This is interesting, because Batman has no excuse to return. He has no superpowers. If he actually dies, any subsequent resurrection will be hard to manage – though far from impossible. Parallel world Waynes, fiendish masterplans, and temporal jiggerypokery could all yield a return of the man himself (sort of).

Actually, even as I sit here pondering, I can see some really interesting ways back – not the least of which is to refuse to identify the new Batman for a while. Much more fun that drafting in one of his obvious stand-ins – let’s have some mystery. 

But here’s a thing: why are we killing heroes? First Captain America, now Batman. And even James Bond has been reincarnated without quips, gadgets, or suggestive eyebrows. It’s back-to-basics all over the fictional universe. Is this a belated millennium thing? A post-Obama thing? Is there a groundswell of emotional and mythic spring-cleaning going on?

All these fictional universes have been getting complicated recently, of course. They’ve been carrying the last century’s baggage – arch-enemies, bad costume choices, implausible scenarios. Much like reality, they’ve been stuck with a lot of crap they wish they hadn’t done. (Goodness -is this a sublimation thing? Are we finally realising we can’t push the reset button in real life? That there’s no such thing as ‘drawing a line’ under an issue, as Tony Blair was so fond of doing?)

There’s definitely a desire for simplicity out there, of course – we live in an increasingly complex world, and it’s annoying. Nothing we do is without consequence, without footnotes. In stories like this, we get to start fresh.

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Speaking of fresh… the Bad Sex In Fiction award was given out again last night, this time to Rachel Johnson. The award was established by Auberon Waugh:

to “gently dissuade” authors from including “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”.

I am, alas, unable to locate a picture of the award itself; a web search rapidly takes one into the realms of scandalous Victorian erotica and pictures of Norman Mailer. I’m very interested in that word ‘sound’, though. It seems to me to hold the key to which books get literary prizes – not just the bad sex award, but in general. I’m thinking about this because I got asked about the Booker again in an interview the other day. The thought which always occurs to me when literary prizes come up is the big furore over Harry Potter and the 1999 Whitbread Prize.

For anyone who doesn’t remember (or didn’t care):

Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf beat Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban for the Whitbread Prize on a 5-4 decision. There was something of a spat. Robert Harris was one of the judges on the side of Harry Potter:

“There’s an English snobbishness that began in this country around the time of Virginia Woolf and that has infected the bloodstream like a poison,” he said, noting that it was his understanding that the prize, set up 29 years ago by Whitbread & Company, the British beverage maker and pub chain, was supposed to go to the most enjoyable book of the year. “It says that if everyone can understand something it’s no good and if only a select few can understand it, then it has literary merit.”

Anthony Holden (also a judge) did not agree:

“If I’m a pompous prat for saying that Seamus Heaney’s ‘Beowulf’ is greater literature than Harry Potter,” he said, ”then I’m proud to be a pompous prat.”

Mm. Soundbites not to offer up…  Well. I can see where he’s coming from, but the point is that as far as I can ascertain Harris was right: the Whitbread was supposed to be about what’s enjoyable, rather than what is ‘great literature’. Now, Holden may find only great literature enjoyable, in which case, fine. As Dave Baddiel points out, though, each category is supposed to be in equal contention for the overall prize. Poetry is always going to be more ‘literary’ than writing for children. The year before, as a matter of interest, David Almond’s fabulous Skellig won the children’s prize, and the main prize went to Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters.

Enjoyability, of course, may be an even more tricky quality to judge than literary-ness.