“Ein Fledermausmann! Schiessen! Schiessen!”
It’s the spring of 1969. You pick up a copy of The Brave and the Bold 84 from the spinner rack and open it at random.
What you see is a lushly illustrated, tuxedoed Bruce Wayne on a motorcycle, charging across a World War II airstrip the day before D-Day.
What th — ?
You flip through the issue and find the melodramatic action thrilling (and then realize that it’s been a long time since you’ve been thrilled by the action in a Batman comic book).
The story by writer Bob Haney featured an unlikely team-up between the Caped Crusader and Sgt. Rock, the WWII infantry noncom featured in Our Army at War.
The story featured Batman, in 1969, thinking back on an Allied mission he performed in France a quarter-century before on June 5, 1944.
Continuity problems aside, for me, this was the issue that signaled the direction Batman needed to go.
By 1969, the Masked Manhunter was stuck with a tired and played-out image as “camp,” a legacy of the Adam West TV show that had ended the year before. We long-time fans were aware that that the character needed a complete change — leaving the garish, clownish spotlight behind and returning to the shadows from which he emerged.
And here was just such a change, in both art and story. Nazis, after all, are not the Penguin or Mr. Freeze. They always make perfect villains, and have the advantage of having been real.
The art by a 27-year-old Neal Adams was breathtakingly fresh, and the inking by Sgt. Rock’s Joe Kubert reinforced the new approach — muting the silliness of the superhero genre by enfolding it into the more “realistic” atmosphere of war comics.
Earth One, Earth Two, Earth Whatever. Who cared? This was one good story.
The idea of Bruce Wayne/Batman as an Allied secret agent had even had a precedent. That was his status in the 1943 Batman movie serial.
Great story
ReplyDeleteJohn Roberts said: In German editions of DC comics, they just called him Batman. German children know enough English to understand.
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