C O M P A N I O N MICHAEL EURY MICHAEL KRONENBERG •
INTRODUCTION BY DENNIS O’NEIL
TABLE OF CONTENTS 4
INTRODUCTION BY DENNIS O’NEIL
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CHAPTER 1 THE “NEW LOOK”: Why Batman Needed the Fix-It Man
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28
34
40
46
50
60
112
CHAPTER 14 FADE TO BLACK: The Creature of the Night Returns
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CHAPTER 15 TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP OUT: Robin’s Journey Through the Counterculture and into Self-Awareness
CHAPTER 3 BATMANIA BEGINS: Batman Fans React to the “New Look”
128
CHAPTER 16 BREATHING LIFE INTO BATMAN: An Interview with Neal Adams
CHAPTER 4 GOOD HELP IS HARD TO FIND: The Death of Alfred and the Story of Aunt Harriet
148
CHAPTER 17 KILLER’S SMILE: The Joker Returns to His Homicidal Roots
CHAPTER 2 THE MAN WHO REDESIGNED BATMAN: An Interview with Carmine Infantino
CHAPTER 5 THE CASE OF THE COLLECTIVE CONUNDRISTS: The Mystery Analysts of Gotham City, Their Forebears, and Their Offspring Guest essay by Mike W. Barr
152
CHAPTER 18 FRIGHT NIGHT: Batman and the Horror Genre
CHAPTER 6 GOTHAM’S FINEST: Batman’s Relationship with the Police
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CHAPTER 19 TWO DARK KNIGHTS: Batman and The Shadow Guest essay by Will Murray
CHAPTER 7 THE GHOSTS OF GOTHAM: Bill Finger and Sheldon Moldoff, the Men Behind Bob Kane
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CHAPTER 20 THE RA’S AL GHUL SAGA: Batman’s Greatest Foe and His Epic First Battle with the Caped Crusader
CHAPTER 8 AMERICA GOES BATTY: The Batman TV Show 174
CHAPTER 21 A YEAR WITH ARCHIE GOODWIN: One of Comics’ Greatest Writers and Editors Takes Over Detective Comics
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CHAPTER 9 HOLY HOT ROD!: The Batmobile
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76 84
CHAPTER 10 BATMAN-A-GO-GO!: The TV Show’s Impact Upon Comic Books An Interview with Michael Allred and Lee Allred
CHAPTER 22 “THE BAT-MURDERER”: Accused of Murder, Batman Goes on the Run As a Fugitive
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86
CHAPTER 11 GOTHAM’S UNSUNG HERO: An Interview with Joe Giella
CHAPTER 23 THE SHADOW OF THE BAT GROWS: Batman’s Changing World in the 1970s
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CHAPTER 12 THE MILLION DOLLAR DEBUT OF BATGIRL
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CHAPTER 24 BATMAN’S CONSCIENCE: An Interview with Denny O’Neil
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CHAPTER 13 AN INDEX OF BATMAN’S “NEW LOOK” ROGUES’ GALLERY 206
CHAPTER 25 THE DEFINITIVE BATMAN?: Englehart, Rogers, and Austin’s Memorable Storyline
220
CHAPTER 26 AN INDEX OF BATMAN’S BRONZE AGE ROGUES’ GALLERY
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THE “NEW LOOK” BATMAN AND DETECTIVE COMICS (1964–1969): An Issue-by-Issue Index
223 All art TM & © DC Comics.
THE BRONZE AGE BATMAN AND DETECTIVE COMICS (1969–1979): An Issue-by-Issue Index
THE “NEW LOOK”
magine, if you will, a world without Batman. Such a notion seems preposterous today—beyond the Dark Knight’s popular franchise of comic-book titles, Batman is known to almost everyone who goes to the movies, watches television cartoons, plays video games, wears T-shirts, and eats breakfast cereals. Yet Batman had not reached such omnipresence in 1963. Batman’s publisher, then known as National Periodical Publications but more commonly known by the name it officially bears today, DC Comics, could no longer tolerate the steady decline of sales figures of Batman and the hero’s original (and company’s namesake) title, Detective Comics, and concluded that this so-called Caped Crusader desperately needed a shot in the arm.
I
JACK SCHIFF, EDITORIAL SCAPEGOAT How had Batman, today one of the most recognizable fictional heroes in popular culture, been allowed to slip into a sales chasm? Over the years, many fans, historians, and comics creators have pointed the finger of blame at Jack Schiff, at the time the editor of Batman and Detective. More accurately, however, the blame might be placed not upon Schiff, but instead upon the massive shoulders of the publisher’s “number-one selling character,” Superman. Premiering in 1939 in Detective Comics #27, just under a year after Superman’s Action Comics #1 debut and meteoric rise to stardom, Batman had spent his entire career scurrying to keep up with the hero who was “faster than a speeding bullet.” Beyond the comic books, Superman was a multimedia trailblazer, visible in theaters (in animation and movie serials), on the radio (in a popular dramatic series), in a widely syndicated newspaper strip, in myriad merchandising, and, eventually, on weekly television. While Batman made it to the serials (twice, but the role was recast with the second serial, foreboding the parade of Batmen in the Bat-films of 1989– 1997) and into newspapers (although the original Batman strip had a short syndication run), there was no Batman radio se-
ries (the hero and Robin did guest-star on Superman’s radio program, however) and Batman merchandise produced before 1966 was almost non-existent. By the mid-1950s, the Man of Steel, in the form of actor George Reeves, was seen each week on television’s syndicated The Adventures of Superman, while Batman had to settle for the unofficial title of Number Two with a (DC) Bullet. Such embarrassment might lead a body to hide out in a cave. In the 1950s, DC’s editorial director Whitney Ellsworth—who appeared to be DC’s only editor to those who read the line’s fine-print indicias, which credited Ellsworth as the editor of all of the company’s titles—ventured west from DC’s New York office to Hollywood to work with producer Robert Maxwell on TV’s The Adventures of Superman. By 1957, production on Adventures of Superman had halted, but Ellsworth remained in Los Angeles to develop other cinematic properties. At that point his comic-book editors back in Manhattan began to build their individual fiefdoms (and receive editorial credit in the indicias), none more so than Superman comics editor Mort Weisinger. By virtually all accounts an aggressive, domineering personality, Weisinger might have lacked social graces, but he unquestionably knew how to make his Superman comic books popular. Borrowing elements from pulp magazines and Atomic Age science-fiction movies—a trend editor Jack Schiff called DC’s “monster craze”— Weisinger’s Superman titles became the home of fantastical concepts, from a constantly expanding family tree of Kryptonian survivors, to sinister alien invaders, to absurd character metamorphoses (everything from Superman sprouting a Jack Schiff
CHAPTER I
WHY BATMAN NEEDED THE FIX-IT MAN
THE BATCAVE COMPANION
7
All art TM & © DC Comics.
lion’s head to Jimmy Olsen growing into the bestial Giant Turtle Olsen). Jack Schiff, on the other hand, was an unobtrusive personality, characterized by former DC writer Alvin Schwartz on his blog as “intelligent, caring, fair, and literate.” Schwartz goes on to describe Schiff as someone who “wouldn’t swallow a bad plot,” suggesting that when necessary, the editor, himself a competent writer, would take a firm but instructional hand in guiding the writer’s story to a satisfactory conclusion. Schiff acquiesced to Weisinger, however, when the Superman editor reportedly suggested that the Batman titles follow the Superman titles’ lead. “I was having disagreements with management about the ‘monster craze’ everybody was into,” Schiff recalled to Gene Reed in The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide #13, the 1983 edition. “I fought against the introduction into Batman and Superman of this trend, but I was pressured into using them.” So once again the Darknight Detective was relegated to the shadows of the Man of Steel’s billowing red cape. And thus, Weisinger’s Krypto the Super-Dog—Mort’s answer to popular cinema canines Lassie and Rin Tin Tin—begat Schiff’s Ace the Bat-Hound; Superman’s Kryptonian cousin, Supergirl, paved the way for Bat-Girl (Batwoman, incidentally, predated Weisinger’s Supergirl by three years); and for comic relief, Bat-Mite pestered the Dynamic Duo like the mischievous imp from the fifth dimension, Mr. Mxyzptlk, bedeviled Superman. In tales from the typewriters of Bill Finger and Dave Wood and penciled by artist Sheldon “Shelly” Moldoff, Batman creator’s Bob Kane’s long-time “ghost,” this “Batman family” remade the Gotham Guardian into a patriarch, with the inclusion of the costumed Batladies and masked (yes, masked) dog diffusing whispered charges of a gay relationship between the Dynamic Duo’s alter egos, Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson. One big, happy Bat-family. While Batwoman, Bat-Hound, et al. retooled Batman’s stories into a safe haven for juvenile readers, much as Weisinger’s Superman family made the Superman titles the perfect entry-level comic books, the other bizarre elements cribbed from the Man of Steel’s sci-fi-rooted mythos were an uncomfortable fit
Bizarre Bat-transformations.
in the Gotham Guardian’s supposedly darker, more gothic metropolitan terrain. Flying-saucer sightings and alien visitations became more commonplace in Gotham City than did appearances by Batman’s old fiends the Joker and the Penguin, and by the early 1960s, it seemed that readers could no longer count on Batman wearing his normal blue-and-gray gear each issue. Instead, some outlandish transformation regularly befell the hero: He became Bat-Mummy, the Batman Creature, Alien Batman, Giant Batman, Zebra Batman, Robot Batman, Rainbow Batman, Rip Van Batman, Negative Batman, Batman Genie, and even Bat-Baby, without Superman’s convenient plot device of red kryptonite to tidily explain away those alterations! For a rooftop-dwelling crimebuster like Batman, these stories were grossly out of character, and readers noticed, vacating Gotham City. In 1962, average circulation figures for DC’s Superman were at 740,000 copies per issue, while Detective Comics could only muster a weak (for the time, but covetable by contemporary standards) 265,000 copies per issue, being out-performed in the marketplace by Harvey Comics’ little devil Hot Stuff, which sold on average 265,409 copies per issue. Irwin Donenfeld, the son of DC Comics’ founder and first president Harry Donenfeld, assumed the company’s editorial director chair vacated by Whitney Ellsworth, and in late 1963 grew distressed over Batman’s waning popularity. Sales had continued to drop on Batman and Detective, and both were performing so poorly that they were being considered for cancellation. Batman’s adherence to the Superman “formula” had failed, and from Donenfeld’s point of view, the Masked Manhunter was due a new look.
THIS IS A JOB … FOR THE FIX-IT MAN! The story of how Batman was assigned to editor Julius “Julie” Schwartz has been told almost as many times as the story of Batman’s origin, but for the record: Impressed with Schwartz’s track record for character revitalization, particularly his updating of the Flash with artist Carmine Infantino in Showcase #4 (Sept.–Oct. 1956), Irwin Donenfeld met with Schwartz in late 1963 and asked him to work his magic on Batman. “I wasn’t really interested in the [Batman] stories,” wrote Schwartz wrote in his 2000 biography Man of
Julius Schwartz
An undated commissioned painting of “the Batman family” by Sheldon Moldoff.
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THE BATCAVE COMPANION
Carmine Infantino
Infantino remained the artist of The Flash, but in order to take on Detective and the Batman covers he was forced to relinquish penciling duties on his other major (and beloved) assignment, spaceman-hero Adam Strange in the Schwartz-edited Mystery in Space. To open his editorial schedule for Batman and Detective Comics, Schwartz, whose professional roots were in scifi fandom and as an agent for sci-fi authors, also lost Mystery in Space and its companion anthology, Strange Adventures, with issues #91 (May 1964) and #163 (Apr. 1964), respectively. The Adam Strange feature was a casualty of Schwartz and Infantino’s reassignment to Batman, although Adam’s was a slow demise that lasted just over a year. While Infantino was not the original Adam Strange artist, he drew most of the character’s adventures. His kinetic layouts and quixotic alien architecture and landscapes, along with the imaginative scripting of Gardner Fox, made “Adam Strange” a Silver Age classic, despite the character’s relatively meager profile. Replacing Carmine Infantino as “Adam Strange” artist was Lee Elias, whose rigid style seemed even stiffer when compared to Infantino’s flair. Readers ultimately rejected Adam Strange’s “new look” and after Mystery in Space #102 (Sept. 1965), Adam Strange rocketed into limbo for years. Ironically, Jack Schiff was the editor to whom Mystery in Space (and Strange Adventures, which also suffered) was assigned.
All art TM & © DC Comics.
Two Worlds. “I was more interested in the science-fiction stories I was working on with Adam Strange, Green Lantern, etc.” Yet Julie, a loyal company man, accepted the assignment. At this point the story forks into two variations: Julie Schwartz had, in interviews, remarked that he told Irwin Donenfeld that he wanted his Flash artist, Carmine Infantino, to work with him on Batman; Infantino has also heard that his Flash covers attracted Donenfeld’s eye: “They were selling well and that’s when he decided on he wanted me on Batman.” No matter which man brainstormed the idea of Infantino drawing Batman, both Schwartz and Donenfeld agreed that the artist was the perfect choice for the assignment. On a day in late 1963, Donenfeld declared that he wanted Schwartz and Infantino in his office the very next morning and, like Commissioner Gordon urgently Hot-Lining Batman, Julie phoned Carmine to summon him for the meeting. In Donenfeld’s office the duo were told, in no uncertain terms, that they were being assigned the task of renovating Batman, like they had previously done with the Flash, and were given an unenviable deadline of a mere six months to turn around the character—or Batman and Detective Comics would be put out to pasture. Some fans are skeptical over this cancellation claim, believing that DC Comics would never have seriously considered the discontinuation of its second most established super-hero (Batman was still considered enough of a headliner to co-star with Superman in World’s Finest Comics, and Jack Schiff, in the aforementioned Price Guide interview, remarked that there was never any serious consideration of cancelling Batman—“All comics sales were bad across the board.”) From the perspective of Schwartz and Infantino, however, Donenfeld was gravely concerned over the future of Batman … and they had just been delivered an ultimatum. Infantino shared Schwartz’s indifference toward Batman—he was quite befuddled over the prospect of drawing the character, in fact—but as the artist himself puts it, “When your boss speaks, you have no choice.” Nor did Schwartz have a choice in another matter: Despite his initial desire to make Infantino the penciler of the two Batman books, Batman’s creator Bob Kane was contracted to produce a majority of the two series’ pages each year, limiting Infantino’s Batman contributions to, more or less, every other issue of Detective Comics; Schwartz shrewdly found a way to maintain Infantino’s presence in the Kane issues of Detective by assigning Carmine the book’s new backup series starring the Elongated Man, spun off from guest-star appearances in The Flash. Appreciating Carmine’s uncanny knack for designing eye-catching covers, Donenfeld and Schwartz assigned Infantino the cover chores for both titles.
JACK SCHIFF’S MISSION TO SAVE BATMAN In 1983’s Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, one-time Batman editor Jack Schiff revealed that he brought out the bad guys in an effort to turn around the Caped Crusader’s declining sales. “I managed to revive some of the old villains like the Joker and the Penguin, and that was what caught the eye of the TV people,” Schiff said. “I was the one consulted on the material given to them. “The sales went up with the villains featured,” Schiff continued, noting that his Batman Annuals of the early 1960s, which often included reprints of Golden Age stories featuring Batman’s Rogues’ Gallery, “kept confirming my stand—they sold terrifically. Letters from fans indicated their liking for the old stories I’d been editing all along, but I didn’t win out against the monster craze.” While the Joker was barely absent from print long enough to legitimately have been considered “revived,” the Penguin did indeed return after a seven-year absence in Batman #155 (May 1963). Preceding this was the introduction of a new Clay-Face in Detective #298 (Dec. 1961). Batman Annual #3 (1962) reprinted the origins of Golden Age villains Mirror-Man and the Mad Hatter, inspiring their returns in new stories in 1963. Also in 1963, Dr. Double X and the Terrible Trio returned, Cat-Man premiered in the first of a trilogy that referenced Catwoman, and new super-villains Ant-Man, Dr. No-Face, and the Zodiac Master bowed. Schiff’s efforts were nipped in the bud by Irwin Donenfeld’s insistence of a personnel change to helm the Bat-books.
Original artwork to the Infantino/Anderson 1966 Batman and Robin poster that has since become the Dynamic Duo’s signature image from the mid1960s. Signed by Murphy Anderson. TM & Š DC Comics.
AN INTERVIEW WITH CARMINE INFANTINO
Conducted by Michael Eury on August 2, 2007 Transcribed by Brian K. Morris
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armine Infantino (b. 1925) toiled briefly at Timely (now Marvel) Comics in the early 1940s before migrating to DC where he illustrated “Black Canary,” “Green Lantern,” the “Flash,” and the “Ghost Patrol.” Infantino’s versatile style and strong sense of design kept him gainfully employed during the super-hero crash of the 1950s. His distinctive art style made the revived Flash a hit in 1956, triggering an industry-wide revival of super-heroes. Infantino drew The Flash for most of the 1960s, drew “Adam Strange” (in Strange Adventures), and was selected to “save” the ailing Batman books as the lead artist of the character’s “New Look” updating; he also drew the “Elongated Man” backup series in Detective Comics. Infantino was appointed as DC’s art director in the late 1960s, designing most of DC’s covers for several years. He was later promoted to editorial director, then to publisher, guiding DC through myriad innovations. He left the company in the mid-1970s and went to Marvel, drawing the popular Star Wars and Spider-Woman comics before returning to DC in the 1980s. In the 2000s, Infantino is semiretired but occasionally appears at comics conventions. THE BATCAVE COMPANION: We’re going to talk about Batman in the ’60s. CARMINE INFANTINO: Did you get my book?
