December 1965: Things Go a Little Batty

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.

August 1963: Reflection of a Bat

“I leaned over the sink, closer to my reflection, and stare at myself hard,” wrote Nina LaCour. “I don't know what I see. I don’t even know what I want to see.”

We tend to associate mirrors with the mysteries of human identity, and Batman’s archenemy Mirror-Man exemplified that theme.

Mirror-Man — Floyd Ventris — became pretty well convinced that he’d penetrated the secret of Batman’s identity, and came close, more than once, to proving that the Masked Manhunter was Bruce Wayne.

Apparently as omen-prone as Wayne, Ventris was able to escape from prison using the fragment of a broken mirror to dazzle a guard. 

“I broke a mirror, and it brought me luck!” he thinks. “I’ll do a lot of research on mirrors — because from now on I’m going to use them for crime!” (The Mysterious Mirror-Man, Detective 213, Nov. 1954).

Using a “two-way electronic mirror” to see through Batman’s cowl, the mirror-spectacled criminal only gets ridiculed by his gang when he announces his discovery. 

Batman has defeated him with preemptive PR, having written a newspaper article as Bruce Wayne about ridiculous past occasions when people claimed he was Batman.

Mirror Man’s return in Batman 157 (Aug. 1963) began with a storytelling flourish from writer Bill Finger. Four of the characters — Batman, Batwoman, Vicki Vale and Ventris — were shown considering their images in reflective surfaces.

Mirror-Man’s mirror-themed crimes include the use of reflective billboards and a U.S. Army “solar mirror” and the theft of a giant telescopic mirror intended for installation at the Mt. Malador Observatory. 

Twice, Ventris trapped Batman and Robin in mirrored rooms.

Mirror-Man’s impact was undoubtedly diluted by the fact that he was “reflected” in a contemporaneous Flash super villain.  The Mirror Master, who also employed esoteric mirror tricks, debuted in Flash Comics 105 (Feb.-March 1959).

The first line of Wikipedia’s entry on Mirror Man is, of course: “Not to be confused with Mirror Master.”

July 1963: They Grow Up So Fast, Don’t They?

The fifth Batman Annual, published in the summer of 1963, focused on Batman and Robin’s undeniably odd existences.

Readers were treated to a merman Batman, a phantom Batman, a zebra Batman, a bewitched Batman, a giant Batman, Rip Van Batman and Robin the Wonder Man, a reprint from Batman 107 (April 1957).

Imaginatively, children become instant adults when they read superhero stories. But in The Grown-Up Boy Wonder, Robin didn’t find the abrupt transition so easy.

In the Batcave, Dick Grayson is overcome when he accidentally spills “…the thing Superman found floating in outer space.” He awakens to find himself physically mature.

Things Superman brings back from space should always come with an FDA warning label, by the way.

In this tale drawn by Sheldon Moldoff, writer Bill Finger cleverly exploits the immaturity theme, making the plot turn on the advantages and disadvantages of sudden physical maturity. 

Robin’s inexperience with his new size and weight causes him to be captured by the red-clad Daredevil gang, which promptly unmasks him. But that does them no good, because no one can recognize the face of an adult Dick Grayson.

Robin’s new identity as Owlman may well have been a cheeky wink at one or two of Batman’s vanished competitors. Both the Owl and the Black Owl began fighting crime for different publishers beginning in 1940. 

This wouldn’t be the only time that Batman recycled concepts from rival superhero titles he had outlived. The same thing happened with another imitator, Cat-Man.

Despite his experience with the adult responsibilities of crime-fighting, Robin wasn’t ready to grow up — a fact that was underlined by two stories in this issue. 

The Grown-Up Robin ends with the restored Dick Grayson running after schoolmates, saying, “Gee, it’s good to be a kid again! Hey fellas, wait for me!” 

And the middle story, Robin Falls in Love, ends when the Boy Wonder assures Batman, “From now on, I’m keeping my mind on criminals, not girls!”

