MYTHCOMICS: "ROBIN DIES AT DAWN" (BATMAN #156, 1963)

 

There might not be a lot of subjects on which long-time Batman-fans agree, but almost all seem united in despising the Caped Crusader's "alien period" of roughly 1958-1964, largely under the influence of editor Jack Schiff. Schiff, who was not personally a fan of the science fiction genre, didn't rely only upon pitting the hero against weird ETs. I noted in my essay PARADIGM SCHIFF that he also introduced more costumed villains in Batman's post-Code adventures, possibly in order to downplay the Wertham-created stigma of "crime comics." Batman's alien invaders were also probably Schiff's attempt to emulate the financial success of the Superman books under fellow DC editor Mort Weisinger, who increased the frequency of sci-fi elements in the Man of Steel's stories around the same time. However, though Batman had encountered alien threats sporadically during the Golden Age, few if any fans embraced the importation of so many extraterrestrials into a Bat-cosmos that was usually comparatively mundane. Yet one Schiff-story proved the exception to all that fan-hostility.                               

Before launching into the contents of said story, the Bill Finger/Sheldon Moldoff opus ROBIN DIES AT DAWN, I should note that writer Finger almost certainly took inspiration from the debut episode of CBS's TWILIGHT ZONE series, first airing in 1959. The Rod Serling script for the debut story, "Where is Everybody?", depicted a solitary man wandering about a deserted town, freaking out at the total absence of other people while equally concerned at not being able to remember his own identity. The Big Reveal is that the man is an astronaut trainee who has hallucinated his experiences in the empty town after having been confined for many hours to an isolation booth. Finger utilizes the same basic notion of a government experiment, meant to train astronauts in resisting the rigors of loneliness, but takes that basic idea in a direction specific to Batman's mythos.                                                                   

 Like the protagonist of the TWILIGHT ZONE tale, Batman experiences a sudden shift into a world he does not recognize. Unlike the trainee, Batman remembers everything about himself, but he has no clue as to who brought him to this place, or why that entity deprived him of his weapons. As with the other protagonist, everything Batman perceives is a hallucination conjured from his own mind due to being isolated from human contact. But instead of seeing an Earthly world bereft of people, the crusader imagines himself on a night-shrouded alien world, where he encounters only beasts, mutated plants, and one huge symbol of the world's past habitation.   

  Batman finds a deserted city as does the ZONE protagonist, but not only does he find no sentient life, he's attacked by a mutant plant. Unable to free himself, he wishes that his boon companion Robin would render aid, and in marked contrast to the ZONE story, the object of Batman's desire for companionship does materialize and frees the senior hero. The two heroes walk around a bit-- if they compare notes on their respective advents, we don't hear it-- but Batman feels even more acutely the surveillance of some unseen intelligence. The sun dawns, but this only presages a new horror, as the duo stumble across a four-armed idol that comes to life and pursues them.                                                                                         

Unable to fight such a threat, the heroes hope to maneuver the giant into falling into a chasm. It's Robin's idea to provoke the colossus into a rash attack, and the Boy Wonder's ploy succeeds-- but at the cost of his own life. Finger's caption implies the irony that the dawning sun, so often associated with life and human activity, bears witness to Batman's "terrible catastrophe." There had been various Batman stories in which the hero had become enraged when criminals injured or threatened Batman's young partner. But this seems to be the first in which Robin suffers from the fact that Batman called upon his partner for succor-- making it the first time Robin's injury can be seen as directly Batman's fault. There is nothing remotely like this "survivor guilt" in the Rod Serling story.                              

Batman continues to experience the feeling of being watched, and this feeling manifests in a four-footed alien beast with huge eyes that glow yet possess no pupils. It's just when Batman is about to give up on life that the scientists behind the isolation-experiment terminate the hero's torment. As in Serling, the whole test has been to gauge how well even a superb specimen like Batman can cope with the demon of loneliness, all in some dubious service to the space program. But the consequences of the experiment have yet to play out.                                                                                                            

It's while Batman and Robin undertake a nighttime attack upon a band of thieves, the Gorilla Gang that Batman experiences a new hallucination, and in trying to prevent Robin's death a second time, the hero almost kills both of them. 

On yet another night, history repeats itself: this time, Batman re-experiences a sense of sacrificial guilt and almost lets himself be run down by a car he associates with the glow-eyed monster of his nightmare. Now that the psychosis has occurred twice, Batman concludes that he must now hang up his cowl, for he can no longer function in a crimefighting partnership that endangers him, his ward or both of them.                                                                                         

  Ironically, it's these small-timers in the gorilla-suits who make possible Batman's continued career. They capture Robin and send Batman a message that they're going to execute the Boy Wonder at dawn. Batman's mad detective skills show that he can still suss out clues that take him to the gangsters' hideout, and Finger teases readers one last time with the possibility of a Bat-blackout.                     

 But a true threat to Robin's life activates Batman's "reality principle," and provides a shock to his system that permanently erases the effects of the deprivation-test. It can be fairly said, too, that Batman's return to a protective parental status-- where he's the one who does the rescuing of his junior partner--also banishes what may be seen as fears of inadequacy. And so this time, when the sun dawns, it's to banish nightmares, rather than to reveal them.  

