And so we begin with the auspicious Batman #1 of Spring 1940. First off, the differences in the format are noticeable because for the first 5 issues, Batman was a quarterly magazine, so this contains 4 different stories for a total of 52 pages of comics for the wonderful cover price of a single dime! The first page is pretty damn cool.
I don't know if it's the way Batman Chronicles printed these things, but the coloring here is amazing. Really beautiful, bold stuff. Maybe I'm just geeking out on colors because of this awesome Colleen Coover interview where she makes a really cool observation about purple and green and primary colors which will figure into this posting again later. This scan might be too small, but if you look at the way Martha Wayne's face is drawn in the first panel, you can really see that Bob Kane probably inspired Tim Sale (The Long Halloween) in a big way. And how cool is that top image of Batman? Oh yeah, and obviously everyone knows what's going on here by now. I think I'll start keeping a running tally of how many times this same scene is played out throughout this run.Anyway, the story. This is the very first appearance of The Joker and boy is he scary.
Yipes. Anyway, the plot of the first story is that The Joker is stealing gems and killing people after he announces that he's gonna do it on the radio. After the first two, he finally meets Batman and eventually kicks him off a bridge into a river. For his third scheme, he comes up with this horrifying disguise:
Honestly this issue is visually scarier than all the other things I've ever read with the Joker in them. After Joker bags another body and another gem, Robin tails him to an abandoned house in a forest. This would suggest that Batman hasn't yet developed his intense brooding neuroses about letting a Robin do anything potentially dangerous alone. That particular hang-up would have been useful in this case because Robin is quickly beaten over the head with Joker's police billyclub AND THEN BATMAN TAKES OUT THIS AWESOME INFRARED FLASHLIGHT
TECHNOLOGY! Anyway they fight and the Joker ends up in jail, but the end makes it pretty clear that he's definitely going to get out of jail. And that's the end of the first half of one of the three stories in here. This one was later remade into the also awesome Ed Brubaker story The Man Who Laughs, which sort of reconfigured the story around to what the Joker is now, adding in the intense nihilism and insanity he's known for now, where in this original version the Joker's gimmick seems to be mostly playing cards (Lots of card lines like "The Joker is still trump card!" and "Joker's back in the deck!"), which is interesting given that he's already using his patented smile gas, which would seem to go along with his comedic bent as visible in things like JM DeMatteis' Going Sane.The second story involves one of the OG Batman villians, Professor Hugo Strange. This story was also later remade into Matt Wagner's Batman and the Monster Men, which is also great. Strange busts out of jail with his gigantic monster men pals. After that, the Monster Men go straight Godzilla on Gotham City, smashing a whole squad of cops with a light post, tossing cars left and right, and pulling their El-train off its tracks, so obviously Batman jumps into action to shut that down. And how does he do that? In the mind-blowing WWII-era Batplane, with a pilot seat-mounted machine gun and styling that looks like a realistic bat head with a mermaid tail.
Bats gets to Strange's hideout where he pretty much gets rocked by the Monster Men, and then gets injected with MONSTER SERUM in a bit that would later be half-used in the video game Arkham Asylum to set up its brutally underwhelming final boss fight. Batman convinces the Monsters to beat each other up while he uses an emergency chemistry set to cook up an antidote to the serum and gets back in the Batplane. AND THEN IT TURNS INTO KING KONG. One of the Monster Men climbs to the top of the tallest building in Gotham and Batman strafes him in the Batplane until finally he's knocked out by gas pellets fired from the plane. It's a pretty funny ending that comes out nowhere, and it inhabits a bizarre space between serious thriller Batman and the yet-to-come completely nuts 60s Batman.The third story takes place on a boat and isn't really noticeable save for that it introduces Catwoman and there's this awesome panel:
Story four is chapter 2 of the original Joker section, and it just gets better. Joker starts off his newly escaped life by whacking a cop in the most ingenious way possible. He puts a poison dart inside a phone and screams his name FORCING THE DART OUT WITH THE POWERFUL VIBRATIONS FROM HIS LOUD VOICE. I love old comics. Also, I hope you did read that Colleen Coover interview, because this page is a beautiful use of complementary purples and yellows.
How great is that? Also, that guy is so terrified he says "jokers" twice simultaneously. Anyway, the Dynamic Duo and the cops come up with the idea of creating a fake jewel for Jokes to heist, and when he shows up, Robin gives chase across the rooftops of Gotham. Joker is just about to shoot Robin when Batman distracts him, they fight, and Batman eventually kicks Joker into a wall which causes the man in green to stab himself in the chest. The final panel makes it clear that this won't be the last we ever see of The Joker.All in all, this is a pretty auspicious start for Batman's solo book. The introduction of what eventually became probably the most popular and recognizable villian of all time, a ridiculous King Kong homage, and "QUIET OR PAPA SPANK!" This is going to be a real adventure for me as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment