As of November, 1973, it had been twenty-seven months since the last time I bought an issue of Detective Comics.  (For the record, that issue was #416, featuring the fourth appearance of Man-Bat.)  There hadn’t been any conscious “drop” decision involved in this long dry spell between purchases; like a lot of other titles, Detective was simply one of those books I made an individual buy-or-not-buy choice about every time I saw a new issue on the stands.  I’d check out the cover, glance at the credits for the Batman story, note who Bats was fighting this go-around — maybe even see who was starring in the backup feature (there was always a backup feature back then) — and if one or more of those aspects grabbed me (or, if the spinner-rack pickings were really slim that week, even just mildly interested me), I bought the comic book. 

I can’t say exactly which of those aspects convinced me to pick up Detective #439 — which, in addition to the inertia generated by my not having bought the series in so long, also had to contend with the book’s new “Super Spectacular” price tag of fifty cents, which had been instituted with the previous issue.  But I’d have to guess it was Neal Adams’ exceptionally striking and atmospheric cover, which popped off the stands like nothing else out that month — quite an achievement, given the more limited canvas that said new 50¢ format (the covers of which were expected to promote the book’s additional, mostly reprint features, as well as the lead story) gave the artist to work with.

If nothing else, I’m 100% certain that my “buy” choice was driven not at all by the fact that Archie Goodwin had become the editor of Detective two issues earlier, with issue #437.  My sixteen-year-old self was still regrettably clueless as to how important the editor was in the process that brought me my beloved newsprint treasures every month — an importance that was particularly significant at DC Comics, where (unlike at rival Marvel) there were multiple editors, each of whom independently managed their own line of titles in their own way.  So it was pretty much lost on me how big a deal it was that Detective was no longer being edited by Julius Schwartz — the man who’d inaugurated both the “New Look” for ‘tec and its companion title Batman in 1964, then shepherded those titles through the mid-decade “camp” era, then managed the “Big Change” that saw the Caped Crusader return to his creature-of-the-night roots at the end of the 1960s (although it should be noted that that transition had already been inaugurated in the pages of the Murray Boltinoff-edited Brave and the Bold, courtesy of the vision of Neal Adams, prior to Schwartz picking up on it).

As for Goodwin himself, while I knew that he’d been the writer for of all of my favorite stories from the early days of Warren Publishing’s black-and-white comics line — stories I’d only read in reprint, but which had knocked me out, regardless — I may not have realized that he’d also been the editor of Creepy and Eerie in those days, or fully appreciated that his creative contribution had been as vital as that of the outstanding artists (Wally Wood, Reed Crandall, Alex Toth, Steve Ditko, Neal Adams, etc.) with whom he’d collaborated so fruitfully.  For better or worse, I mainly associated Goodwin with his more recent freelance work for Marvel Comics, where he’d scripted a relatively lengthy run on Iron Man (never one of my favorites, alas), as well as shorter stints on Captain Marvel, Fantastic Four, and other titles; and while all of his Marvel stuff that I’d read had been solid, professional work that had entertained me well enough, it hadn’t really made a lasting impression.  Still more recently, of course, Goodwin had become ensconced at DC, where he’d been editing (as well as doing some writing) for several of the publisher’s war titles (G.I. Combat, Our Fighting Forces, Star Spangled War Stories) — a gig which meant he might as well have fallen off the face of the Earth as far as I was concerned, since I didn’t read war comics.

Goodwin had been handed the reins of Detective Comics at a particularly challenging time, as the venerable title from whom DC had taken its very name had recently been reduced to bi-monthly status, beginning with issue #435.  The new editor opted not to tinker too much with the lead feature (Batman seemed to still be selling OK, after all), although he did give the writing assignment to a new scripter — himself — and brought in Jim Aparo (who’d been drawing the Darknight Detective over in Brave and the Bold for the last couple of years) as the feature’s new regular artist.  On the other hand, he decided to go with a brand-new strip for the backup feature, which he then proceeded to develop with a young artist with whom he’d been working on his war books: Walt Simonson.  (More about that strip later.)

After producing just one issue of Detective in DC’s standard 32-page, 20-cent format, Goodwin was handed yet another challenge, as the iconic title joined a number of other DC series in moving to the “100 Page Super Spectacular” size and price point the publisher had previously used only for packaging reprint material.  Featuring the same amount of original content as before (roughly 20 pages), the “new” format for Detective and its peers also included over 60 pages’ worth of stories from DC’s vast Golden Age and Silver Age archives.  Naturally, most of the editorial commentary that ran on the letters pages of the first issues to feature the new format emphasized the “bargain” involved in getting so many more pages of comics for your money, proportionately speaking; the fact remained that you were, nevertheless, paying more than twice as much for each issue than you had been previously.  And from an editorial perspective, it meant that the new content produced for Detective under Goodwin’s aegis had to compete for attention not only with every other comic on the stands, but also with the title’s own reprint material (whose selection, incidentally, was overseen not by Goodwin, but by E. Nelson Bridwell) that would henceforth take up the lion’s share of space in every issue, outweighing the new stuff’s page-count allotment by a rate of three to one.