QUICK ARABESQUE TURNS

 When I initially wrote my first essay on the artistic differences between "grotesques" and "arabesques" in the Golden Age BATMAN comics, I didn't recall that anyone else had made any similar arguments. But I have come across a couple of observations that loosely parallel mine.                                                                               

 The earliest I've come across is a foreword by Max Allan Collins to BATMAN ARCHIVES 2, which collected the Bat-stories from DETECTIVE COMICS #51-70 and which was published in 1991. Collins doesn't use my word "grotesque" of course, but he speaks of how "in the dark world of the Batman, crime did pay," which is the reason a vigilante was necessary, and he also mentions how the narration boxes convey a "dark, ominous mood." The earliest example Collins finds of a brighter figure is Robin, who debuts in DETECTIVE COMICS #38 (1940), though the writer speaks of The Penguin's debut in DETECTIVE #58 (December 1941) as a "turning point." Collins further asserts that as Jerry Robinson became more dominant on the Bat-comics, the stories lost much of the "noir look" of the early Kane period and emphasized more "humor elements."                           

Rik Worth advances a slightly similar argument in the pages of his 2021 THE CREATORS OF BATMAN, his biographical study of the intertwined lives of Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Worth substantially agrees that Bob Kane preferred the noir-look of his early stories but claims that it was artist Dick Sprang who "made Gotham a much brighter and more colorful place." Worth does not source his claim about Kane's preferences and his book does not study in detail the feature's artistic developments any more than this post does. Still, it's interesting that when Sprang produced his first full-fledged Bat-tales for BATMAN #19 (Oct-Nov 1943), one of the three Sprang stories places Batman and Robin in an extravagant fantasy-setting foreign to the world of noir: having the heroes chase down U-Boat Nazis into the sunken city of Atlantis.                                                           

  My nominee for "Batman's first arabesque" precedes the debut of Robin, though. In the first six issues of DETECTIVE COMICS, the Dark Knight contends with ordinary crooks (and in these stories it's Batman who is the grotesque), with the mad scientist Doctor Death (two appearances, with Death getting deformed in the second tale), and with the vampiric Monk, whose two stories pile on lots of Gothic grotesquerie. However, in DC #33, following a two-page origin of Batman (whose script is sometimes attributed to Bill Finger), the ten-page main story concerns a villain who, while obscure today, abandons the reigning spookiness for a duel of science-fiction weaponry. This foe was Carl Kruger, a mad scientist with a Napoleon complex, and I for one find nothing Gothic about him.                                                                                                       

  This ten-pager, "Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom," was written by Gardner Fox while the art is theoretically by both Bob Kane and Sheldon Moldoff. "Dirigible" stands in the tradition of both prose SF-stories of futuristic warfare and movie serials about villains with death-rays. Kruger unleashes a dirigible on Gotham City, causing mass havoc with something like a disintegrator beam. Batman meets science with science, inventing a chemical that immunizes his Bat-plane against the beam before the hero rams the dirigible with his craft. One page later, Kruger's plane crashes to Earth after Batman gasses the villain, and Gotham is saved from its first apocalyptic threat. I am not claiming that Carl Kruger is a particularly memorable villain. However, he's much more of a colorful fantasy-figure than his immediate predecessor in mad science, Doctor Death. Thus, in my book Kruger's blue-and-red attire by itself makes him Batman's first arabesque evildoer, and thus the figurative ancestor to all other variegated villains, from the Penguin onward. It's slightly appropriate that Sheldon Moldoff drew the character, for in later years he would become famous (or infamous) for drawing most of the really wacky Bat-foes in the creative era I've termed "Candyland Batman."  

NEAR-MYTHS: STAR-SPANGLED ROGUES' GALLERIES

In THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER, I made some generalized comments on the debt that Jerry Siegel's STAR-SPANGLED KID feature had to the Batman-AND-Robin team that was launched in April 1940 (with the usual allowances for inaccuracy of cover-dates). Jerry Siegel didn't rush to come up with his risible reversal of a kid hero with an adult sidekick, since STAR SPANGLED COMICS #1 debuted as a regular DC feature almost a year and a half after Robin's debut. (To be sure, the Kid and Stripesy first showed up the previous month in ACTION COMICS #40, where the raconteurs clearly hoped that Superman's fans would rush to check out the New Dynamic Duo in their own magazine.) DC editors may have thought, "Hey, Batman was conceived when Bob Kane (supposedly by himself) tried to do his version of Superman. So why wouldn't it work for the creator of Superman-- teamed with humor-artist Hal Sherman-- to riff on Batman?" At any rate, the very name of STAR-SPANGLED COMICS was clearly contrived to spotlight the name of the cover-featured hero, and for the first half dozen issues Siegel and Sherman's heroes got three adventures apiece. There were other features in SSC, but none were all that prepossessing, with only the Mort Weisinger-Hal Sharp Tarantula maintaining any place in DC history.                                                     

  Now, as the title may suggest, my main interest in these early stories is to demonstrate some early examples of the "pattern criminal," which formula I think developed largely in comic books. This conception contrasted with such pulp-favorites as the "one-gimmick villain" and "the all-purpose villain" types, which I argued were the dominant templates for the prose pulps. Thus the only two relevant features of SSC are those of Tarantula and of the Kid and Stripesy. The first adventure doesn't trouble to retell the pair's origin from their debut in ACTION COMICS, but the last one in issue #1 introduces their most persistent enemy, Doctor Weerd. After the villain's regular ID is humiliated by a rather snotty Sylvester Pemberton, the villain reveals that he has his own "Mister Hyde" potion, that changes him into a shaggy-locked, barrel-chested hulk. Unlike Siegel's Superman, whose repeat villains appeared off and on, Weerd appears in every single issue until #7, and he's clearly an all-purpose type like Luthor, whipping up diverse weapons like giant robots, a vortex machine and a mirage-maker. Did Siegel hope Weerd would be the Kid's "Joker?" It seems a fair conjecture. Issue #1 also features the first outing for Tarantula, in a forgettable exploit that doesn't give the spider-man much of an origin either.                                                               

   Issue #2 introduces the comic's first "one-gimmick villain," but in the TARANTUALA feature. Such was the Crime Candle, whose big thing was doping people with candles that exuded toxic gases.                                                                                                             

