Irv Novick

At last, the DC Showcase volumes have reached the point where Batman is getting good. I recently looked up the old Alley Awards on-line and the ‘Batman’ titles twice won the same award: strip most in need of improvement, even in 1962 when regular penciller Carmine Infantino scooped the best artist award. ‘Showcase Batman Volumes 1-4’ are interesting historical documents but reading them does not give great pleasure, though looking at the art gives some.

It does here, too. This fifth volume features a few issues pencilled by Neal Adams and a lot of covers by him. As Adams aficionados abound, I will do you the favour of listing which issues he drew so you can decide if the quantity warrants purchasing this book. It does. Adams pencilled: Detective Comics # 395 (16 pages); Batman # 219 (8 pages); Detective Comics # 397 (15 pages); Detective Comics # 400 (16 pages); Detective Comics # 402 (16 pages); Detective Comics # 404 (15 pages); Detective Comics # 407 (15 pages). The Man-Bat features in three of these. All of them are inked by Dick Giordano and look great. Adams also did most of the covers shown in this volume.

In paying proper respect to that maestro, I do not wish to belittle the art contributions of his colleagues. Irv Novick turned in very clean, elegant pencils with interesting layouts and dynamic figures. His work was also graced with Giordano’s inks, the quality of which are especially visible in these black and white reprints. While the pencils of Bob Brown, inked by Joe Giella and Frank Giacoia, are not quite as pleasing to the eye as those of his fellows he still did a competent, professional job.

The stories are mostly by Frank Robbins with a few by Dennis O’Neil and Mike Friedrich. Robbins does fairly decent detective yarns. DC Comics improved in the seventies but did not follow Stan Lee down the soap opera route. Variety being the spice of life, this was a good thing. Frank Robbins writer is the same Frank Robbins artist who did some work for Marvel later on ‘Captain America’. I’m not a big fan of his art but as a writer, he’s pretty good and apparently played a key part making the character more serious and restoring the creature of the night scenario. I was always under the impression that Dennis O’Neil led the way in that.

There are still some hangovers from the more childish age of DC Comics so Batman will wear a rubber mask, pretending to be someone else and get away with it, as do some of his opponents. Rubber masks look like rubber masks in real life. Ridiculously, he carries a bat-dummy of himself under his cape in ‘This Murder Has Been Pre-Recorded’ in Batman # 220 so that the misleading cover can show him being blown up in a phone booth. Again, this is not realistic.

Alas, DC still had a bit of a thing for misleading covers. Robin going off to university is milked for two: Detective Comics # 393 shows a tearful Boy Wonders saying, ‘The case is over, the team-up is finished! This is goodbye for Batman and Robin!’ Batman # 393 shows Batman storming off saying, ‘Take a last look Alfred then seal up the Batcave forever!’ In fact, these events ushered in a solo Batman fighting crime without bat-gadgets and led to the Dark Knight image he still has today. It was a conscious decision by the editors to strip the strip back to its roots. The television series was finished by this time and to keep that image would have been…well, batty.

Some of the stories by Dennis O’Neill are quite sophisticated. ‘Ghost Of The Killer Skies’ (Detective Comics # 404) is a biplane battle classic while ‘The Secret Of The Waiting Graves’ (Detective Comics # 395) and ‘Paint A Picture Of Peril’ (Detective Comics # 397) have dark romantic themes unusual for comics of the period. These three were drawn by Adams. The team of O’Neill and Adams was the talk of the town at the time and also revolutionised ‘Green Lantern’.

Probably the most notable thing about this collection is that it gets better and better as you read your way through it. These stories mark the turnaround from strip most in need of improvement to strip destined to be taken up by Hollywood and turned into a series of blockbuster movies, albeit some years later. Great stuff and soon to be released – July 2015 – is ‘DC Showcase Presents Batman Volume 6’ which will be even better if Ra’s al Ghul has anything to do with it and I think he does.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/… (mehr)

Batman: Tales of the Demon collects material from Batman nos. 232, 235, 240, 242-244, Detective Comics nos. 411, 485, 489-490, and DC Special Series no. 15 written by Dennis O’Neil with art by Bob Brown, Neal Adams, Irv Novick, Michael Golden, Don Newton, Dick Giordano, and Dan Adkins. In his introduction, Sam Hamm cites Rā’s al Ghūl as a turning point in the Batman mythology, wherein the character moved away from the lighthearted late-Golden and early-Silver Age stories to a more mature, imposing Bronze Age character, with al Ghūl filling a niche for Batman like Moriarty to Sherlock Holmes. These stories also forefront Batman’s skills as a detective unlike the more fantastic tales of the 1950s and early 1960s, with O’Neil even encouraging the reader to try to follow the deductive leaps and clues in various asides. Along with this focus on detection, O’Neil sends Batman worldwide, with his fighting prowess and technology aiding his intelligence, evoking James Bond at times.

These stories are the first appearances of Rā’s al Ghūl and his daughter, Talia, and so they may feel incomplete to later readers after the mythology surrounding al Ghūl was further developed. For example, the first time he is resurrected from near-death (in Batman no. 235) involves what look like large laser emitters, rather than the now-standard Lazarus Pit (which first appeared nearly 20 issues later, in Batman no. 243, also in this volume). The stories in Tales of the Demon primarily serve to introduce al Ghūl and his world, each building on the last to further develop the motivations of the Demon’s Head. The last three issues barely feature al Ghūl, instead focusing on one of his main adversaries, Sensei, who kills Kathy Kane, the Batwoman. Shocking as her death may be, less than a decade later Crisis on Infinite Earths retconned this version of Kane out of existence. For those who want to read about Rā’s al Ghūl’s history, this is a great introduction. These stories predate by seven years the first story in the post-Crisis Rā’s al Ghūl Trilogy, collected in the Batman: Birth of the Demon trade paperback, though that became the new canon following Crisis on Infinite Earths.

On a tangential note, Brian Stelfreeze’s cover for the Warner Books edition looks like an attempt to portray the main characters of these issues in the style of the then-current Batman films directed by Tim Burton.… (mehr)