This is one of the few remaining digests in my collection. As you can see by the cover, it was read and re-read. Given the cover-date of July 1981, it would have been on the stands just before the summer. This was the summer I turned eleven. The white cover is discoloured, not simply by age, but by dirty eleven-year-old, "summer" fingers. I think I bought most of my digests at the Drug Store on the main street of Parry Sound when we were cottaging. I never really found too many of them in my local variety stores in Richmond Hill where we lived. I don't know if they distributed them more widely in vacation areas... I have heard of distribution working in this way. Digest were the perfect item to read on long car rides... small and portable, but many pages and lots of stories. This one took some damage from some serious summer reading! I don't know what happened to all my old digests... perhaps I sold or traded them off. Digests and tabloids were never easy to store because of their odd sizes; they couldn't be nicely kept in those long comic boxes like regular comics. Anyway, this one remained in my collection probably because I was (well, still am) a great Batman fan, and this one featured the major villains of Batman's rogues gallery.
As with so many of the digests in those days, the cover was by Ross Andru and Dick Giordano, and it is a pleaser with the baddies in their classic 70's iconic poses, some of them evoking the old Infantino iconic poses that appeared on the 8" Mego action figures boxes that we loved so much!The first story is a reprint from Batman #260 (Aug. 1971), and is written by Denny O'Neil, and illustrated by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano. I think Novick is one of the great unsung Batman artists. He was pretty much the steady Batman artist from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. His work held the fort on Batman in much the same way that Swan did on Superman during this era. Novick is unsung, though, because the whole period was punctuated by great guest appearances by the likes of Neal Adams and Marshall Rogers (both of whose work we shall see in this digest). Novick had a nice clean style, a good command of the figure, attractive layouts, and he drew the characters very well. He cut his teeth in the Golden Age on MLJ's the Shield in Pep Comics, and to my mind is one of the classic DC house artists of this period. His 1970s style is much in the vein of Dick Dillin and Jim Aparo. When you read a comic by any one of these three, you knew you were reading a DC comic.
Our story, "This One'll Kill you, Batman," begins at Arkham Asylum. In the early 1970s Arkham Asylum/Hospital was beginning to be established as the place that Batman's criminally insane villains went when they were not on the streets. If memory serves, certain villains, the ones that were not certifiably nuts, were still housed at Gotham Penitentiary. Eventually, it became established that Arkham was a doctor that had founded the hospital, but here the name is derived from it being on the "edge of Arkham, New England." I think that in current comic book continuity, Martha Wayne was originally an Arkham before she married Thomas. Bah.
The story begins with the Joker pulling off a prison break.
Batman attempts to put it down, but after having an urn of coffee spilled on him, a fellow named Marcus is about to stomp Batman to death when a green hand intervenes...
Here we get two villains for the price of one, but man did I ever hate it when they coloured Two-Face's hand green. Even as an eleven year old I knew that the acid only scarred the left side of his face, not his whole body, for goodness' sake! Fire the colourist!
But why was Two-Face helping out Batman? Read below...
The story is a pretty typical Joker tale of the early 70s. He is just starting to return to the homicidal version of 1940, but there is still a lot of his goofy 1950s/60s person showing through. Even though he does a lot of bad stuff, this is still a comic you can let your kids read.
I turns out Batman got a bit of a dose of the Joker's laughing drug, and being a bit worried he hurries off to see Dr. Hamish (who?). He is one of the only two people in the world that is apparently qualified to prepare an antidote. The other is Dr. Rockwell, who is in London. Fortunately for Batman, Dr. Hamish lives in Gotham! But unfortunately, just before he is able to help ole Bats, Hamish gets a delivery of flowers with some deadly gas, which kills him. The Joker's calling card gives it all away.
Batman learns he has three days to live, but he is such a fine guy that he uses one of his remaining mornings to attend Dr. Hamish's funeral. Now isn't that decent? That's just the kind of guy Batman was in the seventies. The current prick-Batman wouldn't even think of doing this! And Hamish must have been well-known in the superhero community because Oliver Queen, Hal Jordan, Clark Kent, Alfred, and Lois Lane are all in attendance! Wow. That's the kind of support group that a person needs at such times of tragedy!
The good news in all of this is that Alfred gets Batman to the Batplane, between intermittent fits of laughter, and Batman flies of to London to find Dr. Rockwell. The Joker has beat him there and has put Dr. Rockwell in a guillotine.
