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.  

THE FIRST TIME I SAW ALFRED (DIE)

 

I don't remember where I recently heard someone bring up DC's possible reasons for letting editor Julie Schwartz kill off the faithful butler Alfred in 1964, but it was probably in a podcast like this one. The cited podcast reports, but does not credence, the idea that Schwartz was in any way worried about the alleged problems of having three men live alone in Wayne Manor, which had been raised by Wertham in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT ten years before. Allegedly, the story goes, Schwartz immediately brought in Dick Grayson's Aunt Harriet to occupy the mansion, so that her feminine presence would allay suspicions about any hanky-panky between Bruce and Dick.

This unfounded theory intrigued me enough to blow an hour or so scanning an online pirate site for all the Schwartz issues of BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS after the introduction of Aunt Harriet and up until the revival of Alfred, and guess what?

Auntie's hardly in most of the stories. If anything, she was usually just seen serving dinner for a few panels, if that, and she had far less interaction with Bruce and Dick than the character in the BATMAN teleseries did. The comic-book Aunt Harriet didn't know the secret identities of the millionaire and his ward, but if Schwartz had any idea of having Harriet, through intention or accident, endanger the heroes' clandestine activities, he didn't follow through. There's exactly one story wherein Harriet suspects that her charges might be the Dynamic Duo. But when she's proven wrong through the usual shenanigans, the matter is never raised again. After Alfred's brought back to life and returns to Wayne Manor, there's a moment in which Harriet plans to leave, but Bruce and Dick talk her into staying. They needn't have bothered, for though Schwartz remained editor for about fifteen more years, even he didn't bother insisting on her presence, and she just faded into the woodwork.

In addition, Schwartz barely took advantage of an easy way to counter homosexual suspicions: by giving the two heroes heterosexual relationships. Fans will never know if this was the reason for the introduction of various female presences during the Batman-run of editor Jack Schiff-- pesky photographer Vicky Vale in 1948, Batwoman in 1956, and Bat-Girl in 1961. Yet the way Batwoman and Bat-Girl were paired off with Batman and Robin respectively gave some credence to the "Placate Wertham Theory," as did the long exile of Catwoman from DC comics due to Wertham's complaints about her. When Schwartz took over both Bat-books in 1964, he dumped all the rotating Schiff characters-- but that didn't mean he couldn't have come up with one or two token girlfriends to take the place of the Schiff Sirens. 

Schwartz's intention to focus on the "detective" angle of Batman's persona resulted in a lot of stories with almost zero female presence. Occasionally Batman and Robin would help out some poor pitiful damsel whose boyfriend was in peril somewhere, but really-- if there had been homosexual readers who wanted to fantasize a "wish dream" of Batman and Robin together, it would have been easy to ignore Aunt Harriet's nearly nugatory presence to facilitate such fantasies.

There was one early, almost half-hearted attempt to make a romance possible, but for Bruce Wayne rather than Batman. In BATMAN #165 (1964), Batman meets a serious young policewoman, Patricia Powell, who discloses to the masked hero that she has a thing for Bruce Wayne, even though she's only seen the handsome millionaire from afar. This short tale, and a follow-up in the next issue, tease the reader with what may happen when Patricia finally gets the chance to meet her idol face to face. But Schwartz evidently lost interest in the idea, for the second story doesn't even resolve its "what happens when they meet" cliffhanger. 

Not until after 1966, when Alfred was back and Harriet was slowly on her way out, did the two Bat-features begin re-emphasizing female characters. Some became established members of the mythos, like Poison Ivy, the second Batgirl, and a revived Catwoman. Others only appeared only once or twice, like Alfred's niece Daphne Pennyworth, for whom Robin briefly had a thing, but were still more memorable than the Schwartz "damsels" from the first couple of years. (Incidentally, the backstory of Niece Daphne was possibly recycled into that of the Batgirl in the 1997 BATMAN AND ROBIN.) The slow increase in memorable Bat-females after 1966 was probably the reaction of Schwartz, or one of his superiors, to the success of the teleseries that year, that it was a good idea to include a few more charismatic females, as the TV show did. 

So my laborious answer to the "Aunt Harriet" question is that if Schwartz had some hope that her presence would inspire good detective stories, that hope was dashed, because most of the scripts just shunted the old lady off to the side. Schwartz may not have had any strong reason for getting rid of Alfred, who in the past had proved quite useful to Bat-writers seeking to craft detective-stories. But rather than having some arcane fear about "three men living together," Schwartz probably just wanted another means of divorcing his regime from that of his predecessor. The fact that Alfred didn't just get written out like Vicky, Batwoman and Bat-Girl was probably a sop to those fans who would have complained had the faithful butler simply vanished.  

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.

 

PARADIGM SCHIFF

 

On occasion I’ve found fault with the kind of criticism that concentrates only on the “firsts” or the “big events” in comic book history (or in any arena of fiction, genre or otherwise). While no one can read everything— sometimes, not even all the stories centered around an evergreen serial character like Batman—it should be kept in mind, as I mentioned here, that the first Joker story is not necessarily the best Joker story.

When I picked up a cheap copy of 2018’s DC COMICS SUPER HEROINES: 100 GREATEST MOMENTS, I knew that “firsts” and “big events” would be the main concern of the book’s author, Robert Greenberger. All of the “100 Greatest Moments” tomes are big, heavily illustrated coffee-table books, spotlighting various aspects of DC comics history. Usually the book touch only adequately upon the history of the company’s first forty years while giving heavier coverage to the developments of the last four decades. I don’t especially begrudge this editorial decision. Every generation has its own preferences in popular culture, and if you’re selling a coffee table book to readers in the 2010s, it probably ought to concentrate on subject matter of interest to readers in the 2010s.

For that reason, I won’t cavil at the choices made by Greenberger and/or his editors. I could complain, say, that a major Silver Age heroine like Elasti-Girl gets only two pages, and that she’s only given a couple of panels fighting (or just starting to fight) a giant robot. But I can appreciate that the comics-reading paradigm has shifted: that, from the eighties onward, super heroines became a lot more important to hardcore comics-fans than they ever were to the more casual readers who used to pick up funnybooks at the corner store. So it’s all but inevitable that Harley Quinn gets a lot more coverage than Elasti-Girl, and I don’t take issue with Greenberger’s choices in any serious way.

What does give me pause, though, is a passage in which he puts forth an inaccurate paradigm with respect to the history of DC’s treatment of its super villains. I think it’s more a mistake than anything, based on inaccurate recollections. Still, the way in which DC changed its practice of using bizarre villains in the Silver Age made a difference to the way they told superhero stories for all future decades. Today, almost every superhero published by every publisher has a “rogue’s gallery.” It’s hard to remember that even a hero like Batman, renowned for a memorable cast of villains since the 1940s, spent his first fifteen years fighting ordinary crooks rather than super-criminals. A shift in this paradigm did occur after the establishment of the Comics Code in 1954, but it’s not quite the same as what Greenberger reports on page 156, where he’s trying to sum up the involved history of how Catwoman, absent from DC titles for twelve years, was returned to “active service” in a 1966 issue of LOIS LANE. Greenberger writes:

In the 1950s, DC Comics decided to retire its costumed criminals in reaction to congressional scrutiny of the comic book field. That all changed in the 1960s as the New Look Batman titles began to reintroduce the villains, fueled by the January 1966 debut of the ABC BATMAN series.

The short version of my disagreement with Greenberger is this: if anything, it was the non-costumed criminals who started appearing less, while in the post-1954 BATMAN comics, long-time editor Jack Schiff continued to add to the rogues in the gallery of the Caped Crusader.

To begin the long version, though, Greenberger’s sweeping statement, applied not just to Batman but to the whole DC line of the 1950s (by which I think the writer really means 1954-1959), makes no sense. Throughout the decade the company published the Superman and Wonder Woman features, and though neither feature boasted a huge rogues’ gallery in the fifties, I see no evidence of a moratorium in those stories, given that Brainiac appeared in 1958 and Angle Man in 1954. Further, in the late 1950s, some time after the institution of the Comics Code, the company launched titles for three key superhero titles: the Flash, Green Lantern, and the Justice League. True, not until the 1960s proper did these three features soon generating large quantities of rogues. But when these respective features got going, those heroes’ opponents were usually either alien menaces or costumed crooks, with a steadily diminishing presence of non-costumed lawbreakers.

I should mention that before the publication of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern and Justice League features, and before the Barry Allen Flash’s official series began—all in 1959-- editor Jack Schiff was also giving Batman a combination of both costumed crooks and alien menaces. It’s for the “aliens in BATMAN” that Schiff became reviled by early fans, partly because most of the stories were pretty bad. Editors Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz—the one known respectively for most of the Superman features, while the other was renowned for those three fledgling series of the late fifties (among others)—had been SF-fans in youth, and so they understood how to use SF-tropes in kids’ comics books. Jack Schiff was not a SF-fan, and so he accepted a lot of bad space-opera stories that clashed with the basic concept of the Caped Crusader.

