Detective Comics #443 - Manhunter Meets Batman!

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. 

***

Everyone knows the greatest comic ever created is Detective Comics #443.

Admittedly, I say that without ever having read it.

But who needs to read it? It's got Batman. It's got Manhunter. The cover's by Jim Aparo. The insides are by Walt Simonson. It's a 100-page comic and its lead tale is blessed with the title Gotterdammerung!

There's no more chance of it not being the greatest comic of all time than there is of a Red Nails adaptation by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith not being the greatest comic of all time.

Admittedly, if the tale's author Archie Goodwin had titled it Batterdammerung, it would have been even better but I can only conclude the man lacked my remarkable taste and good judgement.

So, now that we know it's the greatest comic of all time, without even having read it, how does it stand up when one actually does read it?

In the wet streets of Gotham, a man has died.

That man is Dan Kingdom - private eye, master of the martial arts and friend of Batman - assassinated before he could tell the dark detective something about the prime minister of a land called Congola.

Fortunately, Bruce Wayne is, that very night, hosting a party for that very prime minister, giving his alter-ego the perfect chance to find out just why Kingdom was killed and what beans he was about to spill about whom.

Not so fortunately, the party's barely begun when the prime minister's assassinated too. It's starting to look like Batman's a straight-out jinx.

Unconcerned about that, our hero leaps into action and goes in pursuit of the killer but, before he can make him talk, is attacked by a mystery villain called The Enforcer who promptly decks him.

The Enforcer flees but Batman tracks him and the assassin to Nairobi where he encounters Paul Kirk - the Manhunter - who's planning a final and decisive attack on the secret HQ of the deadly Council who resurrected him from his death in World War Two and now plan to take over the world.

Not liking the sound of that kind of thing, Batman offers to help Kirk and his friends but is spurned by them because of his reluctance to kill. Batman takes it in good spirits and says that, in that case, he's headed off back to Gotham.

So, Kirk and his friends  Asano Nitobe, Christine St Clair and Kolu Mbeya set off to the Australian outback where the Council are currently keeping their headquarters.

On the plane there, we get a recap of how Kirk was resurrected by the Council, after dying in World War Two and now feels like a man out of time, giving us an impression of him as a dark Captain America.

But no sooner do they reach that secret HQ than it turns out Batman was fibbing and, by means not at all explained, has got to to the scene first and has already taken out two of the council's killers, convincing Kirk he might be of some use after all.

Thus it is that Batman fights the returning Enforcer while Kirk goes off in pursuit of Dr Myrkros, the coordinator behind the Council's schemes.

It's during this fight that we discover The Enforcer is none other than the supposed assassination victim Dan Kingdom and that the body found in Gotham was merely a clone of him, created by the Council!

Elsewhere, Kirk confronts Myrkros who's got himself a psionic helmet and uses it to blast the hero with deadly radiation. Thus, does Paul Kirk die a second time.

Or does he?

Realising it's all gone belly-up, Batman leads Kirk's friends away from the base and steals a plane in which they escape.

But, as that plane flees, a nuclear explosion erupts behind it, letting its passengers know that Kirk didn't die from the psionic attack but achieved one final resurrection before, at last, succeeding in destroying the base, Mykros and his Council all in one go. At last, the man who should have died decades ago can know peace.

It has to be said it's a very simple and straightforward tale that goes from plot point to plot point in the most linear and obstacle-free fashion possible but it wraps up the Manhunter saga efficiently enough and looks pretty as it goes about it.

Perhaps its main weakness is that, being designated a Batman tale, Bruce Wayne's alter-ego seems far more competent than Paul Kirk, managing to find the Council's base before Kirk and his friends do and defeating The Enforcer who seems to be too much for Kirk to handle. This is unfortunate, as the thrust of the tale is to wrap up the Manhunter saga and should, you'd have thought, therefore, centre around Kirk and his friends.

Come to think of it, strictly speaking, Batman could have been totally written out of the tale without any need for the central plot to be changed.

Oh well. Who cares? It's drawn with style and, as I've said, the cover's by Jim Aparo. The insides are by Walt Simonson. It's a 100-page comic and its lead tale's blessed with the title Gotterdammerung. If that doesn't keep a human being happy, what will?