January 1963: Catman and Company

Batman enjoyed a survivor’s privilege.

As one of a handful of superheroes to endure intact from the 1940s to the 1960s, the Masked Manhunter starred in stories that effectively recycled popular concepts from the fairly recent but by-then-forgotten past.

For example, Holyoke Publishing started Crash Comics in 1940 with a Superman pastiche, Strongman, but replaced him on the fifth issue’s cover with a Batman/Tarzan-inspired character, Cat-Man.

The Golden Age Catman

A year later, he had his own comic and a costumed sidekick named Kitten (who, unlike Robin, was a girl wonder). Catman dropped the hyphen and appeared through 1946, undoubtedly annoying DC Comics the whole time.

So it must have been something of an in-joke when, in Detective Comics 311, DC introduced a villainous Catman with a orange, caped and cat-eared costume strikingly similar to that of the Golden Age superhero.

A bored trapper of big game, Thomas Blake decides to enliven his life by becoming Batman’s adversary. He’s inspired to choose a theme by the Joker and the vanished Catwoman, who hadn’t appeared since Detective Comics 211 in 1954.

The Feline Freebooter’s trick of surviving certain death with his “nine lives” was picked up by Catwoman in the Batman TV show three years later.

That same month, in World’s Finest 131, Superman, Batman and Robin fought the Octopus gang with the “help” of a well-intentioned but inept inventor who called himself the Crimson Avenger. That was also the name of one of DC’s earliest mystery men, a masked newspaper publisher who debuted even before Batman in Detective Comics 20 (October 1938.)

Three years earlier, in Detective Comics 286 (Dec. 1960), Batman, Robin and Batwoman defeated the super-power-hungry Star–Man, and three years before that Batman himself temporarily adopted the identity of “Starman” (Detective Comics 247, Sept. 1957). Starman had been a DC superhero launched with great fanfare in 1941.

Bill Finger wrote three and possibly all four of those stories, so maybe he was going through a nostalgic phase.

May 1962: When Batman Needed a Nap

The Masked Manhunter’s bizarre transformations hit the wall in March 1962, the month Batman 147 appeared on the newsstands.

A giant, a mummy, an alien, a genie, a negative man, an invisible man, whatever. I didn’t mind seeing Batman temporarily transformed into any of those. 

But a baby?

No.

Children don’t like seeing their own rather comical impotence reflected back at them — at least the ones who read superhero comics don’t. So Bat-Baby was an ill-conceived concept.

“In a story by Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff and Charles Paris, Batman and Robin are recovering jewels from a heist by Nails Finney,” noted Dave Marchand.  “The Dynamic Duo bust into the deserted warehouse that the hoods are using, to find renegade scientist Garth there as well... who bathes Batman in a strange energy beam, that reduce

s his age to that of a baby!’”

The chagrined Robin says, “I’d better carry you to the Batmobile! You can’t walk while your costume is sagging all about you!”

“Robin, I never thought there’d be a time when you’d have to carry me in your arms like a baby!” replies the infantilized Batman. 

Tricked up in a sort of Bat-playsuit, the ever-resourceful superhero retrains himself to use his small size as an advantage, then subdues Garth’s gang and reverses the transformation. 

“De-aging superheroes was an oddly popular trend at the time,” wrote Evan Mullicane. “Superman had the well-known Superboy and the more obscure Superbaby while Wonder Woman had Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot. These characters proved popular enough that DC even turned Superboy and Wonder Girl into their own characters with Connor Kent and Donna Troy. Despite this, younger versions of Bruce Wayne never caught on.  To date, Batman 147 is the only appearance of Bat-Baby in DC comics.”

The Bat-Baby costume ended up in a Batcave display case. 

“Just a reminder — of a brief childhood!” Batman remarked with a smile.

Ironic. Batman’s childhood was indeed brief, but not for that reason.

August 1961: A Plethora of Powers

Batman and Robin could corral not only costumed crooks, but also super-powered foes – and just about as easily.