But Batman’s ET-encounters didn’t crowd out the super-villain tales, though they might have helped edge out the mundane crime stories. (It’s worth remembering that when Frederic Wertham launched the public jeremiad that led to the Comics Code’s formation, the psychiatrist ranted far more against crime comics than those featuring long-underwear heroes.) Between 1954 and 1959 the Joker appeared four times, and that’s without counting an appearance in the Superman-Batman feature in WORLD’S FINEST. The Penguin may have had a mild moratorium on his adventures, since he only appeared once in 1956 and didn’t show his beak again until 1963, though that second appearance is still way in advance of the 1966 TV show. Two-Face was revived in 1954 and never appeared for the rest of the decade, but he hadn’t been used that often even in the Golden Age.

Of the classic Golden Age villains still extant, only Catwoman—who had appeared in three 1954 stories—seemed to get completely mothballed for the next twelve years, until, as Greenberger notes, she re-appears in LOIS LANE (as does the Penguin, for his second Silver Age appearance). No one has ever proved that DC had an anti-Catwoman policy, though it may be significant that the Princess of Plunder is the only costumed villain specifically mentioned in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, where Doctor Wertham complains about the nasty influence of her whip on young minds.

But Schiff, as stated, continued to build up the Bat-gallery, even if none of these super-crooks were quite on the level with the best Golden Age malefactors.

The Mirror-Man appears right in the cutoff year, 1954, though he doesn’t show up again until 1963.

The Mad Hatter, who borrows the name of a 1948 villain but who is essentially a new character, appears first in 1956 and then again in 1964.

The Signalman appears both in 1957 and 1959 before making one more appearance in 1961 as “the Blue Bowman.”

The Terrible Trio, aka the Fox, the Shark, and the Vulture, make a 1958 debut and then pop up once more in 1963.

And two one-shot villains, False Face and Mister Zero (later Mister Freeze), made their respective debuts in 1958 and 1959, after which both were adapted to the 1966 show, even though only Freeze became ensconced as a Bat-rogue from then on.

And of course, for the remainder of Schiff’s four-year custodianship in the sixties, he also introduced such familiar characters as a new Clayface and the Cat-Man, explicitly introduced to compensate for the lack of a cat-crime crook. Schiff also introduced a lot of lesser foes—Mister Polka Dot, anyone? —but even those examples prove that he bought a lot of stories with fancy-dressed felons.

So the paradigm is this: Schiff, far from cutting down on costumed antagonists, started beefing up Batman’s rogues’ gallery long before the revised versions of Flash and Green Lantern even had regular foes. I’m not surprised that this minor aspect of comic-book history got lost in the shuffle, though I am a little surprised that Greenberger, born in 1958 and thus a guy raised in the Silver Age, allowed himself to make such an erroneous statement. I can only assume it was done in haste, trying to simplify an involved subject for modern comics-fans, who have no particular reason to care about the policies of DC Comics in the 1950s, much less the accomplishments, good and bad, of comics-editor Jack Schiff.

ADDENDUM: Just after completing this essay, I read ALTER EGO #26 (2003) for the first time, and I came across a snippet in which Julie Schwartz sort-of promoted one aspect of the Schiff falsehood. Schwartz says, "fortunately, the one thing I did was to bring back the villains that Jack Schiff had neglected."

That's not quite the same as the assertion that Schiff didn't use villains at all. But Schiff did revive two Golden Age villains, essentially remaking them into new characters (Mad Hatter and Clayface). How many old villains did Schwartz revive? I only remember three during the sixties-- the period when Schwartz was editing the Bat-books to his preferences-- namely Riddler, Scarecrow and Killer Moth. And not that many new Schwartz villains of the sixties grabbed the fans. Blockbuster maybe-- but Eraser? Cluemaster? Spellbinder? His editorship in the seventies seems more like him kicking back and letting the writers do what they wanted, We did get the revivals of Deadshot and Hugo Strange then, but I don't know how much to credit Schwartz with those. I guess Schwartz made more use of Joker, Penguin and Catwoman, but some of that was due to the TV show.