                                                                                                        Issue #3 holds nothing relevant, but in #4-- dated January 1942, and thus a month or two after Bill Finger unveiled The Penguin in a December 1941 issue of DETECTIVE COMICS-- Siegel and Sherman introduced the Needle. Now, the Needle's weapon of choice was a gun that shot needles, so he didn't "branch out" as the Penguin did, using different gimmicked umbrellas and (a little later) trained birds. But though neither Needle nor Penguin gets an origin as such, both seem to have "patterned" their respective weapons after their respective physical appearances. That said, the Penguin seems like a developed character from the first, and the Needle is a just a flat bad guy.                                                                                                         

   Siegel and Sherman distinguish themselves a bit more in SSC #5 with new villain Moonglow. A wimpy type of professor, he discovers that he can enhance both his intellect and his penchant for evil by prolonged exposure to moonlight. The small touch of characterization, though, doesn't lead to anything comparable to, say, Two-Face, or even Green Lantern's foe The Gambler. More relevant to my "pattern criminal" project, though, is the TARANTULA tale in the same issue. "Warlord of Crime," whose script GCD credits to Manly Wade Wellman, introduces a crimelord named Siva. This villain uses a whopping TWO gimmicks patterned on the mythos of the Hindu god: (1) he's served by a henchman named Ganesha, who wears an elephant-costume like that of Mythic Shiva's divine son, and (2) Siva burns rebellious followers with fire the way the Hindu god annhilated his opponents with fiery powers. However, for whatever reason Siva never appeared again, and remained at large at the end of his only story.                                                             

With issue #6, the Kid gets scaled back to two adventures (one featuring the omnipresent Doctor Weerd, again) -- and then, just one tale in issue #7, in which Simon and Kirby's NEWSBOY LEGION bumps the Kid off the covers. Robotman and TNT join Tarantula as backup features who (I believe) never get cover-featured in SSC. The solo Kid adventure does feature the comic's first villain-teamup in "The Picture That Killed," as The Needle and Doc Weerd challenge the not so dynamic duo. In #8, Manly Wade Wellman apparently caught the teamup bug from Siegel and Sherman, since he assembled three of Tarantula's very forgettable villains into "The Trio of Terror." Siegel and Sherman trumped Wellman by bringing together their three most noteworthy nasties-- Needle, Weerd and Moonglow-- in "Crime by the Chapter." None of those villains, together or separately, were as good as the best Finger foes, though at least the Sherman antagonists were more visually memorable than those of Hal Sharp (except the aforementioned Siva). And that's where I'll leave this short study, for by issue #9 it was clear that the Kid/Stripesy duo had failed to impress the kid-readers as their model had, and whatever "pattern criminals" may have appeared were then overshadowed by many more momentous features in the early forties. Despite various post-Silver Age revivals of the original characters, the two seemed to distinguish themselves most when Geoff Johns reinvented the core idea for his STARGIRL concept, which in turn begat the last good superhero TV show for the CW network. But clearly there was a good reason that no one ever bothered to bring back (to my knowledge) any of the Kid's villains, or those of any other foemen in SSC.                       

THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER

I've recently finished two DC ARCHIVES collections of Golden Age Batman comics, and once more I am impressed with the level of quality in comparison with other formula-comics from the period. Yet the nature of this extra quality is hard to define.                                       

Whatever that "je ne se quoi" might be, it has nothing to do with a flouting of formula, that tedious preoccupation of the comic-book elitists. During the Golden Age, the dominant practice of comic-book publishers was to load their magazines with short stories of about eight pages each. This seems to have applied whether or not the magazines featured continuing characters, and the strategy probably evolved from the idea that the kid-readers had short attention spans and were more likely to pick up issues if they offered a lot of varied content. For adventure comics in particular, there evolved the formula that some have called the "three-act structure:"   

   (1) Villain, whether new or recurring, launches his first crime, defying either conventional lawmen or the starring hero, but escapes, (2) The hero crosses paths with the villain again, and the villain either simply escapes or subdues the hero and leaves him in a death-trap, (3) The hero either escapes a trap or finds a new means to track down the villain and defeats him, whether he's captured, dies, or merely seems to perish.                                                                       

 I haven't read every Bill Finger out there, even in comics alone. But I think I'm aware of all of his "career highs," and Rik Worth's book on the early days of Finger and his BATMAN co-creator Bob Kane has helped fill in a lot of blanks on this era of comics-history. Going by this biography, as well as an interview with Finger's grown son in ALTER EGO magazine, it appears that Finger didn't have any pretensions beyond making well-crafted formula adventure-stories for most of his life.                         

 What Finger seemed to have, though, was an inordinate talent for creating characters who transcended the limits of their formulaic stories. Dozens upon dozens of other writers followed the aforementioned "three-act structure" for such characters as Vigilante, Wildcat, Star-Spangled Kid, Tarantula, Human Torch, Black Terror and all the rest. But most other formula-stories in other features never escape the bounds of their own restrictions. Finger seems not only to have possessed the ability to take the formula-elements to their furthest extremes-- far more, I'd argue, than many more critically lauded talents like Jack Cole and C.C. Beck-- he also seemed to have inspired most of the other writers in the Bob Kane "stable," such as Edmond Hamilton and Gardner Fox. I'm not saying that any such imitations came about for abstract artistic reasons, though. If Gardner Fox wrote better stories for BATMAN than he did for RED MASK, it's probably because he recognized that the people writing the checks expected a special level of craft.                 