TBC: I loved your book! INFANTINO: I covered most of that in there, didn’t I? Didn’t that explain enough of it to you? TBC: Well, it gave some base information… INFANTINO: Maybe there’s areas I didn’t cover. TBC: I want to dig into a few specifics. INFANTINO: Certainly, I have no problem with that. I’m not hiding anything. [laughter]
TBC: Back in 1963, you were drawing The Flash and “Adam Strange” (in Mystery in Space) for DC for editor Julius Schwartz. How did you get tapped to do Batman? INFANTINO: From the Flash covers I did. Irwin Donenfeld [former DC Comics editorial director] saw the Flash covers. They were selling well and that’s when he decided on he wanted me on Batman. That is what I heard, now. I can’t put my finger on it and can’t promise you that is exactly so, but this is what I heard. And the story goes, Julie gave me a call and he said, “The boss wants to see us
CHAPTER II
THE MAN WHO REDESIGNED BATMAN
THE BATCAVE COMPANION
15
above the Earth. And The Flash, I did it all in The Flash. You look closely at those and you can see the architecture beginning there. It was very prevalent.
All art TM & © DC Comics.
TBC: You didn’t have as much of an opportunity in your Batman stories in Detective to draw architecture. But you’d occasionally have the characters on the rooftops. INFANTINO: Right.
Infantino’s snappy Flash covers helped land him the Batman assignment.
both.” I said, “Well, I’m coming in on a job next week.” He said, “No. No, he wants you tomorrow,” so I had to go in. We sat down, and Irwin said, “The Batman books are dying and you two have six months to save them or, very simply, it’s over.” And I was a little stunned, you know, all of a sudden. I mean, I enjoyed “Adam Strange,” and I was taken off that. “Detective Chimp,” I had been taken off that, too. I was always getting taken off things I enjoyed. But when your boss speaks, you have no choice. TBC: If you had said no, for whatever reason INFANTINO: Ahh, I wouldn’t have got very far. TBC: You had to do this. INFANTINO: He was adamant about it. TBC: From the artists who were drawing for DC at the time, is there somebody else you think could have done a good job in fixing Batman? INFANTINO: Irv Novick could have done it. He would have been wonderful. Mike Sekowsky could have done it … no, I don’t know about Mike, I’m not certain, but Irv, definitely. You know who else could have done it? Nick Cardy. I mean, these are people who could have done it. And lastly, Jim Aparo. Any of those would have been perfect. TBC: Why do you think Batman had fallen into such dire straits? INFANTINO: I think the editor, Jack Schiff, was a bad carbon copy of [Superman editor] Mort Weisinger. Whatever Mort did on his covers, Schiff replayed it later. Mort had Superman-Mite [Mr. Mxyzptlk], he had Bat-Mite, and all that. And they were terrible covers. You know, the stories were awful and there was no zip, no flavor, no fun, and the covers were even worse. It was that bad. DC had lost thousands and thousands of dollars for many months and Schiff was on the ropes, apparently.
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THE BATCAVE COMPANION
TBC: And the bossman gave you and Julie Schwartz six months to turn Batman around. INFANTINO: Sure, he speaketh and we doeth. We had six months. First of all, I was stunned when he said that. My second attitude was, I wasn’t in the mood for this. I mean, I enjoyed what I was doing but we had no choice. And we left the office, and I said, “Julie, who the hell wants this damn thing anyhow?” [laughter] But Donenfeld felt we’d done The Flash very well, and “Adam Strange,” and a number of other things, so I guess he figured, “Well, let’s move them both over. Hopefully, they’ll do that with Batman, too.” TBC: That was difficult for you, wasn’t it? You really loved doing “Adam Strange.” INFANTINO: Oh, I enjoyed that very much. I didn’t create the character, you know. There’s a controversy there. I know that Gil Kane did the cover [for Adam Strange’s first appearance in Showcase #17, Nov. 1958], but Murphy Anderson claims he created the character. And he did a cover for Julie—allegedly now, I don’t know how true this is—and he claims Julie turned the cover down. Now I never remember Julie turning a cover down. He would have you make modifications, but never turned them down. But this is what Murphy claims, so I don’t know. I believe Julie, Gil, and Murphy were there. The first two are dead, so I guess we’ll never know the truth about that. [chuckling] But the only thing I did when I got the character was, I made some minor modifications on the uniform, but not very much. Nothing telling. But the fun began when I started drawing the buildings on the planet of Rann. TBC: You’ve always been big on architecture. INFANTINO: Oh, the architecture, I love architecture, so I was having a great time. In one book I did, I created a city that was built on different planes floating in the air, a city with levels floating
TBC: They were mostly ground-based in their crimefighting. INFANTINO: Yeah, very grounded. TBC: Two years before your first issue of Detective (#327, May 1964), you drew Batman as one of the Justice League in an “Adam Strange” story that guest-starred the JLA (“The Planet That Came to a Standstill!” in Mystery in Space #75, May 1962). INFANTINO: Yes, I remember that. Where we threw them all in. He was just part of the crowd. I mean, he was one of the main Justice League characters. TBC: Exactly. Was that “Adam Strange” story the first time you ever drew Batman? INFANTINO: It may have been … yeah, I think so. I don’t recall doing him before. TBC: How did you approach the updating of Batman’s physical appearance? INFANTINO: Well, you know, the Flash was very trim and slim, and he could not be that way, the Batman. And apparently, Sheldon Moldoff had drawn him like some stick figure, you know what I’m saying? He had a flat, deadly look, he wasn’t fat or thin or anything. So I said to Julie, “I want to build this guy up to a degree,” and he agreed, and I did. If you look at the difference between the Flash and him, Batman’s a lot bulkier. TBC: More muscular. Yeah, Flash is much leaner. INFANTINO: Right, that was done purposefully. TBC: I’ve always been curious about the reasoning behind the muscle-bound, padded suit from the Flash TV show, back in 1990. INFANTINO: It was awful. It was a bad copy of Batman. TBC: The Batman movie, with the muscles built into the costume. The actor who played the Flash, John Wesley Shipp, was great in the part, but he was a weight lifter, and if you’re a runner—and es-
BATMANIA BEGINS
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ulius Schwartz’s second “New Look” issue to hit the stands was Batman #164 (June 1964). The editor’s pet artist, Carmine Infantino, was absent from its interior illos, which were credited to Bob Kane (via Kane’s stylized signature box) but were actually the handiwork of penciler Sheldon Moldoff and inker Joe Giella. Moldoff, reenergized by this new direction for the Caped Crusader, readily maintained the gusto of Infantino’s firsttime-at-Bat in Detective #327. Batman #164’s iconic cover features the Dynamic Duo swinging on their Batropes, framed by a midnight sky and backlit by a full moon. Batman’s yellow-oval insignia is not only visible on the cover, but is smartly designed to be near the center of the image, drawing the reader’s attention like a bull’s-eye.
Batman #164’s lead story, “Two-Way Gem Caper!,” scripted by Ed Herron, delivers numerous signature moments in Bat-history: • the stairway to the Batcave is replaced by an elevator; • the new Batmobile is rolled out, the clunky old sedan of yesteryear junkheaped for a sleek sports car; • an updated and high-tech (for 1964) Batcave is introduced, complete with a schematic cutaway of its chambers and contents; • the Batcave’s automatic cave “garage door” is revealed as the Batmobile’s secret exit; • the Bat-Signal and Commissioner Gordon make their first “New Look” appearances, and the HotLine to Gordon’s office debuts (although in this tale the phone is black, not the flashing red Batphone fans would soon come to know);
Welcome to the Batcave: The Moldoff/Giella-illustrated Batcave cutaway from “Two-Way Gem Caper!”
TM & © DC Comics.
“TWO-WAY GEM CAPER!”
CHAPTER III
BATMAN FANS REACT TO THE “NEW LOOK”
THE BATCAVE COMPANION
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TM & © DC Comics.
TM & © DC Comics.
All art TM & © DC Comics.
case was Julie Schwartz, who plucked a fad a tad too late—by the time Batman #164 saw print, folk music was becoming passe and the Beatles were sweeping the American pop-culture landscape. By comparison, John Broome’s earthen, urban Gotham Village setting in Detective #327 was much more effective at being trendy than Herron’s Batman #164, although Herron’s tale was more satisfying in delivering the Batman-isms absent from Broome’s freshman effort. The hiring of inker Joe Giella to finish both Carmine Infantino’s and Bob Kane/Shelly Moldoff’s Batman pencils was one of editor Schwartz’s wisest personnel decisions. Giella’s consistent, clean inks gave these two otherwise dissimilar art styles a compatible look. Giella’s definitive linework also made Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson recognizable when illustrated by both pencilers. With Batman #164, one difference in how the two pencilers rendered the “New Look” Batman’s uniform became obvious for those paying attention: Infantino drew a yellow oval around the hero’s chest insignia, while Moldoff preferred a yellow circle.
WHO DREW THE COVER TO BATMAN #164?
Writer Ed Herron updates numerous elements in the Bat-mythos in Batman #164’s script.
•
Batman is shown to be quite the acrobat in the story, and the Dynamic Duo’s brawl with a pair of thugs foreshadows the ZOWIE!/CRASH!/OOF! choreographed battles that would soon become a national sensation; and • the issue’s second story introduces the Mystery Analysts of Gotham City (discussed at length in Chapter 5), a more organic attempt at building a supporting cast for the Darknight Detective than Jack Schiff’s Batman “family.” With all of these innovations and renovations, Batman #164 reads like “Batman vol. 2 #1,” which is not surprising since Herron’s script was written before Broome’s script for Detective #327. Herron’s “Two-Way Gem Caper!” attempts to be cutting edge by twice raiding the television airwaves for story fodder. First, its bad guy, a gem thief named Mr. Dabblo, is armed with a TV antenna that fires electrical blasts. Second, Herron’s script capitalizes on the thenpopular TV variety show Hootenanny and the folk-music fad by having a fictional music group called “the Hootenanny Hotshots” appear in the issue (the cover included an add-on blurb, “Guest-starring the Hootenanny Hotshots!”). Regarding the antenna-weapon, it is unlikely that the idea for such an unbelievable device was writer Herron’s, but instead editor Schwartz’s and cover designer Infantino’s, since creating covers first, then building stories around them, was part of Schwartz’s editorial M.O. While Dabblo zapping Batman with the TV antenna provides a catchy cover image, its absurdity electroshocks the Dynamic Duo into camp almost two years before TV’s Batman. The inclusion of the folk craze contemporizes Batman’s junior partner: Dick digs folk-singing, and young Grayson’s guitar-strumming and caterwauling sends chills down old square Bruce Wayne’s spine. Actually, the “old square” in this
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THE BATCAVE COMPANION
For those paying close attention, the cover art for Batman #164 is a curiosity. Julie Schwartz kept impeccable records, including a ledger which states that Bob Kane was paid for the cover pencils for that issue— meaning, per Schwartz’s files, that Kane’s ghost artist du jour, Sheldon Moldoff, penciled the cover. Some fans, however, have noticed specific features of the cover art, including (below) The cover to Batman #164, and (right) from its interior, a recreation of its cover scene.
THE DEATH OF ALFRED AND THE STORY OF AUNT HARRIET
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ONE LESS BELL TO ANSWER Dick Grayson’s Aunt Harriet joined the Batman mythos not from a creative spark, but as a mother of necessity. Frederic Wertham, the infamous psychologist who torchlit a destructive wildfire through the comics industry in the mid-1950s by penning his scathing indictment against comic books, Seduction of the Innocent, pegged the Dynamic Duo Alfred’s valiant rescue of his Masked Masters, from Detective #328. as gay (not that their true names of “Bruce,” a homosexual stereotype, and “Dick,” which needs no explanation, helped this new character, Schwartz got the notion to off loyal Alfred the defend their heterosexuality—nor did their live-in manservant). As butler and insert in his place Dick’s previously unseen relative. And new-Bat-editor Julie to do the dirty deed and revamp the Wayne family dynamic for a Schwartz surveyed his new generation, the editor called upon the writer who had scripted just-inherited Gotham Batman for the previous generation: Bill Finger. City, he elected to dispel Finger’s “Gotham Gang Line-Up!,” by the uncredited Moldthis insinuation, once off/Giella art team, concerns gangsters jockeying for the privilege and for all. “I decided to of executing the captured Batman and Robin. When faithful Alfred bring a woman into the discovers the Dynamic Duo’s predicament, without regard for his household,” Schwartz own safety he rallies to their aid (on a motorcycle, no less), shoving recalled in his Man of Batman and Robin out of the way of a falling boulder, being crushed Two Worlds autobiogto death as a result. Finger scripted a battle sequence featuring a raphy, “a spinster aunt fury unseen since Batman’s earliest days: “Like avenging angels,” a of Dick ‘Robin’ caption reads, “the crime-fighters charge into their hated enemies!” Grayson, who could Alfred (who had yet to receive the family name “Pennyworth”), a part possibly be seen as a of the Batman comics since his introduction in the Golden Age’s sort of chaperoning Batman #16 (Apr.–May 1943), is no more. In his late butler’s memden mother.” ory, Bruce Wayne establishes the Alfred Foundation, “a charitable To clear a path for organization that will contribute to the benefit of all mankind!”
TM & © DC Comics.
armine Infantino and Joe Giella’s striking “Gotham Gang Line-Up!” cover for Detective #328 (June 1964) presented another of ace cover artist Infantino’s patented How will our heroes escape this mess? images. However, the cover offered no hint at the shocking—and later, lamented—event about to transpire inside.
CHAPTER IV
GOOD HELP IS HARD TO FIND
THE BATCAVE COMPANION
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All art TM & © DC Comics
THE ORIGINAL BAT-AUNTS The introduction of Aunt Harriet Cooper was not the first time readers met one of Dick Grayson’s family members. In the Golden Age, Dick’s dishonorable Uncle George and Aunt Clara Grayson attempted to extort money from the lad’s wealthy guardian in “Bruce Wayne Loses the Guardianship of Dick Grayson,” in Batman #20 (Dec. 1942–Jan. 1943). A decade later, in the landmark first team-up of Batman and Superman in Superman #76 (May–June 1952), young Grayson’s absence was attributed to his visiting “relatives upstate” (Aunt Harriet and her stillliving husband, perhaps?). “Bruce Wayne’s Aunt Agatha!” came a’knockin’ on Wayne Manor’s door in Batman #89 (Feb. 1955), courtesy of Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff, and Stan Kaye. “My dear boy, I intend to stay a week, possibly two,” Agatha announces to her nephew and his stammering ward when she shows up unexpectedly while faithful Alfred is on holiday. Wackiness ensues as eagle-eyed Agatha catches Bruce and Dick sneaking out of the house as Batman and Robin (chiding them for going to a “masquerade party” improperly dressed for the weather), and pesters them for the eight-page tale’s duration, even publicly unmasking poor Bruce. While Aunt Agatha appeared in only one story, she managed to make two cover appearances—on issue #89’s Win Mortimer-drawn cover, and on the Giant in which the tale was reprinted, Batman #233 (July– Aug. 1971), with a Dick Giordano cover. Poor Aunt Harriet never managed a single cover appearance! Had editor Julius Schwartz been more Bat-savvy at the time, he might have resurrected Aunt Agatha from DC’s vault rather than introduce Aunt Harriet. However, since Bill Finger wrote both the Aunt Agatha and first Aunt Harriet stories, one wonders why he didn’t suggest to Schwartz the return of Agatha. Possibilities: It could have slipped his mind (after all, Finger wrote numerous Batman tales); it might have been discussed, but Schwartz opted for the younger Harriet over the old-maid Agatha; or Finger, happy to have a Batman assignment under Schwartz, may have obliged the idea-spewing editor’s wishes to bring a Hoagy Carmichael song-inspired “Harriet” into the mix.
AUNT HARRIET MOVES IN A mere five panels after Alfred’s tragic demise, a frumpy middle-aged lady shows up unannounced on the doorstep of the grieving Wayne and Grayson, barging in—and moving in—to dote on “Dick—Dick—my poor little nephew!” With this matronly hen in the Wayne roost, Schwartz’s reasoning went, those nasty allegations of a more-than-crimefighting relationship between the Dynamic Duo would disappear. Ironically, that bandaid from DC’s editorial Fix-It Man locked Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson into a different closet: Aunt Harriet’s residency in Wayne Manor forced Bruce and Dick to perpetually hide their “secret lives” from their uninvited housemother. And thus Aunt Harriet becomes a plot device to keep the Bat-boys on their toes, spicing stories with a Will she discover their secret? mystery. Harriet initially becomes suspicious of strange goings-on in Wayne Manor in writer John Broome’s Detective #331 (Sept. 1964), “Museum of the Mixed-Up Men!”—the first team-up of Batman, Robin, and Detective backup player the Elongated Man—when she’s puzzled by a “peculiar buzz” when answering the phone, which her nephew (and the readers) know is Commissioner Gordon’s signal of
It’s not Avon calling, but instead, it’s Aunt Harriet.
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an incoming Hot-Line call. Over time, more phone buzzes and bizarre flashing lights pique Harriet’s curiosity—and as Dick’s Aunt gets wise, Bruce and Dick grow paranoid that she might find them out. Aunt Harriet’s moment in the sun occurs in Detective #351 (May 1966), in “Cluemaster’s Topsy-Turvy Crimes!” by Gardner Fox, Carmine Infantino, and Sid Greene. Under editor Schwartz’s direction, writer Fox brings Harriet’s growing suspicions to a head when she, while applying “some extra ‘elbow grease’ on a wall” while housecleaning, accidentally triggers a secret electric door, which leads to an elevator shaft: “Odd that neither Bruce nor Dick ever told me about this elevator!” She rides the elevator down “into a great sprawling cave,” and discovers “the famous Batcave,” suspecting that Wayne and Grayson are actually Gotham’s famed Cowled Crusaders. The sound of the incoming Batmobile leads her to scoot back upstairs, covering her tracks so as not to alert her nephew and his guardian of her intrusion. But the lingering scent of Aunt Harriet’s perfume alerts the heroes that she has been in the Batcave. Thus begins a game of cat and Fledermaus, with Harriet slyly snooping to ferret out the truth, and Bruce and Dick outfoxing her at every turn to give her “plenty of room for doubt.” This type of comic-relief bit, a favorite gimmick of Schwartz’s (as Superman editor in the 1970s, he would inflict upon poor Clark Kent—or, rather, Superman’s writers—recurring slapstick gags perpetrated by prankster Steve Lombard), might have downward-spiraled into bad sitcom territory were it not piggybacked onto the “A” story of “Topsy-Turvy.” A new super-villain, the Cluemaster, is trying to discover the location of the Batcave to unmask the interloping hero, giving more credence to the levels of subterfuge employed by Batman and Robin to protect their identities, which include creating bogus alter egos and a substitute Batcave. Bruce and Dick finally put Aunt Harriet’s suspicions to bed when they discover Harriet’s secret camera spying on them; they employ trick photography to show Batman and Robin and Bruce and Dick in the same picture. As Batman and Robin smugly congratulate each other over outwitting Dick’s aunt, the Boy Wonder ruminates, “I suppose some day we’ll tell Aunt Harriet the truth, just as we did with Alfred!” One can only wonder what different direction the Bat-stories might have taken if, early in the tale, Aunt Harriet had confronted Bruce and Dick about their discovery, and they had welcomed her into their confidence. “About that time, the Batman TV show came along, revealing for the first time Aunt Harriet’s last name (Cooper) and status as a widow (by way of the reference to her as ‘Mrs.’),” DC Comics historian John Wells reminds The Batcave Companion. “Belatedly, the details were added to the comics (Detective #373).”
