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."  

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 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.

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."

E.C.? P.C.!-- PART 2

The more I think about the matter, the stranger it seems to me that Gary Groth, as I noted in Part 1, should even raise the question of how "generous" William Gaines was to his artists.  What form of largesse could possibly be of any significance, given that Gaines neither allowed creators to own their own works, nor returned art to the artists?  Why not just laud the EC work in terms of its excellence, and leave the question of Gaines' ethical deportment for separate consideration?

Gaines, I believe, is frequently given a "pass" in these matters due to the critical position EC Comics occupies in the minds of the Bloody Comic Book Elitists.  As example-- and this is, to be sure, not a COMICS JOURNAL-specific concern-- I cite these passages from ALTER EGO's interview with Sheldon Moldoff, conducted by Roy Thomas.
 

MOLDOFF: Well, as I said, you've got to come out at the right time and the right place. An interesting part of my career-and I have written proof, since I've kept all my records from 'way back-
When Max Gaines was killed in his motorboat accident, his son Bill took over EC. I had met Bill before, but now he was in charge, and I was doing some work for him. I asked him, "How's things going?" He said, "Lousy. The family's considering closing up and getting out of the comic book business." I said, "Bill, if I give you an idea which I think will be the next trend, will you give me a contract and a percentage of sales if it shows a profit? I only want it if there's a profit; I'd get paid a percentage of the profit. I think I know what's going to come in next." And he said, "I'd be glad to!" I said, "Okay, I'm going to bring you a couple of titles and a little breakdown, and show you what I have in mind."

Moldoff asserted that this handshake deal wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.

 So I went running down there, and they're still at Lafayette Street, and I said, "Bill, what is this?" He said, "I knew you'd be here." I said, "Well, do you blame me? We have a contract, and you're supposed to use mine! I'm supposed to be the horror man!" He said, "Well, I decided I'm not going to give percentages. I don't want to give percentages. I'll give you all the work you want, but no percentages." I said, "No, we had an agreement, and I want you to honor it!" He said, "Well, there's nothing you can do about it, Shelly. I decided I'm not paying anybody percentages."

 Thousands, perhaps millions, of words have been written to pillory the employees of Marvel and DC for their heinous acts in "stealing" the works of Jerry Siegel, Jack Kirby, et al.  In the quote reprinted in Part 1, Gary Groth accused Marvel of "impoverishing" its employees.

How many words have been written, online or in print, to excoriate William Gaines for his alleged crime, for which there's at least as much evidence as there is for the "crimes" of Stan Lee?

Has anyone so much as alluded to Moldoff's allegation when making an assessment of Gaines, be it in the JOURNAL or anywhere?  I honestly would like to know, as I can't very well read everything.


Assuming that my hunch is correct-- that Gaines' problematic status has received little to no comment-- am I alleging a conscious conspiracy to protect the rep of William Gaines, because he's one of the Fathers of Quality Comics That Snooty Elitists Like Best?

No.

But I think that elitists are unconsciously selective when it comes to the purported offenses of their heroes.  Gaines' offenses, even if they are genuine, are just old news, no one cares about whether or not he cheated a minor player like Moldoff.  But Stan Lee's offenses against Jack Kirby, DC's against Siegel and Shuster-- these are "evergreen," because Marvel and DC remain "the enemy," now and forever, World Without End.

In Part 3 I'll address certain contemporary reactions to EC comics.

E.C.? P.C.! -- PART 1

So what could possibly be "politically correct" about the "E.C." Comics of the above title? 

Taking the second item first, Wikipedia provides an exhaustive definition of "politically correctness," claiming that it "is a term which denotes language, ideas, policies, and behavior seen as seeking to minimize social and institutional offense in occupational, gender, racial, cultural, sexual orientation, certain other religions, beliefs or ideologies, disability, and age-related contexts, and, as purported by the term, doing so to an excessive extent."

This would not seem particularly applicable to EC Comics itself, given that the company was known for championing social issues in an uncompromising manner. 

However, I'll argue here that the term does apply, not to the original comic books, but to their forthcoming republication by the company Fantagraphics, which is also known for (generally) championing their own set of issues.  The full announcement can be read here, as well as Gary Groth's remarks on the project.  It is these remarks by Groth that I find to be "politically correct." In the following paragraph, Groth minimizes any potential "offense" in his reading of William Gaines in order to distance him from the common ruck of other "mainstream publishers."

The more I think of Gaines, the greater a publishing figure he becomes," Groth continued. "EC couldn't have existed without Gaines, specific books couldn't have happened without Gaines. He nurtured a lot of books, and had a sense of quality that virtually no publisher could match with the possible exception of St. John. Although he was somewhat paternalistic, you can see that from today's point of view, Gaines was incredibly generous to the artists by the standards of back then. He's a remarkable figure in comics publishing. I think among mainstream publishers he still might stand alone.

The "politically correct" keyword of this paragraph is the word "generous."  In what way was Gaines "generous" to his artists?  Did he give them the right to own their stories?  Did he return their art?  Did he occasionally fete them with expensive dinners and similar largesse?


Of the three rhetorical examples I posed above, I have only heard an affirmative with regard to the last one: Gaines did apparently dole out largesse to *some* of his contributors.

However, I don't get the sense that mere largesse has ever been the standard by which either Groth or most of his Comics Journal contributors have judged publishers.  The common position voiced at the Journal is that any publisher who does not fully endorse creator ownership is the lowest barnacle on the ship.  A quick example of this disdain for such publishers appears in this Journal essay by Groth, in the context of a historical argument about Marvel's return of art to its artists:

By 1976, because of a confluence of historical circumstances, which mostly amounted to raised commercial and creative consciousness among artists, both Marvel and DC were returning original art drawn for their current comics. DC also dug through their archives at that time and returned to the artists all the old art in its possession. Marvel did not until 1984, when, under pressure from artists, they too began to return older original art. But there was a catch. The artist had to sign a one-page “release form” that was a retroactive work-for-hire contract, cementing Marvel’s ownership of the reproduction rights of the art and any concepts or ideas within it. Most artists didn’t have any objections to signing this, or at least not sufficient objections to prevent them from signing it in order to get their original art back (which they could, for example, sell on the then-growing original art market — which was an important economic consideration, insofar as working for Marvel over their lifetimes had impoverished many of them).

I'm fairly sure that with some digging I could find passages that excoriated, in much harsher terms, any publishers who purchased work under the "work-for-hire" stipulations, but this one will do for now.  Marvel is bad because it exploited its artists and continued that exploitation by enforcing these retroactive "work for hire" contracts in order to protect Marvel from legal complications.

Why then is Gaines immune from this lofty scorn?  In what way did he take care of his artists, and how if at all was it different from the standard practices of Gaines' contemporaries, including the company that would later be known as Marvel?

Or is Groth's praise of Gaines influenced by a "political" need to distance Gaines from those practices?

More in Part 2.