Additionally, Goodwin had to make adjustments on the creative end in regards to the Batman lead feature, as, after having been announced with some fanfare as the feature’s new regular artist, Jim Aparo exited that role following issue #438 (he would, however, continue to draw Detective‘s covers, handling that duty for every issue of Goodwin’s tenure with the exception of #438, for which Mike Kaluta did the honors).  Going forward, a rotating succession of artists would illustrate Goodwin’s Batman scripts.

Or, at least, that would be the case beginning with issue #440.  Because Archie Goodwin didn’t write the lead story in #439, as the reader would learn upon turning to the comic’s first page…

I don’t know if I had actually already bought Detective #439 and brought it home when I first read the credits for “Night of the Stalker!”… but if I hadn’t, the fact that the script was by Steve Englehart might well have been the deciding factor that convinced me to cough up fifty cents.  Englehart was fast becoming one of my very favorite comics writers via his work at Marvel over the past year or so, and I would have been keen to see what he would do with an iconic DC character like Batman.

As for the other names in the credits, I knew Sal Amendola for his work on the “John Carter of Mars” strip in DC’s Weird Worlds — but who was Vin Amendola?  And while Dick Giordano’s inking credit for inks was clear enough, what was the story behind that cryptic parenthetical phrase just barely squeezed in between the credits box proper and the bottom edge of the page: “From an incident as described by: Neal Adams”?

That story, and many other details behind the creation of “Night of the Stalker!”, were later recounted by Sal Amendola in a letter that ran in Comic Book Artist #3 (Winter, 1999); a slightly revised version appeared in 2015 as part of a column by Greg Hatcher published on CBR.com.* While your humble blogger can only share the main highlights of that reminiscence in this post, anyone who admires this particular Bat-tale anywhere near as much as I do will find the entire piece a rewarding read.

As originally published in CBA #3, Sal Amendola’s account begins:

Around 1970, Neal Adams described an incident that he thought would be exciting to incorporate within a Batman story.  He told the “incident” (story pages 11 & 12) over and over again, to anybody who’d come into “The Artists’ Room” at DC Comics.  He told it each time as if it were the first.  He was appropriately and effectively histrionic. I fought off goose pimples each time I heard him tell it… [Note: Amendola was working on staff at DC at this time.]

 

Nobody took up Neal’s “Batman incident.”

 

I told Neal’s “incident” to my brother, Vinny.  He encouraged me to “Do it.  Do it.”  I wrote an outline.  Talked it over with Vin. He told me what he liked and what he didn’t…

 

When first I wrote the outline, I presented it to Neal.  He’d agreed to write the dialogue and do the penciling.  Then I learned that he’d given my outline to Mike Friedrich to dialogue.  I was “hurt.”  Neal was angered.  He returned my outline.  My brother said, “Do it.  Do it.” (pencil it).  I did.  Showed it to everybody I could. Everybody had some shot against it…

 

I presented the finished pencils to Julie [Schwartz].  We argued about changes that he wanted me to make.  He won some.  I won some.  With one exception (Julie said that the title, Déjà Vu, would not be understood by the readers), the compromises weren’t too painful for either of us.  We talked about getting someone to do the dialogue. He wanted Len Wein. I was afraid that Len’s approach would be “Holy Adam West, Bats,” and so I insisted, “NO!”  He suggested Roy Thomas. I was ecstatic.  [DC publisher] Carmine [Infantino] rejected him, because Roy worked for Marvel.  We agreed on Steve Englehart.  But then Julie rejected the story, anyway. “What can I tell you, my boy,” he said (every single time I offered him a story), “There’s no plot!”

 

Around 1973, Archie Goodwin came back to DC as editor.  He asked to see my Batman story.  Accepted it.  Steve dialogued it…

We’ll have more of Sal Amendola’s recollections to share as we progress through the story…

In CBA #3, Amendola notes that his inker, Dick Giordano, “didn’t like that I showed The Batman’s eyes in the close-up on page 3; and he refused to ink the eyes black in all the other panels (but since I did the backgrounds, when the pages passed back to me from Dick, I blacked in all the eyes…)”.

According to Sal Amendola, the killer who goes over the cliff with Batman in this scene, Cannon (whom the artist ultimately drew to resemble Neal Adams, incidentally) didn’t originally survive the experience:

My outline had the Batman saved on a branch that he already knew was sticking out of the side of the cliff, and the villain falling to his death.  My brother thought that the Batman should “T’row da guy off da cliff” (my brother spoke “Brooklyn”).  I told him that The Batman “don’t t’row nobody offa no cliffs.”

 

Julie Schwartz and I were at odds on that point, as well.  Julie, in looking over the artwork, asked, “Where’s the villain” who charged toward the Batman, sending both over the cliff.  I said that he’d fallen to his death.  “You mean Batman killed him?” Julie asked.  “No,” I responded, “The Batman let him die.”  He insisted that I indicate that the Batman had saved the criminal, and to add a panel that would confirm that fact. “Batman doesn’t ‘let’ anybody die!”  At first, I was angry about that change.  I’d wanted to show the Batman so blinded by outrage that he would be driven to the edge of murder; to become almost as unprincipled as the sociopaths he hunted down.  I later was glad for this particular change.