Manhunter: Cobras of the Deep - Detective Comics #440.

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.

***

Thanks to the wonders of DC Comics' 100-page publications, we lovers of 1970s derring-do were treated to the exploits of the New Manhunter.

Which was all well and good - except most of us had never even heard of the old Manhunter.

Fortunately, Detective Comics #440 put that right, as it gave us the wartime Simon and Kirby classic Cobras of the Deep in which big-game hunter, turned battler of Nazism, Paul Kirk strikes yet another blow to Hitler's ambitions to create a Reich that will last a thousand years, by making sure it only lasts for twelve.

Determined to win the war, a German submarine captain concocts a plan to rid the Axis powers forever of the threat from their deadly nemesis Manhunter.

His plan is simple, invite our hero to a place and then blow him up by shooting the mountain of dynamite he's inadvertently standing on.

Unfortunately, the Nazi ne'er-do-well hasn't taken into account Kirk's ability to leap out of the way when things explode and, so, within mere panels, he's out to hunt-down his would-be assassins.

Donning a diving helmet they've left behind, he soon follows their trail to the bottom of the sea, where he's captured, before sabotaging their sub and bringing its crew to justice.

In truth, at nine pages, it's not a long tale. No longer, in fact, than an adventure from the new Manhunter. But it rolls along quickly and efficiently and still has a little time to take in the scenery. I especially like Kirk's one-panel meeting with a huge but passive octopus.

We get no real sense of who Paul Kirk is or what he's about, as he gets just three panels before changing into costume.

It's basically a typical piece of wartime comic book propaganda with incompetent Nazis who talk funny and a brave American dealing justice to them, thanks to his greater ingenuity and refusal to give up.

I was struck, however, by the tendency of the Nazi sailors to wear their uniforms while walking around on American soil and committing their clandestine acts. Frankly, from that, I'm not convinced they're the sharpest knives in Hitler's drawer.

Overall, it's a painless enough read but there's nothing at all in it that would have given anyone reason to think such a standard-issue adventurer had the potential to be revived as one of the most intriguing characters in comics.

STOP PRESS! 

Because Charlie47 demanded it, here's the panel which shows Manhunter's deathless encounter with an octopus.

The New Manhunter in Detective Comics #440. One man's battle with the council.

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.

***

When I was young, there were a hundred good reasons to read Detective Comics #440.

And every one of those reasons was a page.

But some pages were more reasony than others - and the final seven were the most reasony of them all.

For they were the ones which contained the all-new, all-improved Manhunter.

I say, "all -improved," but, for all I knew, he wasn't anything of the sort, as, up until this issue, I'd never read any tales of the old Manhunter who was, of course, one of DC's stable of Golden Age adventurers.

I did, however, know that - as delivered by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson - Paul Kirk's latest incarnation was a splendid character, armed to the teeth, equipped with a magnificent costume and capable of dealing with any threat life could throw at a man, whether it be tigers, multiple copies of himself or lunatic conspirators.

So, clearly, I loved it in my salad days but what of now?

As we join the action, Manhunter and his newly recruited accomplice Interpol agent Christine St. Clair are strolling down a street, for reasons that are never made clear, when her old boss Damon Nostrand tries to run them over. 

That is, of course, no more than a minor inconvenience to our hero who simply stabs Nostrand's car and then sets it on fire, blowing its driver up in the process.

This leads Manhunter to stroll into flashback mode and tell of how the secret organisation known as The Council recruited and trained him to be their assassin and how Nostrand had been the first victim they'd sent him out to kill.

Lest we think too unkindly of The Council, they did, at least, tell our hero of their mission to create a better world and that the removal of men like Nostrand is the only way to achieve it.

But, being a man of conscience, Manhunter had, instead, warned his intended victim - only for it to turn out Nostrand was in on it all and the mission was merely a test of Manhunter's loyalty.

After a quick battle with his own clones, Manhunter fled the scene and set about arming himself for his new life as an adversary of The Council.

The whole thing is a masterclass in concentrated story-telling as we get through a startling amount of plot and information in just seven pages, without it ever feeling rushed or any element ever feeling perfunctory. In fact, it really does feel like a twenty-page story until you make the effort to count the pages.

