Hello Internet travelers! I hope you’ve all had a merry Christmas and are well on your way to making this a happy new year! I can’t say I’m sorry to see the back of 2018! The Greys had a pleasant but bery busy holiday season, and we are very glad to be home again. We’re in the process of trying to get things put together for the coming semester, so we remain quite busy. Yet, I’ve tried to carve out a little time for modding and a little for blogging. I know it’s been a while since my last Into the Bronze Age post, but hopefully the new year will allow me more opportunities for this little project. Now, since we’re headed into a new year, I can’t think of a better way to kick off it off than with classic comics, can you? So, let’s get started!
- Action Comics #406
- Adventure Comics #412
- Batman #236
- Brave and the Bold #98
- Detective Comics #417
- The Flash #210
- Forever People #5
- G.I. Combat #150
- Justice League of America #94
- New Gods #5
- Superboy #179
- Superman #244
- Superman’s Girlfriend, Lois Lane #116
- Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #143
- World’s Finest #207
Bolded entries are covered in this post, the others will be covered soon.
Batman #236
“Wail of the Ghost-Bride!”
Writer: Frank Robbins
Penciler: Irv Novick
Inker: Dick Giordano
Editor: Julius Schwartz
Cover Artists: Neal Adams and Gaspar Saladino
“Rain Fire!”
Writer: Mike Friedrich
Penciler: Irv Novick
Inker: Dick Giordano
Letterer: John Costanza
Editor: Julius Schwartz
“While the City Sleeps!”
Writer: Bill Finger
Penciler: Dick Sprang
Inker: Charles Paris
Letterer: George Roussos
Editor: Whitney Ellsworth
The first of our bat-books this month is the eponymous title, and it has a solid but unexceptional cover. It’s nicely drawn, of course, but it just doesn’t grab me. I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps because the threat’s distance from Batman renders it a little less potent, perhaps because the ghost bride herself doesn’t seem all that ghostly. Either way, I wasn’t exactly excited to pick it up.
The story within is also just fine. Despite the massively melodramatic copy on the splash page declaring “Can an unholy command from beyond the grave compel the Batman to break his solemn vow never to kill?”, the story within is not really all that dramatic or impactful and features no such moral quandry. It begins with Bruce Wayne, ever the detective, winging cross-country on a jetliner and reading a book about unsolved mysteries. He reads about a young heiress named Corrine Hellbane who disappeared in the Atlantic under mysterious circumstances while on her honeymoon. Pondering her uncertain fate, the millionaire falls asleep, while another wakeful man reads a story in the paper about the demolition of the Hellbane family home and considers his connection to the house. Foreshadowing!
Suddenly, Bruce is shocked awake by a spectral voice, which demands “Avenge my death, Batman!” For a moment, he thinks he sees a ghostly bride “out there, on the wing!” Wayne’s Shatner moment aside, he writes it off to a dream or a distorted reflection, but he keeps having such visions, seeing the bride again and becoming so distracted that some random street punk nearly takes him out while on patrol as Batman that night.
The next morning, he found himself invited to a charity fundraiser making a game of the demolition of the Hellbane estate. When he arrives, the disguised hero finds the upper floor marked off limits, but during the destruction, he sees that someone has ignored the signs and gone up. Investigating, the snooping millionaire is knocked out, but he is not so easily stopped. When he wakes up, he changes into his costume and heads up the stairs as the Dark Knight. On the second floor, he springs a trap and takes out two hoods that were laying for him, scaring them so much they go running to their boss.
Bursting into a chamber they try to bar, Batman finds that the missing heiress’s former fiance, Axel March, tearing up a wall. He and his two flunkies had posed as a news crew to get access to the house, and after the Caped Crusader clouts the clown, we discover what he was after. It seems that Corrine Hellbane didn’t disappear at sea after all. In fact, she never even left her house. The Masked Manhunter discovers her deteriorated remains sealed in a wall. Desperate, March attacks Batman once more, but he’s no match for the Masked Manhunter. Their struggles bring their hostess, Agatha Tyler-Tilford, whose family owns the house, to investigate. However, the Dark Detective realizes that March must have had help to accomplish his scheme, and Agatha was the one who posed as the phony female to fake her disappearance. The story ends with the mystery solved, the guilty punished, and the house torn down.