Finger also holds a special place in forging the trope of "the criminal who makes his crimes follow an artistic pattern." There were "pattern criminals," in the sense I'm using the term, in the pulp prose fiction on which most Golden Age adventure-comics patterned themselves, and a few preceded the rise of Superman and Batman. But what I've encountered in those earlier sources usually fit one of two types. First is the "one-gimmick villain,"-- an evildoer who gains control of one distinctive weapon, like the poison vampire bats of the Spider's 1935 foe "The Bat Man." Second is the "all-purpose villain," who can conjure a lot of weapons from an illimitable arsenal, like the 1938 "Munitions Master" from DOC SAVAGE, or Superman's first two "mad scientist" foes, The Ultra-Humanite and Luthor. Barring any new revelations, though, the Joker appears to be a third type: the "pattern criminal," who repeatedly keeps using gimmicks that reference some particular fetish or propensity. The Joker only uses one humor-based gimmick in his debut, the famed "Joker venom," but Finger and other Bat-writers kept finding new gimmicks for the Clown Prince of Crime to employ in his war of one-upmanship with the Dynamic Duo. Jerry Siegel debuted Luthor a month or so after the first appearance of the Joker, but as stated he was always an all-purpose villain. Siegel didn't tap into the appeal of "pattern criminals" until he launched his own somewhat risible take on Batman and Robin with the duo of "the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy" in October 1941. The Kid and his partner began battling arguable pattern-types like The Needle-- though I imagine Finger's second big antagonist, The Penguin, predated all or most of these by some months, since he popped up just a couple months after the Kid's debut. Superman's first recurring pattern-criminals, The Prankster and The Puzzler, both debuted in 1942.                                                                                   

  I think Finger's power to create good villains-- and, hypothetically, his ability to inspire other creators by his profit-making example-- sprang from his interest in figuring out at least rough psychological motives for his evildoers, just as he may have done for his heroes. This interest in even shallow psychology outstrips most of Finger's contemporaries. Jack Cole had an artistic talent which none of the BATMAN artists could have emulated had they wanted to, and also a taste for the ghoulish that exceeded the best japes of the Joker. But Cole's villains are almost entirely one-dimensional, and his best-known hero Plastic Man is not too much better. Both Rik Worth and Fred Finger suggest that Bill Finger was a dreamer who never quite grew up, so that he was rarely able to manage money or time. But I'd argue that even in his weaker stories-- and Finger did a lot of goofy, poorly conceived stories in addition to his quality fare-- he shows a greater, perhaps childlike ability to take the weirdest ideas seriously, in a spirit of uninhibited play.                  

THE GAIN FROM PAIN STAYED MOSTLY WITH BOB KANE

 On a messageboard I raised the topic of Bob Kane's degree of control over the BATMAN franchise. Here's what I know of the matter, culled from Gerard Jones' fine book MEN OF TOMORROW and various posts on the blog OZ AND ENDS.

First, from a 2009 post entitled "Bob Kane's First and Second Contracts," J.L. Bell wrote:

In 1938 Bob Kane (shown here, courtesy of NNDB.com) started supplying material for Detective Comics. That material was written by Bill Finger, but Kane kept his scripter's contributions quiet for as long as he could. As a hungry young artist, Kane signed some sort of work-for-hire agreement which granted the magazine publisher full ownership of his material and characters in exchange for some compensation.

Seeing the money that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were earning for their Superman character, Kane decided to create his own costumed crimefighter. In 1939 he and Finger came up with Batman. No one knew that the character would still be incredibly lucrative sixty years later. Kane sold the Batman character to the company that would become DC Comics under the same contract as his previous stories.

Jones substantially says the same, but with this caveat:

Kane would never talk about the deal he signed, but apparently it guaranteed him some security and control of the material.-- MOT, p, 150.

Bell and Jones tell subtantially the same story regarding Kane's second contract with DC Comics:

Kane started to renegotiate on his [contract], using a novel approach. He said that he'd been a minor back when he'd signed his original DC contract--which was therefore unenforceable...Other comics creators had met Kane as a fellow high-school student, so they knew he was lying. But DC couldn't prove it. There was no government record of Kane's birth, and his family was backing up his story. Furthermore, with the Superman lawsuit coming up and business going down, the company was eager to nail down rights to the Batman character.

 

Jones further speculates:

[Jack Liebowicz] reportedly returned partial legal ownership of Batman to Kane, including rights of reversion... then guaranteed Kane a certain number of pages a month at a staggering page rate... MOT. p. 247.

One thing Bell argues that Jones does not reference, however, is that in 1963 DC may have pulled the wool over Kane's eyes to ace him out. Bell shows that the Bat-sales in that year rated on average about ninth or tenth on he DC list of titles. He also points out that if Batman was so unpopular, why did DC keep featuring him alongside their big gun Superman in WORLD'S FINEST? 

So why did DC's top brass tell Kane that they were thinking of canceling Batman entirely? I think the answer lies in his unusually expensive 1947 contract. The problem with Batman comics probably lay not in their income but in their costs.

The publisher wanted Kane to give up his high per-page rate and his stultifying creative control. I suspect its head, Irwin Donenfeld, used brinkmanship to open new negotiations, and that tactic worked. DC was able to move the Batman comics in a new direction.

 

Now, Kane continued his association with the Bat-comics for a few more years, so his most-used contract artist, Sheldon Moldoff, continued receiving assignments. But instead of using the cartoony style during the earlier Silver Age under editor Jack Schiff, Moldoff emulated the more realistic style of BATMAN's "New Look" approach under editor Julie Schwartz. However, one year after Moldoff published his most well-regarded story of the period, "Beware of Poison Ivy," financier Steve Ross bought DC Comics for $60 million. And Jones adds:

Because Kane owned partial rights to BATMAN, he could negotiate his own sale.-- MOT, p. 306.

