By my reckoning, DC Comics’ The Brave and the Bold was one of the first comic book titles I ever spent my own money on (for the record, it was preceded only by Superman, Detective Comics, Green Lantern, Justice League of America, Flash, and Lois Lane). I bought my first issue, #64, in December, 1965 — drawn in, no doubt, by its irresistible Gil Kane cover — and BatB soon became one of my most consistent regular purchases as a nascent comics fan. No, I didn’t buy every single issue, but that was true of virtually every other title as well (the sole exception in those early days being Justice League of America, to which I quickly subscribed). The ongoing appeal of the book, of course, was that you were always guaranteed at least two superheroes for the price of one (sometimes, as with issue #65’s team-up between the Flash and the Doom Patrol, you got even more). That wasn’t quite as good a deal as JLA, which might give you as many as ten costumed crusaders cavorting in the same story… but it was still pretty sweet.
I continued buying Brave and the Bold through the camp era of Batmania (best epitomized, perhaps, by #68‘s meeting between Metamorpho and “Bat-Hulk”, which also featured three of the TV show’s most popular villains) — an era which saw the end of the free-form team-up format (my purchases included the last ever issue of BatB not to feature Batman, i.e., #73, which paired Aquaman and the Atom) — and on into the short but pivotal run illustrated by Neal Adams, which initiated the Darknight Detective’s return to his Gothic and noir-ish roots, thus setting the basic tone for how the hero has been portrayed ever since.
Unsurprisingly, then, if you’ve been a regular reader of this blog for a while, you’ve read a number of posts about Brave and the Bold over the years. (If, on the other hand, you happen to be a newer arrival, you’re warmly invited to use the upper left-hand menu to search for “Brave and the Bold” to retrieve and read what you’ve missed.) That said, it’s been a while since one of those posts appeared — over three years, as a matter of fact. And the 
issue covered in that last post, #93, was a definite outlier — not only, or even primarily, for its unorthodox “team-up” between Batman and the anthology title House of Mystery, but rather for its creative team of artist Neal Adams (who was returning to BatB for this issue after leaving the title over a year before) and author Denny O’Neil — who would have the distinction of scripting one of the only two new lead Brave and the Bold stories appearing between issues #63 (Dec., 1965-Jan., 1966) and #147 (Feb., 1979) not written by Bob Haney. (If you’re curious, the other one was #87’s team-up between Batman and Wonder Woman, which was scripted as well as pencilled by Mike Sekowsky.)
Anyway, seeing as how I wrote ten Brave and the Bold-themed posts between 2015 and 2020, and none since then, you might well assume that my younger self must have stopped buying the book in late 1970. But that’s not actually true. In fact, I continued to buy BatB throughout the next decade — not as frequently as I had back in the 1960s, true, but still often enough that I’d call it a semi-regular purchase. So why haven’t I been posting about the series? Basically, it’s just because none of the issues I bought back in ’71-’73 made the cut when I measured them against other comics I bought at the same time; as I’ve noted on several previous occasions, my younger self bought a lot more comic books — and not just any comics, but good, interesting ones — than it’s possible for my present-day self to write about in the time available.
Interestingly, one random consequence of my haphazard BatB purchasing pattern during the Bronze Age is that I seem to have missed most (though not all) of the era’s most egregious examples of the freewheeling approach to comic-book writing that eventually earned the title’s most prolific scripter the sobriquet, “Zany Bob Haney”. You probably already know the stuff I’m talking about. Take, for instance, Haney’s frequently idiosyncratic characterization of Brave and the Bold‘s 
leading man, as revealed in such scenes as the classic opening of issue #102, which finds that dread creature of the night known as The Batman taking a stroll through an upscale Gotham City neighborhood in broad daylight, enjoying the spring weather and checking out the young ladies. Delicious! Or the story where Batman dies, yes, really, and the Atom has to animate his corpse (#115). Or the one in #124, where 
terrorists attempt to murder Batman and Sgt. Rock by forcing BatB artist Jim Aparo to draw them being killed. Yeah, that stuff. Somehow, I managed to miss it all.
I also managed to keep clear of some of the most blatant examples of Haney’s cordial disregard for established DC continuity, such as when he had Batman fight alongside the aforementioned Sgt. Rock in World War II and in the present day in issue #84; or when he revealed that Bruce Wayne had an older, brain-injured brother named Thomas, Jr.; or when he let it be known that both Batman and Superman had superheroic teenage sons alive and active in the present day. (OK, so those last two examples don’t come from Brave and the Bold; rather, they appeared in World’s Finest, which Haney was also writing during this period — and which I never read during his tenure. Still, you can hardly discuss Haney’s take on Bat-continuity without taking them into account.)