This is an okay mystery with some hints of the supernatural, but Batman plays doubting Thomas all the way through, even declaring “anything can be explained rationally…if you find the key!” While this fits a Batman in isolation, it doesn’t work for a character who’s part of the DCU, who regularly hangs out with magicians and encounters monsters and spirits on a regular basis. Heck, this very month he’s teaming up with the Phantom Stranger in The Brave and the Bold, and we’ve seen supernatural stories in this very book. Now, it makes sense that Bruce would seek a rational explanation first, but it seems a little silly for him to balk at belief completely.
Other than that little nitpick, the story is fine, though the mystery lacks any real punch, since we don’t actually meet the suspects until about the time they are revealed as the culprits. The random interlude with the generic street tough doesn’t help with that. Irv Novick’s art is quite good throughout, achieving some nice atmosphere and action. He does a particularly nice job on the villains’ faces. I’ll give this average tale 3 Minutemen. Of course, in this issue we also we get the added benefit of another Head-blow Headcount appearance by the Dark Knight Detective!
“Rain Fire”
In our backup slot this month is the finale to the rather odd hippie commune centered Robin adventure, where the Teen Wonder is pursuing attempted cop-killer-turned-dropout, Pat Whalon, who has set a fire to throw the hero off his trail. We pick up the tale as the conflagration comes to life and threatens to consume the countryside. The Caped Crusader quickly organizes the outcasts into a bucket brigade in attempt to battle the blaze.
Despite their best efforts, the inferno threatens to get out of control, so Robin rushes to the neighboring farms and towns, recruiting help. Despite the fact that pretty much nobody likes the hippies (and who can blame them!), everyone rushes to their aid, as the fire is a threat to one and all. With the townspeople’s help, the conflagration is contained long enough for emergency aid to arrive. Before long, government helicopters are dropping fire suppression foam and extinguishing the inferno.
With the immediate threat handled, the Teen Wonder heads out after his quarry, trailing the escaping gunman on his motorcycle and finally bringing him to heel on a mountain road in a fairly nice sequence. Whalon attacks, but he’s no match for Robin. The story ends with the townsfolk reaching out in friendship to the hippies, whose commune was destroyed by the blaze, while Whalon’s former girlfriend, Nanci, finally returns to her family to visit her hospitalized father (daughter of the year she ain’t!). Terri, the vague, maybe-psychic, who has been dropping in and out of the strip seems to have disappeared, leaving Robin to think that she, in all of her unclear motivations and indefinite mumbo-jumbo, reminds him of a certain ill-defined Teen Titan.
So, this is an okay story, and Irv Novick does a really nice job on the art, with the fire-fighting sequences being pretty dramatic and the various background characters evincing a lot of personality and individuality. At the end, Nanci tells Robin that he’s shaken her hippie beliefs (though her ignorant self-righteousness and pig-headedness probably had a roll in that too), and he responds “No more than the commune shook mine!” We see in this another example of Friedrich pounding home his point about communes, but he honestly doesn’t beat that particular drum too hard in this tale. Instead, we get more of a focus on the idea that ‘we’re all in this together,’ with the ‘normal’ townsfolk and the hippies all finding common ground as they fight to save the land that is home to them all. Honestly, that’s not a bad sentiment to end on, especially these days. I’ll give this rushed finale 3 Minutemen.
Brave and the Bold #98
“Mansion of the Misbegotten!”
Writer: Bob Haney
Penciler/Inker/Letterer: Jim Aparo
Editor: Murray Boltinoff
Cover Artist: Nick Cardy
“The Killer Shadow!”
Writer: John Broome
Penciler: Carmine Infantino
Inker: Sy Barry
Editor: Julius Schwartz
“One Challenger Must Die”
Writer: Arnold Drake
Penciler: Bob Brown
Inker: Bob Brown
Editor: Murray Boltinoff
Alright, we have some vintage Zany Haney in this issue! Get out your Earth-H score cards and see if you can get a Zany Bingo. We’ve got: a long-time friend of Batman never mentioned before or after, an unprecedented family connection (sort of), gobs of uncharacteristic portrayals, and a crazy, utterly out-there twist. I think that’s Bingo! All of this lies under a cover that is just decent. It is vaguely creepy, with the monstrous faces waiting in the wings, but it isn’t really all that interesting, however much Phantom Stranger is chewing the scenery with his reaction.