Whatever the particulars of the deal, it ended Kane's professional association with the Bat-comics, though he sometimes parlayed his fame as sole credited creator to snag "advisory" status on projects like the 1989 BATMAN film.

More on the related matter of Bat-myths to come, same Archive-time, same Archive-channel.

 

MYTHCOMICS: "THE RANGERS VS. TOMAHAWK" (TOMAHAWK #112, 1967)

Though I wasn't looking for a mythcomic to ring in the New Year, a story set during the "birth of this nation," the era of the Revolutionary War, seems moderately appropriate. The cover accurately depicts a scene in the story by writer Bill Finger and artist Fred Ray: a falling-out between the titular hero and one of his subordinate "Rangers," which, contrary to the cover-copy, would only qualify as "the scrap of the century" if the reader was only considering scraps of the 18th century. The fight is only a tiny part of the main story-- henceforth called RANGERS for short-- while the true emphasis centers upon a conflict in the bosom of hero Tom Hawk, a.k.a. "Tomahawk."

The character is largely forgotten by modern comics-readers, but he enjoyed a long run at DC Comics from 1947 to 1972. In the forties and fifties he wore a coonskin cap seven years before the affectation was popularized by Walt Disney's "Davy Crockett" series, and his longevity probably qualifies him as DC's most successful "western" character prior to Jonah Hex. For most of his early years, Tomahawk's character was identical to almost every other DC starring character: a man of boundless competence, never at a loss for a plan, whether he was fighting Indians, British soldiers, or the occasional revived dinosaur. Bill Finger, however, displayed in many of his scripts an interest in the hidden depths of the human psyche, and RANGERS is a done-in-one story wherein the indefatigable hero has something of a breakdown-- which of course is never again referenced in any ensuing stories. 

The basic idea of the story may have been derived from the 1960 WWII film CIRCLE OF DECEPTION, in which British intelligence feeds false information about the pending European invasion to an officer and then contrives to let him be captured, so that the Nazis will torture the information out of him and act on the bad intel. RANGERS's setup involves Tomahawk himself volunteering to be captured by a regiment of German mercenaries, a.k.a. "Hessians," but only so that he can pretend to break after some time in captivity and feed the commanders false information. 

However, the "competent man" finds himself exposed to an evil deeper than he ever encountered in earlier exploits. The commander, (or rather "commandant") of the Hessian mercenaries is Von Grote, an anticipation of Nazism long before the phenomenon actually existed. Finger cleverly sells this by referencing the common knowledge that the sign of the swastika was widely dispersed across many continents, so that it's slightly logical for this Nazi-in-training to wear an Indian medallion with the symbol, and to place the same symbol on the uniforms of his men. 

Because Von Grote (in German the name means "big," though Finger was probably thinking of "grotesque") is a foretaste of the twentieth century's concept of Ultimate Evil, Tomahawk's tortures are far more intense than the stalwart woodsman ever expected. Thus he becomes obsessed with finding and killing the Hessian commander, and he refuses medical treatment for his injured leg. "I want [my leg] like it is-- so every time I take a step and the agonizin' pain shoots up through my body-- I want it to remind me-- remind me of Von Grote -- the man I gotta kill!" 

I won't say that this transition of a bland hero into an obsessed avenger was ground-breaking-- I imagine that even DC Comics occasionally had some of their war-heroes go off the deep end, however temporarily. But Finger isn't content to anticipate the Ultimate Evil of Nazism in Revolutionary America; he also glosses the semi-crippled hero's predicament with that of a sea captain who "swore to kill a great white whale which had taken his leg." The fact that Finger recounts the supposed existence of Moby Dick in the 1770s (or his real-life model "Mocha Dick") is treated lightly: after one Ranger tells the story, another one says. "I bet someone will write a book about it one day." Yet Finger is careful to mention that the whale kills not only the obsessed captain, but his crew as well.

While Tomahawk's subordinates struggle to cope with the changes in their leader's psyche, Von Grote, being a pre-Nazi, does what comes naturally: he establishes a prison camp for captured American soldiers. No tortured or starved prisoners are ever seen, though the villain has a good line about using stables to hold people instead of horses. Tomahawk and his men invade Von Grote's camp, and after hero and villain match their chosen weapons against one another-- frontier tomahawk vs. German knife-- Von Grote reveals that he's set a trap to capture and execute all of the rebels. Tomahawk finally reveals that his obsession has imperiled his men, so he finds a last-minute solution to overpower the Hessians, one that, with typical DC irony, involves the hero turning the villain's own weapon against him. Tomahawk then captures but does not kill Von Grote, and promises his men that he'll get his leg repaired now that he's sane again. The last panel, in which a wooden swastika is seen burning, creates a similitude between the defeat of these proto-Nazis and the future defeat of the ultimate Axis evil. (I'd reprint the end scene like the others here, from Read Comics Online, except that the scene loses something by sharing page-space with one of DC's goofy humor-strips.) 

One can't tell from this story whether or not Finger was familiar with the complexities of Melville's novel, in which Moby Dick often seems to be the incarnation of cosmic evil; the sense that the universe cares nothing about human suffering. From the Ranger's summation of the supposedly "real" story, Finger may have believed that the white whale was nothing but a brute beast, rather than cosmic evil. Even one character in the book, the whaler Starbuck, makes that interpretation, and professes that to seek vengeance on a brute beast is "blasphemous."

 Yet Von Grote is not just a Nazi, but a Nazi sadist. (Tomahawk seems astonished that his enemy takes pleasure in suffering). The concept of a pitiless Human Evil is not equivalent to the concept of a pitiless Cosmic Evil. But in both MOBY DICK and of this Bill Finger story, the correct response to evil is not to forget all other considerations save vengeance, with the result that one sacrifices one's own comrades. 