The continued popularity of Superman probably had something to do with the proliferation of super-powered criminals and beasts who plagued Gotham City in the late 1950s and early 1960s. 

In Detective Comics 294 (Aug. 1961), an energy leak from a Gotham City scientist’s experimental device drove John Dolan insane while giving him the ability to change his own molecular structure by using a control belt. 

Dolan appears to be writer Bill Finger’s revamping of the concept of the earlier Atomic-Man. Engineer Paul Strobe had altered the molecular structure of objects by staring at them through special googles, while Dolan altered his own molecular structure.

Three years later, those same elemental transformation powers were reborn in a superhero, Metamorpho.

But Batman got ’em first. When a device designed to trap Dolan accidently explodes, Batman gains the same powers, and employs them in a plan to defeat the Elemental Man.

This became a typical pattern for these stories. When he encountered super-powered foes, the Masked Manhunter sometimes helpfully gained the same powers himself. That also happened with Zebra-Man and the Flame-Master. 

This house ad from the first Batman Annual shows that in same month, in World’s Finest 119, Superman, Batman and Robin were seemingly under the thumb of a new superhero called Tigerman. However, the character turns out to be a hoax the heroes have dreamed up to outfox the criminal Purple Legion.

Meanwhile, in Batman 141, a humiliated super-criminal called the Moth vows revenge against Bat-Girl (Betty Kane). Oddly enough, another lepidopteran-inspired villain, the Killer Moth, would become the first opponent of the next Batgirl, Barbara Gordon, in Detective Comics 359 (Jan. 1967).

January 1961: Bizarre Characters and Fantastic Weapons

Sometimes the comic books you didn’t see were the most intriguing.

For example, I spotted Detective Comics 287 (Jan. 1961) in DC’s house ads, but probably spent that week’s quarter on the second (and best) of the Superman annuals, the all-menace issue.

By the next week, Detective 287 must have vanished from the newsstand, because I remember my disappointment at missing it. 

Colorfully costumed figures were still thin on the ground then, just ahead of the Marvel Age, and the bright cover of 287 offered four of them — two bird-themed, one insect-themed and the familiar flying mammal — plus ray guns.

RAY GUNS!

Irresistible.

But not, of course, to long-time Batman fans.

“(I)n the jittery wake of the Comics Code, the Bat-tales were dulled down a bit as DC editors feared to show people getting shot and punching each other,” wrote Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs in The Comic Book Heroes. “In 1957, science fiction came to Gotham City, and during the next few years the Dynamic Duo went haywire.”

Meanwhile, the lead story in Batman 137 (Feb. 1961) might have been called foreshadowing.

“Mr. Marvel” was the rival crime-fighter who stole the Boy Wonder away from the Masked Manhunter. It wouldn’t be the last time that a Marvel gave DC Comics heroes trouble.

The story — Robin’s New Boss by writer Bill Finger and artist Sheldon Moldoff — almost made a weird kind of sense in the science fictional universe inhabited by Batman before the “New Look” reset everything in May 1964.

With Gotham City overrun by alien tech, Batman’s ropes and gas pellets might well have seemed a bit old hat. So enter a new masked crime-fighter who relies on force fields, tractor beams and flying cars.

This story, like so many in those years, was really about love, loyalty and an apparent betrayal. Robin had only pretended he wanted to run off with this fancy new superhero, who — surprise, surprise! — turned out to be an alien.

November 1960: That Thing You Doom

As thrilled as I was by Superman’s first annual in 1960, I was even more excited to see this “All-Menace” issue — finally, foes worthy of Superman’s stature and some real super-powered action!

For the bargain of a mere quarter, you got Metallo, the Invulnerable Enemy, Titano the Super-Ape, Bizarro, Brainiac and my favorite, the Thing from 40,000 A.D.

Oddly, despite his science fictional origins, Superman went for a long stretch of his early career having few science fictional adventures. Mundane criminals and crusades against social injustice and political corruption occupied much of his day.

By the time Superman 87 arrived in February 1954, things had started to change.