The story inside is pure Haney. It begins with Batman going to visit his old (and certainly not made up just for this issue) friends, Roger and Clorinda Birnam, who live in a suitably dark and foreboding manor. I’m sure nothing’s amiss here! Roger, attended by a doctor named Malthus, lies dying, and he has called up his closest friend, the freaking Batman, to be there at the end. The Dark Knight also sees his godson, Enoch. Can’t you just imagine the Caped Crusader standing in a church in full costume during the kid’s christening? After offering some comfort to the child, the Masked Manhunter bids Roger farewell, and promises to honor his dying wish, that he look after Clorinda and Enoch. His honest, yet gentle exchange with the kid is surprisingly touching.
We get a rather incongruous, but very Haney, shot of Bats attending his friend’s funeral in full daylight and in full costume, but a few weeks later, strange things begin to happen. First, the Dark Knight sees Dr. Malthus around town, only for the fellow to deny the name, and then the Detective investigates a ritual murder disguised as a hit and run, only to discover that the victim was a mourner at Roger’s funeral.
The investigation is interrupted by Clorinda, who has seen a strange specter in her house. Batman rushes to her aid and encounters a glowing figure, but when he tries to tackle it, he is repulsed and it vanishes. Despite all of this happening in plain view of the grieving widow, Bats pretends like she imagined it all, which has to be great for her mental health. When the local constable arrives, the Dark Knight leaves Clorinda in his care and continues his investigation, only to encounter the glimmering ghost once more and be pointed back to the house.
There he witnesses some strange, satanic spectacle, only to be knocked unconscious by a piece of pipe falling from the roof (that’s right, another Head-blow!) and awakens to find a simple house party going on inside. One of the guests asks for his autograph, and after giving it (imagine the modern Batman signing autographs!), he retires to a bedroom to recover from the blow. However, his rest is disturbed by the arrival of Enoch, who seems to cast a spell over the hero. The Masked Manhunter suddenly finds himself unable to move and besieged by a demonic form. Fortunately, the spectral figure from before appears and chases away the attacker, only to be revealed as….the Phantom Stranger!
The mysterious man frees Batman from his paralysis and explains that he’s stumbled into the middle of a coven of witches, and that his friend was murdered so that Clorinda could inherit his fortune! How’s that for a zany twist? The Stranger has been investigating them, but in order to protect himself from their spells, he had to coat himself in a spectral shield, which is why the Caped Crusader didn’t recognize him. As they leave the house to pursue the coven, which has fled, they hear a child crying from an upper room and assume it is just another trap.
When Batman tries to exhume his friend’s body to check for signs of foul play, the constable, who is part of the cult, attacks him, and once again the hero awakens after a SECOND Head-blow in a single issue (!), only to find himself in worse trouble than before. He’s being held down on an altar as Enoch, secretly the little Hell-spawn leader of the coven, prepares to sacrifice him to their dark master. The Dark Knight frees himself, but Satan himself suddenly appears and carries him off!
Or rather, it is the Phantom Stranger masquerading as Satan in order to rescue his ally. The next night, the pair try to pull the cult’s fangs and get proof of their nefarious deeds by kidnapping Enoch and then….sort of just traumatizing the kid by exposing him to occult paraphernalia. The child acts, well, pretty much like a child, and is freaked out. After some more digging, they realize that Clorinda actually gave birth to twins, and they’ve got the innocent, normal son.
Batman: Dark Knight and….kidnapper?
The heroes launch a last assault on the coven, but once more Batman is paralyzed by magic. Yet, just as she and her demon-spawn prepare to escape, Clorinda sees her murdered husband in the dark at the head of the stairs, and panicking, falls over the rail, taking the little monster with her, to their deaths. It turns out that, in the Moonlight, her conscience converted a portrait of Roger into his vengeful ghost, and doomed her and her demon seed. The issue ends with Batman caring for his friend’s now orphaned real son…who is never mentioned again. “I’ll look after him forever…provided forever is until the end of this sentence.”
