented to a degree).

Yes, most of the links in the pars above are links to other Huston stories, but I guess if you're going to indulge in a bout of navel gazing, you should also provide links to said navel.

The climactic yelp of agony?

It all adds up to a PCing of the American comic book industry that has been going on for far too long.

Well I guess it makes a change from conservatives explaining how American comic books are directly responsible for the ruination of the youth of America.

In such circumstances, we always love to trot out Fredric Wertham, vigilant campaigner against sex, drugs and violence in comic books back in the nineteen fifties.

Presumably that's the PC free zone to which Huston longs to return, but if that's the case, and if having a gay to hand in an Archie comic gets him upset, what's he going to make of Wonder Woman's taste for bondage (or Wertham's notion that her strength and independence could only mean she's a lesbian)?

We could go on and on - the deep depravity of golden age nineteen fifties comics books is one of our pet themes and visual favourites, with a rich abundance now available on the intertubes.

I guess it's possible to have a proper decent argument with Huston - as Andy Khouri does while providing some nifty graphics, and so promoting the comic book in ways that surely make DC publicists smile like a cheshire cat - but in the end Huston's being so stupid, and so unaware of the transgressive nature of comic books that the only sensible response is a chortle.

Now we've learned that conservatives have a larger amygdala (it made Gawker, so it must be true), does this go some way to explaining why in cultural matters they're simply incapable of an adequate response?

If Huston had been enraged about how the current Batman has abandoned his vigilante thuggish neurotic behaviour, for a joint private public partnership using the authority granted to his company (Halliburton anyone?) by the elected government of France, he might have had some grounds for a whinge.

But of course as soon as you start celebrating Batman as a Robin-fixated Freudian vigilante thug operating outside the social norms, the conservatives rail at the way he's undermining the social norms for a bit of a one two, biff and bang with equally anarchic enemies (the Joker anyone, as the movie plays out the tormented puritan v the demented nihilist riff?)

Of course we're still waiting for a genuine secularist atheist comic book hero, smiting mightily all the religious extremists in the world, but we can wait ... and in the meantime, it doesn't much matter if the hero is a fundamentalist Christian from the south, or a trendy Algerian Muslim in Paris. (And while it's got nothing much to do with anything, take a look at A Prophet, which isn't as solid as Mesrine, but does a nice job of exploring current social tensions, via a young Arab man climbing the rungs in prison to become a decently French mafia man).

Meanwhile, if you truly have a life to waste, you can study up on The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters. Not too many atheists in that lot, but at least The Hulk is listed as a lapsed Catholic. Go the Hulk ... show me your angry alienated green muscles again.

In the end, comic books, like any other art form, are about ideas and insights, and it seems the enlarged conservative brain simply can't comprehend the notion.

Never mind, let's mess with Huston's mind with these caps from long ago. This is the unPC correct arcadia which he yearns to return to? Go feminists ...