Retro Comics are Awesome

[andersonh1]

Batman #39 continued

The Man in the Iron Mask!
The core of the story is an act of cruelty: Iron-Hat Ferris ratted out his gang, and in retaliation, they weld him into an iron mask so he can't hide and so no one will help him. He's been made an example of. A desperate Ferris can't get anyone to help him until one thug offers to do so for $1000. The broke Ferris attempts to steal the money, running into Batman and Robin. He gets away, and has nowhere to turn until DA candidate Henry Kendall finds him on the street and offers him a lift. The next we hear of Ferris, he's gone on a crime spree, and it's up to Batman and Robin to help the current DA put a stop to it. In the end, it's revealed that Kendall did in fact release Ferris from the iron mask, but he then went on a crime spree himself while wearing the mask, planning to let Ferris take the blame, get credit for stopping him, and get elected DA. This is just the kind of corrupt official I'd expect to see in Gotham City. He's killed when he tries to escape from Batman, still wearing the mask, and is struck by lightning "as surely as if he was in the electric chair", according to Batman. Harsh. Cruel gangsters, a visually interesting and almost sympathetic villain, and corruption in Gotham makes this a strong Batman story.

[andersonh1]

Batman #39 concluded

A Christmas Tale!
This year's Christmas feelgood story changes things up a bit by featuring Catwoman as the villain. She's stolen three cats with no apparent value, but she uses them in various ways to commit robberies around Gotham. She prevents one of her gang from shooting Batman at one point, claiming she doesn't want a murder rap hung on any of them, but as usual it's a bit more than that. In another welcome bit of continuity, Batman and Robin use their snow-camoflage gear and reference the case from World's Finest Comics #7 in Autumn 1942 where they wore the same outfits. Catwoman is captured in the end of course, leading to this exchange:

Catwoman: That's mistletoe above us! Well, don't stand there - kiss me! Don't turn me in, Batman! Join up with me instead! Together we can rule the underworld! We can be a king and queen of crime! You and I - together!
Batman: Together? How could we - with me outside and you inside a jail cell!
Catwoman: You... I hate you! I - I'll scratch your eyes out!
Batman: What long claws you have! But the prison manicurist will clip them for you!

I can just hear Adam West delivering those lines. It's a typical villain runaround, welcome because the Catwoman was absent for so much of the previous volume. Poor girl... at least Batman used to flirt back with her and let her go. Not any more.

[andersonh1]

Detective Comics #120
February 1947

Fowl Play!
Unusual birds... rare knowledge... way to wealth! A recluse... reads no newspapers! Penguin, you have found a way to feather your nest!

To no one's surprise, the Penguin escapes jail again. While reading the morning paper, he takes offense at Professor Boyd being referred to as "the country's most noted ornithologist" instead of him. He goes to talk to Boyd and introduces himself, but Boyd misunderstands the whole situation and thinks the Penguin said his name was "Ben Guin" and that he was responding to an ad for an assistant. The Penguin immediately sees an opportunity here, and naturally he plans to make use of Boyd's private aviary of rare birds to commit crimes. This of course is when Batman and Robin enter the picture, running across a robbery in progress by the Penguin and his cronies, and the attempt to stop him is on.

There's not a lot that stands out in this typical Penguin runaround, other than the rather brutal way Penguin tries to kill Batman and Robin by trying to have a hawk crack their skulls, and the fact that Robin has to get rid of his red vest at one point, showing that he wears a green shirt underneath. The Penguin has not worn out his welcome, unlike the Joker, but he's more interesting when they do something different with him, like his genuine attempt at reform in his last appearance.

Detective Comics #121
March 1947

Commissioner Gordon Walks a Beat!
This might have been an interesting new status quo to explore, but it's over by the end of the story. Batman and Robin respond to the bat-signal, only to find Inspector Vane in Gordon's office. Vane says that he is now Commissioner, and that Gordon no longer holds the job. He revokes Batman's badge, and smashes the bat-signal. The working relationship between Batman and the police is over, and as Batman leaves, he runs into Gordon... walking a beat for the first time in 20 years. The mayor had asked for his resignation, but Gordon refused. Under civil service laws he couldn't be fired, so they reduced him to the lowest rank. The mayor claimed Gordon was "too old and relied too much on Batman". Neither Gordon nor Batman buy the excuse, and Batman decides to question the mayor. It turns out the mayor was blackmailed by gangster "Sure Thing" Smiley over his son's betting. Smiley loves to place bets and then cheat, while sticking to his exact wording, a trait Batman uses against him to both escape being shot, and to capture Smiley and get Gordon his old job back. Batman bets he can shoot Gordon but not kill him, and it's a piece of transparent plexiglass between him and Gordon that allows him to win the bet.