June 1960: Thrills Times Three

The first issue of Batman Comics I ever bought, as opposed to Detective Comics, was 132 (June 1960).

Artist Sheldon Moldoff and Batman co-creator Bill Finger did the honors, and the cover-featured Lair of the Sea Fox was the primary attraction. With his underwater sleds countered by the Bat-Submarine, the purple-clad Sea Fox was an interesting though limited villain, confined to the seas and sewers and so forth.

The Dynamic Duo had by then taken to wearing their capes while scuba diving, which was odd, but no odder than many other things they did, I suppose.

The issue included what I’m sure is the only Batman story named after a Joanne Woodward movie, The Three Faces of Batman.

I was already familiar with Batman, having purchased Detective Comics 277 (March 1960) and World’s Finest 110 (June 1960).

When I picked up World’s Finest 110, I was intrigued to see that Batman and Robin seemed remarkably effective and undaunted for people who lacked Superman’s vast array of powers. I was also delighted by the bright, contrasting colors of all their costumes.

A big Superman fan, I was particularly pleased to now be able to explore Batman and Robin’s solo adventures in two comic book titles.

The story was a clever one by Jerry Coleman. Let’s say you’re some creepy octopoid invading the planet Earth to shrink and steal buildings for your outer space amusement park. How do you stop the unstoppable Superman, who is sure to interfere?

By siphoning off Robin’s life force so that every blow delivered against the alien invader harms the Boy Wonder.

 Behind the handsome Curt Swan cover was the gorgeous interior art by Dick Sprang, the famed Batman artist who actually preferred doing these team-up stories with Superman because of the wilder freedom of action they offered.

Sprang, Superman, Batman, Robin, Tommy Tomorrow and Green Arrow — all in color for a dime. I had no way of knowing how lucky I was.

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.

February 1960: At the Waves, Waving Goodbye

Superman’s first great romance seemed a little fishy.

Actually, that bad pun doesn’t do justice to an engaging storyline. In The Girl in Superman’s Past (Superman 129, May 1959) and Superman’s Mermaid Sweetheart (Superman 135, Feb. 1960), artists Wayne Boring and writers Bill Finger and Jerry Siegel introduced readers to Lori Lemaris, a mermaid from sunken Atlantis.

The first story begins with Clark Kent and Lois Lane bundled up to attend a football game at his alma mater, Metropolis University. Clark reminisces how a chance campus encounter with a girl in a wheelchair led him to fall in love with the mysterious beauty, and moon over her. 

One poignant, ironic element of the story has the most physically free man in the world drawn to what appears to be a disabled girl.

But when Clark asks her to marry him and is about to reveal himself, Lori cuts him off by telling him that she’s always known he’s Superman. 

The shocked Man of Steel figures out she’s a telepathic mermaid, and they team up to rescue flood victims before they part.

Finger’s stories about Superman were often memorable, and these added a recurring character to Superman’s universe, despite the built-in contradiction with Superman’s friend Aquaman (Lori’s Atlantis and Aquaman’s Atlantis were clearly not the same place).

It did seem interesting, to me, that Clark Kent’s first real romance should coincidentally involve a being as fantastic and secretive as himself. 

And Clark and Lori have more in common than we might initially think. For one thing, they’re both monsters.

“Like fantasy creatures such as mermaids, Clark/Superman combines categories in ways that technically make him a ‘monster’ without inspiring the kind of fear/disgust that would make him the centerpiece of horror (except, perhaps, to villains),” observed critic Greg M. Smith.

This kind of doomed romance has the advantage of seemingly bringing major changes to a continuing character who will, at the end, be left back at square one. 

February 1960: Peril from the Past

Writers must have found it tricky to keep Batman and Robin relevant in stories in which they teamed up with Superman.

After all, as screenwriter Jackson Gillis observed, the nearly omnipotent Superman could “corral any criminal” all by himself.

One writer who could handle the job of giving the Dynamic Duo equal weight in those team-up stories was Bill Finger, Batman’s co-creator.

