[In the following review of Batman: The Ultimate Evil, Bishop and Robinson discuss Vachss's use of Batman as a vehicle in his fight against child abuse.]

Pow! What? Batman has taken on child prostitution in Thailand? No, we are not making this up. Zowie! Child abuse, whether at home in Gotham or over in exotic "Udon Khai," is at once the source and the reflection of the ultimate evil? And Batman, of all super heroes, despite his camp associations and (Holy Hypocrisy!) his historic relationship with Robin, enlists to combat commercial pedophilia? That struggle was (Wham!) his late mother's mission, the real reason his parents were murdered? You say the boss (Splat!), the ultimate kingpin of the ultimate evil, is named Malady? And the goal—not of the mythic Batman but of the story we're reading—is (Zap!) to destabilize the Thai govemment? Uh-uh, we are not making any of it up.

In fact, our only problem with the extraordinary new Batman project is that author Andrew Vachss simultaneously is and is not making it up. Vachss's new Warner novel, Batman: The Ultimate Evil, has also been adapted (Dynamic Dual Distribution!) as a two-part DC Comic. In both formats, Batman learns about the hideous child abuse perpetrated in his own grim Gotham and then follows the horror to mysterious Udon Khai, where he destroys a tourist industry founded on the sexual enslavement of children. Since Udon Khai, like Batman, exists only in fantasy, both novel and comic book include an appendix—journalist David Hechler's article describing actual child sex tourism in Thailand—along with a list of organizations working against it. One of these, Vachss's own Don't! Buy! Thai! (we are not making up those multiple, comic book-style exclamation points, either), is coordinating an international boycott of Thai exports in which Vachss hopes to engage his readers.

For Vachss, child prostitution and international pedophile tourism dwarf any revelations about Batman's past, as the superhero's fame becomes a vehicle for the author's larger project. In a recent interview, Vachss told us that "Batman is a story and Thailand is not enough of a story." In fact, even Thailand, a major but by no means solitary offender in this area, takes a back seat to the issue of child abuse writ large. Any apparent anomaly is resolved by Vachss's assertion that "child protection and crime prevention are the same thing." Hitherto, Batman has merely been "fighting criminals, not crime"; he can now trace his brooding dissatisfaction with his life's work to his inability to recognize this distinction. By linking child abuse, social ills and criminal activity, Vachss uses Batman in much the same way the comic-book hero uses his Batmobile: as a crime-fighting instrument. Vachss enlists Batman in his laudable thirty-year fight against child abuse of all sorts; he hopes that the superhero will take the cause to a super-big audience.

The contractual restrictions that Vachss accepted in order to enroll the Caped Crusader in this particular crusade require a clear disjunction between fiction (Batman and Udon Khai) and reality (the child prostitutes of Thailand). In the text, Vachss effects the transition with a signed statement, as the tone shifts from the mythic ("'In their name!' the Batman cried deep within himself as he swung through the open window to face the ultimate evil") to the reportorial ("Child sex tourism is not new"). Does the invented narrative support the real one? On the most basic level, of course it does. The fiction tells a story about child abuse and sexual slavery and the reportage exposes Batman's mass readership to facts about sex tourism in Thailand that arguably would reach them in no other way. But Batman's fictional adventures in fictitious Udon Khai may make it harder to appreciate the true story meant to mobilize readers to action.

Batman: The Ultimate Evil is a techno-thriller. The original Batman possessed no superpowers. Instead of extraterrestrial strength, flight or X-ray vision, he had an exquisitely trained body and loads of fancy equipment. Vachss builds on this history: Batman's workout is now so intense that the cool-down alone takes ninety minutes, and the Batmobile's new gadgetry makes the car a lot smarter than you are. He also has access to the latest weaponry—Batman supplies the Udon Khai guerrillas with an arsenal worth two-and-a-half pages of description—and computers loaded with all knowable information. To free the children of Udon Khai, Batman, himself a finely tuned machine getting in touch with its inner child, need only deploy the various mechanisms along the trail illuminated by the data—and Zap!

By contrast, the reader who joins the real-world struggle is assigned a much less glamorous task with far fewer visible results: simply refusing to buy products made in Thailand. It's not a role for which the political economy of mythical Udon Khai offers much preparation. Udon Khai's is a one-industry economy, based on specialized, pedophiliac sex tourism at astronomical prices and with long waiting lists, controlled by a single resident foreigner, the vicious William X. Malady. Thailand's real sex industry is part of an international development strategy favoring mass tourism, the attraction being cheap, abundant sex with teenage and adult prostitutes, as well as children. If there's a "kingpin"—and we're not sure it's that simple—it's the World Bank, and the malady is global capitalism. That and the international AIDS epidemic….

Aware that he's writing for "an audience with an attention span of X," where X = minimal, Vachss intentionally narrows the focus of his novel to make his point more dramatic. But he also wants to motivate this attention-X audience to social action Now, while they may indeed buy many of the products manufactured in Thailand (e.g., athletic shoes and action-hero figurines), Batman's principal audience, young males who read comic books, may not be the most likely source of international consumer activism, especially in these apolitical times. More worrisome is the efficacy of a boycott in this situation. Most people in Thailand who sell themselves or their children into sex work do so because they lack other options. Outside the sex trade, the labor market offers work—at a fraction of a prostitute's earnings—as domestics and production workers in the very sweatshops that produce athletic shoes and action-hero figurines. So a general boycott may result in even fewer choices for children and parents. Moreover, the Chuan government, which was publicly committed to ending child prostitution, has recently been replaced by a coalition of old-time politicos who favor a business-as-usual stance. Vachss may have the right idea, but action directed against the sex industry itself may be a more effective strategy.