THE BATMAN TV SHOW
I
t’s a classic Hollywood success story: A television producer, desperate for reading material for an airline flight, chances across an issue of Batman (issue #171, with the Riddler) and—Holy Brainstorm!—an idea lightbulb flashes over his head and he realizes that the Caped Crusader can be TV’s Next Big Thing. This is a tale that has been told repeatedly by wellintentioned journalists, comics historians, artists, and by Batman editor Julius Schwartz in his autobiography. It’s certainly a crowd-pleaser. Too bad it isn’t true. Actually, there is an element of truth therein: the producer, William Dozier (1908–1991), was reading Batman comics on an airplane. But instead of a lightbulb, a dark cloud of embarrassment loomed over his head: “I felt a little bit like an idiot,” Dozier confessed in 1986 in The Official Batman Batbook. So how, then, did Batman, the comic book that only recently had been spared the axe, become Batman, the programming and cultural phenomenon? It all started, according to one account, when a television executive spent an evening with Batman and Robin.
THE FIRST “ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW” “Made in 1943 … discovered in 1965! Columbia Pictures presents An Evening with Batman and Robin. The greatest serial ever filmed … now the IN-tertainment scoop of the year!” That’s how Columbia Pictures touted its re-release of the 1943 movie serial Batman; its 15 chapters were edited into a single motion picture and retitled An Evening with Batman and Robin. Starring the plump Lewis Wilson and gawky Douglas Croft as the Masked Manhunter and Boy Wonder, this blackand-white low-budget romp was replete with ridiculously broad performances, a scenery-chewing Japanese villain named Dr. Daka, spine-tingling narration, and cliffhanger action. What
passed for escapism to World War II-era audiences was perceived as the “in” thing by the trendy sophisticates of the swinging ’60s. In the 20 art houses where An Evening with Batman and Robin was booked, it was greeted with chuckles and guffaws, plus cheers for the heroes and hisses for the villains, the same type of rambunctious audience interaction that later became popular with midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A popular version of Batman’s television genesis places Yale Udoff, at the time ABC-TV’s director of late night programming, at a screening of An Evening with Batman and Robin at Chicago’s Playboy Club, where he allegedly took note of the crowd response to the characters he had read in comic books as a child. (A variation on this story sets it at Hugh Hefner’s Chicago Playboy Mansion, with both Udoff and Batman creator Bob Kane among Hef’s guests for a Batman showing.) It’s unlikely that director Lambert Hillyer intended his 1943 Batman to be anything short of “serious” thrills, but his retread serial proved that the dashing Dynamic Duo were good at getting laughs in 1965. While Udoff was connected, at least peripherally, with Batman’s development at ABC, his attendance at a Playboy showing of this serial is apparently another urban legend that has evolved from a distortion of the facts. It had only been a year since a 1964 essay by Susan Sontag had popularized the term “camp”—amusement derived from something knowingly artificial or extreme … something so selfconsciously “bad” it becomes “good.” Real-world unpleasantries such as an unpopular war and civil unrest had starved shellshocked Americans for such unrestrained escapism: Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were anointed the patron saints of the art world by recycling low-brow subject matter like soup cans and romance comics into high art, cartoonist Jules Feiffer was venerating early super-hero comic books by writing about their histories, and television was becoming the stomping
CHAPTER VIII
AMERICA GOES BATTY
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NUMBER THREE AT BAT During the mid-1960s, ABC was television’s third-rated network—dead last, since in those days there were only three majors on the tube. Its programming department, led by director of west coast development Harve Bennett (also known for executive-producing The Six Million Dollar Man and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) got the notion in January of 1965 that a cartoon might be perfect for a 7:30 p.m. half-hour show, which was then prime time’s lead-in slot, a time period dominated by children viewers. “They had a research outfit question people in supermarkets, churches, schools, and so on, about which shows they would rather see on television,” William Dozier recalled to Joel Eisner in The Official Batman Batbook. And per the public’s decree, according to Dozier, the top-five Ready for Prime Time characters were: Superman, Dick Tracy, Batman, the Green Hornet, and Little Orphan Annie. (Dozier’s memory might have been faulty here, since the Green Hornet had been out of the public eye for Batman executive producer William Dozier. some time in 1965.) If Superman was indeed considered by ABC, at the time the Man of Steel’s rights were fortressed due to the Broadway musical It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman. It has also been reported that Dick Tracy was Harve Bennett’s recommendation; nevertheless, Dick Tracy became untouchable once NBC outbid ABC for creator Chester Gould’s comic-strip flatfoot (for a show that was never produced). It is at this point that Yale Udoff entered the story. Udoff was indeed a Batman booster, even admitting in the February 1994 edition of Cinefantastique Magazine, “because I have these very distinct, Russian cheekbones, people used to call me the Joker.” Edgar Sherick, ABC’s programming chief at the network’s New York office, initially thought Udoff was joking with he lobbied for a Batman show. “We threw him out of the office,” said Sherick to Cinefantastique, but Udoff’s persistence caused Sherick to reconsider. Douglas Cramer, then-assistant to Sherick and later executive producer of the network’s Wonder Woman, was an aficionado of pop art and realized that Batman would translate well to color television. ABC’s board of directors took some convincing, but out of respect for the players involved got behind the development of a Batman show. So Batman, the number-three character on the researchers’ list, was picked by TV’s number-three network not because of an airport newsstand discovery, but because of a grassroots support campaign.
FROM GOTHAM TO HOLLYWOOD ABC obtained the Batman rights from National Periodical Publications and Cramer contracted 20th Century Fox to produce Batman. As William Dozier revealed in 1966 on the Canadian TV news program Telescope, hosted by Fletcher Markle, he was invited out to lunch by Cramer, who offered him the opportunity to oversee Batman. Dozier was flummoxed. “Batman was simply not in my ken,” the long-time programming vet remarked to TV Guide in 1966. “I have always been associated with loftier projects.” (Prior
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to Greenway Productions, Dozier’s Fox-based production company formed in 1964, Dozier was the vice president of Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems television division from 1959 to 1964. Under his watch, Screen Gems produced two “lofty” comics-inspired family sitcoms, Dennis the Menace and Hazel, as well as television classics The Donna Reed Show, Gunsmoke, and Bewitched. Previously, Dozier had been executive producer of dramatic programs at CBS, head of production at RKO, and head of Paramount’s writing and story department. He began his career as a literary agent … as did Batman editor Julie Schwartz.) “Moreover, ABC had bought the concept without any idea what to do with it,” Dozier continued to TV Guide. As reference, Dozier “bought a dozen comic books and felt like a fool doing it.” On Telescope, Dozier elaborated, revealing that he purchased a mixture of current and vintage Batman comics, commenting that “it took a bit of doing to get some of the older ones. They cost three or four dollars apiece.” It is here that the airplane story originated. While traveling cross-country for a Batman meeting, Dozier was spotted with a lapful of Batman comics by a television colleague on that same flight who cracked, “I guess those scripts do get a little dull after a while.” The chagrined producer’s lips were sealed by a confidentiality agreement and he couldn’t reveal to his friend why he had those comics in his possession. “After a day or so,” as he told Telescope’s Markle, the producer got the idea—Holy Brainstorm!, this time for real—that the right way to translate Batman’s surreality to broadcasting’s reality was by “overdoing” it, making it “so corny and so bad that it would be funny.” To achieve Batman’s offbeat balance of adventure and humor, Dozier needed a writer with what he called “a shortcircuited mind.” He flew to Madrid, Spain, to meet with the “very erudite writer” Lorenzo Semple, Jr., who was working on a project there. (Earlier, Dozier and Semple had concocted an unsuccessful Charlie Chan pilot called Number One Son.) Semple has also stated that it was his idea to play Batman as camp. The writer said in 1989 in the magazine Filmfax that Dozier “told me rather shamefacedly that they’d given him some character he knew nothing about called Batman. I had read Batman as a kid and the minute he told me I knew it couldn’t fail. We decided to try and make it funny by seeming to take ourselves and the show seriously. It’s difficult to do because the minute the show looks as though it’s aware of being funny you’ve slipped into a tedious kind of farce.” In 1994, Semple remarked to Cinefantastique that “not a comma was changed” in his Batman pilot script, and that Dozier presented his script, not the idea for a The “short-circuited mind” of Lorenzo Semple, Jr. also produced the screenplay for Flash Gordon (1980). campy Batman, to ABC.
© DEG/King Features.
grounds for nonsensical, high-concept programs featuring such unorthodox characters as mountaineers in Hollywood (The Beverly Hillbillies), a magic housewife (Bewitched), a displaced nuclear family (Lost in Space), and a Détente Duo of studly super-spies (The Man from U.N.C.L.E.). What a perfect time to pack up a pair of super-heroes and ship them off to camp!
GORSHIN WORKING OVERTIME In the TV Guide listings for Thursday, March 31, 1966: 7:30 p.m. ABC Batman “Give ’Em the Axe” Guest-starring Frank Gorshin as the Riddler, threatening to entomb Batman and Robin in hot wax. 7:30 p.m. CBS The Munsters Guest-starring Frank Gorshin as Fair Deal Dan, a con man trying to sell half-wit Herman a lemon. Adam West enjoys telling the tale of how Dozier kept West’s ego in check during Batman’s heyday by reminding him that there had been thirteen Tarzans, or that “Tarzan No. 13” was waiting in the wings to replace him. There is another story linking Mike Henry to Batman. In the early 1960s, Ed Graham Productions had reportedly optioned Batman to develop as a liveaction adventure series, allegedly with Mike Henry starring in the role. This would have aired on CBS-TV on Saturday mornings, but plans for the series fizzled.
TM & © DC Comics.
It is widely assumed that one of the comics Dozier read on his legendary flight was Batman #171 (May 1965). Since that issue went on sale the first week of March in 1965, the same time ABC-TV was executing its Batman plans, this is indeed possible. Making it probable is its use of the comic book’s lead story, Gardner Fox’s “Remarkable Ruse of the Riddler!,” as the spine of what Lorenzo Semple, Jr. scripted as the Batman pilot, the two-part “Hi Diddle Diddle” and “Smack in the Middle.” Batman #171’s kitschy Carmine Infantino/Murphy Anderson cover shows the Riddler—previously one of writer Bill Finger’s more obscure Batman villains, with only two prior appearances, both in 1948—laughing insanely, spinning back and forth like a punching bag, unharmed, between Batman and Robin’s fists. “What lunacy!,” Dozier must have thought. He tapped impressionist Frank Gorshin (1933–2005) to portray the Riddler. Gorshin was a familiar face to TV viewers of the day, having meandered through guest-appearances galore (Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Have Gun—Will Travel, The Untouchables, Combat!). He also found no shortage of work as a character actor in a diverse range of films including Hot Rod Girl (1956), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), Studs Lonigan (1960), and That Darn Cat! (1965). After reading Semple’s wacked-out screenplay, Gorshin’s reaction was, as he told TV Guide in 2000, “This is never going to work. So I’ll do it!” After a number of script revisions, shooting for the two-part Batman pilot began on October 20, 1965, under the direction of Robert Butler; the shoot lasted 21 days, three days over the scheduled 18. As the Riddler, the lean and uncontrollably manic Gorshin cackled an infectious but chilling laugh he developed at Hollywood parties. Juxtaposed against Batman, delightfully played by West as the squarest of squares, Gorshin’s Riddler seemed all the more dangerous, like a powder keg just waiting to go BOOM! “I’d always felt that, of all the villains, Frank’s Riddler was the most ‘villainous,’” “Batman” himself revealed in the Winter 1997 publication Adam West Remembers Batman. “I always sensed in Frank’s characterization that, while the other bad guys were more interested in taunting Batman, Riddler was the only one who might actually get
© Greenway Productions/DC Comics/20th Century Fox.
THE RIDDLER: LIBERATED FROM LIMBO
Publicity still of Frank Gorshin—in loafers! —as the Riddler.
violent—he was living dangerously close to the edge.” The pilot tested poorly to audiences, who were expecting a traditional adventure show and didn’t understand its humor. ABC added a laugh track and played Batman for a different test audience, with similar results. There was panic growing among ABC executives that this extremely costly show might flop, but those attached had faith in the program and persevered.
BRINGING THE COMICS TO LIFE From numerous Batman and Detective Comics issues, old and current, Greenway Productions lifted villains, several plots, and an element particular to the comic-book language: “hand-drawn” sound effects. Batman’s fight scenes glorified their sound effects with pop-art graphics flashing across the screen, tightly orchestrated POW!s, ZAP!s, and CRUNCH!es punctuated by the brass bleats of Nelson Riddle’s soundtrack. (Those sound effects were often plastered over Batman and Robin doubles Hubie Kerns and Victor Paul, the stars’ stand-ins during the action sequences. It should be noted that the thick-waisted Kerns gave birth to another fable attached to the show: that Adam West had a “spare tire.” West was fighting trim during Batman, but the Paunchy Powerhouse spotted by viewers was actually his double, Kerns.) Tilted or “dutch” angles, a throwback to the film work of Bride of Frankenstein director James Whale, were used for the villains’ scenes to convey, according to Adam West, that “criminals’ minds are ‘distorted.’” This technique also gave many shots a comics-like perspective. Neal Hefti composed the surf tune Batman theme, whose lyrics contained one word—“Batman”—repeated over and over. Dozier used to joke that he
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HOLY HOT ROD!
C
but some pragmatic readers questioned its design, which sacrificed safety for style. “I feel the Batmobile should have a bulletproof windshield that encloses the driver’s seat because it’s during this time that [the] Dynamic Duo is highly susceptible to an attack from above and behind,” wrote Batfan and future Bat-writer Mike Friedrich in the “Letters to the Batcave” in Batman #166 (Sept. 1964). Similar opinions regarding the heroes’ vulnerability were voiced by Batmanians in the Batman fanzine, Batmania.
TM & © DC Comics.
“
ome on, Bruce … let’s take her for a spin!” pleads Dick Grayson in Batman #164 (June 1964) after Bruce Wayne reveals to the Boy Wonder’s alter ego the new Batmobile. “The original Batmobile has had its day!” Bruce asserts. “The trend now is toward sports cars—small, maneuverable jobs!” Wayne was correct: The surburban sprawl of post-World War II, which seatbelted Americans into car dependency, and the popularity of teen-age movies in the 1950s, many of which featured souped-up hot rods, steered pop culture into the fast lane in the 1960s. Sleeker, faster “muscle cars” were the rage, and so when DC Comics editor Julius Schwartz updated Batman in 1964, the Batmobile—the tank-like sedan with a bat-head grille—was chop-shopped into a sportier model. Artist Carmine Infantino redesigned the Batmobile into an open-topped, twoseat roadster with a curved windshield, a style influenced by the Porsche and the “C1” Corvette, according to Hollywood car expert Bill Spencer, who maintains the website batmobile.com. The vehicle was colored dark blue, with black detailing (often shading, in ink), and included a black bat-mask decal on its hood and an interior Hot-Line phone to Commissioner Gordon’s office. This version of the Batmobile was immortalized in a 1966 Infantino/Murphy Anderson-drawn poster showing Batman and Robin soaring out of the Batcave (the poster illo has been reprinted upon occasion, including the Batman tabloid Limited Collectors’ Edition #C-44, June–July 1976). Anderson penciled and inked a variation of this image as the figural sleeve to a 1966 45 RPM Batman children’s record featuring the songs “Here Comes the Batmobile” and “The Battiest Car Around.” The new Batmobile definitely helped contemporize Batman,
The new Batmobile revealed, from Batman #164 (June 1964). Art by Moldoff and Giella, from Infantino’s Batmobile design.
CHAPTER IX
THE BATMOBILE
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Five years before DC rolled out its new Batmobile, actor Glenn Ford— who in 1978 would play Pa Kent in Superman: The Movie—drove what would eventually become the most famous Batmobile of all time. In the 1959 MGM romantic comedy It Started with a Kiss, Ford and Debbie Reynolds, playing a married couple, won in a lottery a futuristic car: a 1955 Lincoln Futura. The Futura was a concept car (only one was made) designed by Lincoln-Mercury and built by hand in Turin by the Italian company Ghia, for a cost of a quarter-million dollars. It enjoyed a short but popular lifespan on the Ford Motor Company’s car-show circuit but never made it onto the assembly line. In late 1965, production on TV’s Batman series was accelerated, causing a pile-up with executive producer William Dozier’s plans. Car customizer Dean Jeffries was committed to create a Batmobile for television—he planned to work from a 1959 Chrysler—but had to back out due to the scheduling change. (Jeffries went on to design several famous Hollywood cars, including The Monkees’ Monkeemobile, Green Hornet’s Black Beauty, and Death Race 2000’s Gatormobile.) Enter “King of the Kustomizers” George Barris, known today for Hollywood hot wheels as diverse as The Beverly Hillbillies’ truck, The Munsters’ Munsters Koach and Drag-U-La, and the title vehicle from The Car. Barris stepped in as the Batmobile designer and had to hit the ground running with a grueling production schedule of only three weeks. Barris found the Futura, with its sharp-angled tailfins and bubble-windshield, to be the perfect prototype for the TV Batmobile. Cobbling together a series of design sketches, the customizer reimagined the Futura into “the car that Batman would drive,” as he called the Batmobile in the 1996 book Barris TV & Movie Cars. Barris met with Batman creator Bob Kane, who okayed the Batmobile designs and got them quickly approved by Greenway Productions, producers of the show. With roughly two weeks until shooting, Barris, abetted by Bud Kunz and Les Tompkins, rebuilt the Futura, modifying its nose, headlights, and tail into a bat-like motif. With its glossblack finish and neon-orange pinstriping, the Batmobile followed the lead of 007’s Aston Martin and was rigged with crime-crushing accessories, including laser beams, knockout gas, a trio of trunk–mounted rocket–blasting cannons, and a flame-spewing exhaust pipe for the Dynamic Duo’s life in the fast lane. Just prior to Batman’s January 12, 1966 premiere, for a TV Guide publicity stunt Barris test-drove the Batmobile down the Hollywood Freeway, its open, 10-foot Batchutes flapping behind the car. After the customizing of the Futura was completed, Barris’ crew made a set of fiberglass full-body molds, which in November 1966 they turned into three duplicates of the Batmobile to tour in car shows and other promotional venues. According to Bill Spencer, these duplicates were not as “equipped” as Batmobile #1—none of the trio had a complete interior with the full array of labeled accessories seen in TV closeups, and cars #2 and #4 had no door handles or working trunks. A myth has arisen that the Batmobile “clones” were each created for spe-
The one-of-a-kind Batmobile prototype, the 1955 Lincoln Futura.