This was a decent story with a nice hook, but not much is done with it. It would have been nice to spend more time seeing Gordon as the focus. In a lot of ways, he's a non-entity as a character in this series. He's there as Batman's contact on the police force, but we know very little about him as a person other than he's a friend of Bruce, and even that hasn't come up in years. Seeing him walk the beat and interact with people, maybe even help put a stop to Smiley's plan would have been a lot more satisfying than having Batman rescue his friend. For what it was, the story was good, but it could have been a lot better.

World's Finest Comics #27
March-April 1947

Me, Outlaw!
"Wheels" Mitchum is busy typing up his life story. He's on a deadline and hands it over to a reporter for $3000. The reporter begins to read, and we go back to Wheels as a kid, growing up on the streets and learning to be tough, getting into extortion early on before getting into stolen cars. He's caught and sent to prison, where he decides he has to learn to outsmart the cops. The story starts to get very specific with dates here, because a lot of the plot is built around the homefront environment of World War 2. Mitchum gets out of prison in 1941. He's an ex-con and won't be drafted. He goes back into stolen cars, opens a garage as a front, invests in an infra-red paint drying tunnel, and refits and repaints stolen cars for re-sale. Batman figures out his next target and takes on the gang, is shot in the shoulder and nearly baked to death in the drying tunnel, until he and Robin start smashing bulbs. The crooks let them out and this time are taken down by a furious Batman, who uses a gun for the second story in a row, this time to shoot barrels of gasoline and start a fire.

Mitchum gets away, and gets a plastic surgeon to change the way he looks. He puts on some weight, grows a mustache, and gets into the post-war black market, once again dealing with stolen cars. He buys a surplus amphibious landing craft, left over from the war, and uses that to transport the stolen cars. Batman figures out that it's not the pig iron hauler it was claimed to be, because it was riding too high in the water. Mitchum escapes again, and this time he goes to a mob lawyer, pretends he can't live on the run with Batman after him, dictates a confession, then shoots the lawyer, framing him as head of the stolen car gang. But Batman catches him, and at his trial for murder, Batman compares the bullet used to kill the lawyer with the one taken from his shoulder, proving they were from the same gun. Case closed, and the story returns to Mitchum and the reporter. Mitchum says to send the $3,000 to his kid brother to help him with college, before heading to meet his deadline... with the electric chair. He's an unrepentant crook to the last, convinced that he outsmarted Batman and the police all the way, they just got lucky.

[andersonh1]

Robin without a vest:


Batman firing a gun:

[andersonh1]

Batman #40
April-May 1947

The 13 Club!
Yes, it's the Joker again, watching some tv... or listening to the radio. The opening caption is not entirely clear. Either way, it's a tv show showing the meeting of "The 13 Club", a group of local citizens who prove that superstitions are nonsense. So it's reality tv, sort of, for the 40s. One guy lets a black cat walk across his path, another spills salt, three guys light their cigarettes on the same match (I've never heard of that one), etc. The Joker sees this and of course decides that it's a great basis for a crime spree, and he's going after the members of the club. When one guy quits out of fear of the Joker, Batman joins up. Thus commences the runaround as the Joker and his gang commit crimes and Batman has to try and stop them. The obligatory death trap is better than usual as Batman and Robin frantically try to find every piece of metal they can to draw lethal electricity away from them. They finally catch the Joker, who is ready to go back to jail so he won't have to listen to Robin's bad puns any more. It's not a terrible story, it's just formulaic. As I noted with the Penguin story a few reviews back, I like seeing the familiar villains when they do something different with them, but when it's the standard plot with "insert Batman villain here", it feels very routine.