I welcome other fans' input, since I'm not sure if I'm forgetting some important Bat-foes.

THE BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY PT. 3

Regarding the first three ages that I assigned to the Batman franchise here, modern fandom knows little or nothing about what concerns attended the transitions from one phase to the other, be it on the part of the producers or the readers. Since the BATMAN titles did not start carrying regular letters-pages until 1959, fans today cannot know what was on the mind of the fans in the 1940s as they saw Batman's adventures change from the weird horror of the first period to the Gould-like sophistication of the second one. Nor did the producers of the Batman comics call attention to the changes when they started having Batman encounter more aliens and magic imps in the hero's "Warm and Fuzzy Age," though a few fan-writers recorded their (generally negative) impressions in the burgeoning world of fanzines.

In the letters-page of the BATMAN features, we do have some clues as to how both comics makers sought to portray the transition from "Warm and Fuzzy" to "the New Look," as well as contemporary reactions by readers. It's a subject that might reward an exhaustive study, were I writing an essay on the topic for academic publication. But I'm only writing this blog largely for my own amusement, I'll confine myself to just a few representative quotes.

The first "New Look" Batman comic to appear on U.S. news-stands was DETECTIVE COMICS #327 (May 1964).  The letters-page does not print any responses to the preceding issue by Jack Schiff, substituting instead half a page to the plans Julie Schwartz (who is, however, not mentioned in the text) has for the title. The page's other half is allotted to a letter from Big Name Fan Tom Fagan talking about the fourth annual Halloween parade in Rutland, Vermont, in which he mentions that the parade included several members of the Batman Family-- including newly dumped semi-regular characters Batwoman and Bat-Mite. Schwartz, or whoever may have written his copy for him, does not precisely denigrate the works of the previous era, but the copy does extol the "New Look" over its predecessor in subtle ways.

There's a "new look" about the BATMAN art (the handiwork of the peerless pencil-and-pen pair, Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella)-- and there's a slicker, more dramatic style of storytelling (from the "talented" typewriter of John Broome).

The ensuing paragraph further informs the readers that a new backup feature, that of the Elongated Man, has ousted the Martian Manhunter from the pages of DETECTIVE COMICS; this section does not specifically champion the qualities of the new feature except to mention-- evidently playing to the hardcore fans in the audience-- that its writer and artist, Gardner Fox and Carmine Infantino, are both winners of awards from the Academy of Comic Books Arts and Sciences. Schwartz's announcements conclude with obliquely informing the readers of the "big event" to come in the next issue of DETECTIVE-- which, as all good Bat-fans should know, was the death of Alfred, a "big event" subsequently reversed when the producers of the teleseries wanted to keep the Bat-cave's butler around on the show.

The art of the "New Look" Batman is not compared to that of the previous raconteurs, largely Dick Sprang and Sheldon Moldoff, because all of this art was billed as having been produced by Bat-creator Bob Kane. Some fans were certainly deceived: a letter from BATMAN #172 credits the improvements on the art to the inking of artists like Giella and Sid Greene on "Kane."  But the letters-page's comment on the writing of John Broome is without a doubt an attempt to persuade readers that the "New Look" would offer improvements on the previous period's writing, calling Broome's style "slicker" and "more dramatic."

One cannot always be sure that all the letters in Silver Age lettercols were genuine, save those that were written by "Big Name Fans" whose frequent appearances insure that the editors were not likely to have used their names flagrantly.  The letters-page of BATMAN #168 leads off with a representative comment by a known letter-hack of the period, Leonard Tirado, and this reader makes no bones about unfavorable comparisons to the previous Schiff regime as he comments on a story from BATMAN #165:

"As all of us in fandom know, the new look policy in BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS will mean newer and better stories like those featured in the current BATMAN. All previous attempts at faked-up science-fiction have been wiped off the somewhat depreciated slate of the dynamic duo. "The Man Who Quit the Human Race" was different than all others in that the science element was just used for what it was intended... to make the tale plausible, and not serve as a cover-up for "A monster is on the loose, boys" type plot."