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cific on-screen functions: closeups, distance shots, high-speed chases, etc. Spencer and other car enthusiasts contend that the main Batmobile was the only “on-camera” car on Batman, with one exception: In September of 2007, online personality “A. Pennyworth” spotted one of the replicas standing in for Batmobile #1 in “The Contaminated Cowl,” a Mad Hatter episode. Spencer discloses, “In that case, the replica was in the background of the shot and partially hidden by some equipment. But otherwise, the original car was the only one that ever appeared on screen.” How did this myth begin? “The story about them being used as alternates on the show itself is something that came about after the show went off the air, likely to make them more marketable,” Spencer explains. “After all, a ‘screen used car’ is more desir- The dynamic duo of Glenn Ford and Debbie able to fans than a ‘copy of a screen- Reynolds are depicted in the Lincoln Futura, used car.’” Spencer points out that in which would later be customized into the TV addition to these fables about the du- Batmobile, on this poster for MGM’s 1959 romantic comedy It Started with a Kiss. plicate Batmobile’s screen time, their quantity has also fluctuated, with frequent mentions of a fifth Batmobile and one interview even mentioning a total of seven Batmobiles. Regarding the primary Batmobile, in real life it did not handle the road as effortlessly as it seemed to cruise the backroads of TV’s fictional Gotham City. “Although the Batmobile would photograph wonderfully, and would certainly become a character unto itself, it was very difficult to drive,” admitted Batman star Adam West in the 30th anniversary publication Adam West Remembers Batman (Winter 1997). “It was heavy and unbalanced and the brakes were not good. The steering and suspension were unwieldy and awkward, and it took a lot of getting used to.” Television viewers had no trouble getting used to it, though—the TV Batmobile was a hit. For young boys and car buffs watching Batman, the following dialogue, mouthed by the Caped Crusaders as they fired up the Batmobile’s nuclear engine, generated more electricity than a battery jump: ROBIN: Atomic batteries to power. Turbines to speed. BATMAN: Roger. Ready to move out. In addition to its appearances on the three seasons of Batman, the Batmobile appeared in the 1966 theatrical Batman movie. The car revved back into living rooms in January 1979, on NBC-TV’s pair of Legends of the SuperHeroes hour-long specials. The Barris-designed Batmobile was heavily merchandised during the mid1960s’ Batman craze, with miniatures produced by Corgi being among the most accurate recreations; simplified variations of the car were also produced as toys, some in kid-friendly colors such as red and light blue. Additionally, the comic-book Batmobile was the model for some merchandising, and a variety of Batman items produced featured bizarre versions of the car that defied the laws of physics, some with giant Batman and Robin heads superimposed into proportionately smaller automobiles. The popularity of the Barris Batmobile has endured over four decades after it first sped into America’s consciousness. In October of 2004, the Batmobile was selected the #1 television car of all time by cable viewers on the series TV Land’s Top Ten. In 2007, the first of several miniature TV Batmobiles was released as part of Mattel’s Hot Wheels line. The TV Batmobile was selected as the #9 car in “The Top
© 1959 Loews Corporation.
THE BAT-CAR OF THE FUTURA
THE CREATURE OF THE NIGHT RETURNS
T
he late ’60s and early ’70s brought about many changes in America. By late 1969, the counterculture was filtering into mainstream society, including comics, initiating a trend of “relevant” comic-book storylines. Another cultural phenomenon that gripped the country at that time was a wave of nostalgia, as many young people discovered the joys of past favorites such as the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Flash Gordon serials, and the pulps of the 1930s. Despite the money and popularity generated by the Batman craze of 1966, many fans believe that the influence of William Dozier’s TV show caused significant damage to the well being of Batman the comic-book character. In 1969, the dark, avenging “creature of the night” that Bob Kane and Bill Finger created 30 years earlier had become a distant memory. Once the Batman TV show was cancelled in 1968, the casual readers of Batman comics started to drop off. Rumblings began within the pages of Biljo White’s Batman fanzine Batmania for DC Comics to abandon the camp baggage that Batman and Detective Comics had picked up from the TV show and return Batman to his “creature of the night” roots. They also demanded that Batman be restored his monicker of “the World’s Greatest Detective.” Even the fan letters appearing in Batman and Detective began to reflect fandom’s disgruntled feelings toward DC’s handling of Batman. Bob Rozakis—a longtime Batman fan, who in the 1970s transitioned from letter writer to DC employee, including a stint early in his career as Julie Schwartz’s assistant editor—says, “During the Jack Schiff days, the stories I liked most were the murder mysteries. I wanted to see Batman return to being a detective.” All of this seemed apropos for the rebirth of Batman and a return to his darker, more sinister roots of 1939–1940.
THE “BIG CHANGE” The first reference to an upcoming change in continuity occurred in Detective Comics #388 (June 1969) in “Batman’s HotLine—Extra,” when a letter writer predicted Robin graduating from high school and leaving for college, thus splitting the Batman/Robin team. Editor Julius Schwartz responded, “if we may be permitted a bold prediction of our own, sometime around Detective #391 [it turned out to be issue #394] and/or Batman #216 [actually #217] a BIG change will come into Batman’s life! You’ll have to see it to believe it!” In “Letters to the Batcave” in Batman #215 (Sept. 1969), Schwartz wrote regarding a forthcoming switch of inkers from Joe Giella to Dick Giordano, “We’re
Julius Schwartz had changed Batman’s continuity before with the “New Look.” Along with writers Denny O’Neil and Frank Robbins, he would do it again in 1969.
CHAPTER XIV
FADE TO BLACK
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fully anticipating approval of Dick Giordano’s stylish treatment—a preliminary move in the BIG CHANGE that’s coming to Batman in the December issue! You’ll have to see it to believe it!” Referring again to the “big change” in Batman #216 (Nov. 1969), Schwartz wrote, “Our plans for the future—involving the Big Change to Batman—materialize in the December issues of Batman and Detective—with Frank Robbins handling the change-over storyline!” In Detective Comics #391, Schwartz announced, “it is tradition we’re in the process of getting away from (‘The big change is coming to Batman!’).” By Detective Comics #393, clamoring fans were At first editor Julius Schwartz would trying to predict what the “Big Change” only allow Neal Adams to work on random covers like this one for Detective might be. #372 (Feb. 1968). While Schwartz was heavily hyping Batman’s upcoming change in the pages of Batman and Detective, the character’s facelift had actually started more than a year earlier in The Brave and the Bold, the bimonthly Batman teamup title edited by Murray Boltinoff. In Brave and the Bold #79 (Aug.–Sept. 1968), featuring Batman’s first team-up with Deadman, artist Neal Adams began an eight-issue run that really set the ball rolling. Adams had grown up a big fan of the Caped Crusader, and since his childhood had a distinct idea of how he thought Batman should be portrayed. When Adams first started working for DC in the mid- to late 1960s, on several occasions he asked editor Julius Schwartz if he could draw a Batman story for Batman or Detective. Schwartz turned him down, but eventually gave him several covers to work on, starting with Detective #370, which he inked over Carmine Infantino’s pencils. Yet after being rebuffed by Schwartz from doing any Batman interior art, Adams found a more supportive editor in Murray Boltinoff, with whom he had previously worked on DC’s humor titles Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis. Adams remembers, “I told [Boltinoff] I’d love to work on Brave and the Bold, [and] he was only too happy to have me.” Adams had a plan to subtly reNeal Adams and Julius Schwartz at the DC offices turn Batman to the vision he had of the character when Neal was in the late ’60s.
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A VIEW FROM THE PENTHOUSE The first hint of an impending change in Bruce (Batman) Wayne’s life begins in Detective Comics #393 (Nov. 1969), “The Combo Caper!,” written by Frank Robbins with art by Bob Brown and Joe Giella. The “shocking” cover rendered by Irv Novick says it all: Batman stands over a group of beaten crooks with a teary-eyed Robin in the foreground, who says, “The case is over—the team-up is finished! This is goodbye for Batman and Robin!” Large boxed type proclaims, “WHY?” Many times throughout the Dynamic Duo’s career this scenario would play out on the cover of Batman or Detective only to turn out to be a hoax, an imaginary story, or simply a way for the editors to provoke readers to buy an issue. This time, however, it proves to be true. It’s the last day of August leading into Labor Day as Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, and Alfred are getting set to spend the weekend out of town. Dick says, “Our last weekend together—for a long time to come, Bruce!” Frank Robbins’ story is rather uninspired as the Dynamic Duo work to solve the case of a neighbor’s cracked safe. Along the way Bruce and Dick help a troubled youth. The story’s final panel portrays a pensive Batman thinking, and repeating Robin’s words on the cover. The panel’s caption says, “The biggest change in Batman’s life is coming in the December 1969 issue of Batman! You’ve got to see it to believe it!” With this story readers finally get the inference that part of the “big change” is that Dick Grayson is finally getting ready to leave Wayne Manor and go off to college. The “Big Change” starts in Batman #217 (Dec. 1969), and who better to
All art TM & © DC Comics.
Before Schwartz, artist Neal Adams was making changes of his own starting in Brave and the Bold #79 (Aug.–Sept. 1968), darkening Batman with his gritty realism.
a ten-year-old kid, a plan he initiated by the seemingly small but significant step of rendering all Brave and the Bold scenes at night. “So that’s essentially what happened with Batman,” Adams says. “He became slightly more mysterious.” [Adams elaborates on his Brave and the Bold innovations in his interview in Chapter 16.] It was also Adams’ distinct style and gritty realism that separated his Batman from all that came before him. Comics fandom took serious notice, and letters indicated that Adams’ Batman was the Batman readers wanted to see. The cumulative effect of Batman’s and Detective’s post-TV show slumping sales, fandom’s demand to put an end to the camp era, and Adams’ “brave and bold” take on the character forced Schwartz to take decisive action and change Batman’s continuity.
Hinted at in letters columns for months, the reality of Batman’s “Big Change” finally came at the end of Detective Comics #393 (Nov. 1969). Art by Irv Novick.
ROBIN’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE COUNTERCULTURE AND INTO SELFAWARENESS
[Editor’s Note: This essay was originally published in Back Issue #22.]
T
he end of 1969 and the beginning of 1970 was a tumultuous time in America. The Vietnam War divided the nation, and America’s decision to invade Cambodia wedged that gap even further. In March 1970, the US Army charged 14 soldiers with murdering hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers in the My Lai Massacre. In May 1970, US National Guardsmen at Kent State University killed four students and wounded nine others during protests against the Cambodian invasion. And one month earlier, the Beatles, the symbol of the counterculture and musical change, decided to break up. Amid this chaotic period, another famous team was dis-
solved. In Batman #217 (Dec. 1969), DC Comics decided to break up the Dynamic Duo by sending Dick (Robin) Grayson off to college. The story in that issue, writer Frank Robbins’ “One Bullet Too Many!,” began a new chapter for the Batman and Robin continuity. Editor Julius Schwartz, with the aid of writers Robbins and Denny O’Neil, decided to update the Caped Crusader’s world. Schwartz simplified Batman and his surroundings by trying to recapture the character’s 1939 roots. At the same time, this gave birth to Robin’s new life as both a college student and as a solo-operating super-hero. As he departs Wayne Manor for the airport, Dick Grayson proclaims to Bruce Wayne and Alfred: “I know it’s going to be rough on you guys—in the beginning! Guess it’s kinda hard for you to dig that only yesterday I was your ‘young Master Dick,’ Alfie, and your ‘kid who needed a big-brother-image,’ Bruce. But—I’m a man now! ’Least—that’s what my draft card says, plus my acceptance at Hudson University!”
TM & © DC Comics.
CAMPUS CRUSADER
Dick Grayson’s tearful farewell to Bruce, Alfred, and Wayne Manor, as he sets off for his new life at Hudson University. Batman #217 (Dec. 1969).
The exploits of Robin would now continue as solo stories in the back of both Batman and Detective Comics. “Dick Grayson’s first day at Hudson University has been an eventful one! He walked smack into a rebel-student revolt … and a policeman’s club!” That’s how “Drop Out … or Drop Dead!” in Detective Comics #395 (Jan. 1970) begins. Continued from Detective Comics #394, the two-part story was written by Frank Robbins and beautifully illustrated by comic-book legends Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson. It unfolds in a letter that Dick has written to Bruce Wayne. During a campus revolt, Dick is arrested along with some of the rebellion’s leaders. They are ushered away to an abandoned farm. Dick escapes as Robin and overhears a “dirty plot.” The police are phonies who are working with the protest leaders. They plan to fake a beating on the protestors, thus sending the students on campus into a frenzy and leading them to hold
CHAPTER XV
TURN ON, TUNE IN, DROP OUT!
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A TRUE TEEN TITAN The year 1970 represented a turning point for DC: While Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ historic run on Green Lantern/Green Arrow received considerable press coverage for its stories of relevance that reflected the turbulent times, Robin’s solo stories dealt with many of the same issues. The difference was that Robin’s stories were told through the eyes of a college student. To more accurately portray these tales, Schwartz assigned young writer Mike Friedrich to write the “Robin” backup features. Friedrich (and occasionally Frank Robbins) would have to write these stories under the tight constrictions of an eight-page format. Mike Friedrich entered the comics industry after years of writing to DC letters columns in the 1960s, where he developed a mail acquaintance with Julius Schwartz. Said Friedrich at Julius Schwartz’s memorial service in 2004: “My letter-writing began around the time the ‘New Look’ Batman was introduced, though I’d been a fan of Julie’s for two or three years before then. A couple of years later it turned into a bit of correspondence as Julie began to send short replies. Robin in solo action, courtesy of artists Gil “As I grew during high school, my Kane and Murphy Anderson. Detective comments began to contain suggesComics #395 (Jan. 1970). tions for how stories could have been improved. As I neared my summer vacation in 1966, I off-handedly wrote asking if I could try writing a script. Julie quickly affirmatively replied and just as quickly rejected my first effort, an Elongated Man story. “Not long after this, by coincidence Julie and his wife were taking a vacation to San Francisco. [One-time DC ‘letterhack’] Guy Lillian and I arranged to come in from our suburban homes to see him together. Unfortunately we had a near-tragic auto accident on the way and wound up at the hospital instead of his hotel. “Undeterred, I continued to submit ideas and scripts, and the following spring (May 10, 1967) he bought my first one, a “Robin the Boy Wonder” story that eventually saw print in Batman #202. As I was graduating from high school
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the following month, I took the script payment ($10/page) and used it to go to New York for the summer before entering college. “I finally met Julie by showing up on the day that DC conducted tours (I wasn’t old enough to know about making appointments), and then once in the office introduced myself. He was as many have described, a straight-laced formal guy with a white shirt and tie. My wardrobe was T-shirts and jeans. Despite this generation gap, he was straightforward, friendly, and amazingly tolerant.” Three years later, Friedrich adds, “My first ‘Robin’ story was actually my first professional sale. Julie Schwartz assigned the Mike Friedrich stories after that. Since these were backup stories and I was a very new and very distant (3000 miles away) writer, they were good on-the-job training assignments.”
IDENTITY CRISIS Friedrich’s first Robin solo story as a regular assignment was “My Place in the Sun!” in Detective Comics #402 (Aug. 1970), penciled once again by Gil Kane. With this tale Friedrich establishes the tone for his “Robin” stories, examining the hot-button issues facing college students of the time, such as the generation gap, Vietnam, race relations, and the ecology. Friedrich explains his feelings on these topics: “Dealing with contemporary social and political issues was a major part of why I enjoyed writing for Julie Schwartz and on the ‘Robin’ series in particular. I was angry about the state of affairs (still am!) and wanted to right these wrongs, if only in my stories.” Dick Grayson begins a struggle to find his place as Robin in the world. Friedrich’s portrayal of the “Teen Wonder” was similar to that of a certain web-slinger being published by the competition. Speaking about this correlation Friedrich says, “There wasn’t a direct influence, but indirectly Stan Lee’s slangy, irreverent writing style was certainly an influence.” In “My Place in the Sun!,” Speedy (Roy Harper) drops Robin off at Hudson University after a Teen Titans assignment. Changing to their secret identities, Dick shows Roy around the campus and takes him to his boarding Dick Grayson reflects on his place in the world house room. Dick points out the as Robin, and as Batman’s former partner. drainpipe outside his window, Detective Comics #402 (Aug. 1970).
All art TM & © DC Comics.
a strike at the university. Robin attempts to take down the provocateurs. Back at the campus, protesters demand that the students shut down Hudson University because the police have taken their fellow students away. The protest leaders decide to head back to campus to display the beating they received from Robin and blame it on the police. Left with an unconscious Robin at the abandoned farm, the bogus cops decide to kill him. Waking in the nick of time, Robin takes them down. Changing to Dick Grayson, he races back to campus to quell the strike.
Neal Adams’ contribution to the Academy of Comic Book Arts’ (ACBA) portfolio in 1973 was this superb sketch of Batman and Talia. TM & © DC Comics.