Whew! What a yarn! Trying to simplify Haney plots for summary is a real challenge. Nonetheless, this is a fun story, however much it may be completely wrong for Batman in some of its details. It is also, unsurprisingly for the Zany one, completely bonkers! Batman has an old friend who he is SUPER close with, but the world’s greatest detective never happens to notice that the guy’s wife is a witch or that his godson is a demonically powered evil child prodigy. Despite this, there is an engaging and creepy mystery, which does a good job of evoking a sense of creeping madness, of losing your grip on reality, that belongs to certain horror stories. It’s goofy in sections, but Jim Aparo’s art, by turns beautiful, moody, or magnificent, really helps make it work. Plus, it gives us two different head-blows, a first for my little indexing project! I’ll give this crazy turn through Earth-H 3 Minutemen. It’s interesting to see another magic/witchcraft focused tale. Clearly, the fascination with the occult is growing, and it isn’t going away any time soon.
Detective Comics #417
“Batman For a Night!”
Writer: Frank Robbins
Penciler: Bob Brown
Inker: Dick Giordano
Letterer: John Costanza
Editor: Julius Schwartz
“A Bullet For Gordon!”
Writer: Frank Robbins
Penciler: Don Heck
Inker: Don Heck
Letterer: John Costanza
“Alfred, Armchair Detective”
Penciler/Inker: Jerry Robinson
Letterer: Ira Schnapp
Editor: Whitney Ellsworth
“The Mystery That Edgar Allan Poe Solved”
Penciler/Inker: John Prentice
Colourist: Steve Englehart
Editor: Jack Schiff
Our cover story here is, in its way, as crazy and out of character for Bats as any Zany Haney yarn, but it’s not bad for all that. We start with a very melodramatic cover which is pretty misleading in its import. It’s a fair piece, and the presence of two Batmen is liable to give one pause, but it didn’t exactly make me anxious to pick up the book. The tale within starts, not with our resident Dark Knight protagonist, but with a part-time pugilist. Namely, we join Jan Paxton, barely holding his own in a boxing ring with the heavyweight champ. It turns out that this is an exhibition match held for Paxton’s benefit. He’s a writer who does a ‘day in the life of’ type magazine column, trying out different professions and writing about what they are really like.
After having survived his turn with the “sweet science,” the aching author tells his visitors, Commissioner Gordon and Bruce Wayne that he has even crazier plans for his next column, taking on a day in the life of…the Batman! Now, of course Bruce promptly ignores this and refuses to put some random schmuck, even an athletic one, into mortal dang….ohh, wait….no, he totally agrees to give the guy a tryout. Bringing him blindfolded to the Batcave, the Caped Crusader gives the writer a crushing workout, though his guest gets in a few licks. In the end, Bats is impressed enough to let Paxton try a night ‘under the hood’, which is just crazy. Once again, imagine the modern Batman doing this. Even for our Bronze Age Batman, this seems rather out of character for the darker, more serious turn the book has taken in the years we’ve been following it.
Nonetheless, the next night Paxton is driving around in the Batmobile in full costume. He spots a tractor-trailer hijacking and hitches a ride on the truck to stop the thieves. He takes out the trailing car by uncoupling the trailer from the cab, and as a grown-up who has to think about things like accidents and car repairs, I can’t help but think, “sheesh! He probably just cost the truck company way more in damages than he’s going to save them by stopping the robbery!” Despite that, this maneuver is actually something of a success, but when he tackles the thieves in the cab, he is decidedly less lucky.
He disarms one, but has to turn his gun against another. Only the real Batman’s timely intervention prevents a shooting. Now, here we’ve got an actual fitting piece of characterization, as the Dark Knight is furious about Paxton’s use of a gun and his defamation of the Caped Crusader’s name. That revulsion for guns is an element integral to the character that we haven’t really seen much so far.