On the other hand, I did pick up some of the issues where Haney had Batman team up with someone whom I knew good and well resided on Earth-Two — such as the Justice Society of America’s Wildcat, who showed up a whopping five times from 1969 through 1976 (not bad for a guy who hadn’t held down his own solo feature since 1949). And, yeah, whenever that happened, it was kind of irksome that the stories didn’t deal with the fact that “our” Batman supposedly operated on Earth-One; still, it wasn’t all that hard while reading such tales to imagine that they were taking place on Earth-Two, and that the Darknight Detective on view in them was the one who belonged to the JSA; after all, that hero was the Earth-One Batman’s exact double in almost all major respects. (I understand that some fans took the opposite approach, imagining that Wildcat [or the Spectre, or whoever] was a hitherto unknown Earth-One version. I can see how that would work, too; though the Earth-Two Batman hypothesis seems more efficient to me, seeing as how it doesn’t require the invention of a new character. But, no biggie.)
In any event, whatever sins against DC continuity Bob Haney may have committed in the issues of Brave and the Bold that I read, they didn’t seem so important as to require a whole new parallel Earth to explain them (i.e., “Earth-B”, as fan-turned-pro-editor/writer Bob Rozakis would dub it; or, if you prefer, the “Haneyverse”). Indeed, so far as I was concerned, Brave and the Bold was as far from a continuity-buster as it could possibly be; rather, it was a continuity-builder.
After all, in an era when crossovers between individual titles were relatively rare — and line-wide crossovers a la Crisis on Infinite Earths were completely unheard of — where else were you going to get a sense of an interconnected fictional universe? The Justice League and the Teen Titans only had so much room in their respective ranks, after all. Same for the Superman and Batman “families” of costumed heroes. It was Brave and the Bold, therefore, that had the main job of establishing that the exploits of such disparate characters as the Metal Men, Deadman, Plastic Man, the Phantom Stranger, and even Cain the Caretaker all took place in the same wondrous world. Being a reader who loved that particular aspect of comic-book storytelling, then as well as now, your humble blogger appreciated the efforts of Bob Haney (and his editor, Murray Boltinoff) to reach across DC’s various editorial fiefdoms and drag any and all properties trademarked by the publisher into the BatB pool.
I recall my younger self being particularly pleased the first time that one of the new characters created by Jack Kirby following his return to DC in 1970 showed up in Brave and the Bold. Prior to July, 1973, I’m not sure that any non-Kirby DC comic outside of the “Superman family” titles (e.g., Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane) had so much as mentioned a single one of the King’s recent major contributions to the DC Universe (with the exception of a glancing reference to Darkseid in Justice League of America #94 [Nov., 1971]). So I was pretty stoked when the alter egos of two of Gotham City’s most fascinating citizens — Bruce “Batman” Wayne and Jason “Etrigan the Demon” Blood — were brought together for the first time in BatB #109 (Oct.-
Nov., 1973). Haney even devoted a whole scene of that story to Jason’s interaction with his “master”, the enchanter Merlin, that, while only lightly impacting the issue’s overall plot, provided a lot of the Demon’s overall raison d’etre for any reader who wasn’t already familiar with the character from Kirby’s series. (The writer also scored extra points with me as an Arthurian legend enthusiast by working in a reference to Merlin’s cave near Tintagel, England — a considerably more authentic home base for the legendary British mage than Kirby’s fictional “Castle Branek” in the Eastern European region of Moldavia. But, I digress.)
Of course, whatever new reader interest in The Demon might have been engendered by the character’s appearance in Brave and the Bold #109, it wasn’t enough to keep the series from being cancelled with its 16th issue, published just three months later. But you can hardly blame that on Haney, Boltinoff, or Aparo, whose job was to move copies of their title, not the other guys’. Nor could you cast aspersions on the BatB team for the demise of the title of the next Jack Kirby creation they chose to co-star in their book, since the eighteenth and final issue of Mister Miracle had shipped in November, two months prior to the publication of Brave and the Bold #112.
For my part, I was just happy that that apparent last gasp of Kirby’s highly ambitious and personal “Fourth World” epic hadn’t necessarily signified that the New Gods of Apokolips and New Genesis were gone from the pages of DC’s comics forever, their saga never to reach an appropriate conclusion. How could it, when the son of Highfather was right here in Brave and the Bold, teaming up with Batman?
The “file folder” header at the top of our story’s opening splash page is a byproduct of Brave and the Bold having gone to DC’s “100 Page Super Spectacular” format with this very issue. Typically, a certain amount of first-page real estate was reserved for the publication’s indicia, printed in small type at the bottom of said page. But most of the Super Spectaculars (including this one) featured a Table of Contents as the comic’s actual first page, and that was where BatB #112’s indicia appeared — meaning there was an inch or so that needed to be filled with something other than white space at the top of every story that had originally run (or, in the case of “The Impossible Escape”, had presumably been planned to run) as a comic book’s first page.
That actually came in pretty handy in this instance, since it gave editor Boltinoff (or, perhaps, assistant editor E. Nelson Bridwell) the opportunity to explain that, despite it being published two months after Mister Miracle #18, this story actually took place before that one.
I don’t suppose that the Caped Crusader’s use of a gun-shaped tear-gas grenade launcher in this scene quite breaks the “Batman doesn’t use guns” rule… but it’s still a pretty jarring visual, at least for me.
Jim Aparo’s first issue of Brave and the Bold had been #98 (Oct., 1971), in which Batman partnered with the Phantom Stranger — a character whose own series Aparo was drawing at the time. The artist didn’t work on the next issue, #99, but was back for #100… and for the vast majority of issues after that, serving as the book’s regular illustrator right up to its cancellation in 1983 — after which he immediately became the artist on the Bat-book which replaced BatB on DC’s publishing schedule, Batman and the Outsiders — and after that, served a long stint drawing the Dark Knight’s solo adventures in both Detective Comics and Batman, well into the Nineties.
Aparo was without doubt one of the most prolific Batman artists of his generation; during his peak years of the Seventies, when he was generally inking and even lettering his artwork, he was also one of the best. His version of the hero clearly followed after Neal Adams’ (as did most of his peers’), but incorporated plenty of the artist’s own individual approach to mood and action as well.
Mr. French explains to Batman and Commissioner Gordon that the bat-statuette contains hieroglyphics he’s recently been working to decipher; for that reason, it wasn’t in its regular exhibit space when the thieves invaded the museum, and their failure to find it is evidently the reason they ultimately resorted to suicide. Gordon wonders what could possibly make the statuette worth such dedication, and French further explains that the translated hieroglyphics reveal the location of a second lost tomb — “that of Atun, the ancient Egyptians’ legendary first pharaoh*… who gave them their science, art, and unique belief… in immortality!”
Regardless of how well Jim Aparo could draw Batman, it obviously took more than that to be successful as the artist of Brave and the Bold; he also had to be able to credibly draw virtually every other DC hero, as well. That was one thing when he was dealing with characters like Deadman or Green Arrow, whose look had been largely defined in recent years by Neal Adams — an artist who worked in the same sort of illustrative, realism-evoking style as Aparo himself — and something else when handling the creations of someone like Jack Kirby, who came from the more abstract and expressionistic end of the artistic spectrum. It’s to Aparo’s everlasting credit, then, that his versions of Mister Miracle, Big Barda, and Oberon are every bit as convincing as his takes on any of those Adams-flavored characters mentioned above.
I get that the requirements of this issue’s plot worked against Haney’s giving Barda and Oberon anything more than walk-on roles in this story; still, I wish he’d found room to script at least one caption explaining that, yes, Scott Free let his best friends know he was alive and well before following the mysterious Dr. Bors off to parts unknown. Alas, he didn’t, so we’ll just have to write that scene in our own heads.
Sayid theorizes that Faroosh was killed by men in the employ of “someone ruthless and powerful” who mistakenly believed the dealer still possessed the bat-statuette. Batman decides that the only way to get to the bottom of this mess is to go search for the tomb of Atun himself; when the Egyptian inspector attempts to dissuade him, the Darknight Detective cracks that maybe “old Hotep’s guardian bat” will protect him. “We’re birds of the same feather!” And with that, it’s off to the desert for our hero.
While it would be incorrect to suggest that Batman never left the environs of Gotham City in his solo books, the Bats of BatB definitely seemed like more of a globetrotting adventurer — making it less of a surprise than it might otherwise be to see him riding a camel beneath a blazing desert sun…
Ingrid reveals that she’s in possession of a rubbing of the statuette’s hieroglyphics that explains how to get into the tomb, but not how to get out — which is why she needed the services of a Super Escape Artist. Being a “noted archaeologist”, she’s able to read the pictograms, which she proceeds to translate for Mister Miracle: “I, Hotep, the chamberlain, at my life’s end, carve this history…”
Bob Haney may or may not have been cognizant of the events of Mister Miracle #18 when he wrote this story, but he was at least up-to-date enough to know that Scott Free’s original Mother Box (a sentient computer used on both Apokolips and New Genesis, for anyone out there unfamiliar with the details of Jack Kirby’s Fourth World mythos) had been destroyed in MM #11, and that the hero had since replicated its circuitry inside his cowl.
Hmm, are our storytellers cheating just a bit here? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I had my eyes open the whole time! But I guess we can cut Haney and Aparo some slack and assume that MM made his move somewhere between one panel and another at the bottom of page 14.
Moving on, the duo comes to another passage branching off from the main one. Realizing it could be either the way out or another trap, Mister Miracle employs his “probe beams” to scout ahead…
OK, I guess we’ve established now that MM really is faster than a panel-to-panel transition…
“The last thing I remember was trying it on out of curiosity!” Yeah, that was almost the last thing you ever did, too, Bats.
But that was something that was pretty consistent about Bob Haney’s characterization of Batman from the ’60s on: his rashness. It was sometimes hard to believe that someone that impulsive could survive to the end of a single issue, never mind the dozens ultimately penned by BatB‘s most prolific scribe; yet, somehow, he always did.