Speaking personally as a reader, I believe that Schwartz made the right call; I’m glad that Sal Amendola came to agree.

At the sight of the Batman, the “Taj Mahal” guy panics completely.  He hurls himself through a closed glass window, then sprints for a nearby stream, with his “eerie stalker” in close pursuit.

The next two pages, 11 and 12, are those that originated as Neal Adams’ imagined “incident” (perhaps “set piece” would be a better descriptor?):

Again according to Sal Amendola, he received a surprising amount of push-back from other comics professionals over the conclusion of his story, with Marie Severin and John Romita at Marvel Comics (where Amendola went to work in 1972) telling him, “Superheroes don’t cry.”  Which, I suppose, just goes to show that even very talented people can make the wrong call, sometimes.  Certainly the impact of the story would be altogether different if it had ended in any other way than with the scene of a weeping Bruce Wayne.

At 14 pages, “Night of the Stalker!” is already longer (by two pages) than the standard Batman story in Detective during this period; but when originally developed circa 1970 — a time when DC’s standard-size comics generally featured 22-24 pages of art and story — it was intended to run for fifteen pages.  Sal Amendola was understandably unhappy about this (“The next-to-last page was dropped [to make room for an ad, I was told — never got that page back…was never paid for it.]”).  While I can’t say that the pacing at the story’s end has ever felt rushed, or in any other way “off” to me, in the interest of completeness, here are Amendola’s handwritten notes to Steve Englehart outlining what would have been page 14:

In the version of his recollections published by CBR.com in 2015, Amendola elaborates on what he wished to accomplish with the lost page:

I sorely miss the page that was dropped in favor of an ad.  It was meant to serve as a “wind-down / transition” page between the non-stop action, and the final page, which showed Bruce emotionally breaking down in his penthouse office.  This deleted page explained that The Batman had, essentially, walked all the way back to Gotham from the edge of the Long Island countryside.  It makes logical his having a copy of the newspaper on Bruce’s desk in the last panel.

 

The dropped page also showed The Batman in an elevator to the Wayne Foundation penthouse, with some awed and dumbstruck young people, returning with replenishments for an all-night party.  The narration was to have told of their having excitedly told the other party-goers that they’d just shared their elevator ride with The Batman.  Of course, no one would believe them.  The narration was also to have mentioned the muffled sounds of the party, audible in the elevator. — Life and death intensity for The Batman… while Obliviously Care-Free Life continues.

Would “Night of the Stalker!” have been a better story with that page included?  Perhaps; though, obviously, we’ll never really know.

Another aspect of the scripted story that bothered Amendola — and one that he was able to convince Archie Goodwin to have changed — was that Englehart had given the Batman at least a few lines of dialogue.  None of those remain in the story as published.  As Englehart has written on his own web site: “The idea was that the Batman would not say a word throughout, so of course I soon decided he needed to say a few words.  Fortunately, editor Archie Goodwin cut all that out.”

Finally, one more thing that irked Amendola about the nearly-finished piece was the credits.  His own version of them, as indicated by his notes to Englehart, went as follows:

(Evidently, Englehart and Amendola were in fact rooming together at this time, so the scripter would presumably have understood the joke.)

It’s not all that difficult to understand Amendola’s concerns with the credits as they appeared in the final product; perhaps the changes were made simply to conserve space, but the published version of the credits not only gives top billing for the story to Steve Englehart, but also collapses the Amendola brothers’ contributions into a single joint credit for “plot & pencils” — which is quite misleading, suggesting as it does that Vin Amendola (who never did any other work in comics, as best as I can determine) had been involved both on the plotting and the pencilling end of things, rather than just assisting Sal with the plot.  Also, according to Sal Amendola, the story almost went to press with no acknowledgement whatsoever of the man whose imagination had instigated the whole project: “Neal was given no credit at all (but since I also did the background inking, when the story passed back to me from Dick, I lettered-in Neal’s credit, myself).”  We should note here that Goodwin did later attempt (in the letters column of Detective #441) to clarify just who was responsible for what in regards to the story — making sure along the way to state (in typically self-effacing fashion) that his own contribution was limited mostly to recognizing that “a classic was being dropped in my lap” when it was first brought to him, and then “nodding my head yes at the proper moment” to see it through to publication.  Still, given than many people who’d bought and read ‘tec #439 would never see issue #441’s lettercol, a certain amount of damage had arguably already been done.