The Case of Batman II!
"Bruce Wayne Near Death due to Auto Crash" screams the headline of the Gotham City Gazette. "Bruce Wayne in Fatal Crash" and "City Socialite Seriously Hurt in Crash!". Bruce clings to life in the hospital while Dick and Alfred pace the halls. All they can do is wait, but when morning arrives, so does the bad news. Bruce didn't make it. It's left to Alfred and Dick to settle his affairs as Henry Bush, his lawyer, asks about reading the will, and a date is set.

But that's not the only problem. With Batman gone, the underworld will run wild if they learn the news. And it's just at this moment that gangster Beetle Boles breaks out of jail. Gordon shines the bat-signal, and Robin goes alone, telling Gordon that Batman is busy. Gordon won't let him take on the gang alone, so Robin promises to return with Batman the next day. So he sets out to find a replacement for Bruce, and the story appears to go a bit off the rails here, as he randomly picks a complete stranger from a local gym, Bill Randall, and after questioning him a bit, arranges a meeting with Robin. Randall is taken to the Batcave (and this is one of the first times it's started to look more like the modern version) and offered the job of Batman, which he accepts. He trains with Robin, with Alfred saying he doesn't really measure up to the real Batman.

To make a long story short, Batman II, Robin and even Alfred manage to round up the Boles gang and put them away, with Randall putting in a good performance on his first outing. Dick and Alfred return home to hear the will read, and as Bush reads it, out from the next room steps... a very much alive Bruce Wayne. Shocking, I know. The whole thing was a trap to prove Bush was planning to steal from Bruce, which he had attempted by adding a fake charity to the will, in reality himself. The whole business with a second Batman was just bad timing because the Boles gang happened to break out of jail while Bruce was running his sting operation and had to be dealt with. Randall was, of course, Bruce in disguise, and while Dick was in on the plan, Alfred was not.

It wasn't hard to figure out where this story was going, because of course Bruce wasn't actually dead, though the kids of the day might have bought it. And it is admittedly a sound idea to see Dick have to carry on alone and deal with all the problems that Batman normally handles, with Gordon not having the same confidence in him as he does in Batman, understandably so. I do wonder how Bruce will explain his "resurrection" after the newspapers proclaimed him dead, but the story ends without addressing that loose end.

[andersonh1]

Batman #40 concluded

The Grand Opera Murders!
I enjoyed this basic murder mystery as Batman and Robin investigate a series of murders in the Gotham Opera, based around tenor Colin Vanning, a stereotypical celebrity with a massive ego and a demanding temper. There is a rivalry with a fellow tenor, and various red herrings in terms of suspects. At one point Batman and Robin join the chorus in disguise to keep an eye on proceedings and they're both terrible singers (or at least pretend to be). In the end, the killer turns out to be Vanning himself, who pretended to be a target only so he could kill other opera singers and gain notariety before he himself died of a heart condition. I like the return to this sort of basic mystery for Batman to solve, and the artist must have had some good photo reference to work with, because the opera house backgrounds are very detailed and nicely drawn.

Detective Comics #122
April 1947

The Black Cat Crimes!
Catwoman is back, and like the last few stories, this one opens with her in prison before she escapes and starts another crime spree. I miss the days when she was a simple jewel thief who committed stealthy crimes and was a much more interesting character. She's no different than the Joker or Penguin these days with her costume and gang and gimmicked crimes. But still, of all Batman's active rogues, she's the only one who hasn't been overused at this point, and it's nice to have a female villain in a largely male dominated series, just for variety. But her Catmobile with its legs and claws and giant cat face is very silly indeed.

She goes for another cat-themed crime spree, of course, using black cats and superstition to blackmail rich men into paying her. Batman and Robin attempt to stop her at various locations throughout the story, including at a circus where Robin enjoys being on the trapeze again. There's a nice action sequence where Robin pursues her up the Statue of Liberty, and we see the thing that does set Catwoman apart from Joker and Penguin: she's not a killer. She seems genuinely concerned that Robin might fall and get killed. But she's not above kidnapping him, which turns out to be a mistake since he's able to clue Batman in on Catwoman's hideout via their belt radios. For once, Catwoman escapes at the end of the story.