AN INTERVIEW WITH NEAL ADAMS
Conducted by Michael Kronenberg on May 7, 2003 Transcribed by Laurie Kronenberg eal Adams (b. 1941) first rose to prominence as the artist of the TV show-inspired newspaper strip Ben Casey, which he drew from 1962 until 1965. He then segued to comic books, his art appearing in Creepy and Eerie magazines and in various DC war and humor titles. His big splash was on the Deadman feature starting with Strange Adventures #207 (Dec. 1967), followed shortly thereafter by The Spectre. Adams’ bold layouts and ultrarealistic drawing style took comic-book fandom by storm, and he soon became DC’s most popular and in-demand cover artist. Becoming the penciler of The Brave and the Bold in 1968, Adams returned Batman to “creature of the night” status with his dark and gritty interpretation of the Masked Manhunter. Adams soon found himself drawing Batman stories for editor Julius Schwartz, and with writer Denny O’Neil established the modern interpretation of the Batman in Detective Comics #395 (Jan. 1970), “The Secret of the Waiting Graves.” His collaboration with O’Neil continued on various Batman tales over the next few years, and together they cocreated Ra’s al Ghul and reinvented the Joker. While he also distinguished himself as the artist of Green Lantern/Green Arrow, The Avengers, and The X-Men, and established the successful Continuity Associates art studio, to many comic fans Neal
N
Adams’ version of the Batman is THE definitive version of the character. [Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted before the deaths of DC editor Julius Schwartz and artist Alex Toth. It was originally published in Comic Book Marketplace #104 and 105 and is reprinted here with permission. It has been edited for publication in this volume.]
Brave and the Bold?” Under this barrage of fan mail Julie finally offered to let me draw for the regular Batman titles. In our hallway chat as he offered me the Batman work Julie finally said, and with some annoyance, “Why is it, Neal, that you think you know how to do Batman and all the rest of us don’t?” What I said to Julie at the time, and I would repeat it now, is that, “It’s not that I knew what Batman should be, it’s that I and every kid in America knew what Batman should be.” It just didn’t seem like the people at DC Comics knew what Batman ought to be. So I didn’t think of what I did as being anything really spectacular.
THE BATCAVE COMPANION: It seems that Detective Comics #27–37 (1939– 1940), when Batman first appeared, was an influence on you, as if you were going back to the character’s roots. Is that true? NEAL ADAMS: The truth is that, when I presented Batman to DC Comics, and I didn’t get to present it to the Batman editor [Julius Schwartz], I got to present it to the Brave and the Bold editor [Murray Boltinoff], I think my attitude as to how the character should be portrayed was exemplified in my conversation with Julie Schwartz. I had asked to work on Batman many times and he turned me down. So I drew Batman for several issues in Boltinoff’s Brave and the Bold. Letters poured into DC Comics saying and asking, “Why is the only ‘good’ Batman the one in Neal Adams at the DC offices in the late 1960s.
CHAPTER XVI
BREATHING LIFE INTO BATMAN
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When I was a little kid, when I was like ten and 11 years old, I started to make a Batman encyclopedia for myself, where I traced drawings and copied drawings. I wrote on the bottoms the various characteristics of the various characters and I wrote about the Batmobile and all the other things. And I guess I did about ten pages before I dropped from kid exhaustion. For a ten- or 11year-old kid that was already a big deal, and I don’t think anything in those pages doesn’t exemplify what I think Batman is all about. I don’t blame the people at DC. I think the TV show ran roughshod over the Batman character, and DC Comics followed suit. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody what Batman is about. It’s just sometimes you lose track of things. The movies lost it, and maybe never had it. I think that’s the way it is with people. There are influences that come along that take your mind and switch it around and then make you think things that you never would have thought if you didn’t have all these influences. TBC: It seems the people at National [Periodical Publications, DC Comics’ former name] had become incredibly stodgy. ADAMS: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say that. I think the world had become kind of stodgy. I think we had fought our communists and fought our parents. I mean, you must understand, I come from the time when, I believe it was the Governor of New Jersey went on the air and destroyed rock and roll records; when people openly talked about the African influence on white’s music; where quiet bigotry was going on all the time, everywhere, even in New York; where the world was clutching its game ball for fear that something would come and penetrate it or steal it away. Perhaps that’s not the way to put it, but it was a very protective and insular time.
For me, it was not my time. If there was a time that I should have been born, perhaps, it was not then. In all other things, I’m a pretty conservative person. As you look at me now, as we’re across the interview table, I look as much like a fireman or a policeman as I look like anything. I’m not a revolutionary. I was never cool. I was never reactionary, even though people insist that [I am]. I just look at things as needing change if they’re wrong, and lots was wrong. TBC: Who accused you of being a reactionary? ADAMS: I think it’s common in my description. If you read enough interviews, I go from “a revolutionary” to “kinda crazy,” somewhere in that mix. Common parlance for me. It’s just people, but among my fans, I’m not that way at all. I’m just somebody who refuses to live in the past, and for no reason except that I don’t like it there, not because I want to make any change, but just because it’s just bad for you. The truth is, there really isn’t anything special about me. I just don’t like old crap, and maybe I’m a little hard to push around. That’s about the most you say: a little hard to push around. I can be pushed around, but it’s hard. TBC: That’s a pretty big thing, though. You came into a business that was hiding. ADAMS: Exactly. Listen, I met artists who would say to me that they’re line illustrators. They’d had the nerve taken out of them. And remember, an awful lot of them went away. Alex Toth argued with me once that I said he went out to Hollywood and went into cartoons. If Alex Toth wants to argue with me, then anything he says is fine as far as I’m concerned. Al Williamson, one of the greatest comic-book artists ever—there’s just no question, there’s not even a conversation—did
ghosting work for other comic-strip artists who, in my opinion, were not as worthy as he was to do the strips that they did. You would see sixpage stories in Dell, the most vanilla of comicbook companies, by people like Wally Wood and, my goodness, the best guys, and it was a terrible, terrible time. It’s not to say that the artists of DC were bad, but certainly they were especially blessed to get work. DC didn’t make the effort to find the very best at that time. They let them go. And, if there’s one thing that I won’t forgive on a personal basis, it’s DC’s doing it. Not so much that they hurt the characters, they hurt the business by hiding and being babies, but it was a conscious decision and you have to respect it. I don’t have to respect it. [laughs] TBC: I’m going to give you a couple of names, and if you could just give me some quick opinions… ADAMS: I generally don’t have opinions, even though people think that I do have opinions. You will find, as you ask. TBC: Dick Sprang. ADAMS: Loved his work when I was a kid. Love it. Absolutely. If I were doing a Batman series, I would love to do a Dick Sprang story. That would just knock me out. TBC: Julius Schwartz. ADAMS: You know, really truly, in my heart of hearts, I loved Julius Schwartz. He’s a cantankerous and a difficult man to deal with, but my association with Julius, when I worked with him, was nothing but salutary. He made it hard for me, and that was fine. He was sort of a like the drill sergeant. So, in my heart, I really love the man.
TM & © DC Comics.
TBC: Have you seen the Batman: The Animated Series adaptations of your stories, and what do you think of them? ADAMS: I see them on and off. You must understand that an awful lot of my career has been spent with companies not paying me royalties for what I do while I fight for other people’s rights. I see an awful lot of my stuff. It’s almost as though people went into a room and said, “If we change it just this much then it won’t be Neal’s anymore.” I think that’s a little odd. What is gained? I saw it happen with the X-Men. The first X-Men movie, pretty much, if you look at it carefully, was culled from my series of X-Men, except for the focus on Wolverine. Of course, it’s hard to argue that the key element of Magneto building a machine that turns everyone into mutants isn’t my creation. A bunch of the Batman stuff was my style. I can’t argue with their source. If we replace royalties with the word “homage,” then I guess they treated me pretty nice. Adams portrayed his Batman as powerful and also as a master detective, as seen here in Batman #234 (Aug. 1971).
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TBC: I think so. It would have been nice to see
then you’re going to work together and change it and make a story out of it. It’s kind of a game. I worked with Julie on Spectre scripts and I understand Julie and the way he works. I had been thinking about how I was going to approach Julie because I didn’t want this Man-Bat story changed and ruined. I was trying to think of any way I could to present it right. Anyway, I was at Dick’s desk, for some reason, probably handing work in, and I had noticed that [Schwartz Denny O’Neil asked Adams to portray the antagonist of Detective #397 and Robbins] were in there for quite a as Orson Welles. while talking back and forth. It was a lationship with the amateur singer who he was hot day and the sun was coming in grooming to be an opera star. Did you base the Julie’s window, and they basically had come to a look of that character on Welles? He looks like dead end. So Julie turned to me and said, “So, Orson Welles. Smiley … so, Adams. You got a Batman story?” ADAMS: I was told by Denny that he just wanted And I said, “Yes, as a matter of fact I do.” an “Orson Welles fat guy.” And I thought, if I drew “Oh, yeah, yeah, fine.” Orson Welles, that would be bad. I know Denny “Okay, you don’t have to hear it.” And then he told me that it was based on Orson Welles, it was realized that they didn’t have any story. Orson Welles related to that movie. And I thought, “All right, what is it?” “Okay, it’s a fat guy. I don’t want to do Orson Welles. That’s not right.” It doesn’t seem right to me. But people equate “fat guy” with “Orson Welles,” so there you go. That was a story that I believe Dick inked. It was after that story that I got together with Dick, and I said, “Dick, we’re going to have to talk. If you’re going to ink my stuff any more, we’re going to have to do a better job than this.” I wasn’t really happy with that story. And I thought, “Shoot, I’m doing “Deadman,” you know. Let’s get a relationship going,” because I had a feeling that I was going to be written by Denny and inked by Dick, and let’s sit and talk. Let’s get serious about this stuff. If we’re going to work together, let’s do some nice stuff. And I think that was the time where Dick and I seriously started to work together.
“‘Man-Bat,” I said. “It’s a guy who likes Batman so much that he wants to help him. And he thinks that if he develops a serum and he gives it to Batman it will make Batman more like a bat. It will give him the powers and abilities of a bat. And he’s a scien-
TBC: Can you tell me how the idea of Man-Bat (Detective #400, June 1970) came about? ADAMS: Yes, I can. I had actually thought about it, and I had written a synopsis I wanted to approach Julie with after I’d finished the job I was working on. He and Frank Robbins were sitting at his desk; Frank Robbins was fairly new with Julie. Julie attaches himself to certain writers. He’s very writer-oriented, and he was working well with Frank Robbins. Generally, the way it happened with Julie was: A writer would come in with a story and then Julie would tell him he didn’t like it. And then it would evolve into another story. So you get used to Julie that way. The first idea that you’re going to present him with, he’s not going to like,
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All art TM & © DC Comics.
TBC: I didn’t know that was the significance of that story. ADAMS: No, I don’t know if it is. It’s just that, at that point, that’s when we started talking.
Neal Adams’ pencil rough for the cover of Detective #400, the first appearance of Man-Bat.
cil drawing and make it into a halftone, then we’re going to shoot the other drawing on to acetate. We’re going to paint out the back of it and put one on top of the halftone.” “That won’t work. It’s just too confusing. It’ll be a mess.” “I don’t think so.” “Well, all right. It’s just Neal being crazy again.” “We’ll do a drop-out.” “A drop-out? What’s a drop-out?” It’s something that everybody uses now… I think there must be a drop-out button on your computer. TBC: So you’re the first person to actually do that at DC. ADAMS: No, you’ve got to understand that everybody did that stuff before when there was the real world and before they fell into this hole. There was a character called “Fate” who was printed in dropout, in purple. He was the narrator of the book that was done by Bob Powell and he’d be in the top of every panel having conversations with you and he’d be a drop-out. Every page all the way through the book. [Editor’s Note: The Hand of Fate was a horror title published by Ace Magazines in the early to mid-1950s.] Joe Kubert did 3-D. I mean, everybody did this stuff. It’s just when everything closed down, the top went on the bottle. And everybody thought it was new. “Neal invented new colors!” [laughs] “Imagine … he invented new colors!” They have a thing that some of the guys referred to at DC Comics as “Neal Adams blue”? “Neal Adams blue” is B Y2 R2. That is, you take blue and you add 25% yellow and 25% red and it makes a night sky, but it’s a really nice night sky. It’s not blue, or blue with red in it so it’s magenta. Blue with yellow and red, which
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TBC: It was great. ADAMS: I wish I could tell you there was more to it than that, but that’s it. TBC: It stands out. That’s the most important thing.
TBC: “Night of the Reaper” (Batman #237, Dec. 1971) involved a Jewish Holocaust victim who seeks revenge on his captors. You portrayed Dr. Schloss, the villain, with an incredible amount of pathos, and the story was very powerful. What were your feelings about that story? ADAMS: Tell the story, that part was all I cared about. The rest of the story was a crock. It was a story that sort of started out with stories of Rutland, Vermont. TBC: Right. The costume party. ADAMS: Everyone came back from Rutland. I didn’t go, but they kept on telling stories about it.
TM & © DC Comics.
Bob Powell’s art and production techniques in the 1950s horror title The Hand of Fate was an influence on Adams.
You know, we ought to do a story about this one. I’m told Harlan [Ellison] said we ought to do a story on that. Good idea, why don’t we do it. It would be a great story. And then all this stuff was essentially given to Denny, and Denny wrote this really great story. So I thought, “Well, sh*t, everybody’s gonna look at this story. I better do a good job.” So I tried to…
TM & © DC Comics.
© 1954 Ace Magazines.
makes it dense. It’s “Neal Adams blue.” [whispering] “Nobody does that.” They told me you couldn’t have more than 250% of a color on a panel, on a page, or in an area. I’d say, “Why?” “Well, because the ink would get too thick and slide around.” I said, “But we print on toilet paper. Nothing is going to slide, believe me. Maybe on a New Yorker magazine. We print on toilet paper, don’t you get it? You can put a 1000% of color on it. Add color. It won’t slide.” “Well, during the war, World War II.” Yeah. At one time maybe that was the quality of paper, but not now. So then the next job I did I did 100% yellow, 100% red and 100% blue. [laughs] To piss them off. “You can’t do that.” “Yes, I can.” “It’ll slide all over the place.” “I don’t think so.” Of course, it didn’t. It’s embarrassing. Is it revolutionary saying something like “one plus one is two”? “Golly, I hope it works.” Guys, please. What would be funny, of course, is if the paper slid…
From Batman #237, Adams’ thumbnails for the tragic two-page conclusion to Denny O’Neil’s “Night of the Reaper.”
HE’S BACK! And he’s just ready to kill. Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams bring back the homicidal Joker in Batman #251, a version unseen for over 30 years. TM & © DC Comics.
THE JOKER RETURNS TO HIS HOMICIDAL ROOTS
f there ever was an archetypal villain in comics, it has to be the Joker. Almost every super-hero’s arch-nemesis is compared to him. When Bob Kane, Bill Finger, and Jerry Robinson created the Joker, he was a grim and frightening killer clown who piled up a large body count in his first appearance. The Joker made his debut in Batman #1 (Spring 1940)—in two stories, no less! This is scripter Bill Finger’s introduction to the grim jester on the splash page: “Once again a master criminal stalks the streets—a criminal weaving a web of death about him. Leaving stricken victims behind wearing a ghastly clown’s grin— the sign of death from the Joker!” In his debut, the Joker makes the coroner work overtime by leaving four corpses in his wake, and in the issue’s second Joker story, the villain’s body count totals an astounding nine! The most chilling element of the Joker’s modus operandi is his Joker Venom, which kills its victims and leaves a ghastly death grin on their faces. This was pretty grisly stuff for 1940 … but by 1941, DC Comics had toned down the Joker’s act, and he had killed his last victim (for the next three decades, at least). By the end of the 1960s, the comic-book version of the character more closely resembled Cesar Romero’s looney TV Joker than Bill Finger’s original chilling inspiration for the villain, Conrad Veidt in the movie The Man Who Laughs (1928). The Harlequin of Hate had become the Arch Buffoon of Banditry. Although his penchant for killing had been abandoned, the Joker was Batman’s most popular villain from the 1940s through the 1960s, his appearances outnumbering his criminal competition.
“A HOMICIDAL CLOWN” Flash-forward to 1973: Batman had recently undergone a change, retrofitting him back to the creature of the night he was envisioned to be in 1939. It only made sense to do the same with his most popular adversary, and do it with the writer/artist team that gave the Batman his rebirth in “The Secret of the Waiting Graves”: Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams. Believing that a traditional clown poses no threat to Batman or any other hero, O’Neil realized that the archetype of the unpredictable “homicidal clown”—the stuff of which many kids’ nightmares are made—was a better choice for the Batman villain’s characterization. “I’d liken him to the trickster figure of mythology,” says O’Neil. “You just don’t know what he’s going to do. Instead of killing you, he might actually give you an ice cream—or he might change his mind and kill you!” After a more than four-year hiatus from the pages of Batman and Detective Comics, the Joker returned in Batman #251 (Sept. 1973), “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge!” O’Neil’s story is simple and gritty, resembling a 1930s pulp tale. Batman and
TM & © DC Comics.
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Batman’s grim discovery of one of Joker’s old henchmen dead, fixed with a hideous grin and the Joker’s calling card nearby. From Batman #251.
Commissioner Gordon discover a body fixed with a hideous grin and a Joker playing card left nearby. The corpse is identified as one of the Joker’s former henchmen—one of five henchmen who betrayed the rogue on his last job, sending him back to the “state hospital for the criminally insane” (this was just a couple of years before Arkham Asylum would be established in the Batman mythos). One by one, the Joker begins to track down and kill his former employees, and it’s up to Batman to use his detective skills to find the “old gang” before they’re all dead. The Joker gets quite creative in his methods: He kills two using his Joker Venom, blows up another with an exploding cigar full of nitroglycerin, then chillingly hangs his fourth victim, and Batman must save the remaining member of the Joker’s former gang. While the Joker runs circles around the Batman, the hero laments, “The Joker’s making a fool out of me!” O’Neil admits that the Joker’s four-person body count was uncharacteristic of comic books of the day, but contends that his thinking at the time was, “If he’s going to be an effective villain, that’s what he has to do.” The Batman finally confronts the Joker in an abandoned aquarium, where he intends on using a shark as his final method of revenge over the one remaining member of his ex-gang. When Batman asks the Joker, “Why choose a shark as the instrument of your revenge?,” the toothy Joker, standing next to the shark in its tank, insanely responds, “Take a look! We resemble each other!” It’s a moment that perfectly represents this updated version of the Joker, a villain completely intoxicated with by own madness. Artist Adams even changed the Joker’s appearance: Instead of his typical purple outfit with long tails and pinstripe pants, he now wore a grey and green suit and tie.