Before moving on, we should also acknowledge that a reader of 1974 might well have wondered how Batman could be so familiar with Mister Miracle — at least, as being anything more than a colorfully-costumed showman — since this story was written well before the era when Batman would naturally be assumed to be keeping tabs on all his peers in a big ol’ database. It’s probably for the best to assume that in the Haneyverse, all the super-people know each other, and frequently hang out together on weekends.
Apologists for Bob Haney sometimes assert that any concerns over the writer’s cavalier attitude towards continuity or his occasional “zany” ideas are, in the end, not that important when measured against his other strengths as a comic-book storyteller. Here’s Michael Eury, writing in Back Issue #7 (Dec., 2004):
Haney was… one of the most talented plotters in the history of comics writing. While his stories were sometimes outlandish, they were solidly structured, three-act plays that left no questions unanswered.
Well. That last statement might hold true for the majority of Haney’s yarns, but it doesn’t work for this one — at least not as far as your humble blogger is concerned. Because I have a lot of questions. Such as: Just who was “the master”, anyway? Why was Atun’s helmet programmed to imprint his personality on its wearer? What purpose did Atun have for returning to Earth this second time, other than to provide the story’s deus ex machina ending? And so on.
Ultimately, however, I’m not sure any of those questions matter all that much. Most of them probably didn’t occur to me as a first-time reader in 1974; and today, I’m inclined to think that, well, there’s nothing really wrong with leaving a few mysteries unresolved at the end of a story, you know? Whatever else you may say about “The Impossible Escape”, it’s an undoubted page-turner — a fast-paced adventure that surprised me at multiple junctures and kept me entertained to the end. Which, at the end of the day, is all that Bob Haney — and Jim Aparo, and Murray Boltinoff — were really trying to accomplish.
As noted earlier in the post, Brave and the Bold #112 was the first issue published in DC’s “100 Page Super Spectacular” format, which called for roughly 80 pages of comics content — a requirement that resulted in a 3-to-1 ratio of old-to-new material. But while you might expect that would allow for the publisher’s reprints editor, E. Nelson Bridwell, to include three full-length vintage BatB team-up tales to fill out this issue, such wasn’t the case, alas. That was because, while DC’s current comic-book stories ran to 20 pages, the old ones had gone up to as many as 25, which meant that either multiple pages would have to be edited out, or other arrangements would have to be made. Thankfully for us completists, Bridwell chose the latter option; even so, he was still able to feature two full-lengthers from the early days of Brave and the Bold‘s team-up format, beginning with the following tale from issue #51 (Dec., 1963-Jan., 1964):
This story happens to be just the second one-on-one team-up tale ever presented in Brave and the Bold, having been preceded only by issue #50’s pairing of Green Arrow and the Martian Manhunter. At that time, while most BatB stories were written by — who else? — Bob Haney, there wasn’t a regular artist assigned to the title; so this sea-meets-sky teaming of Aquaman and Hawkman was a one-off for the veteran artist Howard Purcell, who was otherwise keeping busy drawing shorts for such DC anthology titles as House of Mystery and My Greatest Adventure.
In its earliest incarnation, Brave and the Bold had featured multiple stories of historical adventure in each issue, starring a roster of continuing characters that included the Viking Prince, the Golden Gladiator, Robin Hood… and the Silent Knight, who stars in #112’s next reprint, a 10-pager written by Robert Kanigher and drawn by Irv Novick:
The Silent Knight, incidentally, is a contemporary of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table — though you wouldn’t know it by this story. While my younger self would doubtless have been even more interested in this tale if I’d been privy to this information, I was still enough into the whole “knightly adventure” thing in general to enjoy it on its own terms.
The final reprinted story in BatB #112, originally presented in issue #59 (Apr.-May, 1965) has the historical distinction of being the first of the title’s team-up stories to feature Batman as one of the co-stars. (My own first issue of Brave and the Bold, featuring the Caped Crusader’s encounter with Eclipso, was only the second, though I didn’t realize that at the time.)
I suspect that I was more interested in this Bob Haney-Ramona Fradon story than either of the other two reprints in this issue, if only because I’d bought and read its direct sequel in BatB #69 (Dec.,1966-Jan., 1967), which presented Batman and Green Lantern’s return engagement against the Time Commander.
Capping off the issue is a three-page featurette about “Batman’s Famous Co-Stars”, which consists of sparse new text amidst mostly-reprinted art, and is the very epitome of filler… and that’s that for Brave and the Bold #112, which, as noted earlier, was the first issue published as a 100 Page Super Spectacular. For what it’s worth, it was also the only issue your humble blogger bought new off the stands in that format — although that’s not actually such a big deal, seeing as how the format itself lasted for only six issues. With 
#118, the book would be back to 36 pages (including covers)… and I, too, would be back, just a few issues later, turning up for #122’s pairing of Batman with the Swamp Thing — the first time the characters had met since the classic Swamp Thing #7, a couple of years before. Perhaps we’ll take a closer look at that one, come July, 2025… but just in case we don’t, please allow me to assure you here that that comic book entertained me — just as did virtually every other issue of Brave and the Bold turned out by Bob Haney, Jim Aparo, and Murray Boltinoff that I ever read.
