March 1960: Let’s Give the Kids a Big Hand

While they may not have rivaled the ever-popular cover gorillas, giant hands clearly had an appeal of their own to the editors at DC Comics.

And not merely giant hands, but giant green hands, for the most part.

I grant you that the giant hand looming over a speeding convertible on the cover of Strange Adventures 110 (Nov. 1959) wasn’t green. But we had a giant green hand crawling ominously across the sand on the cover of Blackhawk 115 (Aug. 1957), a pair of giant green hands in the sky reaching for the heroes’ jet in Challengers of the Unknown 2 (June 1958) and a giant green hand wielded by aliens menacing the Dynamic Duo on the cover of Batman 130 (March 1960).

In The Hand from Nowhere, Batman deduces that’s it’s not aliens who are behind this scheme to steal platinum, but Lex Luthor. The Masked Manhunter corrals Superman’s archenemy using his own mechanical hand.

The story — written by Bill Finger and drawn by Sheldon Moldoff — marks the only time Luthor shows up in a Batman story by himself until the 1990s.

Elsewhere in this issue, Batman battles the masked Master of Weapons, who specializes in the use of ancient weaponry like ballistae, catapults and caltrops. Ace the Bat-Hound’s superb sense of smell helps the crime-fighters track the villain to his prison hideout in an abandoned prison.

The villain’s obsession with ancient arms was of course shared by Hawkman, a superhero who’d vanished in 1951 but would return in 1961.

And in the issue’s third story, Batman’s Deadly Birthday, the Dynamic Duo ends up stuck in the wet plaster “icing” of a three-story cake created to celebrate the anniversary of Batman’s first case.

The same thing happened to the Adam West Batman, courtesy of the Riddler, on the February 1967 episodes Batman’s Anniversary/A Riddling Controversy. The Batman TV show was much closer to the comic books of the era than fans sometimes like to admit.