Everything about the thing works. Manhunter is a kind of dark Captain America, a 1940s one-man army revived in the modern world and having to find a new course for himself in this brave new era. The Council are sinister, grotesque and pathetic, a bunch of old men on life support, trying to reinvent humanity, and the fact that Paul Kirk is a man at war with an army of his own clones is a stroke of genius. Why on Earth have they not made a movie of this?

What did quickly strike me, re-reading it for the first time since the 1970s, is how similar Kirk's backstory also is to that of Shang-Chi, with a well-intentioned man being trained to kill by those who claim to have pure intentions, before recognising the sinister nature of his masters and turning against them.

But Manhunter's a very different kettle of fish to Shang-Chi, having lived a full and adventurous life long before he encountered The Council and having a less philosophical and more matter-of-fact nature. 

At face value, in his modern form, he's another of those ruthless, death-dealing characters who were suddenly all the rage in the era but what sets him apart from the likes of the Punisher, Hangman and myriad others is he doesn't seem to be insane and has a clear handle on right and wrong, meaning you can enjoy the sight of him killing people, without feeling uncomfortable about it.

The one thing that does feel like a letdown is that Manhunter's armoury of weapons feels nothing like as awesome now as it did back then, consisting, as it does, of two throwing stars, an antique pistol, a knife and a pair of shoulder pads. Thus, it is odd to see him travelling all the way to Nairobi to acquire it from one of the world's leading experts in the field, when you would have thought he could have got better tooled-up just by going to Walmart.

Detective Comics #440 - Ghost Mountain Midnight.

This post is brought to you by the kind sponsorship of Charlie Horse 47, via Patreon. Thank you, Charlie. There is, I am sure, a place in Heaven for you.

***

If ever there was a comic I bought for the cover, it was this one.

Admittedly, I also bought it because it starred Batman, was an issue of Detective Comics and contained a massive 100 pages of, no doubt, slam-bam action just asking to be read.

But most of all, I bought it because its cover featured a purple bear threatening our hero - as portrayed by Jolting Jim Aparo.

Well, that's all very well and great but what of the book's actual contents?

Bruce Wayne's on a date in a restaurant when a bunch of rednecks burst in and kidnap one of the waitresses.

Needless to say, it's mere moments before Bruce has made his excuses and, in his guise as Gotham's mysterious protector, gone off to deal with the abductors,

Despite being a man who can, apparently, beat up Superman any time he wants to, our hero's quickly vanquished by a single hillbilly with a rifle butt and then has to go trudging off to the wrongdoers' hometown, in order to make a second attempt at rescuing the girl who we now know is called Sarah Beth.

She is, it seems, the sister of her abductors and, for some reason, they believe it vital that they pop her clogs for her as soon as possible.

Upon arriving in town, our hero finds an uncooperative Sheriff who, like any responsible officer of the law, is more interested in finding an illegal still than in preventing the murder of waitresses and, so, Bats has to enter the local mountains where the kidnappers dwell, in order to fulfill his mission.

There, by eavesdropping, he discovers that, in order to keep a Native American curse at bay, the family believes it must, from time to time, sacrifice one of its own.

And this time is Sarah Beth's turn!

Clearly, Batman can't stand for that kind of nonsense and flings himself into the fray.

He's clearly been having fighting lessons since their last encounter because, despite being heavily outnumbered, he soon despatches the deluded simpletons and goes to rescue Sarah Beth from her chains.

That's when an inconvenient bear shows up.

But it's no ordinary bear.

It's a homicidal bear.

With not a picnic basket in sight and having been injured by fire, it's taken to eating people - and Batman's on the menu!

Not for long, he isn't. No mere twelve-foot tall agglomeration of teeth and claws is a match for the man the Germans know as Die Fledermausenmenschen and he soon sends it flying off a cliff to its doom.

But what a lucky break that is because, at the foot of that cliff, he finds the illegal still the sheriff told him about, concludes it was that which had burnt the bear, and then returns to town to give the lawman a good smack in the mouth, having deduced, on no great evidence, that he put the still there in the first place.

Mission accomplished.

I do like this tale. With its Deliverance meets Scooby-Doo plot, it's the sort of thing I love to see from a Batman story.

I do enjoy it when Batman's handled as a detective rather than a super-hero and this yarn, with its minor sense of mystery and its very simple plot, thus, appeals to me greatly.

