After a quarter-century of ceaseless crime-fighting, Batman was clearly slowing down.
“Editor Julius Schwartz had helped engineer the superhero resurgence, and (DC publisher Irwin) Donenfeld was fond of his handling of The Flash, a bold, colorful title that had debuted in 1959,” explained Glen Weldon in The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture.
“Donenfeld looked at the team behind that comic — John Broome on scripts, Carmine Infantino on pencils and Joe Giella on inks — and decided to issue an ultimatum. He called Schwartz and Infantino into his office and told them they were taking over the Batman books. If the two men couldn’t turn them around in six months, both Batman and Detective Comics would be cancelled.”
“(Schwartz) suspected that Donenfeld’s threat to cancel Batman was an empty one, given the Caped Crusader’s historical number two status in the publisher’s firmament of intellectual property.”
Nevertheless, however reluctantly, the team took on the assignment. Out went all those alien-ridden science fictional plots, and that cozy extended “Bat Family.” In came a sleeker, more grounded Batman whose chest emblem now included a discreet, colorful oval surrounding the bat silhouette.
“(B)y encapsulating the emblem within a yellow field, Infantino transformed it into an eminently reproducible and trademarkable symbol,” Weldon observed.
The New Look shift showed up in a few more updates within the narrative. Batman lost his butler (briefly) but gained a sportier 1960s Batmobile, and Commissioner Gordon acquired a substitute for the Bat Signal — his Hot Line to the Batcave (called the Bat Phone later on TV).
That was an up-to-the minute reference to the presidential “hotline” that had recently been installed to connect the Pentagon with the Kremlin. Made a priority because the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had brought the world to the brink of nuclear destruction, the hotline was a Teletype system that became operative in 1963. The system was intended for text only because of the fear that speech might be misinterpreted.