Since one of the more vocal fan-complaints in later years concerned the inappropriate injection of science-fiction motifs into the Batman stories, Tirado's 1964 comment suggests that some readers didn't mind such motifs in Batman; they just didn't approve of seeing these elements dumbed down for the purpose of simplistic monster-stories, as Tirado implies was the case during the Schiff regime. For Tirado at least, Schwartz and his stable of raconteurs succeeded in bringing a "slicker, more dramatic" feel to the Batman franchise. Modern fans might not see that much difference between the Gardner Fox story in BATMAN #165 and previous alien-happy offerings from the Warm and Fuzzy Era. But there can be little question that some readers not only found Schwartz's editorship more pleasing, and that they found his version of Batman more "legitimate" even though Schiff's version, having been authorized by DC Comics, was just as legitimate. For many years, most fans echoed Tirado's verdict in respect to "Schiff vs. Schwartz," though in recent years Schiff's legacy has received a bit more critical attention.

The issue of legitimacy, however, was raised with far greater force with the debut of the BATMAN teleseries in 1966. Again, while one cannot be 100% sure of the authenticity of Silver Age letters-pages, I tend to consider genuine letters expressing grievances about how the teleseries was adversely affecting the comic books. My representative example is from another BNF, Peter Sanderson. from BATMAN #194:

"... it seems to me that you [editors] think, 'If the readers want campiness, let's give some to them-- if we don't, we won't sell as many mags,' Now, look. Your magazine will NOT drop in sales if you get rid of the 'batbrellas,' the 'holy ____.' If you think that your sales will be crippled without campiness, remove the camp stuff from BATMAN and DETECTIVE and have those two mags for people like me, and for the Camp-ers, put Batman in another mag wherein he teams up with the Inferior Five, because to readers who won't read an 'Uncamp Batman,' he's just a bundle of laughs."

I see one implied element held in common by all three of the quotes cited. Schwartz (or his spokesman) emphasizes "slickness" in a non-pejorative manner, meaning something like "streamlined," and claims that the work will be "more dramatic," which connotes a better appreciation of how to make stories work in dramatic terms. Many fans of the period would agree that the stories from Jack Schiff's editorship had become too ritualized, too formulaic, with rare exceptions like the fan-favorite story "Robin Dies at Dawn." Schwartz was no less invested in delivering formulaic stories-- certainly, in later comments the editor cantankerously disparaged his Silver Age readership.  At the time, though, Schwartz understood that one way to boost the readership of the Bat-books might be to appeal to the hardcore fans, who didn't want to see their favored genre as routine and repetitive, and enjoyed seeing genre-works that paid closer attention to matters of drama and verisimilitude.

Oddly, what the BATMAN teleseries delivered was closer in spirit to Schiff than to Schwartz. Whereas Schiff invoked formulaic elements simply in the belief that this was what the readers ought to want, the TV producers invoked those elements for purposes of spoofing and/or satirizing. Both were, for very different reasons, invoking the Langerian concept of *the gesture,* but in a very ostentatious manner, calling attention to the gestural nature of the fantasy so much that I'm tempted to consider it a sub-division of the gesture, which I will provisionally label "artifice." Thus Sanderson dismisses the camp teleseries as irrelevant to what he wants, since it's just "a bundle of laughs."

In conclusion, this brief overview shows that the original statements of Noah Berlatsky, cited here, were flawed in presuming that all comics-fans ought to have embraced the teleseries if they wanted legitimacy. I don't think most fans of any period wanted legitimacy if it meant trashing the original stories that they enjoyed; it's my impression that fans wanted Batman to be loved for the very escapism he incarnated, not as an ironic commentary on some in human society or psychology. And even the considerations of legitimacy were secondary, just to wanting better Batman stories.

FOUR AGES OF THE DARK KNIGHT

Before proceeding to more questions regarding percevied issues of "legitimacy" within the BATMAN comics franchise, a quick sketch of the first four "ages of the Dark Knight" seems appropriate, to show in capsule-fashion how the franchise changed over the years in creative terms.

I'll christen the ages as follows:

(1) THE FEVER-DREAM AGE: The first year of Batman's adventures in his initial two titles may have started out with a swipe from a SHADOW pulp-tale, but most of the stories read more like THE SPIDER than THE SHADOW. During this short-lived, pre-Robin period, the artists favored lots of chiaroscuro effects and physical grotesquerie, and the plots leaped madly from one weird subject to another, from killer clowns to vampires to mad scientists to devil-men who turn people into flowers.

(2) THE DICK TRACY AGE.  In or around the introduction of Robin, stories took a more ratiocinative, procedural feel. Grotesquerie still appeared, notably with the 1942 introduction of Two-Face, but now it was subsumed by plots that were more nominally more logical, rather than simply lurching from one wild battle to another. Artist Dick Sprang did not work on Batman until 1943, but for fans of the feature Sprang's design-sense has become synonymous with this age.

