Month: June 2016

Detective Comics #354 (August, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

If you’ve ever read this blog, the cover of Detective #354 should already be familiar to you.  There it is, proudly displayed in the header above every post.  (UPDATE: The original header was retired in May, 2020, but can still be accessed via the link given above.)  Obviously, I have a lot of affection for this particular offering from the team of Carmine Infantino and Joe Giella, who contributed so many classic covers to this era of Batman comics (and even got to sign this one — not a routine occurrence at the time).

In some ways, it’s a head-scratcher that the cover is as effective as it is.  A dozen or so thugs — none of them especially formidable-looking — are depicted standing in a half-circle around Batman, shaking their fists at him.  The cover copy describes this as “The Caped Crusader’s most dangerous trap”.  Really?  Even in 1966, and even without taking the then-insanely-popular TV show’s weekly cliffhangers into consideration, I believe my eight-year-old self must have been skeptical of that claim.  Sure, the odds are against him, but he’s Batman.  These hoods aren’t even armed.  Even if he’s not able to take them all down, our hero should at least be able to break free of this “most dangerous trap” and escape.  And while those “force lines” drawn around the thugs’ brandished fists may be intended to make them look more threatening, the actual effect comes off as just a little bit silly.  Read More

Justice League of America #46 (August, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

By the time JLA #46 arrived in my mailbox one day in early June, 1966, I had a pretty good idea who the Justice Society of America was.  I knew about the “Golden Age of Comics” that had thrived a decade and more before I was born, and I also knew all about the “Earth-Two” concept that allowed for the “old” versions of the Flash, Green Lantern, and other DC heroes to co-exist with the current models I read about every month.  But I hadn’t yet experienced the extravaganza that was the annual two-issue JLA-JSA team-up — I’d missed the 1965 event by just a couple of months — and I didn’t have any real familiarity with most of the characters who didn’t have “Earth-One” counterparts.  So I don’t know exactly what I expected when I opened up this book for the first time (after flattening out its mailed-subscription-copy crease, of course).  I’m pretty damn sure, however, that I wasn’t the least bit disappointed.  Read More

Batman #183 (August, 1966)

Posted on by Alan Stewart

The estimable and invaluable web resource known as the Grand Comics Database, without which the production of this blog would be exponentially more difficult (if not downright impossible), generally confines its content to verified (or at least verifiable) facts.  Its entry for Batman #183, however, contains the following anonymous “Indexer Note”:

“Camp style stories in the fashion of the TV series begin.”

That statement, on the face of it, appears to assert as fact something which, if we’re going to be honest and objective, surely must be reckoned a matter of subjective opinion, no matter how well-informed.  But because it is from the Grand Comics Database — and also because we’ve already noted how, in the letters column of the last non-reprint issue of Batman prior to this one, editor Julius Schwartz dropped a non sequitur reference to “camp” — I think it’s worthwhile to examine Batman #183 in the context of that claim.  Read More