In closing, I will note that the only thing that makes this story "uncanny"-- like Melville's novel, but unlike the movie CIRCLE OF DECEPTION-- is the contrivance of the spring-action knife, the  "diabolical device" with which the villain strives to impale the hero.  

NULL-MYTHS: "THE HAUNTED ISLAND" (COTU #43, 1965)

There are a lot of Silver Age DC stories that are wacky in a good way, and there are those that are wacky in a bad, I-can't-believe-it's-so-bad way. But this 1965 CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN story qualifies as a null-myth because it's bad in an inconsummate way.

"Haunted Island" is the second of two stories in issue #43, and it gets the cover feature in large part because this issue marked the heroes' shift away from their dull purple jumpsuits to uniforms in bright primary colors of yellow and red, complete with hourglass-emblems on their chests to remind readers that they were "living on borrowed time." (I think it was around this time that the venerable Blackhawks had to give up their dour blue outfits for garish red and black garments.)

"Island's" writer Bill Finger reportedly only scripted seven stories for this DC series, all under the editorship of Murray Boltinoff as far as I can tell. One presumes that the costume-change signified that CHALLENGERS' sales had dropped somewhat. Like many other DC stories of the time, "Island" doesn't just content itself with having the heroes decide to change their togs one fine day. Instead the change stems from an almost impenetrable whim on the part of the story's villains.

First off, the heroes get involved in protecting a museum-sarcophagus from theft by a weird bird-man.

The bird-man absconds with his booty, but the Challengers pursue in their plane, while conveniently commenting on other "rare artifact" thefts of recent weeks. They land on a "dead island," and in their explorations they find a private museum that includes a preserved dinosaur and giant scorpion.

They then have a dust-up with a large fellow who, despite his sixties turtleneck, is without doubt mean to evoke Universal's image of the Frankenstein Monster. However, in their pursuit of the giant fellow, the heroes are gassed. They wake up wearing their spiffy new outfits.

Then the Challs meet not one, not two, but five freaky forms, including the giant and the bird-man. The leader, who looks much like one of DC's elfin support-characters, informs the heroes that the five freaks are mutant versions of once-human scientists. Their mutation causes them not to just to choose isolation from the human world, but also to collect "things that should be dead, yet still exist."

The mutants, having established that they consider themselves a cockeyed version of the "borrowed time" crusaders, then establish that they want the Challs to join them on the island as part of the collection. Why the mutants should care what the heroes wore, if they wanted museum exhibits, is pretty much ignored. One of the heroes, Prof, volunteers to let himself be mutated, hoping to be able to turn against the death-collectors.

Prof's stratagem doesn't quite work as planned: he turns into an "evil energy-being" and attempts to kill his friends. Only through lots of luck are his buddies able to reverse Prof's transformation and escape the Haunted Island as it conveniently blows up, dooming the mutants and their collection. The four stalwarts then decide to keep wearing the costumes. The end.

The presence of a mutant who looks like the Frankenstein Monster-- but whose identity has nothing Frankensteinian about it-- shows by itself enough symbolic inepititude to qualify "Island" for null-myth status. The story's more salient concept-- the Challengers are given new costumes by negative versions of themselves-- has a little more promise, but it blows that potential by heaping incident upon incident.

The CHALLENGERS title was never distinguished by very good stories, and only occasionally by good art. But this one may well be the mediocre feature's lowest moment.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GOLDEN EGGS" (BATMAN #99, 1956)

The cover to BATMAN #99 doesn't include any images of the crusader's second most famed felon, so I'm leading off with the cover of the 1966 paperback reprint of the story "The Golden Eggs," which to my knowledge is the only place where the tale has seen reprint.

The paperback obviously came into being to cash in on the 1966 teleseries. The series patently diverges from the comic in many ways, some of which greatly annoyed comics-fans, as I covered in the course of the three-part BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY series. However, one of the things that the series got right was the thoroughly unrealistic concept of the "pattern-criminal."

The "pattern-criminal" was the name I applied back in The Day to all characters whose crimes followed some sort of pattern that had intense meaning for said characters. These crooks didn't simply stick up banks or museums at random, but constructed their heists like theatrical performances designed to one-up the forces of law and order generally, and Batman specifically. To be sure, the comics did "pattern-crimes" better than the series did, given that the comics were exclusively aimed at an audience invested in enjoying escapist, unrealistic "cops-and-robbers" stories.

I would assume that there may have been some precursors to this form in prose fiction, particularly in pulp fiction, but even the weird fiends of the DOC SAVAGE feature don't seem nearly as fetishistic about their crimes. So far as I can tell, Bill Finger invented the concept in comic books with the 1940 debut of the Joker in 1940. In his first appearance the Clown Prince's only fetish-crime consists of killing off his victims with a "venom" that makes them grin horribly as they expire. Yet Finger didn't immediately apply the notion to all of Batman's antagonists. Both Hugo Strange and the Cat-- later, Catwoman-- appear in the same issue as the Joker, but their crimes don't follow any pattern as such.

Both Joker and Catwoman began emphasizing "pattern-crimes" over the years, as did the aforementioned "Birdman Bandit," the Penguin. He first appeared in DETECTIVE COMICS #58 (1941), but despite his bird-like appearance, he committed no "bird-crimes" at the time, but was defined more by his use of weaponized umbrellas.

Later Penguin stories had the master malefactor switch off between patterning crimes after birds or after umbrellas, but many of these stories didn't pursue the patterns with enough symbolic complexity to propagate. This Finger-Moldoff story, whose title is borrowed from the fable of "the Goose with the Golden Eggs," is one of the exceptions.

