Batman #204
Look at that cover! This one marked when Batman's covers starting looking really really cool for a very long time. However, the drama conveyed on the cover sort of doesn't appear in this issue, but it's an interesting 2-part story nonetheless (ambition!).
It starts with a blind man getting gunned down on the street. As he falls, he carves a message into a wall with his cane, reading "Commissioner Gordon... They found out I'm Batman!" OR SO IT WOULD SEEM! If you'll allow me to spoil the whole story here to point out a very cool detail that I didn't catch the first time I read this: Batman eventually deduces that someone carved the message into the wall after the man died using his cane, and it holds up in the artwork for the page!
Look at that, the sleeve of the man using the cane is black, where the blind man's jacket is green. In that last panel, your mind fills in the position of the blind man's arm, but it's actually someone else's. Clever!
Following that, we get to see the dastardly villain at the heart of the evil plan, the aptly named Schemer, who is suspiciously similar to the Daredevil villain The Owl, in that he both looks like him and also has a pet owl. This is a good four years after The Owl's first appearance in Daredevil too.
Gordon eventually discovers the body, and since he doesn't know who Batman is at this at point, he has no reason not to believe the message scrawled on the wall. When the real Batman shows up to explain that the blind man did not write it, Gordon orders his men to hold Batman and Robin as impostors. And then they talk to each other with their hands!
Robin escapes while Batman rides downtown with Gordon. He then figures out that the blind man's cane and sunglasses are a two way radio and listens in on
Batman 205
This is by far one of the coolest covers for any comic I've ever seen. Oh those red things are the aforementioned miniature rockets.
Batman and Robin track the schemer back to his lair, a submarine that looks like a floating hunting tower from the ground(?). Batman lowers himself onto the vessel from the Batcopter, handing the controls over to Alfred. Batman says he'll yank on the line twice when he wants Alfred to drop it, setting up a wonderful joke for Alfie.
Oh, comedy. Anyway Batman gets down to the boat and picks up a shotgun BUT GUNS KILLED HIS PARENNNNNNNNNNNTS!
So they beat up the Schemer and that's it. But I'm not done with this story. The guy who wrote all of this update's issue, Mr. Joe Robbins, was also writing The Flash and Green Lantern at this point, which are both books that you would expect to have a slightly sillier tone than Batman (I know we could fight about this all day, but Green Lantern's nemesis is a guy with pink skin named Sinestro and the Flash has Flash Facts) and he sort of carried over the silliness to Batman. If you couldn't tell from Alfred's joke there, check this panel out:
SUCH HIGH PUN DENSITY! Clearly we were still riding high from the existence of good old Adam West Batman. The lettercolumns from these issues are full of stuff about how Mr. Robbins is a little too silly for Batman, but I must disagree with these letters after the sheer insanity nearer the end of his run (and in the next issue). The lettercols have another awesome aspect to them, but more on that later.
Oh no, Batman's getting the death sentence. This issue is a huge fakeout, but that's not the point. The point is the stereotype native american hippie jazz trio thieves. Look at this.
Oh hell yeah. On the next page Batman punches out the bassist and says "Have no RESERVATIONS about your sitting out on this WAR DANCE, CHIEF SITTIN-IN'!" Oh Batman. Weren't you once an Indian Chief yourself? Why so cruel?
Anyway, this issue pulls off a weird Simpsonian plot drift when Bats and Robin catch the jazz trio in the beginning of the story. Later a man claiming he solved the crime for Batman challenges him to a solve-off. This guy rigs the contest by setting all the crimes they're supposed to solve into motion himself but obviously Batman figures the whole thing out and catches him. The shocking part of all this is that the bad guy gets the death sentence! And he requests to be executed in a Batman suit, thus fulfilling the cover's promise. Ha ha.
The letter column of this issue has one letter in particular that made me smile, seeing as a man who would play very prominently in the future has one printed in here.
Mr. Klaus Janson, who would go on to ink the monumental Dark Knight Returns along with Frank Miller's run on Daredevil! It should also be said that a frequent writer-in to the book was one Mark Evanier, who later worked on several Hanna-Barbera cartoons, wrote Groo The Wanderer with Sergio Aragones, and wrote and illustrated a Jack Kirby biography called Kirby: King of Comics. Cool stuff!
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This cover is less awesome than those preceding. The story is also less cool, but it does have one particularly inspired piece of cold war craziness in it.
The idea here is that the United States had a bunch of planes armed with H-Bombs flying around all the time JUST IN CASE the Reds attacked. Sort of like a police patrol car, but with the power to destroy whole nations. Of course, out of the 4 H-bombs our plane was carrying, the only one lost was the experimental miniaturized one.
It fell into the hands of an eeeevil man who holds Gotham ransom for threat of being blown to tiny tiny bits. Batman tracks down the detonator for the bomb inside of a bouncy ball that said eeeeevil man gave to a kid named "Skinnay".
I feel now is also a good time to mention that every time the word "yeah" is written in these books, it's rendered as "ye-ah." I have no idea why.
Anyway, Batman and Robin track the guy down, and rather than get taken in he throws himself in front of a PLANE. Which was awesome. The bomb is disarmed, and the day is saved.
Tune in tomorrow for the Batcave morphing into the African Jungle, Catwoman leading a team of female ex-cons, and if you're lucky, the much ballyhooed by me strike by the women of Gotham City against Bruce Wayne's bachelorhood.
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