Additional Brave and the Bold cover art credits:
- Issue #65 (Apr.-May, 1966) by Bruno Premiani.
- Issue #68 (Oct.-Nov., 1966) by Mike Sekowsky, Joe Giella, and Murphy Anderson.
- Issue #73 (Aug.-Sep., 1967) by Carmine Infantino and Chuck Cuidera.
- Issue #97 (Aug.-Sep., 1971) by Nick Cardy.
*Haney appears to have derived the name of his “legendary first pharaoh” from Atum, the primordial god of creation in Egyptian mythology, though one or both of Atum’s fellow Egyptian deities, Aten and Amun, may have also had an influence. (For the record, the name that tradition gives to the first monarch of a unified Upper and Lower Egypt is Menes.)
My concern with this story wasn’t how Batman knew Mister Miracle, it was how Mister Miracle didn’t recognize prominent Gotham citizen Bruce Wayne.
Not everyone tips his hand. After all, Captain Stacy never divulged that he knew who Spidey was, until his dying breath.
Well, Scott Free did not live in Gotham and ‘was not from around here.”
Yeah, there’s no particular reason he’d recognize Bruce.
Bat-Hulk! 🤣
National (DC) was handling Marvel’s distribution in those days, even limiting the total number of titles Marvel could produce per month. Nowadays I think there would be a lawsuit if DC ever published Bat-Hulk, especially with the name prominently displayed on the cover.
I had a few of those B&B issues from the mid 1960s, and own all of the Neal Adams issues, and read a few subsequent ones, including the Batman/Sgt. Rock/Jim Aparo team up (how come Jim didn’t receive top billing, too?). 😉
After Swamp Thing was cancelled at #24 my eyes perked up any time I saw the character afterwards, so I purchased that B&B you mentioned (though I found the character to be too loquacious — it was supposed to be *painful* for him to speak), as well as his guest appearance in a few issues of Challengers of the Unknown in 1977 (Berni Wrightson even came back to ink one panel), the 1977 and 1978 reprints with two new Wrightson wraparound covers, a Swamp Thing and Superman team-up in DC Comics Presents, and another B&B issue with a Kaluta cover. When his own series was revived I didn’t care for it, and had moved on (this was before Alan Moore had come on board).
In this post your cover scans conspicuously eliminate the original US price. I always like seeing them as part of the original cover design, as well as their historical value when new.
Two of the covers, that is.
Here it is:
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/0/00/The_Brave_and_the_Bold_v.1_112.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20160924175645
DC had raised the price of its 100 pages at this time, as evidenced by the “only 60 cents” blurb at the top right.
100 pagers (autocorrect didn’t like the R)
Chris, I generally do try to use cover scans that include the original cover prices, but these two somehow slipped past me, so thanks for the catch. I’ve just updated the post with more authentic images for both BatB #112 and #122.
How does Batman know Mister Miracle? Maybe it’s courtesy of his “Bat-Sense” that he boasted of to Jim Gordon back on page two!
Seriously, wacky plotting by Bob Haney aside, I agree with Alan, this is a fun, exciting story. And the artwork by Jim Aparo is fantastic. If I was a kid reading comics back in 1974, I’m sure I would have enjoyed this issue.
Mister Miricle was a performer, a public figure. In the real world, he wpuld be likely to get a story in Time or Newwsweek or US News & World Report. In the context of the story, he is a performer who appears to have either powers or alien tech.
Not only would Batman be interested, the JLA would probably be interested as a group and Superman (a close friend in these stories) might be wondering if this guy tied into those strange kids he met or the odd things his friend Olson was running into and “Supertown,”
Yes, taking down Iron Hand in Mister Miracle #1 would get some attention from Batman. I don’t know they’d suspect him of having alien tech, given the high level of tech Earth-One individuals have developed over the years.
I loved Brave and Bold back in the day for many of the same reasons you list, Alan. It was Batman…and the whole rest of the DCU! How could that be bad? I’m not sure I started buying the book quite as early as you did (though I do remember most of the issues you’ve written about over the years), but I don’t remember this one. Maybe it was the Super Spectacular format. Maybe it was the team-up with Mister Miracle, who was not my favorite Kirby Fourth World creation, or maybe I just missed it on the spinner rack. Regardless, I’m glad I get a chance to check it out now.
This was a fun story. Yeah, Haney’s characterization of Batman is wrong and way more “Bruce Wayne in a mask” than a real Dark Knight Detective, but the story moves right along and pops at all the right moments, giving the reader a fun but ridiculous ride. I expected Inspector Sayid to be working for the bad guys, or at least to show up again at the end in some way, but no. For a giant Egyptian roach motel (heroes get in, but they don’t get out), the tomb of Atun was awfully easy to find and enter. Dr. Borg was as transparent a villain pretending to be a scholar as you could get and who didn’t realize in the first panel that the resurrected Atun was Batman, especially when we spent several pages with MM and Dr. Borg and he never showed up. I was also thrown out of the story by Haney’s characterization that Batman would just try Atun’s helmut on for fun and that Scott didn’t recognize Bruce Wayne when he saw him. Finally, I found the ending of the story highly unsatisfying in that we never got to find out who “The Master” was or what was going on in that cliffside super-villain lair (did Haney ever come back to that?) or that MM and Bats would not only never know who pulled Dr. Borg’s strings, but that they’d ever even try to find out.
