Patricia Highsmash
Talia Al Ghul: Somebody’s Daughter
by Travis Hedge Coke
Talia al Ghul, created in 1971 by Denny O’Neil, Bob Brown, and Dick Giordano has fans will justify her every crime and every cruelty, and anti-fans who despise her, largely for misogynist reasons, but also sometimes, because she is somebody’s daughter.
In her first appearance, Talia shoots a man dead, and Batman’s response is to hug her. In her second appearance, which takes us through Calcutta and the Himalayas, she has Robin shot. At the end of that story she kisses Batman.
Third, fourth appearances? Holding a gun. Using a gun. A great love of Batman’s life, Talia probably uses a gun more often per appearance than any other Batman opponent. Talia is the gun.
Like a gun, Talia is routinely treated as something used and not someone with autonomy and adult responsibility.
Somewhen along the line, audiences became accustomed to thinking of Talia’s work and crimes as an extension of her father or an inevitable diktat of her education, typified after Batman the Animated Series, as a personal concern for ecology that simply results in mass murder, chemical weapons sales, slavery, and theft.
From her original appearances forward, her culpability has been obscured and sometimes absolved her nature as a desirable woman, a girlwoman, and as somebody’s daughter.
Not just somebody’s daughter, but by metaphor and extension, the daughter of the Demon, the Devil’s daughter, Dracula’s daughter, Ming the Merciless’ daughter.
Talia can be brilliant, lethal, a force to shake the world and a hand cruel enough to do so, and many in the audience will say it wasn’t her fault, well another large subsection, get mad because it’s absurd that a girl could be so powerful.
Talia al Ghul makes a fortune in the manufacture and selling chemical and biological weapons. She deals in child soldiers and in slavery. She is a billion-dollar thief. Murderer. War profiteer. Gunrunner. Kidnapper.
She is a highly educated, fully competent, independently wealthy adult.
I like Talia, the character. She is an overachiever, addicted, as many former child overachievers become, to staying an overachiever. Her raising and lived experience have led her to a bizarre and somewhat out of her time world perspective.
Talia is encoded as ethnic, as foreign, but impossible to place.
When she adopts an alias, for business purposes, it is an anglophone alias. The artist most associated with her, Neal Adams, says model and actress Caroline Munro is his visual ideal, the ideal actor to play her.
Her father, a semi-immortal eugenicist, is obsessed with marrying her off and her childbearing capacity.
As early as her second appearance, her intelligence and her ability to mislead are highlighted in contrast to her apparent naivete. Yet, decade after decade, characters and audience respond to her as if she is more the naivete, and not the canny game player.
During one attempt to impress the father of her sons, Batman, Talia adopted the modus operandi of his traditional villains, the games, the secret bases and props, the clues and riddles. Her games were thick with meaning, relevance, artistry, and were unwinnable. Her riddles, codified by Leviathan, a social and literary metaphor, that was an anagram for her name with extraneous letters.
Talia works hard defending her place in a society of criminality called capitalism. Her engagements with Bruce Wayne, with Batman, with Lex Luthor, the Justice League, are capitalist bucking for place.
At times she has justified selling biological weapons, by selling to both sides in a conflict.
Talia is a very rich, very cruel adult. How she is responded to, by characters and by audiences, is as a adult-bodied child. She is treated as naive, as innocent, outside conventional social awareness or decorum.
In-story, I think she is savvy enough to play on that. In Neal Adams’ Odyssey, we see Talia play detached from conventional reality, the way to disarm canny individuals. Outside the narratives, as audiences and some creatives see her, exaggeration to say that I despair.
In Event Leviathan, by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev, Talia’s Leviathan organization is remembered as something about running guns, not a wold-conquering, enslaving, temporary empire with weapons of mass destruction. As with DC villains, like her father or the mass-murdering terrorist, Cheshire, there is a seeming desire in the creatives who make these comics, as well as individuals within the comics, to routinely scale back what is acknowledged of their crimes.
There is a racial component. Neal Adams said of Talia’s father, that he created a face not tied to any particular ethnicity, and the same is so of Talia. Middle Eastern of some sort, maybe, or French, or North African, some mix, Japanese, Mongolian.
Ra’s al Ghul and Talia are designed to reapply the Fu Manchu or Dracula trick to the racial, sexual, economic, turn political anxieties of 1970s comic book readers, which for better or for worse, in this instance presumes a white, Christian-background American male between say eight and twenty-two.
Real ethnicities are avoided in attempt to be less racist. This still leaves Talia as the foreign other. As the female foreign other, infantilizing her, remains for an American audience even easier than infantilizing white American women.
Some of the best Talia artists have been able to play with her changeable expression. Her face and movements, under Neal Adams or Chris Burnham are a range of easily deceptive masks and outbursts of emotion with real intelligence behind them. Klaus Janson, in Death and the Maidens, drew her as human and unguarded in opposition to his very rigid Batman. Jerry Bingham, who drew Son of the Demon, alternately, keeps her face an almost emotion-lacking mask the entire comic, only showing a few small smiles in the final third, with virtually all visual passion coming from Batman as her suitor and eventually, father of her child. In Son, as in previous and later encounters, Talia once more shoots several people, and Batman is unconcerned with the gun, with the victims, or with her shooting people, only worried for her safety.