Of course, in the end, it’s the published work that matters — and “Night of the Stalker!” appears not only to have been well received straight out of the gate by both fans and creators, earning a Shazam nomination for best individual dramatic story that year from the latter (for the record, it lost to Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson’s “Götterdämmerung”, published in Detective #443), but also to have maintained its reputation throughout the half-century since, regularly showing up on various “best Batman stories ever” lists, and inspiring outstanding new creative work along the way.**

In November, 1973, however, it comprised only a fraction (roughly one-sixth, to be more precise) of Detective #439’s art-and-story content.  Could the issue’s second all-new feature possibly compete on the same level as “Night of the Stalker!”?  Well, Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson’s “The Resurrection of Paul Kirk” would certainly give it a very good try — but since that 8-page back-up strip ran (logically enough) in the back of the issue, we’ll have some 62 pages worth of E. Nelson Bridwell-curated reprint material to flip through before we get to it.

We’ll begin with “Riddle of the Clown”, from Flash Comics #92 (Feb., 1948).  This Golden Age Hawkman yarn by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Joe Kubert sees the winged hero and his partner, Hawkgirl, travel all the way to Paris, France when their old foe, the Gentleman Ghost, commences a series of daring robberies there.  Although, as it turns out, crimebusting isn’t the only thing one of the Hawks has on her mind…

Re-reading this eight-pager today, I’m struck by how much Joe Kubert’s art style had evolved in the 25 years between this story and the work he was doing on Tarzan and elsewhere in 1973… and by how little Robert Kanigher’s attitudes regarding women seemed to have in the same period, going by his then-contemporaneous work in Lois Lane and Wonder Woman.  Ahem.

Moving on, we next have a Silver Age tale from Atom #12 (Apr.-May, 1964).  Crafted by the classic creative team of writer Gardner Fox, penciller Gil Kane, and inker Sid Greene, “The Gold Hunters of ’49!” is one in a recurring series of “Time Pool” adventures in which the Tiny Titan’s alter ego, Ray Palmer, takes advantage of his one-time professor, Alpheus Hyatt, so that he can have surreptitious historical adventures utilizing Hyatt’s time-travel invention.  This one finds the Atom taking a dip in 1849 Baltimore, where he helps the pioneering detective story writer Edgar Allan Poe solve a real-life mystery — all without ever being seen, naturally.

Next up is another Golden Age story: an untitled tale of Doctor Fate, originally presented in More Fun Comics #66 (Apr., 1941).  Gardner Fox returns as the scripter for this yarn, joining forces with artist Howard Sherman to pit Fate against a so-called “leopard-girl”, who’s ultimately exposed as a hoax.  The story has some additional historical interest as well, as it’s the one in which Fate unmasks for the first time to his love interest (and future bride) Inza.

It’s back to the Silver Age for the next two stories, which are actually linked in a way that’s not immediately apparent to anyone who might be first encountering them here; in fact, they’re linked as well to several other stories that were reprinted around this same time, not only in Detective but in other Super Spectaular titles –making for one of E. Nelson Bridwell’s cleverest (and most fan-friendly) acts of reprint curation during this particular era.

The first of the two tales, “Batman’s Bewitched Nightmare!” was the work of Gardner Fox (yes, him again) and Bob Kane Sheldon Moldoff; originally published in Detective #336 (Feb., 1965), it was the second episode in the “Outsider” story arc that ran intermittently through ‘tec for a couple of years in the mid-1960s, beginning with issue #334 and ending with #356.  As was discussed in detail in our 2016 post about the latter book, the Outsider was a mysterious and powerful villain who seemed to be privy to many of Batman and Robin’s secrets.  He was ultimately revealed to be none other than the Dynamic Duo’s faithful butler and aide, Alfred, who had supposedly died heroically back in in #328 (not so coincidentally, the second of Julius Schwartz’s “New Look” issues), but whom we readers learned had actually been both physically transformed and driven crazy-evil by radiation.

Bridwell had begun re-presenting the entire arc in DC’s Super Spectaculars, starting with its retroactive prequel (the “death of Alfred” story from #328), which was reprinted in Detective #438.  That was followed a month later by the reprinting of the first “proper” Outsider story (from ‘tec #334) in Batman #254, and then, a month after that, by the next installment’s inclusion in the issue we’re looking at today.

In “Batman’s Bewitched Nightmare!”, the Outsider works primarily through a proxy — a broomstick-riding, magic spell-casting witch.  But. as is explained by none other than the Outsider himself in the story’s final panels (after our heroes have thwarted his plan): “Actually, of course, there are no “witches” and no “magic”!  But some people — like the woman I singled out to be my agent — possess extra-sensory powers which the broomstick — being of a rare wood found only in a certain place on Earth — can release, like a catalyst in a chemical reaction!”  Sure thing, Mr. Fox — wood-triggered ESP is clearly much more rational than silly ol’ magic spells.  Anyway, the unnamed not-really-a-witch is apparently captured at the climax of the story, and no fuss is made whatsoever about her true identity… though the house ad which immediately follows the tale suggests maybe something should have been…

OK, so the reprinted Outsider saga continues in… Justice League of America?  And then heads back into the Bat-books?  Well… no.  Not exactly.  But before your humble blogger can explain the meaning of that cryptic comment, we’ll first need to move on to the next story reprinted in Detective #439, an Elongated Man adventure, written by (who else?) Gardner Fox and illustrated by Carmine Infantino, that originally ran in Detective #355 (Sep., 1966).