[andersonh1]

Detective Comics #123
May 1947

The Dawn Patrol Crimes!
I wonder if the concept of this story happened at the same time as the "Famous Firsts" in World's Finest #25? A group of old timey pilots flying early planes are unhappy because they can't get work that allows them to fly at their age. Some crooks use this gang of old timers and their antique planes to trick them into flying stolen radium across the border into Canada. Ross, owner of the company, calls the police, who call in Batman to help. Batman impersonates "Limpy", the worker discovered to be smuggling the radium, but is found out as an impostor by the leader of the gang, the Shiner, a man in a yellow hood. Batman only escapes being burned to death thanks to a timely rescue by Robin. After tracking down and capturing the Shiner, it turns out to be Smythe, Ross's manager.

Radium must have been a topical substance in the mid to late 40s, because there have been a number of crooks out to make a quick buck by stealing it. The Shiner is not too impressive as these costumed villains go, but as an attempt to branch out from the standard gangsters and guys like the Penguin or Catwoman, he's appreciated. Sometimes we just need a one-shot villain with something to mark him as visually interesting. And it does allow the writers to have a little mystery about who he is.

World's Finest Comics #28
May-June 1947

Crime Under Glass!
The villain of this story works far better than the Shiner, since rather than a hood that looks like a yellow handkerchief with white dots, this guy wears a glass helmet cut into facets so that his face is distorted. Visually it works pretty well. The story opens with various men receiving a gift made of glass, and somewhere on the glass object is a sharp edge coated with a fast-acting poison. Gordon calls in Batman to investigate these bizzare murders. The town in which they occurred has two glass works, one established in 1825 and a far more modern one, and the old factory has been losing business to the new one. It appears as though Stevens, the owner of the old factory, lost his mind and began killing. But the killer turns out to be a third party, Judson, an auto manufacturer, who tried to pin the blame on Stevens. In a pretty horrible way to die, Judson falls to his death in a vat of molten glass while trying to escape.

The attempt at misdirection when it came to murder suspects was fairly obvious... it couldn't be the guy revealed on page 5, but the story still works thanks to a visually interesting villain, and strange ways of killing people that reminds me of early Batman. And it's been awhile since a villain died in such a nasty way, so again, tonally anyway, so it feels like Batman going back to his roots as a fighter of bizarre violent crime. Not what I expected at this stage of the character's development.

[andersonh1]

Batman #41
June-July 1947

The Bird Cage Bandits!
The Penguin is out of jail again, and promises to go straight again... but as he and his partner Mr. Buzzard open up a bird store, it's clear they're doing this for less than altruistic reasons. They give away free birds as gifts to certain rich people around Gotham, and there's always some catch that allows the Penguin and his men to commit a successful robbery. One cage has a flare that temporarily blinds everyone in the room, one cage has a small explosive, etc. In some ways this is a repeat of the plot where the Catwoman used cats to get in close and prep the ground for her crimes, only the Penguin uses birds of course. A showdown up north in the snow ends with the Penguin's capture thanks to an artificial avalanche that traps him and his men.

The Bandits of Tiny Town!
This bizarre crime story has gangsters targeting a town full of midgets, the Tiny Town of the story's title. Only they're not drawn to resemble actual midgets. They look like fully grown adults drawn half-size, with the effect being a town full of minature people. The gangsters are two or three times their size and can wreak havoc in the city through sheer physical strength. This is probably my least favorite of all the Batman stories I've read in these collections, both for the inaccurate art and because the story feels like it's just in poor taste.

Batman, Interplanetary Policeman!
I thought interplanetary, sci-fi Batman didn't start until the 50s, but here in in mid-1947 we see Batman and Robin go to Mars to fight a Martian criminal. Maybe it's because I'm used to modern Batman hanging out with the Justice League and fighting aliens, but this scenario didn't really bother me, even though it's as far away from urban crime as the Carter Nichols time travel plots.

Bruce is walking the street late one evening when a stranger in a hat and trench coat approaches him, revealing that he knows both his identities. The stranger is a green skinned, tentacled armed, big headed alien from Mars named Thund Dran. A Martian named Sax Gola invented a ray that turns the formerly crime-free Martian society into a crime-infested place. Having no crime fighters of their own, the desperate Martians surveyed Earth and picked Batman to help them. Bruce goes along, so he and Robin are off to Mars. They enjoy weightlessness in space, then get attacked by Gola's ray when trying to land, turning Dran evil. Robin crashes the rocket on to the surface of Mars, so he and Batman take the crazy Dran along to find help. They do find the other Martians, who cure Dran and give Batman and Robin jetpacks to help them reach the central pump station of Mars, where water is sent from the canals.