The slight, unknowable smile that allows Talia to snow Batman in Requiem for a Martyr and The Lazarus Pit. The smile that lets her profit from war and murder, that lets her commit war and murder, but remain a girl.
Of another daughter, Ra’s al Ghul says to Batman, “Did she come to you, Detective? Precocious in her sexuality, earnest in her demeanor?”
Talia is positioned as sexually available. Sexually precocious. Even in the 1970s, this was played with as a facade, though for someone as special as Batman that bends. In the 1990s and the 21st Century, creatives as diverse as Chuck Dixon and Grant Morrison will put the weight on the facade, rather than chance that she is performing for an angle being the counterbalance to narrative-true availability.
Talia has been, professionally, almost exclusively shaped by white English-speaking men, with the nonbinary Grant Morrison and Greg Rucka being the two significant exceptions. Devin Grayson has a sort of side career writing around Talia, without directly using her much, but the perspective she adds has often put the lie to her typical portrayal.
Much of how Talia is drawn or written is aimed at a stereotypical (white, straight) male gaze. She has been, as was her sister, raised by Ra’s al Ghul and his empire of servants to present for a male gaze. Her fandom does not skew so exclusively white anglophone male. There is tension in how she is portrayed and how, by audiences, she is received.
The Talia in my head, yours, or Neal Adams’ are valid internally, to us, yet there is a hierarchy in terms of published stories, produced screenplays, original creators, later developers, fan theories, and our gut instinctual feelings.
Talia, herself, has no autonomy, and the nature of her fictional universe, where causality and continuity are alterable at any moment means that we can only touch on earlier stories, earlier renderings, in terms of commonality, prevalence, contrast.
In terms of those commonalities and contrasts, our critical faculties must be exercised. Aware of both the character in her fictional world, the creatives shaping her and that world, the distinction between irony, satire, and earnest portrayal. Aware of shifting artists, writers, generations, readers and secondary and tertiary audiences, reprints, flubs, fixes, retellings and collusions.
In the comic that introduced Talia, the colorist uses the most lurid yellow to delineate Asian, first showing us Talia in an Asian setting. Talia’s skin is not colored with this yellow, but her features and her dress are codified via cartooning to be easily read as Asian or Asian-adjacent, in the same fashion as early Dr Strange, at Marvel, was drawn “Asian,” but not colored.
Batman and Talia first formally meet a Buddhist monastery, in an unnamed Asian country, where he will perform a mimicry of the Buddhist parable a catching the bull.
Published some forty years later, another comic, Batman Inc, by Morrison, Chris Burnham, and Nathan Fairbairn, will revisit both Talia’s supposed kidnapping ( as her manipulating her kidnapper) and this monastery scene, from her original appearance, as a disguised master criminal Talia baits the Batman with a maze decorated with the Buddhist parable of their first published meeting.
While it may seem counterintuitive, the same corroborating elements, mean that when Talia is the mastermind or primary manipulating force – Fables, written by Denny O’Neil; Batman Inc; Lex Luthor’s downfall in President Luthor – there is a strong reaction from fans and anti-fans, that she is incapable of these high crimes and that they somehow cheapen or lessen her.
In terms of Batman Inc, it is not unusual to see this longest story to focus on Talia as the primary villain, as somehow reducing her villainy and reducing her power despite the fact that she successfully conquered, if only for a moment, large parts of the entire world, including major cities of at least five continents.
Like Batman too often does, our audience inclination appears to be an overabundance of empathy end of desire for stasis or control of the Talia al Ghul narrative, Talia al Ghul, the person.
What does it do, that artists and colorists shift her ethnicity or ethnic-coding every few appearances? That Adams suggests white, anglo actors for her and her father, but in cases, actors who have played other ethnicities? What does it add or subtract or transmogrify?
Talia al Ghul was introduced to audiences as someone who benefits from, and concludes in, every manner of human rights violations recognized by the United Nations. Sexism and an orientalism encourage a moral gauge for Talia, for audiences reading of Talia, set to far different parameters.
The sheer level of her finances have encouraged readers from first appearance forward, to recontextualize and excuse her criminality. However, it goes even more unacknowledged, that from his first appearance forward, we readers, we audience, have been encouraged by Batman’s financial and class status, to recontextualize and excuse his criminality even faster.
Talia al Ghul, Talia Head, is at least a supervillain, a criminal mastermind, femme fatale, while Batman can never be.
These parameters have remained encouraged irrespective of the quality are the comics, or adapted material in other media.
Talia and her father were never simply racist caricature. They have been, she has been, a consistent examination and deliberate warping of our, and of Batman’s reception to racist caricature, to sexism, to infantilization. The existence of Talia forces an examination of Batman’s profiting and being restrained by racial caricature, gender expectations, and infantilization. They are both, in their continued serial existence, dependent on the forgiveness of war crimes and war criminals.