In World’s Finest 107 (Feb. 1960), Finger came up with a two-step solution to the problem: one, confront Superman with a monster so mighty his powers cannot overcome it and two, give the Dynamic Duo an autonomous mission that’s crucial to stopping the creature. 

The fact that their mission is separate gives Batman and Robin a chance to shine out from under Superman’s shadow.

When a red-eyed, blazing yellow giant emerges on a Mediterranean island, Superman, Batman and Robin rush to intercept it. But this Time Creature’s force field proves as effective as Brainiac’s in stopping Superman.

Meanwhile, a whistling signal draws the Dynamic Duo to a cave where they discover an ancient telepathic device informing them that such Time Creatures had previously laid waste to other worlds. 

Anticipating the monster’s emergence on Earth, our alien benefactors buried the one weapon that can stop the creature during the beginning of the reign of Alexander the Great. Finding it missing, Batman and Robin use Professor Carter Nichols’ time travel device to go after it in 336 BC (Nichols’ friendship with Bruce Wayne stretched all the way back to Batman 24 in 1944).

Finger bounces the action of this lively story back and forth between Superman’s efforts to stall the Time Creature and Batman and Robin’s adventures in the colorful era of Alexander III of Macedonia.

Artist Dick Sprang once confessed that he enjoyed drawing the Superman-Batman stories more than the solo Batman stories for which he became famous. The science fictional possibilities inherent in the World’s Finest stories provided more visual scope for Sprang’s creativity.

January 1960: Black and White and Batman All Over

During one five-year period, Batman gained debilitating super powers from a comet, literally turned negative, grew to giant size, became an “element man,” superheated and was transformed into a bronze statue, a human torch, a mummy, a Clayface Batman, a green-skinned telekinetic alien, a paper-thin Batman emitting green eye beams, an energy duplicate of himself and a distorted mirror image of himself.

In a way, I suppose, these were all distorted mirror images of Batman during an era when temporary radical physical transformation was a recurrent story element at DC.

Typical of these tales is The Zebra Batman!, a story written by Bill Finger and drawn by Sheldon Moldoff for Detective Comics 275 (Jan. 1960).

Mixing his flying mammal imagery with that of an African equid was obviously not designed to strike terror into the hearts of criminals, but Batman had no choice in the matter. Magnetic lines of force had painted the black-and-white stripes on a super-powered villain, Zebra-Man, and on Batman himself following an accident.

“This meant a sad existence for Batman” noted comics historian Tony Guerrero. “He couldn't get near anyone. He couldn't eat. His secret identity would be in jeopardy if he tried walking around as Bruce Wayne.”

“For a campy ’60s story, it brought up some interesting points. Aside from why energy has force lines that cause a person to turn black and white and repel everything, it’s great that some of the side effects were considered. The fact that Batman wouldn’t be able to eat (poor Robin almost got hit in the head by a platter of food in the scenario) and having his secret identity be in jeopardy was a nice touch. Usually in this time period, strange and bizarre things happened and any possible consequence was thrown out the window.”

The story was quickly reprinted during the summer of 1963 in the fifth Batman annual, which featured the theme The Strange Lives of Batman and Robin.

Strange indeed.

December 1959: The Terrific Trio’s Double Trouble

A guy who can double himself would hardly seem to pose much of a challenge to the foremost superhero team of the 1950s — Superman, Batman and Robin.

But because Duplicate Man’s power had a built-in teleportation aspect (and because of Bill Finger’s clever writing), he managed to give the Terrific Trio a run for their money in World’s Finest 106 (December 1959).

Batman artist Dick Sprang was particularly fond of drawing World’s Finest stories because of the outlandish science-fictional high jinks prompted by the presence of Superman. After all, it’s a rare character that offers you the opportunity of showing him mopping up a massive spill of pancake syrup with his hair. 

Whether the stories were silly, somber or both, Sprang’s art made them prized little gems for seven years, from 1955 to 1963.