But “The Tantalizing Troubles of the Tripod Thieves” soon reveals itself to be more than an ordinary case for the Ductile Detective, as Zatanna, Mistress of Magic, shows up on page 6, looking for help in her quest to locate her missing father, Zatara — making this an episode in another intermittent story arc appearing in DC comics edited by Julius Schwartz (and written by Gardner Fox) in the mid-Sixties.  Unlike the “Outsider” serial, however, which stayed within the pages of Detective, this one skipped across Schwartz’s stable of books, beginning with Zatanna’s debut in Hawkman #4 (Oct.-Nov., 1964) before progressing through Atom #19 and Green Lantern #42.  (Those three stories had recently been reprinted in, respectively, Supergirl #5 [which, just for the record, wasn’t a Super Spectacular], Detective #438, and Superman #272.)  With this Elongated Man chapter, the sequence had almost reached its end, both in its original presentation as well as in its reprinting — as was in fact confirmed by the house ad which immediately followed the tale’s conclusion:

Justice League of America #110?  Say, isn’t that the same 100-Page Super-Spectacular in which we’re supposed to find out who the witch from “Batman’s Bewitched Nightmare!” actually was?  Sure is — and that brings us to the explanation of how that story and the Elongated Man one are linked, beyond the simple fact of their following one after another in this issue of Detective.  Because the witch… was Zatanna!  Gasp!

As we previously covered in our post about Justice League of America #51 (Feb., 1967), Schwartz and/or Fox decided that Zatanna’s quest should conclude in the pages of JLA — which was certainly appropriate, given that three out of the four superheroes who’d assisted her thus far were card-carrying members of the League.  (The exception was the Elongated Man, who would of course have to wait until JLA #105 to receive his formal invitation to join.)  But, if they wanted to focus the wrap-up on just the costumed characters who’d assisted Zee to date, there was a problem.  And it had nothing to do with Ralph Dibney — JLA had featured guest stars before this, after all, and would again.  Rather, it was that none of those heroes was named Batman; and in late 1966, at the height of TV-fueled “Batmania”, the Masked Manhunter had to be in every issue of Justice League of America.  Had to be.  So, what to do?  The solution that Fox and/or Schwartz came up with was quite clever, if necessarily contrived — reveal that the witch from Detective #336 was really Zatanna, who’d been suborned to do evil by the Outsider’s uncanny powers.  (All that blather at the end of “Batman’s Bewitched Nightmare!” about ESP and rare wood?  Fuhgeddaboutit.)  Hey, you didn’t think that retroactive continuity was a recent thing, did you?

And so E. Nelson Bridwell managed to have the concurrent reprintings of the Outsider and Zatanna sagas converge in Detective #439, via the one story that belonged to both.  And it was fun.  And I, for one, was happy that both storylines were being reprinted, as I’d originally come in close to the end of the former arc, and at the very tail end of the latter.  Or, at least I was happy until those concluding chapters were themselves reprinted, and I found myself paying again for material I already owned… or, at least, that’s how I saw it at the time.  But more about that a little later on…

We have one more reprinted story left to touch on; and it’s unique, in that it’s the only one that wasn’t originally published by DC Comics (or, if you want to get technical, one of the two companies that eventually became DC, i.e., National and All-American).  Rather, this untitled and uncredited Kid Eternity story was originally published by Quality Comics, whose intellectual properties were acquired by DC when Quality went out of business in 1956.  A number of Quality heroes had recently been revived in the pages of JLA as the “Freedom Fighters” — but Kid Eternity hadn’t been among them.  So I’m not sure if my younger self had ever seen him, prior to Detective #439’s reprint of this 11-pager from Kid Eternity #3 (Autumn, 1946).

Still, I got the gist quickly enough; the Kid possesses the power to summon up the spirits of the deceased, which he uses to help him solve crimes, right wrongs, and so forth.  In this particular tale, he calls upon such famous folks as Thomas Edison and Achilles — though I’ve chose to spotlight the rather more obscure Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, if only because that 18th-century occultist had been having something of a moment in American comics of late, getting name-checked over in Marvel Comics’ Dracula Lives on a regular basis, and even showing up on panel (well, sort of) in the same publisher’s “Doctor Strange” feature running in Marvel Premiere.  Was Bridwell aware of those  recent offerings from DC’s primary competitor?  I have no idea; still, even if Cagliostro’s cameo here was a pure coincidence, it certainly made for an interesting one.

And now, believe it or not, we’ve finally arrived at the back of the book, and at the second brand-new story contained within Detective #439’s one hundred (counting covers and ads) pages:  the third installment of Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson’s “Manhunter” series.  And to think, it only took us roughly 5,000 words (not counting the ones within the scans, naturally)!  Feel free to take a short rest break, if you haven’t already; “The Resurrection of Paul Kirk” will still be here when you get back…

I’m not sure what, if anything, my sixteen-year-old self knew about the new “Manhunter” strip going in.  But I would have recognized the name “Paul Kirk”, which would have let me know that the feature’s protagonist was none other than the same guy who’d starred in Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s “Manhunter” back in the Golden Age — several of whose stories I’d happened to read the last time DC had made a big push towards combining new and reprint material in the same comic book, when they ran as back-ups in the 25-cent “Bigger & Better” issues of Kirby’s New Gods.