By then, it was quite common for supervillains to seize upon some reversal in their fortunes, and to seek to turn it around, the better to demonstrate their insidious inventiveness. As the story escapes, the Penguin has escaped one of his hideouts just before Batman and Robin break in. He takes refuge in a second, rather shabby hideout, but he's brought one item from his old digs with him: a box of bird-eggs. Nothing daunted, the villain then gets the idea to pattern his next crimes according to whatever birds hatch from the eggs, as if to show off his brilliance at being able to profit from the vagaries of fate. The one vagary he can't fathom is a single egg in his collection that he doesn't recognize.

I won't spend a lot of time on each of the Penguin's "golden egg" crimes, but they all share a cosmological aspect, in that they reproduce scientifically observable ornithological factoids. Like most of the ego-driven Bat-villains, the Penguin gives the lawmen a clue as to his impending plans. In one scene, he sends the remnants of a herring-gull eggshell to police HQ. Batman, whose knowledge rivals that of the super-crook, knows that the crime will follow the herring gull's pattern of dropping clams from great heights in order to break their shells. So of course the Penguin uses a helicopter with a claw-attachment to lift a safe out of a skyscraper-office.
Each crime is an occasion for writer Finger to show off his research into bird-lore, and in one of the endeavors, Penguin's main crime is accompanied by a distraction-technique, fooling the Dynamic Duo into chasing the mad laugh of a "kookaburra."

In the end, the crimefighters trail their foe to his hideout. Penguin gets the drop on them with one of his umbrellas, one holding an artificial bomb-egg. (If he'd been the TV-villain Egghead, he would have dutifully called it an "eggs-plosive.") Penguin is hoist on his own petard when the "mystery egg" hatches, releasing a baby alligator that bites his shin and allows the heroes to disarm him. He returns to durance vile as usual, not forswearing crime as such, but casting a pox on all eggs.

MYTHCOMICS: [THE ORIGIN OF BATMAN], DETECTIVE COMICS #33 (1939)

I remarked in THE LONG AND SHORT OF MYTH PT. 1 that the shortest comics-story in which I've found mythic content was this 1962 BLONDIE comic-book story.  For one reason or another, though, it occurred to me that there were a couple of much better examples of two-page wonders. And here's the first of them.

I noted in LONG AND SHORT that most features this short are more in the nature of "vignettes" than of developed stories, saying that "even when [such narratives] do possess super-functionality, it's used for very restricted purposes." However, whereas the Blondie two-pager is the essence of what I've called an "unpopular myth," this two-pager-- which leads into a Gardner Fox story but which has been sometimes been credited to Bill Finger-- has become a very popular myth in many iterations, in many media-- and this despite the vignette's probable indebtedness to Lee Falk's PHANTOM comic strip.

Clearly the Batman origin satisfies my demand that even in two pages the author must create enough elements of Aristotelian complication to make possible a mythic discourse. I'm not quite sure from the PHANTOM excerpt that it does so, since I haven't seen the sequence in context. The maybe-Finger narrative, however, presents the (originally juvenile) reader with a more dynamic opening that Falk's Phantom origin. Young Bruce Wayne actually witnesses the deaths of his parents, whereas the current Phantom only knows from hearsay how his ancestor suffered and thus bequeathed the role of the "Ghost Who Walks" to his descendants. Young Bruce's torment then becomes the fulcrum, the "middle" of the narrative, in which Bruce struggles to make sense of his parents' deaths by dedicating himself to crimefighting. The climax, in which a grown-up Wayne muses on the alleged "superstitious" nature of criminals, may be the primary element that the author derived from Falk, for the Phantom's undying nature is clearly an appeal to the superstitions of tribal peoples in the hero's jungle domain.

In theory, this vignette could have functioned as part of a superior myth-tale, much as Frank Miller's re-interpretation of the Bat-origin functioned within the greater scope of THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS narrative. However, this was not the case with the greater story that is preceded by the origin-vignette. I've established that Fox wrote some strong mythopoeic Bat-tales during this period, one of which, "Peril in Paris," appeared one month after Batman's origin. But the lead story of DETECTIVE #33-- the hero's seventh appearance, titled "The Batman Wars Against the Dirigible of Doom"-- is not one of the character's more notable outings. To the best of my knowledge no one has ever bothered to revive the villains behind the deadly dirigible-- Doctor Carl Kruger and his "Scarlet Horde"-- and Kruger's main schtick was to imitate the conquering ways of Napoleon Bonaparte with 20th century technology.

Happily, the Batman origin stands on its own, even if it has been subjected to endless ideological readings like those of Christopher Nolan, more or less along the lines of "Batman is a fascist because he's a rich guy who wants to keep down disenfranchised poor people, who wouldn't be holding people up for their belongings in a non-capitalist world." To such ideologues, it would be irrelevant that few of Batman's early rogues were common crooks. Even before the introduction of the Joker and the Catwoman in 1940, and the many other villains to come, the first year of Batman's feature was devoted to other exotic figures like Kruger, with names like Doctor Death and the Monk. None of these figures make good stand-ins for the oppressed proletariat. One might argue that over the years Batman encountered far more ordinary thugs than he did super-crooks, but one would still have to demonstrate some sense that these malefactors are opposed to some absolute vision of a law informed by rich (implicitly white) privilege. In contrast, many Bat-adventures focus on the ways in which crime victimizes ordinary citizens-- which I suppose an ardent Marxist would choose to view as mere "protective cover" for the "real" meaning.

Perhaps the one element of the origin-vignette that has remained irreducible to simple politics is the conclusion, in which Batman is inspired by the ominous appearance of a bat. In later years some writers would try to impute greater complications to the Bat-origin, but the simplicity of the original story foils all of these overly labored efforts. The original writer, be it Fox or Finger, intuited that the bat's main importance was to reflect the tormented darkness in the young hero's soul, not where the bat came from or what might have brought it through that window at the most propitious moment.

