Talk about a study in contrasts.
The moody Carmine Infantino cover for Detective Comics 334 features Batman entering a darkened room where handguns are poised to finish him off. But flip to the splash page, drawn by Sheldon Moldoff, and you see a gangster in a grasshopper costume — silly-looking even by 1960s comic book standards — who is riding in the Bat-Boat and netting Robin out of the water like a flounder.
Something similar happens with Batman 168, out that same month. Infantino’s intriguing cover shows a muscled arm punching Batman out a building window. Inside, we learn the arm belongs to a deranged circus strongman. That's okay, but note how that cover idea let our imaginations play with possibilities.
With Batman’s New Look in full swing, the Masked Manhunter tackled a couple of Hulk-like enemies.
In Detective Comics 345 (Nov. 1965), chemist Mark Desmond became the Blockbuster, increasing his own size and strength at the price of his sanity. He was manipulated into committing crimes by his brother.
A similar but lesser-known character, Mr. Mammoth, was introduced a little earlier in Batman 168 (Dec. 1964).
Comics historian Michael L. Fleisher called him “a ‘fabulous strong man’ appearing with a local circus who, although he remains completely unaware of the cause of his strange affliction, becomes overwhelmed by an uncontrollable urge to fight and destroy whenever he hears the call-letter chimes of Gotham City radio station WGC, whose unique ‘vibrations’ somehow awaken a ‘deep-seated fighting emotion — or instinct’ lying dormant within his personality.”
Ed Herron’s story emphasizes Batman’s nobility. The Caped Crusader is trying to help the mentally ill Mr. Mammoth throughout, and only fights Mr. Mammoth to keep him from turning his anger on other people.
Debbie Lockwood:
ReplyDeleteThe Infantino covers of this era wrote checks that Moldoff's interior art could not cash...
Vincent Mariani:
ReplyDeleteI had mixed feelings about Infantino taking over the ambience of Batman. While light years ahead of the ever devolving Moldoff faux Bob Kane version that had plagued the series since the late 1950s, Infantino's Batman seemed overly modern for my taste. Classic old Gotham City was gone. On top of that, The Flash and Adam Strange were handed over to artists who had no feel (to be kind) for what Infantino had graphically established for those characters.
Paul Zuckerman:
ReplyDeleteHow many times I would come home with an issue of Detective or Batman with those beautiful Infantino covers and be confronted by rather pedestrian work by Moldoff? Just about every time!!! As discussed above, I think in many ways his work pre-New Look was marginally better. They brought Joe Giella in to ink both Infantino and Moldoff to give some sort of unifying sheen, but no one would ever mistake the two and when it called for emotion-such as when Alfred died-Moldoff could not bring it across.
Of course, we thought that it was Bob Kane's work and it is still not clear to me if Kane didn't keep some degree of his hand in the work, albeit not much. He had done so when Lew Sayre Schwartz was his ghost. Moldoff claimed that he did everything but Kane said that he still did some work, albeit not much. I guess we will never really know but in any case, it wasn't much to get excited by.
Near the end of Kane's run on the book, the art suddenly got a lot more interesting and dynamic, not as wooden. At the time, I thought that Kane had really improved. Turns out he just hired new ghosts!