At least, I’d have assumed that it was the same guy; but, though it turned out that I was right, I could easily have been wrong, according to the accounts given later by both Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson.

In his introduction to the first reprinting of the “Manhunter” stories in 1979, Goodwin described his main goals in developing a new back-up feature for Detective Comics:

What I wanted was something that would fit (however loosely) within the “detective” format of the book, but contrast vividly in terms of mood, character, and artistic style with the lead stories, something that would nail the eye of the casual browser and maybe eventually develop a following of its own, bringing the book a few readers beyond the dyed-in-the-wool Batman fans.

Goodwin was drawn to the “Manhunter” name as well as to the basic concept of the 1940s character — a big-game hunter who turns to stalking “the world’s most dangerous game” — but didn’t feel that meant he necessarily needed “to follow or pick up on the earlier strip”.  His own inspirations ran more to “Japanese comics featuring samurai and ninjas”; ideas that his artistic collaborator, Simonson, found appealing as well.  Still, even as they worked out the new hero’s background, modus operandi, and visual design, both creators knew that they’d eventually have to call him something besides “Manhunter”.

In 1979, Goodwin recalled:

Since I’d been inspired by the Simon and Kirby strip, I thought I’d pay homage to it by using part of the character’s name, making our Manhunter Paul something or Kirk something.  Trying these on Walt, it became fairly obvious that Paul Kirk was just as serviceable a name as any I’d invented.  We elected to go with it.

But even at this point, Goodwin and Simonson’s “Paul Kirk” wasn’t necessarily the same individual as Simon and Kirby’s “Paul Kirk”.  In an interview conducted for the book Modern Masters Volume Eight: Walter Simonson (TwoMorrows, 2006), the artist recalled:

Somewhere around the third issue we thought it would be kinda fun to actually make it the same guy from the old Kirby “Manhunter,” because we only had eight pages.  We were doing 20-page stories in eight pages. I was doing a lot of panels on the page.  We thought making him the other character would open up his backstory, given our limited space.

In his 1979 intro, Goodwin concurred:

While it didn’t start out as even a consideration for the strip, that linkup with the Simon and Kirby Manhunter grew into one of the major ingredients. It gave him an elaborate history which helped make him a much more solid character, and, ultimately, even a poignant one.

As Simonson noted in the interview excerpt we quoted earlier, the limited number of pages that he and Goodwin had to work with every two months encouraged him to use “a lot of panels on the page”.  Still, that didn’t mean that he was unwilling to go with large panels when the story called for it, as with the thunderously impactful splash that almost fills page 3, above.

While Goodwin’s script for this chapter did a pretty good job of orienting my younger self to the ongoing storyline, there was only so much that even he could accomplish in one eight-page chapter; and so, while I understood that Christine St. Clair was an Interpol agent who’d been pursuing Manhunter all over the globe, I didn’t really have a clear idea why she was after him.  I have to admit, it would have been nice to know at the time — as readers of the previous two chapters did — that she was responding to reports of his having saved various prominent individuals — among them an East Asian political leader, a Middle Eastern oil sheikh, and a South American geneticist — from death at the hands of assassins who looked just liked him (and who were distinguishable from the “real” Paul Kirk mainly by dint of their outfits being colored blue where his was red).

“Nitobe!” exclaims Christine, while simultaneously taking out another Kirk clone or two.  “He’s a legend to any martial arts student!  B-but… he died in the A-bombing of Nagasaki!”  Not true, says Manhunter — both Asano Nitobe and the man he was then bodyguarding, a genetics expert named Dr. Oka, were pulled out before the blast by the Council, who’d already secretly recruited Oka to their cause.  Christine responds by letting Manhunter know that the two of them probably won’t be as fortunate as Nitobe and Oka, as they’ve just run out of ammo…

In late 1973, ninjutsu was still an uncommon word to find in American comic books; the term would be more frequently seen in the next couple of years, as the burgeoning martial-arts fad grew and flourished (though one could argue the whole ninja “thing” didn’t really take off until the advent of Frank Miller on Marvel Comics’ Daredevil, some six years hence).

Yep, Paul Kirk has a “healing factor”… beating Marvel’s Wolverine to the punch by at least five years.

So concludes “The Resurrection of Paul Kirk” — though not, obviously, the backstory of how Paul Kirk came to realize that the Council’s goals were evil ones, and rebelled against them.  That part of the tale was told in Detective #440, in which readers — and Christine — learned that Kirk had decided to warn his intended Interpol target, only to find that said target — Damon Nostrand — was already a Council agent, and that the whole assassination assignment was a set-up intended to test Kirk’s loyalty.  Having failed the test, Paul Kirk was almost executed on the spot by his own clones, but was able to overcome the odds thanks to his lifetime of experience; since escaping, he’d been simultaneously on the run and also on the case, working to thwart the Council’s operations all around the world.  By the end of this chapter, Damon Nostrand had perished, but not before managing to put Christine St. Clair as well as Paul Kirk on Interpol’s “wanted” list.  The next two installments of the Manhunter storyline, in Detective #441 and #442, saw the now-allied Kirk and St. Clair continue to work against the Council’s aims while also trying to clear their names; along the way, they were able to convince the master ninja Asano Nitobe to join their cause.

