Patricia Highsmash
Why I’m Glad Killer Croc is Trans
by Travis Hedge Coke
“Estrogen?”
– The Batman
Do I know if Batman: Reptilian is “in continuity?” Do I care?
Garth Ennis and Liam Sharp’s Reptilian centers around a baby killer alien lizard mutant monster slaughtering people in Gotham City (including tearing up various supervillains, like the Joker and Ridder), seeking out the former gang boss, now vagrant cannibal thug, Killer Croc, attracted by physiological imperatives and animal instinct. Batman surmises that the monster wishes Croc to suckle it, or to breed with Croc, and who knows. Maybe. Batman does not know everything and this Batman is really a dick. He is a dick with a conscience and Croc is an asshole who eats people, but it is left up in the air.
Croc, discovering – or, being told – that he is intersex, freaks him out. He does not know how to deal with physiological changes in his maturing body, how to cope with the social situation he finds himself in, how to reconcile his identity with new discoveries. And, the entire time, there is Batman, being a dick.
This could be a recipe for something horridly transphobic and either annoying or genuinely dangerous to real trans people in the real world, except, at the heart of things, it is a cis guy established as a dick, being a dick, and while Croc is a terrible person, he is not and has never been a terrible person because he is intersex. He is a cannibalistic asshole because he chooses to be.
As much as – as a Batman fan, as a genre-rules enthusiast – “Batman should put all his efforts into social programs” hot takes bug me, Reptilian goes a great way to showing how much corrupt nonsense we, as audience or as fans, let slide when it is Batman doing it. I have seen Batman punch a young man he raised so hard it drew blood, because that young man said he felt bad a mutual friend had been shot. Batman threatening white criminals with prison rape by Black men. Batman being intentionally and unintentionally racist, classist, sexist.
On basic levels, Batman is a really rich white-read American landlord who puts on a scary costume to punch the poor, the mentally ill, and every once in awhile, a Chinese or Middle Eastern crime lord’s underlings. Even more rarely, a monster we can all get behind, like the monied, famous rapist he takes out publicly at the beginning of Reptilian.
By the end of Reptilian, Batman has failed to protect virtually anyone, excited at the prospect of people being tortured, of illegal imprisonment, terrorist action, anti-government violence, betrayal, and pettiness.
Continuity is as delirious, as deleterious, as our our formative ages. What parents do not wreak, mass or mess up, bone, erotics, and economics will.
Repitilian is a familiar tale of changes which are misunderstood, mixed, because they are too taboo to touch their forbiddenness, realizations which even good people turn into hurtful jokes. Croc is male because Croc is male. Croc is male and instersex. Being intersex does not stop Croc from being male. It does, however, mean that Croc is a trans man.
The art style of Reptilian is very much a marriage of Dave McKean exaggeration and microcosmic naturalism combined with the naturalism and cartooning of Steve Dillon, to whom the comic is dedicated and who was intended as the original artist. Dillon’s style was naturalist and cartoonish, but unlike McKean, who uses those to make small moments and looming tableaux, Dillon turned expressive faces into landscapes and reduced the nonhuman world to commentary on people.
Reptilian marries neo-noir electric light reflected in the rainy pavement with a Timothy Dalton-looking Alfred Pennyworth who is always smaller than the Batman he serves, often the one character who looks at us. Bodies become fragilely real by the exaggeration of tears falling down a cheek, by impossible biology and constant limning. Sharp’s Joker’s smile stretches off of his head in lashes of red paint, red ink, like Penguin’s glowing red eyes. To ask why Penguin’s eyes glow, why he now sports a curated mustache, is to lose the thread, lose the power of solarized flashes or frieze-framed polaroid scenes.
Batman brings chiaroscuro with him, not How does Batman bring chiaroscuro with him. Not even, Is it really chiaroscuro?
It takes nearly fifty pages of mutilated victims, Batman being a jerk, and Alfred Pennyworth looking right at us, for Killer Croc to really be brought up in dialogue. Hyper-realist teeth and hairs. Etched streaks of implausible light. Muddy, vibrant, clashing color pops everything. But, so little Croc for a comic about Killer Croc.
Finally, we see Croc in the story and not only on a cover image, seventy-some pages in.
Croc gave birth and did not understand there was a pregnancy, that there was a birth, or what any of it means. A raw suppurating wound on his belly hangs in red fetters from green scales. Batman cuts away the worst of it while lecturing Croc on having gotten fat, delaying his announcement, talking of excess skin after weight loss, cannibalism, pie, delaying just saying, “You’ve just given birth.”
Batman talks of lactating as, “it’s possible you might actually be female,” and, “hermaphroditic phase.”
Croc, born Waylon Jones, looks to Batman as educated, intelligent, caring, fair; a superhero.
Sex stuff scares Batman. That is a long thread through most takes on the character. He is afraid of sex, sometimes with a repressed child’s anxiety. He has gender issues.
Reptilian is about Croc and Croc’s monster baby, but it is also about Batman and guys like Batman. Not the costumes and crimefighting parts, the being a brilliant detective part, but repression masked by snark.
Pages after Croc is confirmed intersex and a parent, Batman begins speculating Croc is an alien or hybrid human/alien. “In the absence of a better theory.”
“A human being infected with alien DNA as a fetus. You’re half-and-half, without all the necessary…” says Batman to a terrified postpartum Croc. TERF language. Transphobic language we cannot be sure Batman believes or which Batman is using to dig at Croc, another weapon, a way to hurt a supervillain and protect himself from the mucky waters and fog banks of gender and sex.
Some people are educated enough, savvy enough, to talk a good ally game, but then their money is on the line, when their stress is up, when it is convenient for them, all the classism, racism, sexism, any bigotry that works will come clicking into place, ready to do its work.
Everything we have absorbed in a hundred pages of comic starts to warp and clarify like churned butter. Croc’s baby makes itself sexually available and momentarily has red, made up human lips. One of Croc’s eyes go the glowing red swirl of earlier villains while his other has the realist specificity, both staring at us as he begs to wake from what is not a dream. With clarity, finally, Croc says to Batman, “I knew you were enjoying this!” and Batman does not disagree.
The tale of two traumatized children who grew into horror stalkers of the night, Croc and Batman. Batman and Batman. A Croc of two worlds.
Batman says of the newborn, that it is, “All alone in an alien world. Struggling to follow a life cycle hopelessly compromised… [S]imply very, very angry. Or it could be that it’s gone completely insane.”
That is a self-description, and one of Croc, too. And, it is indicative of Batman’s fear of hybridity and fear of liminal states. A Batman who needs to bring chiaroscuro. Needs to render black and white in sharpest contrast. A Batman who will offer a desperate man his car as protection, as a womb away from danger, only to tell him, once ensconced, that while he said, “Once you’re inside you’ll be safe,” the truth is, “I lied. I am using you as bait.”
Croc takes on aspects of Joker, of Penguin, of Ivy and the Mad Hatter the way he has combined what are reductively-termed male and female.
Batman cuts himself from the middle of a baby monster as the baby had burst from their parent. A Batman covered in blood and intimacy, painted red and pink. A Batman for whom mother is a job more than a gender, but which is mixed with gender and sex so intrinsically it hurts him. A Batman who surrenders Croc to cruelty, spectacle, mockery and experimentation for being aberrant and abhorrent. For being queer.
It is explicit, in the end, that Croc could be punished for his violence, but he is not. He is punished for his genetics, for gender.
