After decades of battling surreal villains like the Joker and the Penguin, Batman, perhaps the world’s most famous comic-book hero, has set his sights on traffickers in child prostitution.

In a new novel and accompanying comic book, ‘Batman: The Ultimate Evil’ (published by Warner Aspect; the book is 20 dollars, while the two accompanying comics are 5.95 dollars each), the Caped Crusader battles the child sex trade of a south-east Asian country suspiciously similar to Thailand.

Batman’s visit to the country of ‘Udon Khai’, the centre of a child prostitution ring, is explained in the plot as the hero’s search for the killers of his own mother. In typical Batman style, he punches out the sex traders, and frees an untold number of children from a brutally depicted sexual slavery.

But ‘The Ultimate Evil’ — both in its novel form written by Andrew Vachss, and its comic book version written by Neil Barrett Jr. and drawn by Denys Cowan — is more a piece of political muckraking than a simple adventure story.

The story embraces a political rage that is extremely rare in comic books — and much more so for Batman, one of the prized properties of the Time/Warner conglomerate.

In the comic, one of the ‘Udon Khai’ villagers asks Batman, “Why should it be that men of evil can plot to come here and rape our children, and that it is not a crime in their home country? When will we shoot the poachers on sight?”

And Batman himself, when approached by a villager who asks him what a poor family can do to support all its children besides involvement in the sex trade, replies, “If I were to stand where you stood, I would steal.”

One of the most masterful aspects of ‘The Ultimate Evil’ is that is uses a medium uniquely for children, the superhero comic book, to demonstrate, through graphic scenes of suffering, the way the child sex trade crushes the innocence of childhood.

Perhaps most remarkably, Batman — normally a defender of the status quo — actually helps to lead a revolution in Udon Khai, in which the villagers, among other things, kill the main (white) leaders of the sex trade.

Martha Thomases, publicity manager for DC Comics, the Times/Warner branch which publishes Batman, says the story is in the tradition of many superhero comics that have veiled references to politics. “It’s not as if Thailand is named in the story,” she points out.