Batman saves the good doctor of course (because there are only a couple of pages left and Rockwell is the only guy with the antidote). I include the next picture because I just love how goofy Batman looks when he laughs, and it is only one of the many "laughing Batman" panels in this story.
After Batman KO's the Joker, Dr. Rockwell administers the andidote. However, the laughing had become so frequent and debilitating, Dr. Rockwell wondered how Batman had managed block enough to beat the Joker. Batman reveals that he had guessed that horrifying things (like the sight of Rockwell in the guillotine) were what spurred on the laughter and activated the effects of the drug. He therefore decided to focus on all the funniest scenes in his favourite Marx brothers movies. Which just goes to show, there is no substitute for being well-versed in the classics!
I won't give a play-by-play of the next stories, but only show off a few panels of interest here and there.
The next story is the classic Two-Face revival story, "Half an Evil" from Batman #234. If memory serves, Two-Face had not been seen since the 1950s. Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams brought him back in the story reprinted here. One of the things I love about this issue is how Neal Adams "swiped" several panels from Batman #81, "Two Face Strikes again." That was the story in which Harvey Dent, having previously received plastic surgery and returning to the respectable life of an upstanding citizen, attempts to stop a crime and an explosion causes his plastic surgery to come undone. Well, we all know what that means, and a flip of the coin confirms it, Harvey returns to his old ways...
Here is the Adams page from Batman #234, as reprinted in the digest...
And here is what he borrowed from Batman #81 (as found in my Batman from the Thirties to the Seventies book):
The GCD lists the artist as Dick Sprang... Imagine that, Adams aping a Bob Kane ghost. Of course, it really was more of an homage. Interestingly enough, I think these panels were swiped again in The Untold Legend of the Batman miniseries. I`ll have to see if I still have my copies of that and check it out for sure.
Here is another classic Bat-pose re-imagined by Adams...
And I just have to include this humorous scene of Batman scaring Arthur Reeves. Reeves was a recurring Denny O'Neil early-seventies character. I think he was a candidate for mayor or city councillor. He filled the J. Jonah Jameson roll, i.e, "Batman is a menace that must be stopped." Don't you just love the look on Jim Gordon's face?
Next up is a lovely little two-page spread featuring Batman`s Rogue`s Gallery, drawn by Denys Cowan. Can you name them all? Isn't interesting who is included! Who'd have thought Captain Stingaree would have made it into the top 24! Nice to see the recently resurrected Hugo Strange there!
And speaking of Hugo Strange... That's his body in the barrel being tossed into Gotham river by a couple of Rupert Thorne's thugs in the Penguin story 'Tec #473(below). This is one of the classic stories from the Englehart/Rogers run on Detective. It is nice to see this story included because is speaks to my earlier point about missing issues on the newsstand. When that run was happening I was buying my comics at the local variety store. I had read part one of the Hugo Strange story, but missed part two, missed the Penguin story, then picked up part one of the Joker two-parter, but missed part-two. These little digests were a great way of catching up! I just love how Rogers drew Batman's cape!
Another fun thing about this story was Bruce's evolving relationship with Silver St. Cloud. Here she is recovering in the hospital after she was kidnapped by Hugo Strange and his monsters...
And here is Dick giving them some private time!
And one more panel to demonstrate just how much fun Rogers was having drawing Batman's ears... even the panel border could not contain them! Darryl and I used to love going over Rogers' Batman work just to see how outrageously he was drawing the ears and cape! Now that was Batman, in our minds!
And I figured I should also at least show one shot of the Penguin, given it is Penguin story!
Darryl will be mad at me, as the Riddler is his favourite Bat-villain, but I am not going to include anything from the Ernie Chua-drawn reprint in this digest. Instead I will include the one-page origin story, drawn I think by Giordano. There was one of these for each of the villains in this issue.
The Catwoman story is another Irv Novick drawn story. One of Catwoman's henchmen tries to get a little fresh, which was a bad idea. He looks every part the sleezy seventies henchmen, does he not? Irv had several "stock henchmen" looks... I think this guy might have helped out the Joker a bit, too.
This is the only real Catwoman costume in my books... you can keep the leather and goggles.
Well, that's it for this installment. This has been a recap of one from the collection. We have be haunting the thrift shops for more digests and tabloids, and it has been more difficult than we thought, but the thrill of the hunt continues. In our next installment, Darryl will present a surprising find that he picked up after going 0/7 in his thrift shop digest hunting. See you next week!
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