CHAPTER XVII
KILLER’S SMILE
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expression because the smile is frozen on his face. Adams cites the film The Man Who Laughs for this. In that story, adapted from a Victor Hugo novel, the main character has a ghoulish grin carved into his face. (Stills from this movie were used by Bill Finger to guide Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson when they were drawing the character.)
TM & © DC Comics.
NO LAUGHING MATTER
From Batman #251, the Joker refuses to kill Batman, so their “game” can continue.
MAKING IT REAL When Neal Adams and Denny O’Neil were initially preparing to work on the story, their interpretations of the Joker conflicted. Adams did not regard the Joker as a homicidal character and tried to talk O’Neil out of this characterization. But as Adams recalls, O’Neil’s response of, “Well, Joker’s insane, he’s a murderer” convinced the artist to accept the writer’s vision. Once in agreement with O’Neil, Adams thought, “Okay, I’m going to go with this Joker character. He’s not a cartoon. He’s insane. So let’s go. Let’s get nuts.” Adams suggests that he took this story’s quality up a notch, even inking it himself. “You can pretty much see when I put extra effort into it.” Adams points out that in each frame of the story that the Joker appears in, the character is always smiling. In the artist’s mind, the Joker can’t change his
Fandom reacted strongly to the revived Joker. Longtime Batman correspondent Guy Lillian III wrote: “‘The old Joker is back … the killer!’ So I heard Editor Julius Schwartz describe ‘The Joker’s In 1940, Bill Finger clipped photos of Five-Way Revenge’ on a recent visit to actor Conrad Veidt from this edition of New York. And indeed this Joker is so old The Man Who Laughs to send to Bob … so different from the battle-of-wits Kane as a reference for the Joker. friendly enemy he was when we last saw him that many of my fellow readers must have wondered what O’Neil has done with this ancient, and well established character.” Another writer confessed: “Fear! Gentlemen, Batman #251 has left me rattling in FEAR! Never again will I be able to drive in my car on a rain-swept night without the image of that maniacal face from the splash page screaming in my mind. “Neal Adams has done what I thought only Jack Kirby could do—create a really true evil villain, the kind that only visits you in your dreams. (Dreams? Nay, nightmares!) This is the Joker as he should be—stripped of his muscles, his body a spindly bony structure that only his warped mind could occupy. Kudos to Adams for this new and far more exciting insight into the King of Evil!” Another fan wrote: “The Joker! This is the Clown Prince of Crime as he was always meant to be! Not the watered-down version whom we were subjected to for so long, but the REAL Joker: grotesque, insane, fiendishly brilliant.”
OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE COIN As O’Neil and Adams set the tone for the modern Batman in “The Secret of the Waiting Graves,” they did the same with the Joker in “The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge!” This tale would become the standard by which other Joker stories would be judged. It is this interpretation of the character that laid the groundwork for the Joker’s portrayals in the movies Batman (1989) and The Dark Knight
The Joker’s next appearance after the character’s revamp in “The Joker’s FiveWay Revenge” was not in Batman or in Detective Comics, but in The Brave and the Bold. And oddly enough, the Joker was not advertised as the featured villain of that issue of Batman’s team-up book—he was Batman’s partner. “Death Has the Last Laugh” in The Brave and the Bold #111 (Mar. 1974) features one of the best remembered and most bizarre covers during Batman’s Bronze Age. Beautifully rendered by B&B stalwart Jim Aparo, it features Gotham’s finest with guns drawn on the Joker, and the Batman standing between them in a defensive posture, barking, “STAY BACK! Nobody lays a hand on my partner while I’m around!” The banner copy at the top of the cover reads, “The Strangest Team-Up in History.” Bob Haney’s story deals with the murder of a mob informant and his family, and all the evidence points towards the Joker. With one notable exception, none of the victims bear the Joker’s post-mortem grin. Surveying the crime scene, Batman explodes in a fit of rage: “By God, Joker—You’ve done your last criminal act! I swear this time to hunt you down and destroy you like the mad dog you are!!” But after the World’s Greatest Detective composes himself and begins to analyze the evidence, he realizes Batman and Joker agree to be partners in B&B #111. the Joker is being framed for the murders. The likely killer is a member of the mob. Batman discovers that the Joker is stalking the real killer, looking for revenge. The Caped Crusader then makes the decision to strike a deal with his arch-nemesis, calling for a truce between them and for them to work together until the real killer is behind bars. Promising to provide leads and information, the Joker directs Batman to an abandoned canal for a meeting. When Batman arrives, he discovers the Joker has double-crossed him. It’s been a trap all along—the Joker was the killer and now he intends to drown the Batman in the trap he has set in the canal. Through sheer strength and indomitable will, Batman survives and captures the Joker. Bob Haney adapted to the revamped Joker very well, especially considering that the last time he wrote a story with the Joker was the campy “Alias the Bat-Hulk,” the Batman/Metamorpho team-up in The Brave and the Bold #68 (Oct.–Nov. 1966). However, “Death Has the Last Laugh” proves to be one of the best B&B stories of the ’70s and one of the best Joker stories of that era. Jim Aparo’s outstanding art shows off the illustrator at the very height of his skills.
TM & © DC Comics.
TM & © DC Comics.
“THE STRANGEST TEAM-UP IN HISTORY”
ineteen seventy-one saw the introduction of a Batman villain who could truly lay claim to world domination or even epic destruction. A villain who could pull the Caped Crusader out of Gotham City and carry out their battles on a grand scale matching any of James Bond’s most fearsome enemies. A villain not unlike Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu and The Shadow’s arch-nemesis Shiwan Khan. This is Ra’s al Ghul, a criminal genius whose beliefs in world order and balance are fanatical. With the secrets of the Lazarus Pit at his disposal, he is able to defy death. Batman calls him “the most dangerous criminal genius I’ve ever met!” Add to all of this al Ghul’s beautiful daughter Talia, a forbidden woman who tempts the Batman at every turn.
N © Albert T. Longden Associates.
THE YELLOW PERIL Ra’s al Ghul made his debut in Batman #232 (June 1971), courtesy of Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams, and Dick Giordano, but his roots can be traced back to the titular star of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels, which began in 1913. There are numerous similarities between the characters. Fu Manchu was a title of honor, meaning “the Warlike Manchu”; it was thought that the character had been a member of the Imperial family that backed the losing side in the Boxer Rebellion. Sax Rohmer’s The Mask of Fu Manchu. Ra’s al Ghul’s name means
“head of the demon.” In the earliest Rohmer books, Fu Manchu is an assassin sent on missions by the Si-Fan, but he quickly rises to become the head of that dreaded secret society. At first, the Si-Fan’s goal is to throw the Europeans out of Asia; later, the group attempts to intervene more generally in world politics, while funding itself by more ordinary crime. Ra’s al Ghul has ties to DC Comics’ League of Assassins. Fu Manchu has extended his already considerable lifespan by use of the elixir “vitae,” a formula he spent decades trying to perfect. Over the centuries, Ra’s al Ghul has adeptly used the Lazarus Pit to extend his own life. When China falls to Communism, the Si-Fan and Fu Manchu fight to restore the China of old. Fu Manchu has a beautiful daughter, Fah lo Suee, who has been both loyal to her father and aided his enemies, as has Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter Talia. Ra’s al Ghul’s ultimate goal is to return the Earth to a perfect environmental harmony. This is a belief he also shared with the pulp villain Dr. Death. In February 1935, Dell Publishing gave this villain his own title, which lasted three issues. Written by Edward P. Norris, Dr. Death was occult scientist Rance Mandarin, who had the power to control the netherworld. Dr. Death wished to destroy all scientific and technological knowledge in order to return the world to its harmonious state. Pulp villain Dr. Death (1935).
© 1935 Dell Publishing.
BATMAN’S DEADLIEST FOE AND HIS EPIC FIRST BATTLE WITH THE CAPED CRUSADER
CHAPTER XX
THE RA’S AL GHUL SAGA
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The next step in Ra’s al Ghul’s lineage can be traced to the Pulp hero The Shadow and one of his greatest enemies, Shiwan Khan. Khan debuted in the story “The Golden Master” from The Shadow #182 (Sept. 15, 1935). Shiwan Kahn was a descendent of Genghis Khan. He can telepathically control people’s minds, and through the employment of the Tibetan secret of complete mental and physical fixity, he can become invisible. Foreshadowing al Ghul, in the story “Masters of Death” from The Shadow #200 (May 15, 1940), Shiwan Khan is able to reanimate the dead.
THE LEAGUE OF ASSASSINS
TM & © DC Comics.
TM & © DC Comics.
Like Fu Manchu, Ra’s al Ghul controlled a cadre of killers, the League of Assassins, a secret, worldwide operation. Gathered by Ra’s al Ghul, they were assembled to shield their leader from attacks. The League defined it-
TM & © DC Comics.
TM & © Conde Nast.
Shiwan Kahn was The Shadow’s most formiddable foe.
self as “the fang which protects the head.” They accepted jobs from a wealthy clientele who wished to “eliminate” someone using the best assassins on earth. Day-to-day control of the League was left to the Sensei, a martial-arts master from Hong Kong, who oversaw all of the killers on staff. The Sensei arranged the murder of acrobat Boston Brand, who “lived” after death as the ghostly Deadman, and faced off against Batman and Deadman in The Brave and the Bold #86 (Oct.–Nov. 1969). The Sensei would eventually usurp control of the League from Ra’s al Ghul. Before the first Ra’s al Ghul adventure, Batman encountered the League of Assasins in Detective Comics #405 (Nov. 1970), “The First of the Assassins!,” penned by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Bob Brown and Frank Giacoia. Batman is called upon to protect a shipping magnate, his fiancée, and his employee. After avoiding dolphins trained to attack with plastic explosives, Batman and his charges find themselves on what they think is a deserted island. Batman is alertly able to protect everyone from various deathtraps and finally confronts Tejja, a professional assassin, who is determined to kill Batman and those he protects. Batman and Tejja face off in a fearsome battle, where the Darknight Detective assesses his combatant: “He’s been taught to be dirty, vicious—lethal! He doesn’t speak … doesn’t even blink! He’s a human machine—programmed for death!” It is only through chance and the Batman’s great skill that he is able to defeat Tejja. Batman declares, “Somewhere out there is an arch-criminal … a mastermind who was hiding on this island, the leader of the League of Assassins Tejja mentioned! He nearly made a fool of me—but there will be another time, another place… I swear it!” Batman tangles with the League in the next issue of Detective Comics, #406 (Dec. 1970), “Your Servant of Death—Dr. Darrk!” Batman is lured into a deathtrap in the home of another shipping magnate marked for death, this time by Dr. Ebenezer Darrk, who is revealed to be the president of the League of Assassins. Batman frees himself from the trap, but Dr. Darrk escapes. Batman’s next encounter with the League is Detective Comics
Master martial artist Sensei of the League of Assassins appeared in JLA #94 (Nov. 1971).
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Batman battles Tejja in Detective #407 and (above) Dr. Darrk in Detective #406.
TM & © DC Comics.
TM & © DC Comics.
In Detective #411, an unmasked Batman meets Talia (Ra’s al Ghul’s daughter) (above). Talia saves Batman’s life by killing Dr. Darrk (below).
THE DEMON’S HEAD This three-issue build-up led to Batman #232 (June 1971), the long-awaited debut of the Demon’s Head himself, Ra’s al Ghul. Starting with Neal Adams’ bold and innovative cover, where Ra’s al Ghul’s image is a penciled halftone, here was a signal that this would be a villain unlike any previous member of Batman’s Rogues’ Gallery. “Daughter of the Demon!” stands as one of O’Neil, Adams, and Giordano’s best efforts and surely the seminal Batman story of the 1970s. Bruce Wayne is sent a photo and anonymous message that Robin has been kidnapped, and challenges Batman to Ra’s al Ghul debuts on the cover of come to his rescue. He departs for Wayne Batman #232. Art by Neal Adams.
Returning to the Batcave, Batman is startled by an unknown intruder. From Batman #232.
Manor and the Batcave to run a full analysis of the message. It is in the depths of the Batcave that Batman is shocked to be greeted by unexpected visitors in his secret headquarters: “Welcome home, Bruce Wayne—or shall I address you as the Batman?” At long last, Ra’s al Ghul is revealed to us with his strongarmed bodyguard Ubu by his side. It is through deduction, research, and the resources of his organization that Ra’s has identified Bruce Wayne as the person who has bought what is necessary to be the Batman. Denny O’Neil gave Neal Adams no description for the character’s appearance, letting Adams run with the visuals. “Denny had given me too little to work with,” Adams says, and the artist chose to give al Ghul a distinct look. First, he gave him no eyebrows; “I like that because that meant that something happened in his life that removed his eyebrows,” comments Adams. He gave al Ghul a receding hairline, “because he’s been around and experienced life,” and decided to make him look Middle Eastern because of the character’s name. Adams’ final touch was to “give him something interesting as facial hair.” Thanks to Neal Adams’ wizardry, from these simple touches one of the classic Batman foes is born. O’Neil regards Adams’ character realization as “perfect,” adding, “He has a weight and a dignity about him that really works for the character.” Ra’s al Ghul reveals to Batman that he has also received a mysterious message informing him that his daughter Talia has been abducted. After analyzing the clues, Batman links the two hostage messages to Calcutta, India. The man who would become Batman’s greatest foe starts out as his ally as they fly together to rescue their loved ones. At this point in the story, the origins of Batman and Robin are presented, to satisfy a whim of Neal Adams’: “I convinced Julie. [I’d] never done the origin of Batman.” “It was a surprise to me when I saw it,” reveals Denny O’Neil of Adams’ insertion of the unscripted Bat-origins, inserted without the writer’s knowledge. “The story didn’t need it, but I don’t think it hurts anything.” The Batman’s origin segment remains very faithful to the original version by Finger and Kane that first appeared in Detective Comics #33 (Nov. 1939), Batman’s fifth appearance. It also restored Martha Wayne’s death by gunshot to the official canon, after nearly two decades of her death portrayed as a stress-related heart attack. This origin sequence helps to draw a strong link between the character’s birth in 1939 and his rebirth in 1970.
TM & © DC Comics.
#411 (May 1971), “Into the Den of the Death Dealers!,” by Denny O’Neil, Bob Brown, and Dick Giordano. Batman goes after Dr. Darrk and the League of Assassins in the Middle East, where he encounters the beautiful Talia. Disguising himself as an old woman, Batman boards a train called the Soom Express, in pursuit of Dr. Darrk and a female companion. When Darrk and his companion jump from the train, Batman confronts them. The Masked Manhunter is overcome and beaten unconscious by Darrk’s men and detained in an abandoned Buddhist monastery. Batman awakens, sharing a cell with a beautiful woman. He realizes he’s been unmasked, as she has tended to his wounds: “You look familiar—someone I have seen in a photograph, perhaps?” Darrk’s hostage introduces herself: “I am Talia, daughter of he who is called Ra’s al Ghul! Darrk’s henchmen captured me at the University of Cairo! I study medicine there.” Julius Schwartz provides an editor’s note defining Ra’s al Ghul’s name: “In Arabic, ‘The Demon’s Head’! Literally, al Ghul signifies a mischief-maker, and appears as the Ghoul of The Arabian Nights!” Darrk sets up another deathtrap for Batman, but once again he escapes and rescues Talia. They capture Darrk, who reveals that the League of Assassins were paid to kill the shipping magnates in Detective #405–406 because they were providing arms to a rebel force in South America. Talia informs Darrk that he will pay for his treachery against her and her father. As Batman, Talia, and Darrk prepare to intercept and board the Soom Express, Darrk blinds Batman with a gas released from his ascot. Preparing to kill the incapacitated Batman, Talia shoots Darrk and he is killed when he falls in the path of the speeding train.
In Batman #232, Batman’s origin is changed. Martha Wayne is shot and killed.
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ONE OF COMICS’ GREATEST WRITERS AND EDITORS TAKES OVER DETECTIVE COMICS
rom 1964–1979, Julius Schwartz was the editor of Batman’s two main comicbook titles—Detective Comics and Batman. His name was synonymous with Batman’s “New Look” and Bronze Age “creature of the night” revamps. But for one year, from 1973–1974, Schwartz’s tenure was interrupted when Archie Goodwin steered Detective Comics as both ed- Archie Goodwin during itor and writer. During that year, Goodwin his Warren editing days. gave readers outstanding multi-faceted stories with fresh ideas, new artists, and the resurrection of an award-winning character—all in the course of only seven issues. Archie Goodwin got his start in publishing as the art director of Redbook magazine. His first work in comics came as an assistant to Leonard Starr on the On Stage comic strip. In 1965, Goodwin became the head writer and editor of Creepy, Eerie, and Blazing Combat for Warren Publishing. With a reputation as a talented writer and an innovative editor who had a keen eye for art talent, Goodwin came to DC in 1973 and was assigned four books to edit: G. I. Combat, Star Spangled War Stories, Our Fighting Forces, and Detective Comics.