I suspect it's not viewed as one of the all-time classic Batman adventures but it's solidly written by Archie Goodwin and cleanly drawn by Sal Amendola; with Dick Giordano's inks helping to lend it that look we associate with 1970s Batman.

So, yes, I can announce that, for me, with that cover, this story, that bear, and dozens of pages of back-up strips, this was definitely a book worth spending that 50 pence on.

Batman comics I have owned.

Holy smoke, Batman! In recent days, we've looked at the Superman comics I owned as a child. But, as we all know, Superman without Batman is like cow heel without tripe.

And that can only mean one thing.

It's time to look at the caped crusader's comics I once owned as a child.

Batman meets Man-Bat, again.

As a child, I was very taken with the fact that each tale in this collection represented a different decade - especially that one could represent the future, which hadn't even happened yet.

It was my one childhood taste of Neal Adams' Batman, as Bruce takes on a werewolf.

And you can read my review of that story, right here.

It's the first one hundred page comic I ever owned.

While investigating a murder at a circus, Batman and Robin find themselves up against the Catwoman and her tigers.

But the highlight of the issue for me was the dynamic duo finding themselves up against an island populated by robot dinosaurs. It was silly, it was corny and it was old but it had super-heroes and dinosaurs. What more could you want from a piece of fiction when you're ten?

I got this one in Blackpool and have fond memories of it.

At least, I have fond memories of the second tale in the issue, as it introduced me to the concept of fixative, the phrase, "Round Robin," and it mentioned the Battle of Hastings.

Sadly, I recall nothing of the tale that features the Scarecrow.

There's mayhem on a film set and, as the bodies pile up, Batman seems to be losing his touch. He even gets told off by Commissioner Gordon for not catching the perpetrator fast enough.

That's Commissioner Gordon who's never caught a criminal in his entire life.

It's the only issue of The Brave and the Bold I ever owned, as Batman and the de-powered Wonder Woman team up to do something or other.

To be honest, I don't recall much about the tale other than that it had some fairly spiffing Jim Aparo art that I remember taking the time to copy with my pencil and sketchbook. I learned much about drawing torsos from it.

This is the Tomb of the Unknown Batman.

The first Batman comic I ever owned was bought from an indoor market in Blackpool in 1972. Sadly, I have no idea what issue it was or what title it was.

I recall Batman climbing a tree and using bolas on some bad guys.

It also introduced me to his utility belt.

I remember being very taken with the bendy spikes on his gloves.

Straight after buying this one, I went into Timsons shoe shop.

Thankfully, the comic was more exciting than Timsons.

Well, I say that but, for all I know, Timsons was selling Clarks Wayfinders, which - with their built-in compass and animal-track recognition system - were the most exciting shoes ever made.

This was the mag that introduced me to Manhunter, a man who I have no doubt had a compass and animal-track recognition aids in his very own footwear, as he seemed to have everything else in the world concealed somewhere about his person.

You can read my review of this issue's main tale, right here.

One of my all-time favourite comic book covers, as Jim Aparo gives us a life or death struggle in the wilderness.

As in the issue above, there's a monster on the loose and it turns out not to be a monster. Clearly the spirit of Scooby-Doo was strong with the caped crusader at this point in history.

This comic introduced me to the Golden Age Manhunter.

Speaking of the Manhunter, Walt Simonson, the artist who revived that very strip, gives us a tale of a waxworks and a rich man who'll stop at nothing to own Batman's cape.

You can read my review of this issue, right here.

There's a killer tattooist on the loose and only Batman can stop him.

You can read my review of this issue, right here.

It's that issue of World's Finest again, as our intrepid heroes still fail to capture Capricorn.

I'm pretty sure there's a scene in this where Superman declares he can't break into a house because it's illegal and Superman can't do things that are illegal.

So, what does he do?

He gets Batman to do it for him.

Erm, isn't that illegal too?

Detective Comics #438. A Monster Walks Wayne Manor.

Call me presumptuous but I've always wanted a brutish man-servant. The sort who can push people aside for me as I roam the streets of Sheffield.

But where to find such a thing?

Well, it turns out Wayne Manor is where to find such a thing because Bruce Wayne has a problem.

It would appear the house is haunted - haunted by a monster that's already killed a man and attacked poor old Alfred.