ADDENDUM 1-30-2018: Within the last few months I've read the first PHANTOM stories, and find that the vignette dealing with the original Phantom's origin does not have the "elements of Aristotelian complication" that I found in the "Batman origin" vignette.

MYTHCOMICS: "LAUGH, TOWN, LAUGH" (DETECTIVE COMICS #62 (1942)

In REFLECTIONS IN A MERCURIAL EYE PT. 1 I wrote:

...are only the "big events" worth considering in a pluralist "best of" list? Further, to extrapolate from a point Martin makes: are the first appearances of Batman's iconic villains their best "aesthetic" moments? Is the first Joker story the one every comics-fan ought to read? Will it tell the non-hardcore reader everything he wants to know about the Joker? Or would the reader be better off reading a less Gothic but arguably more "aesthetically pleasing' story like "The Joker's Millions" from DETECTIVE COMICS #180 (1952)?

Having uttered this challenge, I'm obliged to answer it more fully than I did above. Obviously I've given a partial answer by indicating that the first Joker story might not be the most representative of the character. As it happens, the Joker-tale from BATMAN #1 is a good rousing story. It appeals most to the kinetic potentiality. particularly because it features the Joker's first use of his smile-inducing "Joker venom" (horribly overused in current BATMAN comics, by the bye). But the story doesn't really tap into the mythopoeic potentiality of a clown-like villain.

What myth does the Joker incarnate? There's nothing new in my observing that one of the Joker's principal appeals is that he, like all clowns and harlequin-figures, provides a distorted "funhouse mirror" reflection of both normative society and human psychology. The tale in BATMAN #1 doesn't do this.

An untitled Bill Finger story in BATMAN #7 comes closer. In this narrative, the Joker invites a bunch of commonplace pranksters into his lair and encourages them to "up the ante" on their pranks, forcing them to fall in with his criminal activities. This is an unusual, interesting twist on the Joker, giving him some of the motifs of the Satanic tempter. However, Finger's story doesn't dwell very long on the role of the pranksters, and it devolves into another enjoyable, but hardly mythopoeic, Batman-Joker chase scene.

Similarly, some stories explore the dramatic potentiality more than the kinetic one. The aforementioned "Joker's Millions," which GCD hypothetically credits to David Vern, is one of these, as is another from the same year, also by Vern: "The Joker's Utility Belt," which earned some fannish fame when it was broadly adapted for the third episode of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries. But neither of these 1952 stories really gives the reader a "funhouse mirror" view of the world.

For my money, the earliest Joker story that succeeds as a myth hails from 1942, written by Bill Finger and executed by Kane, Robinson, and Roussos. As this splash page makes clear, it involves the Joker providing his own ghoulish takes on the familiar jokes found in the legendary "Joe Miller's Joke Book:"

Nothing could seem less fraught with horror than such cornball humor as the riddle of why the fireman wore red suspenders-- until the Joker performs his take on the story:

To be sure, there's an important aspect of profit in the story. It wasn't enough for the 1940s Joker to murder a lot of people: the villain clearly measured his success by his ability to rip off money and expensive items. Not long before the Joker makes his latest escape from prison, a famous comedian shuffles off from this mortal coil. After he's died, he leaves clues to five other comedians (all parodies of famous 1940s funnymen), alleging that if they can manage to read the puzzle behind the clues, they can find their way to a fabulous treasure. For some reason, when rich people make weird bequests like this one, it apparently never occurs to them that some uninvited party might trespass on this little game, and start killing the clue-holders to get their clues.  The clue-trope was an old idea even in 1942, but the Joker isn't solely motivated by gain. He's also offended at having been excluded from the bequest to the great comedians, a rationalization that has some precedence in the folkloric story of Sleeping Beauty

"They dare hold a contest of this nature without inviting me! Hah! I'll invite myself! Ha ha ha!"

The intervention of Batman and Robin prevents the villain from knocking off more than two of his intended five victims, but Finger provides another twist here: Robin is obliged to save one man by providing artificial respiration, but his life-saving duties prevent him from saving Batman from capture by the villain. The Joker takes the bound Bat-hero to his private lair, and it leads to an exchange in which the Joker states outright his personal involvement in their running battles.

For a moment, he seems to revert to his original status, as a macabre criminal who simply wants Batman dead and gone:

And then, in an inspired Finger-outburst, the Joker rationalizes his desire to keep the hero alive for the sake of the game they play:

And so the Joker carries out his super-villainous project in one of the better death-traps of the period: a variation on the "lady or the tiger" scheme-- and even this fits loosely with the story's overall pattern, in which the villain comes up with new, more macabre takes on familiar situations. Batman wins out, of course, and Finger even provides an ironic touch near the close. The Joker gets hold of the treasure-- a set of priceless pearls-- and then flings them away, believing that they're worthless because they've lost their luster. Not only does the hero arrive to beat the villain into submission, he also provides a know-it-all lecture, informing the Joker that the pearls are still valuable and that their luster has only temporarily faded due to not being in contact with human flesh for a time.

Incidentally, this is one of the last Golden Age stories in which DC Comics allowed the Joker to kill victims. In the same year, he was executed for his crimes in "The Joker Walks the Last Mile" (DETECTIVE #64). However, the Joker has his henchmen utilize a special potion to jolt him back to life-- and then the judge rules that the super-crook can't be tried for any previous crimes, due to double jeopardy. From then on, DC was generally careful not to have him commit any new murders for which he could again be executed-- and so things remained until 1973, when Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams conceived of the idea that since the evildoer was criminally insane, he couldn't be executed-- not even for a never-ending series of murders that would soon make Hannibal Lecter seem like a piker by comparison.