All that aside, however, the story was fun and Aparo’s art was beautiful and while it’s easy to complain now, I’m sure back when I was sixteen, if I had seen this story, I would have ignored all that and enjoyed it a great deal. I would have enjoyed the rest of the book as well, since the Hawkman/Aquaman story and the Batman/Green Lantern story were adventures I’ve still not read, even now. The Silent Knight story, I would have ignored.
All in all, a fun book that might have actually been worth the exorbinant sixty-cent price tag. Thanks, Alan!
I sort of had the idea the guy in the lair was supposed to be a Haney (possible) co-creation, General Immortus. (He and Drake always disagreed as to how much Haney did on the first two Doom Patrols.)
I assume it was setting up a return of the Doom Patrol, as Haney and Boltinoff had brought back Metamorpho and the Metal Men about a year and a half before. Maybe Carmine Infantino thought the sales on the DP reprint book in ’73 didn’t justfy it.
It was along the lines of what Frank Robbins did with Bruce Wayne in Batman and Detective, which is less remembered by fans today.
The Batman/Deadman story in B&B # 104 may be the best Batman noir story ever.
I agree about B&B #104, John. Excellent comic. Great story.
That is one of my favorite issues! Terrific hard-hitting ending.
i always presumed, going by the last few panels, that the guy dying in the chateau was acutally Atun. It was his death referred to when the other aliens apologized for summoning him back to their world.
I took the dying man in the chateau for “the Master”, rather than Atun, as the latter was busy helping save Bats and MM’s bacon at the time the former was passing on. I could be wrong, of course. 🙂
As you were talking about in a comment on the Secret Empire story in CPT America, Some times plot threads peter out or get re-purposed.
I think this may be one of them.
The older I get, the more I grow to prefer the very human Bronze Age version of Batman to the brooding antisocial neurotic who supposedly can defeat any adversary if he has enough “prep time” that we’ve been stuck with in the 21st Century.
God yes. It’s really startling to read the old stuff and realize how flesh-and-blood Bats used to be — the equivalent to Superman’s superpowers growing increasingly awesome of course.
Haney seemed more respectful of Kirby’s characters than most of the more established DC heroes he used. The same was also true of Swamp Thing, but less true of heroes like Man-Bat.
Haney’s brother-in-law was Ned Chase, magezine editor and father of comic actor (mostly) Chevy Chase.
Haney was a Navy Combat Veteran of the Okinawa Campaign and held a Master’s Degree from Columbia.
He had an interesting life.
It is interesting how well written the early, pre-Batman B&B Team ups were (like the Hawkman/Aquaman one here or the subsequently-reprinted GA-Martian Manhunter story.). In this one, Haney seems to bring some things in that were bigger plot points for the Golden Age Hawkman (such as talking to birds). In late 1963, Hwney was just before (or just after) taking over the Aquaman book, but he writes Aquaman here more like the Submariner circa 1948. Of course. in the GA-MM team up. neither hero had much of a supporting cast, established bad guys or back-story, so Haney was justified in creating it.
I have read that GAand MM were supposed to become the permanant team, like Batman/Superman in WF. That might have let Haney REALLY create something . . . .
Long time reader and first time commenter – love your site and your writing, it’s always such a pleasure to read! I have huge affection for this era of B&B and this issue in particular – I read this when it was new and adored it – still do, even though in the end it doesn’t make a lot of sense. (Haney’s always able to convince you the story is ending rationally and coherently, even when it’s not.) I actually have an original page on my wall – Aparo was magnificent then. Haney’s sense of drama overrode his sense of plot and logic sometimes (maybe more than sometimes) but his best stories are so memorable and fun that it’s all very easy to forgive. Plus, he crammed more story into 20 pages than anyone I can think of (except possibly Kirby, and even then only possibly). Thanks for covering this one!
Neal Adams said in an interview that he loved working with Haney because he’d squeeze three plots into the same space Denny O’Neil would fit one. He definitely meant it as a compliment.
Wildcat’s origin featured a comic book of Green Lantern so an argument can be made that the Earth One Wildcat appeared before the Earth Two version and vindicates Haney use of the character.
Earth-Two did have superhero comics about its own superheroes so it’s possible for Earth-Two, too (http://atomicjunkshop.com/the-golden-age-of-comics-as-experienced-by-earth-two-comics-readers/)
I could look at Aparo art from this period all day long. It’s a shame there hasn’t been a biographical art book about him.