After some investigation, it turns out it's not a monster at all but Ubu, former man-servant to Ra's al Ghul.

Affected by an explosion and chemicals from the Lazarus Pit, he's now in the habit of glowing in the dark and looking for revenge on Batman for past indiscretions.

Needless to say he doesn't get it.

When I first read this tale as a kid, I didn't have a clue who Ra's al Ghul was or what the Lazarus Pit was. Nor had I previously been aware that Wayne Manor had been abandoned, or why it'd been abandoned.

What I was aware of was that, with a Gothic mansion, its darkened corridors stalked by a, "monster," it was a tale of mood and mystery.

Of course, what really sold it as such was the fact it was drawn by Jim Aparo.

I can't deny it, Jim Aparo's my favourite Batman artist. Neal Adams was fine but his work always seemed so polite compared to the more macho, rough-hewn look of Aparo. It's a fairly slight tale, only a few pages long - and feels more like an epilogue to another tale than a story in its own right - but the harsh moodiness of Aparo gives it a style that guarantees it takes hold in the memory more determinedly than logic suggests it ever should do.

Sheffield's Most Wanted. Part 1: Detective Comics #443.

For the most part I was extremely lucky as a child. My nightmare of being forced to appear on Mike Reid's Runaround never became reality and I also managed to get my hands on most of the comics that I ever wanted.

However, just as no game show is ever free of fear, no life is perfect and there were a number of comics I always coveted but never got my grubby little hands on. In an exciting new feature that'll no doubt prove to be as popular as my legendary Supergirl Sunday slot, I'll from time to time be giving those comics a quick mention.

First on the list has to be Detective Comics #443. Not only was it a 100 pager, not only did it have a cover by Jim Aparo, not only did it feature the Spectre but it gave us the meeting of Detective Comics' then two biggest stars, Batman and Walt Simonson's Manhunter. Was there really anyone alive who could take one look at the pair of them stood back-to-back on that cover and not want that comic? Just the positioning of their feet alone was enough to sell the thing to you.

I actually got my hands on a copy a couple of years back, as part of a job-lot, and it was OK but if only I'd read it as a kid, then I'd really have been able appreciate it.

Actually it's probably best that I didn't. For if I had, my head would surely have burst from all the excitement and left nasty bits of my skull embedded in the walls where they would've become the subject matter of the worst song about wallpaper that Pulp ever wrote.

Sometimes in life it's best that we don't get what we hope for, but such a charming anecdote does give me chance to ask which comics did you always want but never got?

Batman's Detective Comics #458

As an adult, it's hard for me to know just why I loved Batman so much when I was a kid. He had no personality, he had no superpowers, for the most part his enemies were rubbish, and all the fun stuff you associate with him - like the Batcave, Wayne Manor, Robin and the Batmobile - had been pretty much dumped by the time I started reading the strip, meaning that, if not for the silly costume, you could at times have been forgiven for thinking you were watching an episode of Murder She Wrote.

All the goofy stuff had been sacrificed in an attempt to make the previously embarrassing strip more "grim and gritty" than it'd previously been but, in all honesty, for the most part it was no more grim and gritty than the early Iron Man stories.

In the end, I think what grabbed me was the cape and the fact that, as he didn't have superpowers, he was one of the few costumed crime-fighters I felt I too could be like. This of course ignored the fact he was a billionaire and I wasn't.

This issue's a perfect example of the Murder She Wrote tendencies, as the man they call "Bats" has a somewhat pedestrian whodunit in which he has to track down a murderer who may or may not be into tattooing.

Needless to say Commissioner Gordon messes up the whole investigation, arresting completely the wrong man, while Batman solves it with ridiculous ease, mostly because the only clue needed lands in his lap. The truth is that, having solved the crime, Batman doesn't even need to do anything. As the villain's just some bloke, Batman could find a phone booth, call the police and let them make the bust.

The fact that he doesn't is of course down to the Sherlock Holmes conundrum.

Despite the boasts, Batman isn't and never has been the world's greatest detective. That's clearly Sherlock Holmes, a man so smart he solved nearly all his cases without even leaving his drawing room. You'd think, therefore, that if anyone could get away with dressing up as a bat, it'd be Sherlock Holmes.