Of course, as Robins scores on that swing, he whiffs on the next, as Batman still agrees to let Paxton have another crack at impersonating him. Unfortunately, things get much more real for the writer when his sister is killed by a random shooting during a bank heist. Suddenly, the agonized author discovers just what it is that drives the Batman to his single-minded quest for justice. Once again, that is actually a rather nice beat.
The Dark Detectives helps his understudy track down the murderous men thanks to a clue his dying sister gave them, a ring that one of her killers wore. They identify the scum and trace him to a bowling alley, where Paxton sucker punches Batman in order to get a shot at his quarry. Despite charging headlong into gunfire, the writers somehow manages not to end up penning his own epitaph, and manages to nail the killer. The tale ends with him reflecting on how he now understands what gives the Masked Manhunter that special something that makes drives him to succeed at his strange calling.
So, we’ve got a fair little tale here, despite how silly it is that Batman would just let some random dude playact his part for a night, especially after the guy botches it the first time. Nonetheless, there is a decent bit of character work about our hero here, hidden beneath that ridiculous plot device. The sort of ‘corner of your eye’ focus on what is behind the Dark Knight’s crusade is pretty solid, and the mystery solving in the middle is pretty solid. Throughout, Bob Brown’s art is strong, and he does a nice job giving Paxton some personality. I’ll give this unusual Batman outing 3.5 Minutemen, with its good elements outweighing its silly ones.
“A Bullet for Gordon”
Our Batgirl backup this month finishes up the Commissioner Gordon story from last month, and it starts off with a bang! When last we left our heroine, she was racing to save her father from the lethal trap set by her duplicitous double. The fake Batgirl has positioned Gordon where the cop hating radicals will catch him in the open. Fortunately, the real ‘Dominoed Dare-Doll’ arrives to destroy her plans. She saves her father and takes out the thugs, but in the heat of the moment, she slips up and calls the Commissioner “Dad” imperiling her secret. Fortunately, he doesn’t seem to notice, and the crimefighter captures her counterpart with a really awkward-looking tackle.
The imposter imprisoned, the Daredevil Dame keeps her doppleganger’s rendezvous, and meets the big man behind the whole operation, encountering the real cop-killer in the process. Just as her cover is about to be blown, Babs’ father returns the favor and rescues her, arriving just in time to capture the crooks who were preparing to unmask her. It turns out that he hitched a ride on the getaway truck and eavesdropped on the revealing meeting within using a contact microphone, proving he’s still pretty sharp. As the Commissioner gives Batgirl a ride, Babs thinks that he must not have noticed her slipup, but that night, as he looks in on her, supposedly asleep, Gordon wonders when she’ll finally tell him the truth.
I love that touch, that police commissioner and great cop that he is, Gordon has already solved this mystery, but that he just chooses to play along until his daughter decides to confide in him. It’s a great character beat, and it makes a certain amount of sense for the man who has placed so much faith in Batman. It’s a great note on which to end this last chapter, and a good chapter it was. The ultimate bad guys don’t get any real development, but they are overshadowed by the emotional arc of the tale, which focuses on Babs and her father, which works reasonably well. In a bigger story, that would be less forgivable, but as is, this made for a fun, engaging, and exciting finale.
It’s interesting that, in the end, the radicals are given a completely unsympathetic portrayal, being little better than bloodthirsty animals, despite the fact that they weren’t actually guilty of the original crime. So, no sympathetic portrayal of the counterculture here. Unfortunately Don Heck’s art continues to be rather rough, and while this tale has some nice panels, there are also a lot of muddy, awkward bits, like Batgirl’s bizarre tackle. Despite that, I’ll give this one a solid 3 Minutemen.
The Head-Blow Headcount:
Batman makes his not-so triumphant return to the Headcount for the first time in quite a while, but he does it in style, with not one, but two different cranial contusions in the same comic! That’s impressive. Apparently, the Dark Knight excels at everything, including getting knocked on the noggin!
Well, not a bad way to start off 2019, all things considered, hmm? We had a pretty enjoyable batch of books, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else awaits us this month. I hope you’ll join me again soon to find out and, until then, keep the Heroic Ideal alive! Here’s hoping 2019 will be a better year for all of us.
The Greylands 