Something must have seemed oddly
familiar to Bruce Wayne, that day in 1965.
Only a couple of years before,
he’d been accustomed to being changed into bizarre forms — a King Kong-like
giant, or a baby, or an old man, or a genie, or a mummy, things like that. Then
suddenly, in May 1964, all that stuff stopped.
Oh sure, since then some pallid
telekinetic weirdo calling himself the Outsider had been attacking him with
witches and animated Batmobiles and stuff, and his young friend Mark Desmond
had been Jekyll-and-Hyding into a super-strong monster called the Blockbuster.
But other than that, things had
been relatively normal.
Then, in Batman 177 (Dec. 1965), the old weirdness returned with Two Batman Too Many!, a story penned by veteran
scribe Bill Finger.
As usual, the cover’s beautiful
art by Carmine Infantino promised more than what would be delivered by the
interior, which featured the increasingly indifferent art of Sheldon Moldoff.
The story spotlighted a giant
Batman and a tiny Batman, explained away as clay homunculi brought to life by a
shaman’s magic (an explanation that would have sufficed by itself in the
pre-1964 era).
In fact, it was a scheme concocted
by Batman to trap numbers racketeer and jewel thief Ed Garvey. The large and
small Batmen were revealed to be the Atom and a well-padded Elongated Man — two
other characters from the stable of Julius Schwartz, the editor who’d been tasked
with revitalizing the Batman titles in 1964 by using fresher art and slightly
more “realistic” plots.
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