Sadly he couldn't.

Why? Precisely because he solved all his cases without leaving his drawing room. Just how seriously would anyone take a detective who took to dressing up as a bat in order to sit in his own house? To justify such a get-up, it's necessary the detective actually gets off his backside and runs around a bit.

Because of this, Batman couldn't justify dressing up as a bat to stand in a phone booth and call the police. Therefore he has to apprehend the villain himself. He does it of course but you can't help feeling that the talents that once enabled him to face aliens and giant robots every month are going somewhat to waste on such a foe.

I suppose it's an obvious thing that if you want to create an arch-rival for a super-hero, all you need do is reverse that hero's name. So, for Batman, you'd get Man-Bat, for Spider-Man you'd get the Man-Spider and, for Dr Strange, you'd get The Strange Doctor. As far as I'm aware, Marvel Comics never gave us the adventures of The Strange Doctor, though I'd read them if they did.

DC, on the other hand, did give us the adventures of Man-Bat.

I'm just not sure why.

He was hopeless.

In the 1970s, Marvel UK gave us Captain Britain, a strip that started badly and then got worse, ending up, ignominiously, as a back-up strip in their weekly Spider-Man comic and being very badly drawn by Pablo Marcos.

Sadly, the back-up in this comic does nothing to make me any keener on Pablo's work, as we get a Man-Bat tale by him in which Man-Bat's wife turns into a bat then turns into herself then turns into another woman completely, before a Baron Mordo type turns her into a statue.

You can't get round it, Man-Bat just doesn't grab me at all. He looks bad. He's ineffectual. He says, "Skreek!" at the start of every sentence. And everything he does seems to revolve around his wife. I think there might be a good argument that, just as no good super-hero should have parents, no hero should have a wife. Somehow domestic arrangements never sit well in conjunction with super-heroics. With the lameness of its hero and the somewhat random feel of the plot, reading this tale feels like I've blundered in halfway through an Atlas comic.

And that's never a good thing to say about anything.

Detective Comics #450. The hit man and the house of wax.

As I roam the streets of Sheffield, people tell me that, like a fine wine, I'm of a certain vintage.

And possibly should be kept locked in a cellar.

Well, like many people of that vintage, my first exposure to super heroes came through the old Adam West Batman shows, which, with me being about three at the time, I completely missed the irony of and took dreadfully seriously.

By the 1970s, DC Comics were taking Batman dreadfully seriously too, with as much of the old silliness removed as possible in a strip about a billionaire dressed as a bat.

By one point, the Batmobile, the Bat Plane, the Bat Copter, Wayne Manor, the Bat Cave and even Bat-Mite had been ditched in a blatant attempt to move the strip as far away from the TV show as possible.

This issue, Detective Comics #450, seems as a good an example of that as any, as we get a tale of a tycoon who wants to get his hands on Batman's mask and cape as a trophy. To do it, he hires the services of a hitman and a house of wax.

As it turns out the whole thing's just a set-up to catch the hitman. Needless to say our hero does it with remarkable ease and a bit more blood splattering than I was used to. The story's quite neat and pulls a twist that I didn't see coming - possibly because, unless Batman's a Slitheen, it's physically impossible.

Admittedly, on recently re-reading this for the first time since the '70s, my tiny brain was somewhat confused by the twist and it took me a second reading to figure out what was actually going on.

This could be a failure on my part or it could be a confused bit of story telling. It's drawn by Walt Simonson in a dirtier, messier style than I was familiar with after years of Neal Adams, Jim Aparo, Irv Novick, Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano and, although it's not quite the Batman I was used to, it does feel oddly appealing and possibly hints at the grittier years to come for the dark knight detective.

But Detective Comics was rarely just about Batman and so we get a back-up tale in which Robin the boy wonder's up against a man who snatches women's bags in car parks.

I don't want to demean the plight of women who get their bags snatched in car parks but it probably sums up Robin that this is the level of foe he's up against.

Even worse that he seems to be somewhat out of his depth against even that level of opponent.

It's a two part whodunit and, never having got the next issue, I don't know who the wrong-doer turns out to be. The finely honed senses that left me confused by the twist in the lead story tell me it's either the college treasurer or Chief McDonald and therefore I'll guess that it's actually Mrs Roberts the secretary.