At one of Gotham City’s innumerable exhibitions featuring giant props, the Dynamic Duo encounters a man in a blue-and-orange costume stealing a valuable telescope. When they try to stop him, they find he’s twins, and that one of his selves can merge into the other.

Finger comes up with interesting uses for the power. For example, when Batman and Duplicate Man fall off a tall building locked in battle, Duplicate Man can vanish to the safety of his other self. And luckily, Batman had Superman looking out for his welfare.

A criminal scientist who steals inventions, the Duplicate Man wisely decides to keep one of his selves in a lead-lined cavern hideout so that the other can always dematerialize while committing crimes. 

But the superheroes manage to capture him anyway by following Batman’s plan and using hypnotism and a phony teleportation device.

When banner headlines proclaim the Duplicate Man’s capture, a man on the street says of Superman, Batman and Robin, “What a trio! No one can ever duplicate them — or their feats!”

And why a “Duplicate Man?” Probably because that same year, Xerox went to market with something called a “photocopier.”

November 1959: The Year of the Catty

DC characters tended to share certain bizarre experiences — accidentally acquiring Superman’s powers, getting trapped in the Phantom Zone, traveling in time and space, pretending to die, pretending to turn evil, turning invisible, developing futuristic brains, becoming elastic, attaining giant size, instantly becoming fat, instantly growing older or younger.

 And, unlikely as it might seem, acquiring the head of a cat.

In Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane 13 (Nov. 1959), writer Bill Finger and artist Wayne Boring present us with a mystery for Superman to solve. Why does Lois show up at the Daily Planet for a tearful goodbye to her friends with her head encased in a lead box?

In the vanished reporter’s diary, Superman reads that Lois had confronted a vaudeville sorceress calling herself Circe, only to find that she wasn’t dealing with a fake — that her head had been transformed into a cat’s.

Passing a circus sideshow where people are laughing at freaks, Lois thought, “I can never go back to the normal world I once knew — not with my freakish face. (Sob!) And I could never be Superman’s girl friend again! I knew that though Superman would try not to show it, he’d be repelled by my face!”

Superman discovers that Lois doesn’t have the face of a cat, but only thinks she does — thanks to a drugged lemonade and some hypnosis practiced by the fake Circe.

Despite Lois’s traumatic experience, Superman’s sympathy only extends so far. At dinner that night at a restaurant, he orders Lois a saucer of milk to mock her cat-like curiosity.

The story is a reversal of what happened to Superman 15 months earlier in Action 243’s The Lady and the Lion!, when the real Circe gave the Man of Tomorrow a lion’s head.

It might have seemed to readers that Superman’s writers and editors were spinning in Circe circles.

October 1959: Batman Gets Hammered

Outsized and colorful, myth has always provided fertile storytelling material for comic-book superhero adventures.

In The Hammer of Thor (Batman 127, Oct.  1959), the Dynamic Duo battles a super-powered criminal thunder god who turns out to be museum curator Henry Meek. Meek transforms into Thor when he touches the hammer, just as meek Dr. Don Blake would three years later.

In this story written by Bill Finger and drawn by Sheldon Moldoff, the hammer is a replica empowered by a mysterious meteor. Meek’s obsession with mythology does the rest, triggering a hypnotic state in which Meek confuses the sound of thunder with the voice of Odin.

This is one of the rare Batman adventures that ends happily for the criminal. Unaware of his transformations, Meek is blameless, and the resulting publicity makes a success of his faltering museum.

DC heroes ran into a number of faux Thors over the years.

In May 1948, Superman thwarted one of them, shrugging off lightning blasts by remarking nonchalantly that they only felt like electric sparks (Superman in Valhalla, Superman 52).

Then in October 1956, under the influence of a gamma-ray-powered “reincarnation helmet,” a ginger-haired cub reporter recalls past lives as the pal of Samson, Hercules and Thor (Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen 16). But it turns out to be a hypnotic swindle to steal radium. Clark Kent figures it all out when the same machine causes him to dream about a past life on Earth — something that, being from Krypton, he knows to be impossible.