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A MAN WITH A PLAN In Goodwin’s first issue of Detective, #437 (Oct.–Nov. 1973), he reveals his ideas for the book in an editorial in the “Batman’s Hot-Line” letters column. It’s a very candid editorial and worth reprinting as a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into taking the reins of a legendary comic-book title like Detective Comics. After explaining that he got the editorial assignment as a result
of Julius Schwartz concentrating on Shazam! and the new title Strange Sports Stories, Goodwin lays out his plans for Detective: In getting my first issue of Detective off the ground, I had a lot of help—good hints from Julie and useful suggestions from our Editorial Director, Carmine Infantino, among others. But a major factor in setting the tone of a book and influencing sales is, I think, the art. And there, I got very lucky. Taking over as regular artist on the Batman feature is Jim Aparo. To followers of Brave and the Bold and Phantom Stranger, Jim’s crisp, gutsy style will be known. My second stroke of luck on the book’s artwork was a fella called Walt Simonson… I first saw his work last year and told him I could use him, but that I thought his style would pretty much limit him to science-fiction type subjects. Each job Walt did after that seemed designed to prove my estimation wrong, and now … here we are doing Manhunter together. Why Manhunter, you may be asking at this point, when Detective was already well-fixed for back-up features such as Jason Bard, Hawkman, and the like? For a time now, Detective has been off in sales. This is what prompted the cutback from a monthly to a bi-monthly schedule. The book obviously, to judge by the mail, has a strong nucleus of fans that support it; what’s needed now is to build back a larger general readership as well. To try and do this, I’m experimenting, trying to create a new look to the book to catch the attention of new readers, without alienating the regular readership in the process. Too much meddling with the Batman (though there will be some shifting of emphasis in the type of story he appears in) would probably achieve the latter, so a lot of my “new look” will come from the back fea-
CHAPTER XXI
A YEAR WITH ARCHIE GOODWIN
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Goodwin would continue to be very effusive in all of his Detective letters columns. A nice touch that Goodwin added with his first issue was a return to the original Detective Comics logo from 1939; and just like the original 1939 covers it includes a headshot of Batman (drawn by Jim Aparo) above the logo with the caption “the Batman.” Goodwin’s first Batman story is titled “Deathmask” and is beautifully illustrated by Jim Aparo. As with many of Goodwin’s Batman stories, their horror elements would not be out of place in an issue of Creepy or Eerie. The plot centers around an ancient mask of the Xochipecs’ god of death, Matuchima, that is the prized piece With his first issue, Goodwin returned at the Gotham Museum exhibit “the Art of to Detective’s logo of 1939. the Xochipecs.” The mask ends up being worn by a succession of men who are battling for controlling power at the museum. Each of them is driven mad and kills because of the mask’s influence. An additional point of interest is that Goodwin changes Bruce Wayne’s characterization from Schwartz’s “Big Change” image of “do-gooder philanthropist” to that of “frivolous playboy snob.” Even Commissioner Gordon takes note of Wayne’s behavior: “Bruce Wayne’s practically a new person these past few months … not one I particularly care for!” Goodwin’s run on Detective received heavy mail volume—mostly positive, but it’s interesting to note that the most negative responses were due to his changing Bruce Wayne’s characterization.
All art TM & © DC Comics.
ture. It’s based on the old Adventure Comics in the forties (and was reprinted for a time in the now defunct New Gods), but with considerable revamping; mostly, the name’s the same, as is the basic premise. From Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” on, the idea of a man who stalks other men has held great fascination for a great many people. Certainly, I’m one of them. Text © 2009 DC Comics.
Premiering in Detective #437 was “Manhunter,” written By Goodwin and drawn by newcomer Walt Simonson.
“Manhunter” continued as the backup feature in Detective through Goodwin’s run, the character’s story unfolding slowly throughout those seven issues. Almost all the elements of Manhunter contrasted those of Batman. “The Batman exploits the exotic and mysterious side of the American city,” remarked Goodwin in the letters column, continuing, “Manhunter was created to counterpoint the Batman adventures.” Those contrasts went beyond the settings— “So where Batman’s costume is somber, Manhunter’s is bright,” Goodwin commented; “where Batman’s art style is heavy, dark, Manhunter’s is light, airy.” And unlike Batman, whose “arsenal” was limited to gadgets loaded into his utility belt, Manhunter carried an array of weapons. These differences made Manhunter a perfect counterpart to Batman’s lead-in stories. Another contrast between the two characters was that Goodwin and Simonson would eventually tell the Manhunter story in “Marvel style” (plot first, then pencils, then script) as opposed to DC’s full-script format, which was used on Batman.
MONSTERS, STALKERS, JUDGES, AND PLANES
From Detective #437 (right), Commissioner Gordon notices a change in Bruce Wayne. (below) Anyone who wears the “Deathmask” goes mad.
In Detective #438, a monstrous version of Ra’s al Ghul’s servant Ubu rampages through Wayne Manor. Art by Jim Aparo.
MANHUNTER Manhunter’s first installment, issue #437’s “The Himalayan Incident,” would eventually go on to win the Academy of Comic Book Arts’ Shazam Award for Best Individual Short Story (dramatic) in 1973. Both Goodwin and Walt Simonson would also win as best writer and newcomer artist, respectively, for 1973.
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Detective Comics #438 (Dec. 1973–Jan. 1974) had Goodwin again blending Batman with a horror element. The Caped Crusader lent himself easily to the genre; as Denny O’Neil has said, “Batman works well with the grotesque.” “A Monster Walks Wayne Manor!,” illustrated by Jim Aparo, was the final exclamation point to the “Ra’s al Ghul Saga.” Rumor has it that a monster is rampaging through the abandoned Wayne Manor. Alfred travels to the manor to investigate, only to be seriously injured by a “monster.” Dr. Varnov, who specializes in the supernatural, is hired by Bruce Wayne to examine the house and its mysterious goings-on. Batman soon intervenes and discovers that Varnov runs a health clinic in Switzerland. The clinic is near Ra’s al Ghul’s chalet. When Ra’s’ headquarters explodes in Batman #243 (Aug. 1972), the injured form of Ubu, Ra’s’ servant, is discovered crawling from the chalet’s wreckage. Ubu’s body is glowing and he’s muttering, “Lazarus Pit … left active … erupted…”
BATMAN’S CHANGING WORLD IN THE 1970S
s the 1970s progressed, Julius Schwartz’s “Big Change” in Batman’s world was running smoothly. New concepts were being added and old villains were being brought back. Batman’s continuity now had a blend of both the old and the new as the shadow he cast over Gotham continued to grow. As editor of the Batman books, Schwartz controlled the Darknight Detective’s destiny and for the most part he answered to no one else (although Brave and the Bold editor Murray Boltinoff and his chief scribe Bob Haney invented their own Bat-continuity as they went along). Schwartz’s assistant editor Bob Rozakis comments, “Julie was unlike today’s editors, who often act as traffic managers for their freelancers (who do whatever they want). Julie was in control of his books. Writers and artists did not do things without his approval every step of the way. As
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Julius Schwartz had a firm grip on Batman’s world in the 1970s. Shown here with artist Curt Swan at the DC offices.
with all the books he edited over the years, Julie insisted that the stories be stories … with a beginning, middle, and end. And he wanted a narrative hook that would grab the reader and make him say, ‘I want to read this!’”
DUAL PERSONALITY By the early 1970s, relevancy, realism, and nostalgia were the hot trends in comics, the perfect ingredients to start bringing back Batman’s rich collection of unique and bizarre villains. With the “Big Change” in effect for nearly two years by 1971, it was decided to bring back Batman’s most grotesque and sympathetic villain—Two-Face, who made his first appearance in Detective Comics #66 (Aug. 1942). Two-Face started out as Harvey Kent (soon changed to Dent), the brilliant and handsome district attorney of Gotham City. While Dent is prosecuting a case, “Boss” Moroni throws acid at the D.A., horribly disfiguring one side of Dent’s formerly handsome face. This sends Dent into a psychosis, bringing out dual identities, one bad and one good. Two-Face’s behavior at any given moment is decided by the flip of his twoheaded coin with one side scarred and the other clean. Batman #234 (Aug. 1971), “Half an Evil,” was the first appearance of Two-Face since Batman #81 (Feb.–Mar. 1954), discounting World’s Finest #173 (Feb. 1968), where a mad scientist’s formula turned Batman into Two-Face [see Section One]. Once again, the superstar team of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams set another milestone in Batman’s Bronze Age career with TwoFace’s return. “Denny and I agreed we liked the old characters and wanted to bring them back,” Adams recalls, but attributes Two-Face’s return to a decision of Schwartz and O’Neil. “The Batman’s sandbox was mine to play in,” O’Neil adds. “Half an Evil” has a strong detective angle as Two-Face steals a large balloon from a Gotham City parade. Batman traces Two-Face and his gang to an old schooner they’ve stolen
CHAPTER XXIII
THE SHADOW OF THE BAT GROWS
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At the end of Batman #256, Bruce Wayne contemplates his tragic love life.
photos of Catwoman and Talia. Robin says, “You’re looking pretty glum, considering our highly successful night!” Batman replies, “I’ve been thinking, Robin … how Catwoman always causes evil! …Even without intending to! That’s her curse! As for me … whenever I meet a woman I can care for, she’s an enemy! And that’s my curse!” Those are the words of a truly tragic hero. Batman #257 (July–Aug. 1974) saw the return of the Penguin after a sixyear absence. However, the heightened grittiness and realism that Denny O’Neil had so deftly crafted into Batman’s world don’t translate well with the Penguin. The tale doesn’t discern itself in any way from the Silver Age stories of the Penguin, especially with the presence of Robin added to the mix. The most interesting aspect of the story is that Talia makes an appearance and teams with the Dynamic Duo to defeat the Penguin.
Two-Face was the first of Batman’s old villains revived. From Batman #234.
and docked at a Gotham River marina. Batman arrives only to see the schooner blown up by Two-Face. As Batman attempts to concentrate and understand Two-Face’s scheme, O’Neil writes this caption to the reader: “The facts are in … and there is a solution! Have you deduced Two-Face’s intention?” (At the urging of his editor, O’Neil frequently added this type of reader address in his 1970s Batman stories.) Batman discovers that TwoFace put the balloon into the hold of the ship so that once he deliberately sunk it, the ship would drift to a quiet cove. He could then inflate the balloon, raise the ship, and steal its hidden fortune undisturbed. When he’s captured by Two-Face, Batman uses the old Houdini trick of expanding his muscles as he’s being tied up in order to slacken the ropes. After escaping, Batman plays on Two-Face’s obsession of flipping his coin in order to defeat him. O’Neil comments on “Half an Evil”: “[Two-Face] literally wears his problems on his face and that was another case where we tried to combine that sort of grotesque, tragic villain with a detective story.”
FASTER, PUSSYCAT … SQUAWK, SQUAWK! After the Joker’s reappearance in Batman #251, it was Catwoman’s turn to join the villain revival tour. Batman #256 (May–June 1974) marked Catwoman’s first appearance in a Batman comic in nearly five years. “Catwoman’s Circus Caper!,” written by Denny O’Neil with art by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano, also begins a three-issue return of Robin as Batman’s partner. Bob Rozakis discusses whether there was ever any consideration to permanently bring Robin back as Batman’s partner: “I’m sure there was, but it didn’t go very far. Stories in which Robin returned to team up with Batman didn’t result in any spike in sales, so there was no great pressure to do it.” In the story, Robin investigates the murder of a trapeze artist, and shortly thereafter Batman joins him at the circus. Catwoman is there disguised as a lion tamer, and plans to steal two rare white tigers and release them to freedom. While Catwoman seems to be the obvious suspect in the murder, in actuality the victim’s jealous brother is the culprit. Catwoman’s “circus caper” proves to be a MacGuffin, a story tool that O’Neil enjoyed using in his Batman stories. O’Neil concludes the story with Batman and Robin in the Batcave looking at
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It was the Scarecrow’s turn in Batman #262 (Apr. 1975), “The Scarecrow’s Trail of Fear!,” written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Ernie [Chua] Chan, who was making his debut as Batman’s regular penciler. The Scarecrow develops a device that “sends vibrations to the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the body that controls the involuntary emotions,” causing victims to be gripped in paralyzing fear. Using mind over matter, Batman is able to counteract Scarecrow’s latest scheme and defeat him. Ernie Chan penciled nearly 30 issues of Batman and Detective, making him, along with Irv Novick and Jim Aparo, among Batman’s most durable artists of the 1970s. He was known as Ernie Chua during his time at DC. Bob Rozakis explains why: “When he arrived in the US from the Philippines, he was asked his last name by a customs/immigration officer. When Ernie replied Starting with Batman #262, Ernie Chua that it was Chan, he was told that there became Schwartz’s most reliable Batwere too many Chans and so it was man artist. changed to Chua. Ernie eventually had it legally changed back to Chan. “I don’t think the fans were too fond of Ernie’s Batman,” Rozakis adds. “Many of them felt it did not stand up to Adams’ or Aparo’s work,” Chan’s workman-like style of art leaving many fans flat. Yet editor Schwartz used Chan on Batman and Detective because, as Rozakis says, “He was fast, reliable, and available.” Neal Adams’ final Batman story for Julius Schwartz was in Batman #255 (Mar.–Apr. 1974). Rozakis says, “I think Julie would have been happy to have Neal do more Batman stories, but Neal’s biggest roadblock was his inability to meet deadlines. Julie was a stickler for having his books on time,” making Ernie Chan all the more attractive to the editor. Denny O’Neil had another major Bat-villain to revive: the Riddler. Brought out of a nearly seven-year slumber in Batman #263 (May 1975), “Riddler on the Move!,” O’Neil adds a bit more depth to the Prince of Puzzles, but still
All art TM & © DC Comics.
MR. RELIABLE
AN INTERVIEW WITH DENNY O’NEIL
Conducted by Michael Kronenberg on September 3, 2007 Transcribed by Brian K. Morris
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onsidered one of comics’ finest writers, Dennis O’Neil (b. 1939) has written and edited for both DC and Marvel. He is probably best remembered for his Bronze Age work at DC Comics, where he wrote such titles as Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Batman, Detective Comics, Superman, Justice League of America, and Wonder Woman. O’Neil is most closely associated with Batman, and helped changed the character from campy caricature to “creature of the night.” Frequently teamed with artist Neal Adams, O’Neil set the standard to how Batman is interpreted today. After writing the Caped Crusader’s adventures throughout the 1970s, O’Neil became the character’s group editor in 1987 and remained in that post until 1999. THE BATCAVE COMPANION: How did you get the assignment from Julie to work on Detective Comics? DENNIS O’NEIL: Initially, for weeks, he approached me during the camp era. I was sort of “flavor of the week” for a few years there. Julie offered me a chance to write Batman while the camp thing was still going on. I wasn’t interested, but I did
write a fill-in story for him themed on New Orleans jazz [Batman #224, Aug. 1970], which I liked and Julie loved, that was not in any way campy. And as I’m sure you know, the camp fad ended very abruptly and there they were with this character that they had reasons to continue publishing. It was a situation similar to Green Lantern/Green Arrow. So then Julie approached me and the terms of the assignment were a little different. It’s like, “Okay, we’re not going to do what we’ve been doing any more. Do you have any ideas?” “Well, under those circumstances, sure.” I’m not condemning camp, it’s just not my thing. I don’t have any gift for it; I don’t think many comic-book people did. I think DC, because that TV show was so popular, they kind of made a half-hearted attempt to follow it. But I don’t know that any of the comic-book writers had a natural camp sensibility. Anyway, for years and years, from in classrooms and at conventions and such, I said that what we did was simply take the character back to his beginnings and then add what the world had learned about telling stories in this odd form. And then when I became the Batman editor, I looked at those early stories and I saw that our version was always implicit in the early stuff—well, not always, but after the origin story, which was five or six stories in—it was strongly implicit, but not very much
center stage and at times had disappeared entirely. So it was an odd case of our recreating stuff that we thought had already been done. And yet, it hadn’t been done much. TBC: So you’re talking about going back to Batman’s roots during that first year in 1939. O’NEIL: The lone obsessed avenger is certainly implicit in that, but particularly after the introduction of Robin in 1940 was not emphasized very much.
Denny O’Neil, circa the ’70s.
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BATMAN’S CONSCIENCE
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TBC: Was that part of an editorial meeting that Julie had with you and Frank Robbins, or did Julie just come to you? O’NEIL: [chuckles] No, there were no such things as editorial meetings in those days. It was a very casual business. I think Julie got away with as much as he did—and that entailed reinventing the whole super-hero genre—because people just didn’t pay attention. I once asked him about the yearly Justice League two-parter at a time when conventional wisdom said you can’t do continued stories in comics because there’s no way that you can assure the readers will get consecutive issues. He just did it! He didn’t bother to ask anybody, and nobody said anything, so he did it for years. When Julie and I decided to change the tenor of Batman, or the kind of stories we told, and he enlisted me in that effort, again, I don’t think he reported to anyone. Same way with Green Lantern/Green Arrow, I think that the guys in the big offices found out about it when they started reading about it in the papers. So I think I wanted to send Robin to college. I don’t know why.
TBC: When I look back on the stories of 1939– 1940, that first year of Batman by himself, they were pretty strong and still hold up fairly well. Those stories have a strong pulp resonance to them. It lost a lot of that pulp feel when Robin came along. O’NEIL: Bill Finger has said that his strongest influence was probably Walter Gibson’s The Shadow, which is almost the quintessential pulp character. TBC: Right. “The Secret of the Waiting Graves” (Detective Comics #395, Jan. 1970) was the start of how you changed Batman and how he became more of a throwback to exactly what we were talking about, that dark, singular figure. Was that your purpose in that particular story? O’NEIL: Yeah, that was our announcement to the world that this is not your father’s Batman. That was the first one we did, and again, it was so long ago and we thought that this stuff would be forgotten in three years, tops. So nobody was taking notes, even mental notes. But I think first of all, I wanted Batman alone, no Commissioner Gordon, and no Robin. And I wanted to give it a kind of a horror, gothic feel.
TM & © Conde Nast.
TBC: The story has a definite gothic horror feel to it. O’NEIL: Yeah, and I think that was all intentional. I’m not sure that I knew if Neal was going to do the art or not, but I thought he did a great job.
Walter Gibson’s The Shadow was always a strong influence on Bill Finger. Here the Master of Darkness stands on one of Finger’s staples, the giant typewriter.