Thanks, as always, for your research and write-up! This was the heyday of Brave and the Bold. The previous issue, #111, by Haney & Aparo was a truly great Joker story! Jim Aparo was at the height of his powers. Aparo could draw any of the DC heroes well! Bob Haney always brought action and adventure to his stories and I loved the globetrotting (Gotham, Paris, the Alps, Egypt) aspect of Batman which was similar to the James Bond movies of the time. To a kid who had never been anywhere, this was awesome stuff! Yes, we are left with a few questions at the end of the story. However, Haney was bringing all of this together in only 20 pages. Nowadays this story would be spread over 6 issues and the writer would have plenty of space to fill in any plot holes. Haney did not have that luxury. I can’t believe it’s been 3+ years since you’ve broken down an issue of B&B and now we have to wait another 1.5 until you examine B&B #122, but I am already looking forward to it!
I don’t know, but I suspect the sales om B&B #111 convenced them to take a shot at a Joker book the next year.
I wonder if the sales on the Batman/Man-Bat B&B storywas a proof of concept for the brief Man-Bat series Conway tried in late 1975?
Can’t say enough good things about Aparo’s art in the early-70s, before all the grittiness and rough edges were smoothed off later on. The first non-Adams Aparo-drawn B&B I bought was #100, and as each issue came out you could see him getting better and better. I always felt that Aparo was more successful than Irv Novick in channeling Adams while giving it his own distinctive look. And as noted above, he could turn his hand to almost any other character; I always looked forward to seeing who’d be Batman’s partner in the next issue. My personal favourite story was one featuring The Atom. It might’ve been interesting to see other top inkers of the time having a go at his pencils.
I’d just like to thank Alan and all the commentators, this is a wonderful site and a great group of people. I often read the article and then wait another 24 hours so i can return and read the comments!
I think Comic Collecting as a hobby is heading down a precarious path at this moment, it seems that the latest generation that has entered the hobby has become corrupted by absolute nonsense; ‘keys & grails’, ‘hot books of the week’, ‘MCU speculation’ and the obsession over slabbing and CGC 9.8 comics. It’s all fiscally based in their eyes. They’ve got it all so very wrong in my opinion.
This article is what it all should be about, celebrating the medium, the art, the characters and the stories (both on the page and behind the scenes) and it’s wonderful to see everyone really being entertained and engaged by a $10 book that would be deemed completely unworthy by most of the new guard – if it’s not on YouTube does the book really exist? – so thank you one and all for al your input and many thanks to Alan for being the remedy to the hobby’s current ills.
I appreciate you all.
“The Master” bugged the hell out of me and still does. Admittedly there are probably plenty of cult leaders and schemers who never crossed paths with superheroes so we don’t know about them. But still.
A fun story, though I think it would been Oberon worrying and Barda confident Scott would come through. Yes, Jim Aparo was awesome, regardless.
The “gods from Outer Space” aspect bugs me more than it did as a kid, since I’m now aware of criticism that it’s racist (it’s always non-white primitives who need alien guidance to shape them up!).
Yes, I forgot to say, Haney appears to have been tapping into the then-topical “Did aliens build the pyramids?” pseudo-scientific thinking that made it into the mainstream via Erich von Däniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods? And I agree, it is racist.
Of course, Jack Kirby would also derive influence from that zeitgeist just a couple of years later with The Eternals, albeit much more imaginatively & effectively than nearly everyone else who used the “ancient astronauts” idea in their works of fiction.
The Eternals ranks second to Kamandi with me as Kirby’s best work after the end of the Fourth World.
I haven’t read Erich von Daniken’s book in decades, but I confess that I’ve never thought of the “ancient astronaut” concept as racist until I read your comment. I definitely see what you (and others) are getting at here, but I offer as a counter-example the building of Stonehenge, which also gets the “ancient astronaut” treatment. I think the whole alien savior business is more about “well they couldn’t possibly have done this themselves because it looks impossible” than, well they were people of color so they couldn’t have done it (cf, people who think that the Moon landings were faked).
As for the Master, perhaps he had been bitten by a vampire and after dying became the villain who dominated the first season of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”. No?
I enjoyed the reprint material too, particularly the Hawkman/Aquaman. Like most of the earlY B&B swashbucklers, the Silent Knight story wasn’t great, but as I’d never seen the character before that made it interesting.
Haney’s story was all over the place, a real free-for-all. “Bat-sense” seems like an inane holdover from the camp era. Whoever was editing should have stricken that from the script.
As for the Batman in Egypt, we saw him there in the classic O’Neil-Adams-Giordano Batman #232 and #244 in 1971 and 1972. Speaking of which, why didn’t Ra’s al Ghul ever reveal to the world that Bruce Wayne – who had faked his death at the time, but was “found alive” in a South American plane crash at the end of #245 – was the Batman? I suppose his “code” kept him from divulging that secret, even though he was likely incarcerated after being dragged away unconscious at the end of #244.