In The Magic Hammer (Tales of the Unexpected 16, August 1957), artist Jack Kirby gave us another Thor, one in pursuit of his hammer Mjolnir which had been stolen by Loki. Kirby and writer Stan Lee would revisit the theme in Journey Into Mystery 83 (Aug. 1962), creating the longest-running and most famous version of the thunder god.

So Batman met Thor, and then Robin met Ant-Man. But that, as they say, is another story…

August 1959: Lois of the Leopards

On her way back from interviewing Dr. Albert Schweitzer in Africa, Lois Lane’s small plane develops engine trouble.

Bailing out, she strikes her head on a rock upon landing and develops amnesia. And that’s how the Daily Planet’s star reporter became The Leopard Girl of the Jungle (Lois Lane 11, Aug. 1959).

So maybe a subplot involving a jungle girl novel written by Lana Lang made little sense. And maybe writer Bill Finger had to perform logical backflips to “explain” why Superman didn’t simply rescue Lois, but let her knock about for weeks with wildlife while secretly helping her.

But all that really didn’t matter. We wanted to see Lois as a jungle girl, with all that gorgeous Kurt Schaffenberger art. And that’s what we got.

“The end result is an homage strategically placed in the jungle girl history,” observed G.W. Thomas. “Most of the jungle comics and movies were done by the early ’50s. The only significant one was in 1959 with Audrey Hepburn playing Rima the Jungle Girl in Green Mansions. That premiered around the same time this issue of Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane appeared. Coincidence? Probably not. 

“DC had no jungle comics in 1959. Bill Finger’s tale is a swan song to an era of liana-swinging gals in leopard bikinis. The 1960s would be the decade that gave us Ron Ely on TV, Jack Benny and Gilligan parodies, George of the Jungle and Ray Stevens singing ‘Guitarzan.’ We had become too sophisticated for Nyoka serials or Irish McCalla as Sheena.”

As usual, Jimmy Olsen had macheted a trail through the jungle before Lois, in this case three years before (Jungle Jimmy Olsen!, Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen 10, Feb. 1956). 

Because Lois’s title began four years later than Jimmy’s, the kinds of things that had happened to him tended also to happen to her later. So he became Elastic Lad and she Elastic Lass. Both moonlighted as werewolves. And both tried the Tarzan life.

March 1959: The Marriage Menace

Is a wife’s place at home or beside her crime-fighting hubby?

Not a question you hear much lately, but it wasn’t atypical in March 1959, when Batman 122 was cover-dated.

“Batwoman’s kind of a strange character in Batman’s world — a part of it and yet apart from it,” observed the 13th Dimension. “Kathy Kane first came our way in the ’50s, a love interest introduced to possibly/maybe/perhaps counter suggestions that the Dynamic Duo swung not just from rooftops but together between the sheets.”

Maybe. But I suspect Batwoman was also introduced to replace Catwoman, who was considered too sexy and too kinky in the Comics Code era. Batwoman was sort of a “sanitized” Catwoman, and was even transformed INTO a “Catwoman” once.

“In any event, Batwoman — and, later, her niece Betty ‘Bat-Girl’ Kane — made a series of appearances starting at the dawn of the Silver Age in 1956,” 13th Dimension noted. “The best of these adventures were ‘imaginary’ tales of the future (born of Alfred’s fertile mind) when Batman and Batwoman were married with a son who, as Robin II, teamed with an adult Dick Grayson as the new Gotham guardians.

“Then came the New Look of 1964 and gone she was, relegated to reprinted adventures. In the ’70s she was revived only to be killed off in 1979 in a scheme involving the League of Assassins. Early Silver Age, meet later Bronze Age.”

In The Marriage of Batman and Batwoman (written by Bill Finger, drawn by Sheldon Moldoff), an anxious Dick Grayson dreams that Kathy will replace him after Batman and Batwoman marry. A smitten Bruce Wayne marries Kathy without, initially, revealing his secret (the same odd route the Flash took later). Just before awakening, Robin imagines his usurper accidentally revealing their secret identities.