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TBC: Do you remember the reaction from fans or from the editorial office? O’NEIL: Well, if there was any, we never heard about things like that. As I said, it was such a different business that I think probably the current creative people would have trouble believing how different it was. And Julie, after he retired, he’d come in once a week. He’d use the phone to call Harlan Ellison in California and hang around and walk up and down the halls and ask people what they were up to and he kept interested in it. But he said once that the editorial job was simpler for most of the time he was doing it. Theoretically, he just commissioned a whole bunch of Batman stories and threw them in a drawer, then pulled one
out when he needed it and sent something to the press. [chuckles] In practice, it was never anything close to that. But there was no great emphasis on personnel. There were no direct markets, so there were no announcements ahead of time on what would go into the books. Sometimes we thought it would be nice if someone were looking after that kind of publicity, but it just wasn’t on the radar. After Green Lantern/Green Arrow, Neal and I got a certain amount of attention and went on radio talk shows and such, but it was all people contacting us. The company, I’m sure they were happy that it was happening, but I don’t remember that they ever did anything to facilitate it. So “Secret of the Waiting Graves,” it was a story that I thought came out well and I was happy with it and Julie was happy with it and we went on. [chuckles] TBC: People remember that story as a starting point for what the character is today. O’NEIL: That’s what Paul Levitz credits it with. And it served the baseline that the current or the subsequent versions have evolved from. What’s being done today is still recognizably that version. A little darker … it depends on who is writing it. TBC: I’m interested in the story you did where you mixed in the elements of Citizen Kane, “Paint a Picture of Peril” (Detective Comics #397, Mar. 1970). Do you remember that story? O’NEIL: The fat guy. TBC: Yeah, I thought that was great. Were you just experimenting and decided that you’d throw in some elements from Citizen Kane? Because this “fat guy” is the rich recluse like Kane and he’s got the opera singer woman that he’s obsessed with. O’NEIL: Oh, wow! [chuckling] Until this moment, that had never occurred to me. TBC: Oh, really? O’NEIL: I mean, there’s suddenly a lot of attention being paid to that stuff and I’m amazed at the similarities to things that I must have seen in other
TM & © DC Comics.
TM & © DC Comics.
TBC: He needed to mature, didn’t he? Especially with Batman moving on, I guess that was the logical thing to do. O’NEIL: Yeah, and I think even back then, I was a little uncomfortable with the idea of, You adopt this kid, then you send him up against O’Neil and writer Frank Robbins advised Julius Schwartz to break up the Dynamic Duo. every homicidal maniac in TBC: Were you involved in the decision to send Gotham City. [Michael chuckles] Also, Robin was, Dick Grayson off to college and move Bruce from the get-go, a contradiction: the Batman, dark, Wayne out of Wayne Manor? black costume and mask; and then you have this O’NEIL: Yeah. kid in an orange-and-yellow costume.
The rich recluse from Detective #397.
STEVE ENGLEHART, MARSHALL ROGERS, AND TERRY AUSTIN’S MEMORABLE STORYLINE
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ARTISTS BY (MIS)CALCULATION? The backup story in Detective Comics #463 (Sept. 1976), “Crimes by Calculation,” starring the Atom, saw the debut of a new villain named the Calculator. The story’s writer was longtime Julius Schwartz assistant Bob Rozakis. He was earning his writing chops with this assignment, a continuing backup storyline featuring individual members of the Justice League of America facing off against the Calculator. “When I was proposing the stories to Julie, I had said that the villain (who I think I was calling the Juggler at the time) would steal things at the moment they were most valuable,” Rozakis says. “Julie said, ‘So he calculates their value? Then he should be the Calculator!’ This was a case when Julie did have a better name for a character, unlike Captain Stingaree [Detective Comics #460–462], which Julie also came up with.” Rozakis continues: “I was trying to get more freelance writing and came up with an idea of a villain who would fight the different heroes in succession. At the time, there were rotating heroes in the Detective backup slot, so it was a great spot for it. Julie liked the idea and I was able to run with it.
“My goal was to ultimately write a Batman story on my own (since I had previously collaborated with Mike Uslan on the Stingaree stories). That was why the Calculator’s plans led to a confrontation with the Caped Crusader.” Meanwhile, inker Terry Austin, whose first credit line in a Batman comic was the two-part Robin solo story “The Parking Lot Bandit!” in Detective Comics #450–451 (Aug.–Sept. 1975), was to be the inker for the Calculator series. Austin got his start in the industry when artist Al Milgrom brought his samples to Neal Adams and Dick Giordano’s commercial art studio Continuity Associates. Austin recalls, “Al walked me right over there and introduced me to Neal, who proceeded to tear my samples to shreds but finished by saying, ‘Here’s a nice pen and here’s a
TM & © DC Comics.
he Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers Detective Comics collaboration is considered by many to be the definitive version of the Batman. It’s an argument that has persisted since the series completed its run in Detective #476 (Mar.–Apr. 1978). Considering the Masked Manhunter’s seventy years’ worth of adventures, that’s a lofty claim. Its foundation began with an under-the-radar backup feature and a disgruntled writer who was about to deliver his swan song to the comicbook industry.
Readers caught a sneak preview of Rogers and Austin’s Batman in Detective #467.
CHAPTER XXV
THE DEFINITIVE BATMAN?
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All art TM & © DC Comics.
Continuity and informed me that we would be shortly working together on the Hawkman and Green Arrow chapters of the Calculator series.” Detective Comics #468 (Mar.–Apr. 1977), “Battle of the Thinking Machines,” was the conclusion of the Calculator storyline. “The final chapter of the Calculator saga was scheduled to be a book-length issue of Detective Comics where the Calculator would return and wipe up the floor with his five previous opponents until the star of the book, Batman, would arrive and thrash him soundly,” Terry Austin recalls. “Jim Aparo was to be the artist on this concluding chapter, as only long-established seasoned professionals were allowed to work on the important long-running flagship characters at the big two comicbook companies at that point. I found out from Marshall when we were out stumping a couple of years back for the Dark Detective series [the six-issue 2005 sequel to their original run on Detective] that evidently Jim Aparo had suddenly taken ill and the other regular Batman artists were already booked, so in desperation, we were given a shot at Batman! I guess the feeling was, ‘Hey, it’s only one issue, how much damage can these two upstarts do?’ “However, that didn’t sit well with many of the old From Rogers and Austin’s original art, Batman and members of the JLA team up against the Calculator. hands at DC, Joe Orlando in particular. Marshall and I nice brush—now sit down and get to work!’ I became a member of the were ordered into his office on a number of occasions, whereupon, in a dis‘Crusty Bunkers’ inking fraternity at Continuity then and there, renting a play of red-faced screaming through foam-flecked lips worthy of a Marine workspace. A couple of weeks later, after being suggested by Neal, I bedrill instructor, Joe would loudly inform us how worthless we were and how came the background inker for Dick Giordano on all the comic-book jobs our paltry efforts were unfit to grace the insides of a book with the DC imthat he inked for the next two years! I couldn’t have asked for a better, kinder print on the cover. I don’t know how Marshall felt about it, but I know that I teacher and mentor for that period that it took me to bring what I was doing might have taken his opinion more to heart if it hadn’t been coming from the up to the professional standards of the industry. I owe Allen, Dick, and Neal one very boring, pedestrian artist that had graced the fabulous EC stable … more than I’ve ever been able to repay!” I always told Marshall that I owed him one, because on the occasion of his Austin began the Calculator series by inking Mike Grell’s pencils in Deturning in the pencils for that Batman story, I waited outside Joe’s office while tective Comics #463–464 (Sept.–Oct. 1976), then Ernie Chan’s pencils in he shrieked his displeasure at Marshall for about half an hour, knowing that Detective #465 (Nov. 1976). But it was the Calculator backups’ next penwhen he finished, it would be my turn in the lion’s cage! Finally, Marshall ciler, Marshall Rogers, who would soon rocket to Bat-fame. stumbled out, ashen-faced and shaken, and I was nervously ushered in for “As I recall, young Marshall Rogers made the trek to New York City look- my 40 lashes. Joe stood there, beet-red and panting, having literally worn ing for a berth drawing comic books, and, as we all did in those days, made himself out giving poor Marshall his due, and had no strength left to fling his the pilgrimage to Continuity to seek an audience with Neal Adams. Neal vitriol at me. I innocently asked what approach he wanted me to take in inklooked at his samples and mentioned that there was a young inker in one of ing the job and he barked, ‘Do whatever the hell you want—you can’t save the back rooms in the studio that he thought would be a good fit for the type it!’ With that, I left town, going back to my folks’ house in Michigan to work of material that Marshall was drawing. Heeding Neal’s advice, Marshall on the issue, desirous of putting a few thousand miles between our torsought me out and asked what I was working on, which, at the time, was the mentor and me. Calculator backup series in Detective Comics for Julie Schwartz. Mike Grell “To be fair to Joe, I know many people who were starting out in the busihad penciled the Atom and Black Canary chapters, and Ernie Chan had ness at that time who had perfectly lovely, nurturing relationships with him; done the Elongated Man. So, Marshall went off to his DC audition, arranged I just think he didn’t see anything of value in what we did and wasn’t shy by Neal, and proceeded to ask Julie if he could pencil the remaining two about expressing this to us in no uncertain terms. For example, he was a big backup stories of the Calculator. Given the go-ahead, Marshall returned to brush inker—I was a pen guy—I encountered the same sort of resistance
Marshall Rogers
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Terry Austin
THE BATCAVE COMPANION
Readers were excited by Rogers and Austin’s Batman in Detective #468.
DR. TZIN-TZIN
THE JOKER
Real Name: Unknown (if applicable) First Appearance: [historical] Detective Comics #354 (Aug. 1966); [Bronze Age] Detective Comics #408 (Feb. 1971) Powers or Gimmicks: Ruutthless head of international crime carrttel; drives enemies to madness with an evil-eye gaze; employs sophisticatted surveillance devices Additional Bronze Age Appearances: Adventure Comics #418 (Apr. 1972); Batman #284 (Feb. 1977), 285 (Mar. 1977), and 290 (Aug. 1977) Notes: Funded by the League of Assassins in Detec ective Comics #408. Fought Supergirl in Adventure #418. Retturned in 1988 to battle Peacemaker.
Real Name: Unknown First Appearance: [historical] Batman #1 (Spring 1940); [Bronze Age] Batman #251 (Sept. 1973) Powers or Gimmicks: Unpredictable, highly intelligent homicidal criminal; skilled chemistt whose Joker Venom causes victims to die with a hideous grin affffixed to their faces; occasionally uses joke gadgetts rigged into deadly weapons Additional Bronze Age Appearances: The Brave and the Bold #111 (Feb.–Mar. 1974); Batman #258 (Sept.–Oct. 1974) and 260 (Jan.–Feb. 1975); The Brave and the Bold #118 (Apr. 1975); The Joker #1 (May 1975), 2 (July 1975), 3 (Sept.– Oct. 1975), and 4 (Nov.–Dec. 1975); Justice League of America #126 (Jan. 1976); The Joker #5 (Jan.–Feb. 1976), 6 (Mar.–Apr. 1976), 7 (Mayy– June 1976), 8 (July–Aug. 1976), and 9 (Sept.– Oct. 1976); The Brave and the Bold #129 (Sept. 1976) and 130 (Oct. 1976); DC Super-Stars #10 (Dec. 1976); Batman #286 (Apr. 1977), Batman #291 (Sept. 1977), 292 (Oct. 1977), 293 (Nov. 1977), and 294 (Dec. 1977); Detecctive Comics #475 (Feb. 1978) and 476 (Mar.–Apr. 1978); The Brave and the Bold #141 (Mayy–June 1978); Green Lantern vol. 2 #117 (June 1979); Detective Comics #486 (Oct.–Nov. 1979) Notes: In his Bronze Age premiere (Batman #251), the Joker became a killer for the first time in over 30 years.
FIREBUG Real Name: Joseph Rigger First Appearance: Batman #318 (Dec. 1979) Powers or Gimmicks: Demolitions experrtt whose costume contains napalm Additional Bronze Age Appearances: none Notes: Believed dead afftter initial appearance, Firebug reappeared when the Calculattor sent him to face offff against members of Hero Hotline (Hero Hotline #1, Apr. 1989). Latter applied for membership in Black Mask’s gang, but was beatten by his rival arsonist, the Firefly (Detective Comics #689– 690, Sept.–Oct. 1995).
GENTLEMAN GHOST Real Name: James “Gentleman Jim” Craddock First Appearance: [historical] Flash Comics #88 (Oct. 1947); [firstt Batman appearance] Batman #310 (Apr. 1979) Powers or Gimmicks: Invisibility and can pass through solid objects; skilled marksman who uses signatture antique flintlock pisttols Additional Bronze Age Appearances: Justice Leaggue of America #128 (Mar. 1976) [flashback] Notes: Intent on making Wayyne Manor his home, Gentleman Ghostt kidnapped and mind-conttroled Alfred. Returned in Batman #319 (Jan. 1980).
KITE-MAN Real Name: Charles Brown First Appearance: Batman #133 (Aug. 1960); [Bronze Age] Batman #315 (Sept. 1979) Powers or Gimmicks: Hang-gliding thief who uses kites for crimes; has used kite-weapons including nerve-gas box kites, a jett-powered kite, a flash bulb kite, and a net kite Additional Bronze Age Appearances: none Notes: When Kite-Man refused to join the Secret Society of Super-Villains, Deathstroke killed him by throwing him offff Wayyne Tower without his hang-glider in 52 #25 (Oct. 25, 2006).
Nov. 1948); [Bronze Age] Batman #291 (Sept. 1977) Powers or Gimmicks: A half-cocked haberdasher obsessed with headwear; uses equipped chapeaus, mostly top hatts, for crimes Additional Bronze Age Appearances: Batman #292 (Oct. 1977), 293 (Nov. 1977), 294 (Dec. 1977), and 297 (Mar. 1978) Notes: At least two felons claiming to be the Mad Hatter havve terrorized Gotham City; in Detective #510 (Jan. 1982) it was established thatt Batman #49’s Mad Hattttter, with his Alice in Wonderland visuals, was a difffferent character from the Mad Hatter from the 1950s–1970s.
MAN-BAT Real Name: Kirk Langsttrom First Appearance: Detective Comics #400 (June 1970) Powers or Gimmicks: Flight, echolocattion, super-sensitive hearing, above-human strength Additional Bronze Age Appearances: Detectivee Comics #402 (Aug. 1970), 407 (Jan. 1971), 416 (Oct. 1971), and 429 (Nov. 1972); Batman #254 (Jan.–Feb. 1974); The Brave and the Bold #119 (June 1975); Man-Bat vol. 1 #1 (Dec. 1975–Jan. 1976) and 2 (Feb.–Mar. 1976); Detec ective Comics #458 (Apr. 1976) and 459 (Mayy 1976); Batman Family #11 (Mayy–June 1977), 12 (July–Aug. 1977), 13 (Sept. 1977), 14 (Oct. 1977), 15 (Dec. 1977–Jan. 1978), 16 (Feb.–Mar. 1978), 17 (Apr.– May 1978), 18 (June–July 1978), 19 (Aug.–Sept. 1978), and 20 (Oct.–Nov. 1978); Detective Comics #481 (Dec. 1978–Jan. 1979) and 485 (Aug.–Sept. 1979) Notes: Scienttist who created serum to become a Battman-like crimeffighter, inssttead mutating into a batt-like creatture. Wife Francine occasionally took serum to become She-Bat. Starrtted as a villain, but eventually became a parrtt of the Batman Family.
IF YOU ENJOYED THIS PREVIEW, CLICK THE LINK MA AX XIE ZEUS BELOW TO ORDER THIS BOOK! First Appearance: Detec-
THE BATCAVE ANTHONY LUPUS COMPANION
tive Comics #483 (Mayy 1979) Powers or Gimmicks: Crazed gangster who believes he is the son of Zeus; commits myytthologythemed robberies Additional Bronze Age Appearances: Detectivee Comics #484 (June–July 1979) and 486 (Oct.– Nov. 1979) Notes: Zeus continued to plague Battman throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Was killed in the Wondeer Woman storyline “Gods of Gotham” (#164–167, Jan.–Apr. 2001).
First Appearance: Batman #255 (Mar–Apr. 1974) The writer/editor of the critically acclaimed KRYPTON GUSTAV DECOBRA P owers or Gimmicks: COMPANION and the designer of the eye-popping SPIES, First Appearance: DetecTuOF rns KUNG into a hFU: omicTHE idal ART OF VIXENS, AND MASTERS tive Comics #455 (Jan. wolf undthe er tSilver he fulland Bronze PAUL GULACY team upwetoreexplore 1976) oon, w h incBATCAVE redible COMPANAges of Batman comic m books initTHE ION! Two distinct sections Powers or Gimmicks: h, rabook zor-shexamine sttrenofgtthis arp clawthe s, Dark Knight’s progression from Vampire with superhuman andhis fancampy gs “New Look” of the mid-1960s to his “creature abilities to change forms, Addiof tiothe nal night” Bronzereinvention Age Appeaof rances: none the 1970s. Features include issue-by-issue command animals, and Notes: Lupus’ lycanindexes, thropy is interthe result of a views with CARMINE INFANTINO, JOE GIELLA, DENNIS bring inanimatte objects to life serum created by Professor Milo supposedly as a O’NEIL, and NEAL ADAMS, and guest essays by MIKE W. MR. FREEZE Additional Bronze Age AppeaBARR cure Contributors for debilitattininclude g headaSHELches. Lupus reaprancesand : noWILL ne MURRAY. Real Name: Unknown [in Bronze Age continuity; Notes: Former brilliant surgeonDON who hMOLDOFF, id his hearrtt LEN pWEIN, eared STEVE in DeteENGLEHART, ctive Comics #and 505 (Aug. 1981). named Victor Fries in TV’s Batman: The Animated in a grandfather clock to deceivTERRY e enemAUSTIN, ies and with a special tribute to the late riess;; thcover e Friepainting s name bby ecame parrtt of DC Comics MARSHALL ROGERS. With exxttend his vampire life. THEitsMincisive AD HAT Aintroduction TTER by DENNIS O’NEIL and itsSeiconic NEAL ADAMS, THE BATCAVE ith BACK the one-shott Batman: Mr. Freeze conWritten tinuity wby Real NaCOMPANION me: Jervis Tet etcish a must-have for every bat-fan! ISSUE magazine editor FMICHAEL (1997)] irst AppeaEURY ranceand : [hiMICHAEL storical] BaKRONENBERG. tman #49 (Oct.– All characters TM & © DC Comics.
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