In an effort to forget that I'm getting nowhere on MainFictionThing this morning, I've spent an inordinate amount of time leafing through several of the attempts past to bring superheroes to prose – Craig Shaw Gardener's THE BATMAN MURDERS, short story collections – THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF BATMAN, DICK TRACY: THE SECRET FILES –, Andrew Vachss's BATMAN: THE ULTIMATE EVIL, an old MARVEL SUPERHEROES collection, etc etc – and I can't shake the oddity of seeing "Batman said..." in prose: there's a cognitive dissonance – in spite of being an avid fan of the old Shadow pulps where "The Shadow said" runs adverbly rampant – that I find irreconcilable (though the TRACY stories are a little easier since those are, excepting the villains, named with – for lack of a better phrase – real names, no matter the quality of the story); even Morrison's prose/comics mixture in the oft-and-unfairly-maligned BATMAN 663 (which I happen to love) jars me a bit.

Wondering: Is it because I'm so used to seeing others' interpretation of the character that I find it impossible, through a particular lacking of my own imagination, to picture the character as I see him? Is it the codename thing that just feels weird?

Can't recall if I had the same sensation with the few STAR TREK or STAR WARS novels/novelizations I've read (though I do recall enjoying Peter David's TREK novels quite a bit); might have been easier since there's really only one visual interpretation of Picard or whomever. And, like Dick Tracy, it's not a codename but a real name...

I still haven’t gotten anywhere with MainFictionThing.