Interesting that, in the dream, Batwoman is without  her “individualistic” costume and must wear a copy of Batman’s. But it does provide the excuse for her ill-fitting mask to blow off.

January 1954: A Surprising Number of Giant Turtle Men

You can thank — or blame — Mort Weisinger for all the giant turtle men who used to wander around tearing up highway bridges.

The first was cover-featured in the July 1940 issue of the Weisinger-edited pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories, an illustration for Out Of The Depths by H.L. Gold.

In 1941, Weisinger moved from Standard Magazines to National Periodicals as editor of the Superman titles. That’s why Superman’s pal became a giant turtle man in Jimmy Olsen 53 (June 1961).

Superman might have had a sense of déjà vu, because he had also confronted a giant turtle man in Superboy 30 (Jan. 1954).

In the Curt Swan/Bill Finger story The Giant Who Came to Smallville!, a local scientist named Willis complains that no one in Smallville takes his growth serum seriously.

“They all think my giant turtle is just a freak — an accident!” he says. “And they call me a crazy scientist!”

Can’t imagine why. It’s not like he would leave his growth formula in a temptingly shiny test tube next to the baby crib where his infant son could drink it.

Oops. He did.

Superboy has his hands full trying to protect the innocent child from being killed by military planes while shielding the public from the giant. With characteristic compassion, he does so by finding a way to befriend the giant boy, not by frightening him.

Cross-index this one under Monster Toddlers, a category that includes the Fantastic Four’s Infant Terrible and Captain James T. Kirk’s Squire of Gothos.

The story worked a little better here than when it was retooled for Jimmy Olsen. After all, Jimmy had to be not merely expanded into a giant turtle man but also “babyfied” in the brain.

It’s also easier for readers to accept the idea that a toddler might drink a dangerous super-scientific freakish-transformation serum than that Superman’s friends Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, Lana Lang and Perry White would do so.

Repeatedly.

And, of course, delightfully.

June 1940: The Many Faces of Clayface

One wonders how Boris Karloff felt about becoming a Batman villain. 

Was he amused, or irritated, or did he never hear about it at all?

In fact, Karloff was probably too busy to read comic books in 1940, the year Detective Comics 40 introduced the villain “Basil Karlo,” i.e. Clayface. Since his major success as the monster in 1931’s Frankenstein, Karloff had appeared in 37 movies, most of them horror films, and was thus well established as Hollywood’s King of Horror.

When Detective Comics 40 hit America’s newsstands in May 1940, Karloff was starring around the corner in the Columbia Pictures horror/science fiction film The Man with Nine Lives.

The fictional Karlo, once a star of equal stature, had been undermined by his own bad publicity. Outraged that a movie company was remaking his old picture Dread Castle, the deranged Karlo adopted his Clayface disguise so he could kill the actors just as they were to die in the movie.

The Dynamic Duo thwarted him, but then an accident allowed Karlo to escape from a prison ambulance and try to get revenge against Batman, Robin and actress Julie Madison, Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend (Clayface Walks Again, Detective Comics 49, March 1941). 

Clayface would be reshaped again and again. Finding a mysterious pool, treasure hunter Matt Hagen became a shapeshifter Clayface in Detective Comics 298 (Dec. 1961). And using Hagen’s blood, Preston Payne became a monstrous Clayface who could melt others with a touch in Detective Comics 478 (July-Aug. 1978).

In fact, you can trace Batman’s evolution through the iterations of Clayface. Basil Karlo epitomized the Dark Knight’s pulpish weird menace era in the late 1930s. Matt Hagen was an example of the science fictional silly fun of the 1950s. And Preston Payne represented a return to the weird menace era in the 1970s, but with neo-noir-ish science fictional elements mixed in.

Many other Clayfaces have been added since, enough for a whole Legion of Clayfaces, in fact.