Silliness aside, I like this old school sci-fi, with big-headed aliens and a Mars that has canals. And then there are the giant cats (I'm not kidding) that haunt the tunnels around the pump station. Batman is captured and apparently turned evil by Gola's ray, while Robin escapes to bring back help. Turns out it was a ruse by Batman to trap Gola and his followers. The criminals are returned to sanity, and the Martians return Batman and Robin to Earth. The best part of the story? Sax Gola is a Martian wearing a wife beater. Awesome.

[andersonh1]

Detective Comics #124
June 1947

The Crime Parade!
It's the Joker again. This time he bases his crime spree around the "hit parade" on the radio, matching his robberies to songs, giving Batman the means to guess where he's going to strike next. It's a boilerplate Joker story with no real distinctive elements to it, though a picture of Batman as a silhouette with only his white eyeslits showing is the type of modern Batman image that I wish we saw more of in these old stories.

Detective Comics #125
July 1947

The Citadel of Crime!
Out west, a man is shot and left to die. Making his way to a nearby town, he manages to say something about "warning Batman" before expiring. In Gotham (where Commissioner Gordon is apparently dying his white hair brown now), Batman learns that a lot of ex-cons have been vanishing recently, including Dan Briggs, the man who wanted to warn Batman. Batman disguises himself as an ex-con Tom Horne (who looks almost exactly like Clark Kent, glasses and all, possibly because Jack Burnely is drawing this story) and gets an offer of employment when he leaves the prison. Robin follows in the Batplane.

Out west, in a factor described to the disguised Bruce as a "government" plant, security is very tight, almost like the men were back in prison, and they have to sign a three year contract. Bruce learns that men who don't cooperate are taken to a room with a black door and never seen again. The same thing happens to him, where a bald man in a wheelchair with a large head, who calls himself the Thinkier, has figured out that he's an impostor. Bruce asks for some water, throws it on the electric lamp, plunging the room into darkness, and by the time the lights are back on, he's in costume as Batman and slugging the gangsters. But the Thinker rams Batman with his motorized wheelchair and knocks him out, deciding that he'll be shot at dawn. The Thinker's face looks just like one of the Starman villains Jack Burnley drew, interestingly.

Batman manages to get the SOS signal to Robin, who saves him from the firing squad at the last minute. With the plant on full alert, Batman and Robin have to resort to stealth to avoid the guards searching for them, and they learn this plant is making weapons for the underworld. A combination of tricks and misdirection and the use of one of the plant's own tanks help Batman and Robin subdue the guards, but the Thinker tries to kill them with a machine gun. A kick by Batman sends the barrel flying upwards, where the bullets cut a cable, which falls and electrocutes the Thinker. The ex cons just want honest work, and thanks to Batman they now have that chance. I'll take a story like this over a standard Joker or Penguin runaround any day.

[andersonh1]

World's Finest Comics #29
July-August 1947

The Second Chance!
Joel Benson is on death row. As a security guard he had a good job and a loving fiance, but the temptation of easy money was too much for him, and he left the door unlocked so some gangsters could rob the business, only for the robbery to be interrupted by Batman and Robin. Benson runs with the money, fires over the head of some cops to scare them off, but is caught and blamed when one of the police was found dead. Sentenced to the electric chair, Benson joins a breakout attempt and gets out of prison. Hit in the head by debris, Benson blacks out. The crooks take him along, but ultimately decide to dump him by the side of the road.

If you guessed the Benson has memory loss, you'd be right. He's cared for by a local couple, who help him get a job. He starts dating their daughter. His memory still hasn't returned, but he's grateful for the help, though he wonders what kind of person he is. And then the news breaks that Joel Benson has been cleared of murder, and the photo in the paper answers all his questions. He's free and clear, with a girl and a job.... but he remembers the easy money, and where the stash is, and he completely blows his second chance by getting involved in a payroll robbery. And when gangster "Chesty" shoots a worker during the getaway, despite Benson's protests, he's now an accomplice to murder. Captured by Batman, Benson protests that he didn't want the man to be shot, but it's too late... Benson goes to the electric chair, begging for another chance.

Dick wonders if another chance might have helped him, but Bruce is adamant. "If a man doesn't even try to make good with a second chance, he doesn't deserve a third."