Meanwhile, over in the front of the book, Archie Goodwin delivered three more taut, stand-alone tales of the Batman, each drawn by a different artist: Sal Amendola (#440),*** Howard Chaykin (#441), and Alex Toth (#442).  But while none of these eclipsed #439’s “Night of the Stalker!” — frankly, few Batman stories in any era could — they nevertheless more than held their own, both against their immediate predecessor in the lead feature slot, as well as the dazzling work Goodwin and Simonson were doing in the title’s back pages.  And while all this was going on, E. Nelson Bridwell continued to fill the 80 or so middle pages of each issue with a dependably eclectic assortment of stories from DC’s (and Quality’s, and even Fawcett’s) past, featuring the likes of Plastic Man, Black Canary, Eclipso, Ibis the Invincible, and of course Batman (with the finale of the “Outsider” sequence arriving in #440), with even Simon and Kirby’s Manhunter turning up at one point (also in #440).

It all came to a head — and an end — in Detective #443 (Oct.-Nov., 1974), as Archie Goodwin closed out his one-year, seven-issue tenure as the title’s editor with the 20-page “Götterdämmerung” — the final chapter of the Manhunter saga, as Goodwin and Simonson teamed Paul Kirk with Batman for the first (and last) time.  Here, the Darknight Detective joined Manhunter and his allies in their ultimate assault on the Council’s sanctuary; an effort that succeeded in taking down the sinister organization once and for all… but only at the cost of Paul Kirk’s life.  In an almost unprecedented move, the creators of the new Manhunter were taking a bow, exiting the stage… and their creation was making his exit, as well.  To this day, while there have been a number of other “Manhunters” published by DC Comics, the one and only, original, Paul Kirk has been allowed to rest in peace.

Why did the end come so quickly?  In one of the last interviews he gave prior to his untimely passing in 1998, Archie Goodwin explained to Comic Book Artist‘s Jon B. Cooke that there were a couple of reasons for his leaving DC in 1974:

One, I got an offer from [James] Warren to come back and edit a couple of his titles which I found interesting and wanted to try.  At the same time, I also felt that DC was falling behind in terms of giving back original artwork to the creators.  Marvel began doing it, Warren began doing it, most other companies started doing it and we could not get DC to return people’s original artwork — they insisted on keeping it.  So it began making it harder to work with a lot of the better artists and again, being a thing I felt uncomfortable about — if I was getting an offer from someplace else where they would give back the original artwork which I felt should go back to the artist then I certainly felt more comfortable about going in that situation.****

Of course, leaving DC meant leaving Manhunter; after all, Paul Kirk belonged to the company, not to Goodwin or Simonson.  If DC wanted, they could keep the back-up feature running as long as they liked, with whichever creative team they chose.  But, as Goodwin related in his 1979 intro to Manhunter:The Complete Saga:

About the time we finished Chapter Five, I decided to quit DC and take an editing job with Warren Publishing.  When Julie Schwartz, who was going to take over editing Detective Comics when I left, decided he had no interest in picking up the Manhunter character, Walt and I were free to do what we wanted with him in terms of wrapping up the series.  Since I was parting on reasonably amiable terms, DC let me stay on until this was done.  From the beginning, mail to the comic had included quite a few pleas to have Manhunter meet the Batman, and it was certainly something that Walt and I had intended to do once we felt we had Manhunter well enough established.  After using Chapter Six to direct events toward a final showdown, we were set to bring down the curtain with the 20-page team-up story, “Götterdämmerung.”

 

(If you can’t be pretentious in a last issue, when can you be?)

 

Most characters in comics go on and on. It’s good business… If Manhunter had been anything but what it was, an obscure eight-page backup strip based vaguely on an equally obscure Golden Age character, Walt and I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to bring it to the total conclusion we did. And if we had left the strip open-ended, I doubt it would have achieved any of the impact or reputation it has. We got lucky. We got a chance to do something that few people in mainstream comics got to do…

It’s an interesting question.  Would the Goodwin-Simonson “Manhunter” serial — just 69 pages of comics, all told — have achieved its status as a timeless classic, if its creators had kept it going for another seven, seventeen, or seventy-five issues?  Or if they hadn’t ended it with such finality, leaving someone else to pick up the characters and concepts?  We’ll never know, of course.  But your humble blogger is grateful for what we got, in any case… even if his younger self only bought one episode of it brand-new off the stands.

