January 1970: Power and Protest

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists Neal Adams and Jim Aparo helped bring Batman down from the “camp” ledge where the TV show had left him stranded.

In Detective Comics 395, for example, Adams and writer Denny O’Neil restored some of Batman’s old gothic horror in The Secret of the Waiting Graves.

The issue included a second artistic treat — Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson providing us an action-packed story about the emancipation of Robin. 

On his first day at Hudson University, the Boy Wonder investigates a campus protest riot instigated by fake cops in league with fake demonstrators. It’s all part of a communist plot to shutter America’s universities. 

The ongoing Vietnam War is, of course, never mentioned.

Kane simultaneously served up a fine issue in Green Lantern 74. One sequence has particularly stayed with me.

Battles with Star Sapphire and Sinestro have left the Emerald Gladiator in a state of collapse, barely able to crawl, with the last of his ring’s reserve power exhausted. Luckily, his old pal Tom Kalmaku is handy (“I bet nobody calls him ‘Pieface’ anymore,” GL thinks). Tom finds and brings Green Lantern his invisible power battery. 

In a beautiful, carefully constructed dramatic sequence, Kane shows us Green Lantern’s restoration from a state of abject defeat to a literal world-beater, with his pal’s admiration underlining the effects.

“(T)he stuff that I like to draw has nothing to do with any individual character,” Gil Kane once explained. “What I like to draw is some idea of power gathering itself, and all of a sudden the power is blocked and the power has to assert itself and strain itself and there’s an enormous resistance to it and all of a sudden the power breaks through and leaps free. That’s what I like to draw. That, in effect, is the essence behind my personality.”