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.

October 1938: Avengers of Many Colors

The Green Hornet was clearly popular in 1938 — so much so that DC Comics offered two comic book pastiches of the radio superhero.

An urbanized, updated version of the Lone Ranger, the Green Hornet had debuted on WXYZ radio in Detroit in 1936. By the spring of 1938, the show was being heard nationally on the Mutual network.

And in Detective Comics 20 (Oct. 1938), the Crimson Avenger took a bow.

“Whereas in reality the Hornet was Britt Reid, daring young publisher of the Daily Sentinel, the Crimson Avenger was Lee Travis, daring young publisher of the Globe Leader,” noted comics historian Ron Goulart. “The only person who knew the Hornet’s true identity was his faithful valet, Kato, and the Crimson Avenger’s secret was shared only by his Chinese servant, Wing. Like the Green Hornet, the Crimson Avenger never used a deadly weapon and preferred to put his adversaries to sleep with a blast from his gas gun. He wore a dark blue slouch hat, a domino mask and an Inverness-style cape of crimson hue.”

Elsewhere in Detective Comics 20, you could find a house ad for the More Fun Comics feature the Masked Ranger — DC’s version of the Green Hornet’s great-uncle, the Lone Ranger.

A little later, in Adventure Comics 40 (July 1939), DC provided readers with another masked, gas-gun-wielding man about town in a business suit. The Sandman added a cape to the ensemble.

“It’s anybody’s guess whether the Sandman was inspired by Superman or (like the Crimson Avenger) the Green Hornet,” observed comics historian Don Markstein.

Hornet or no Hornet, both the Crimson Avenger and the Sandman were examples of an evolution in melodrama already underway in comic books.

“Masks, hoods and villains with colorful names were becoming the norm in the stories even though many of them were still the evil Orientals at this stage,” noted comics historian Steve Thompson.

And Lee Falk’s Phantom had been haunting the funny pages since 1936.