(3) THE WARM AND FUZZY AGE.  In 1955, the producers of the Batman franchise, headed by editor Jack Schiff, took the first step in imitating the more successful Superman franchise captained by editor Mort Weisinger. In June 1955 Batman and Robin acquired the recurring character of "Ace the Bat-Hound," very possible in response to the introduction of Krypto in ADVENTURE COMICS #210 that March.

Some further additions to the "Batman Family" of the period actually predated any one-on-one comparable figures in the Superman Family, in that 1956's "Batwoman" predated the introduction of recurring character Supergirl in 1959.

However, it should be pointed out that Superman had encounter distaff versions of himself prior to 1956; they simply had never been intended as recurring or series-based characters, as with this 1951 super-powered version of Lois Lane.

Though Dick Sprang continued to contribute to the Batman features into the early 1960s, the artist most associated with the franchise in the early Silver Age was Sheldon Moldoff. Even in 1955, Moldoff can be seen trying to retain the hard edge of Sprang's line. However, by 1956 one can see Moldoff's line becoming more "warm and fuzzy" in that characters have a more rounded aspect. Indeed Big Name Fan Mike Tiefenbacher, former editor of THE COMIC READER, once commented that in this period Batman began to look rather chubby-cheeked, like the Legion's Bouncing Boy

Stories from this period became somewhat more antic, as Schiff endeavored to build up Batman's repertoire of costumed villains. However, the period has become better known among Batman fans for the introduction of the impish Bat-Mite, a clear derivation from Superman's spritely villain Mxyzptlk, and for the introduction of many contrived alien menaces. Possibly the editor had some idea of taking advantage of a moderate science fiction in comics of the late 1950s, but it should be said-- as I pointed out here-- that Mort Weisinger was also pursuing a similar strategy at the time.

(4) THE NEW LOOK AGE: Imps, aliens and the old members of the Batman Family all got the heave-ho in 1964, when editor Julius Scwhartz took over the Batman features and instituted the first overtly heralded change in the Batman family: what the cover of DETECTIVE COMICS #327 called "the New Look."  In BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY PT. 3 I'll deal with the ways in which the changeover was announced and some ways in which readers reacted, but for now I'll conclude by referencing, for anyone interested, this essay as to what was different about the "New Look."

QUICK BAT-HISTORY POST

I started commenting on a CBR forum about the alleged near-cancellation of the Batman comic book in the early 1960s, and it turned into a mini-essay on Bat-history.  Hence, with some adjustments, I'm printing it here too.

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There's a big problem with a lot of the out-of-context quotes we as fans encounter. I can believe someone may've told Bob Kane that DC was considering cancelling Batman, but was it someone making an accurate appraisal? Since we don't know who it was, maybe it was some DC employee trying to bring Bob Kane down a peg ("Hah, you think you're all that but your character's sales are in the toilet").


This page from the COMICS CHRONICLES demonstrates the fact that the sales weren't all that bad, and even if they were, it seems unlikely that even in '62 DC would have dumped a character with any potential for licensing. Note on the same site that WONDER WOMAN's sales are lower than either Bat-book. These days it's axiomatic that WW has often been kept around for her merchandising potential-- and Batman, unlike WW, had had two serials spun off from his comic (though I don't know how much merchandise either character generated in 1962).

I find it probable that though sales of the Bat-books weren't that good, DC editors probably focused first on discussions as to how to make them better, before anyone seriously considered dumping the titles.  Such cancellation *might* have allowed Bob Kane to take the property elsewhere, depending on the terms of his contract at the time.

I don't remember if Julie Schwartz ever said that he actively campaigned for the Batman assignment or not, but I can imagine him going after it, maybe not so much because he liked the character (JS often exhibited veiled contempt for comics-characters in later years) but simply to solidify his position in the company. Previous editor Jack Schiff probably didn't care one way or another about editing Batman, though he's been quoted as claiming that the aliens and such were forced on him and that he would rather have done more Earth-style villains. Interestingly, Schwartz, who was more of a SF-guy personally than Schiff, is the one who ends up doing what Schiff wanted to do; getting rid of (most) of the aliens and concentrating on villains, often reviving characters from earlier times as Schiff had (Schiff did new versions of Mad Hatter and Clayface; Schwartz updated the Scarecrow and the Riddler).