Seven Days of the Scarecrow

Next Wednesday is Halloween, and to celebrate, EDILW is going to spend the next seven days focusing on a seasonally appropriate comic book character, one who is, incidentally, one of our favorite villains—The Scarecrow.

The Scarecrow is one of those perfect Batman villains, one that has a bizarre visual appearance that ties directly into his sinister modus operandi, not to mention his name.

He’s as straightforward as a comic book villain can be. His name? The Scarecrow. His costume? A scarecrow costume. His schtick? He likes to scare people.

You all know his deal, right? Dr. Jonathan Crane, tall, skinny, somewhat bookish Gotham City psychologist and college professor obsessed with the study of fear? Took his experiments too far and alienated his students and colleagues? Decided to wreak his revenge by dressing up as an actual scarecrow and using various fear toxins to scare his foes? Eventually begins matching his scare tactics versus those of the Batman in an ongoing rivalry to determine who Gotham’s true master of fear is?

Yeah, I love that guy.

Part of my affection for the character is likely simply because he starred in a few of the first Batman comics I ever read (Batman/Judge Dredd, Robin: A Hero Reborn). And part of it is that when I first encountered him, he was a character that was really quite new and intriguing to me because he seemed to have this long history with Batman, and yet I’d never heard of him. Like a few other Bat-villains—The Mad Hatter, The Tweedles, Two-Face—he menaced Batman in the comics for some sixty years, but he never made it onto the TV shows or movies the way The Joker, The Penguin, Catwoman and the Riddler did (Actually, Scarecrow was on Challenge of the Super-Friends, but I had no memory of it at the time). So he seemed like a sort of secret, bonus Batman villain to a new reader, if that makes sense. He was one of many treasures that rewarded a young teen who dug on Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film for getting into the comics that inspired it.

The other thing I like about him is how flexible his costume is. Like Batman and all of Batman’s other villains, the Scarecrow can look completely different depending on who’s drawing him, and I think his appearance and costume may actually even be more flexible than, say, The Penguin or Joker, who vary from artist to artist and appearance to appearance, but not quite as wildly as The Scarecrow does.

I think in part that’s simply because his “look” is simply a homemade, head-to-toe costume. It’s taken for granted that the guy has to sew himself a new get-up every time he breaks out of the asylum, which seems to give artists a freer hand to dress him according to their own tastes.

We’ll be looking at several of my favorite versions of the Scarecrow costumes over the course of the next few days, as well as sundry other Scarecrow-related features as we embark upon Seven Days of the Scarecrow.

Ready? Good, because we start in, like, five minutes.