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Yeah.  About that…

Like many another comics-purchasing decision I made fifty years ago that seems boneheaded today, I can’t really recall just what was (or wasn’t) going through my mind when I opted to leave Detective #440, and its immediate successors, sitting in the spinner rack.  All I can do is speculate, really.  And the best I can come up with is that I didn’t really care for the “Super Spectacular” format.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think that my aversion had much to do with the price point — even when, concurrent with the release of ‘tec #440, it went up from 50 to 60 cents — since I was lucky enough as a young reader not to have to worry too much about budgeting for my comics purchases.  Even so, I wasn’t crazy about paying again for stories I already owned, as I’ve already mentioned — and as would have been the case with #440’s reprinting of “Inside Story of the Outsider!” from Detective #356.  Beyond the question of cost, however, a more serious drawback was the limited appeal to my younger self of much of the reprinted material that I hadn’t seen before; a lot (not all, by any means) of the Golden Age stuff seemed crude in comparison to what I was accustomed to in 1970s comics, and even the Silver Age content for which I had greater affinity — it was what had gotten me into comics in the first place, after all — was beginning to feel somewhat simplistic to me.  Finally, I was simply annoyed by the practice of combining new and reprint material in the same comic book package.  I hadn’t cared for it in DC’s 25-cent/52-page era, when the new stuff had at least outweighed the old; and I liked the 100-page model, in which old content dominated new by a factor of roughly 3 to 1, even less.

A side note here: please believe me when I say that I’ve read enough commentary from other fans of my generation to know that my attitude was far from universal, back in the day; many readers loved (and still love!) the “Super Spectacular” and similar formats of the Seventies, relishing the opportunity to enjoy vintage art and stories they’d never be able to afford in the form of back issues.  If you fall into that category, that’s great!  More power to you.  Obviously, I can only speak to my own attitudes, and my own experiences.

But, getting back to November, 1973, and the months that followed: set against what I saw as the drawbacks of the 100-page, reprint-heavy format were the merits of the new material I found in Detective #439, which clearly were considerable.  Hadn’t “Night of the Stalker!” and “The Resurrection of Paul Kirk” been worth fifty (or even sixty!) cents, all on their own?  Here I probably was simply boneheaded — but I probably took the former story as something of an anomaly (which, in some ways, it genuinely was), and as for the latter… well, it was the third chapter of a multi-part storyline, and as intriguing as the narrative was, I probably never felt I had a firm handle on exactly what was going on — and thus never felt entirely invested in the story and its characters.  And, finally, to be completely honest.. while I liked Walt Simonson’s art here (same as I’d liked it a few months earlier in the last two issues of DC’s Sword of Sorcery), I didn’t quite love it yet.  It would take roughly another year — and, ironically, another Batman story in Detective Comics — for me to really “get” Simonson.

Luckily for my younger self back in 1975, when the scales did finally fall from my eyes, I was able to pick up Detective #437, 438, and 440-443 as back issues, at what were then still reasonable rates.  And luckily for my not-so-young self of today, I became an avid fan (and buyer) of Simonson’s work from that point forward… which means you’ll be able to read about many, if not all, of the artist’s other comics achievements of the 1970s on this blog, as we roll merrily along through the decade.  (And, for the most part, in posts where reading all the way to the end won’t be quite so much of an endurance test as it has been with this one… or so at least I hope.)

 

*Hatcher later devoted another column to “Night of the Stalker!” featuring Sal Amendola’s hand-written plot and other notes for Steve Englehart; it, too, is recommended reading for fans of this story.

**In 2005, DC published Solo #5, a collection of short pieces by artist-writer Darwyn Cooke.  Among then was the 13-page “Deja Vu” — a remarkable remake of “Night of the Stalker!”, in which Cooke closely follows the Amendolas’ original plot (and, obviously, also restores Sal A.’s original title), while at the same time providing all-new dialogue and — in part through the employment of a rigid 8-panel grid on every page but the title splash (shown at right) — a completely different, but no less compelling, visual approach than that of the Amendola/Giordano original.  All of this makes for a bravura performance on Cooke’s part, as well as a loving tribute to the piece’s source material.

“Deja Vu” has been anthologized several times since its original appearance; if you’ve never read it, and you appreciate great graphic storytelling (and who reading this blog doesn’t?), I highly recommend that you check it out.

***Sal Amendola drew one more Batman story, which appeared in issue #296 (Feb., 1978) of the hero’s solo title (he also contributed the cover); other than a couple of stories in World’s Finest (and a single page in Heroes Against Hunger #1) that teamed Batman with Superman, he wouldn’t return to the character again after that.

In addition to his gigs at DC, the remainder of the Seventies saw Amendola doing a good bit of work for Archie Comics, as well as drawing the first three issues of Phoenix for the short-lived Atlas/Seaboard Comics.  For a period in the 1980’s, he worked again at DC, this time as an editor and talent coordinator; since then, he seems to have spent most of his professional time and energy in the art education field.  At this juncture, therefore, “Night of the Stalker!” seems likely to stand as Sal Amendola’s most lasting legacy in comics.

****Somewhat ironically, Goodwin’s return to Warren Publishing lasted for only a few months; by early 1975, he was again working for Marvel Comics — this time on the editorial staff, where he’d remain for the next fourteen years.  While he would ultimately return to DC, that day wouldn’t arrive until 1989.