By Various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-84576-038-7
If you buy into the myth, then there are actually many, many great Batman stories. Over the decades lots of very talented creators excelled themselves with the various toys and icons of Gotham City. That’s not to say that there haven’t been some real turkeys along the way, but on the whole people seem to extend themselves for Batman. Often the real problem is one of context, since many stories worry reprint editors in terms of “Sell-By Dateâ€; as if nearly eight decades of creativity can avoid looking dated to some modern consumers.
Guys, who cares? These are the ones who want to colourise Citizen Kane and Arsenic and Old Lace, add cell-phones to Shakespeare and never read any book written before 1989. If they can’t get Wuthering Heights unless Angelina’s in it, their money’s no good anyway.
At least this selection contains a few general rarities from the canon, although the origin from Detective Comics #33 (1939) has been seen so often that most fans can draw it from memory – and many parody artists have. ‘The Case of the Honest Crook’ comes from Batman #5 (1941) and ‘The Secret Life of the Catwoman’ is from #62 (1951). ‘Robin Dies at Dawn’ (Batman #156, 1963) is one of the last classic-look tales before Julie Schwartz, John Broome and Gardner Fox projected Batman into the Silver Age of Comics with their “New Lookâ€, a period strangely unrepresented here.
‘The Batman Nobody Knows’ comes from Batman #250, an attempt by Frank Robbins and Dick Giordano to rationalize the then newly-restored aura of mystery to the character, whilst ‘The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge’ (Batman #251, 1973) is a genuine classic from Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams that totally redefined the Joker for our age. For many people this is The Definitive Batman/Joker story.
Steve Englehart is fondly remembered for his collaboration with Marshall Rogers, but ‘Night of the Stalker’ (Detective #439, 1974), illustrated by Vin and Sal Amendola, with Giordano inks is one of his most powerful and emotive successes, but Rogers’s accompanying illustrations for O’Neil’s lacklustre prose vignette ‘Death Comes at Midnight and Three’ displays little of his design skill. It originally ran in DC Special Series #15 (1978). Number 21 of that magazine (1980) gave us Frank Miller’s first Bat story when he illustrated O’Neil’s ‘Wanted: Santa Claus – Dead or Alive’.
In 1987 legendary and beloved artist Dick Sprang was coaxed out of retirement to produce a double page spread for Detective #572, which here precedes the introspective ‘…My Beginning… and My Probable End’ (Detective #574), by Mike W Barr, Alan Davis and Paul Neary. Bringing us out of the nineties is ‘Favourite Things’ by Mark Millar and Steve Yeowell (Legends of the Dark Knight #79, 1996) and the twenty-first century is represented by ’24/7′ by Devin Grayson and Roger Robinson from Gotham Knights #32 (2002).
In an industry that’s constantly seeking to reinvent and revitalize itself, it’s oddly reassuring to see that entertainment can have a timeless quality, even in a supposedly “throw-away†medium like the comic strip.
© 2005 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.