I’m not the biggest fan of Jim Aparo, but he really did a great job on this issue of B&B. Great mood and heavy use of black to keep the Batman a shadowy figure. Haney’s script gaffes were a bit much, though. A good editor could have ironed them out. Batman trying on the helmet “out of curiosity” — infantile rubbish!
I don’t think R’as ever gave up hope of bringing The Detective around to his side. But yes, it wouldn’t have hurt to make it explicit.
Especially true at this point in the continuity. R’as still had hopes “The Detective” would take over his Empire and he and Talia would provide R’as with a whole host of murderous grandchildren. He ultimately got half of what he wanted, but at this point, he still wanted it all.
Have to dig that one out to refresh my memory, but I can’t recall Batman visiting Egypt in #232. India, yes, and maybe Tibet. Not sure about Egypt as the setting for #244, either.
Yes, you are correct. It was Calcutta, not Cairo, that Batman went to in 232. As for 244, the desert locale for the Batman/Ra’s showdown is definitely in the Middle East.
If Neal Adams had watched Satyajit Ray’s “Apu” trilogy of films, especially the second one which takes place in Kolkata (Calcutta), he could have properly drawn the city. Neal’s “Calcutta” in Batman #232 looks like Cairo, right down to the man begging for alms. A portion of the first Indiana Jones film “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was filmed in Cairo. In retrospect, I think Neal Adams (and possibly Denny O’Neil as well) confused the two cities in #232. “Alms for the love of Allah?” in a city that is predominantly HINDU? After India gained independence from Great Britain in 1948, the nation split up into three parts: the Muslims went to Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the Hindus and Sikhs in those new countries migrated to India. There was terrible bloodshed as they crossed paths.
I read the Brave and the Bold in the 70s and always automatically assumed the Wildcat in those issues was the Earth One version. I never thought it was a continuity error until I read articles about Bob Haney 20 years later. Justice League of America #219 (the Justice League/Justice Society teamup that retconned Black Canary as her own daughter) established that the Spectre that appeared in Earth One stories ( like The Brave and the Bold) was inhabiting the body of the Earth One Jim Corrigan. Also the Batman/Sgt Rock teamup in issue#162 specifically states that it takes place on Earth Two and references their previous meeting in #84 which retcons that to be on Earth Two. #162 was written by Bill Kelley and not Bob Haney.
If there’s one thing Aparo was known for in these parts, it’s drawing the widest ties ever worn by 70s man – check out that fine example sported by Commissioner Gordon on page one 🙂
I seem to recall an earlier B&B story where Batman suggested “some bat-sense” helped, in a way that suggested it was more like a cross between intuition and a lucky hunch. I suspect Haney thought that, well, if it worked once, it’ll work again….don’t know whether it became a regular part of Batman’s crime-fighting arsenal, though.
It also might be like Frank Rock’s “Sergeant’s combat intuition” from the Kanigher stories.
The idea being, in each case, if you servive doing something dangerous, you get a sense fpr it.
Haney wrote the first SGT Rock story, although he existed as an archtype in the warbooke before and the character was modified by Kanigher and Kubert when tey did “The Rock and the Wall,”
Many thanks to those of you who recommended B&B#104. It was a really well done comic that calls into question the moral integrity of a hero ( Deadman the hero in question, not Batman). Next stop B&B#111!
Somehow I never saw or didn’t realise I was seeing any issues of Brave and the Bold in the spinner racks for the first six years of my comic reading. The first one that I remember buying was issue 100 and I was surprised that a DC comic had got to that landmark without me knowing about it. Like you, it then did become one of the comics I would look forward to, anticipating who Batman would be teamed with in the next issue. As you saw, it was one of the few places where the DC universe characters could interact, teen titans has been cancelled more than a year earlier leaving the JLA as the only other place for this to happen – apart from the occasional guest star in any other comic.
I remember enjoying the story and especially the art by Jim Aparo, he is much under celebrated in my opinion. The work that he did on B&B, the Spectre and Aquaman in this period was some of his best.
No surprise, I enjoyed all the reprints as they were all new to me and helped fill in further gaps in my knowledge of what had happened in the past.
I know that Swamp Thing #10 – Wrightson’s last issue – was cover dated May-June, 1974. Hope you’ll be covering that one soon, Alan (and/or Plop! #5, also published at the same time).
No plans for Plop! #5, Chris, but Swam Thing #10 will be coming up in a week or so. 😉
I look forward to it, Alan! When I first read Plop! #5 as a young person I thought it was side splittingly funny, especially Sergio Aragones’ work. Still puts a smile on my face. Loved Basil Wolverton’s covers, and what a treat to have another Wrightson story in there (after #1). This and Swamp Thing #10 were Berni’s last solo stories for DC for about a decade. I hope you’ll cover some of his Warren work as well.
I’d love to write about Wrightson’s Warren work too, Chris! Unfortunately, I’m at the mercy of my younger self, who, for whatever reason, had an aversion to Creepy (where almost all of Wrightson’s stuff appeared) though I continued to pick up Eerie on occasion. Other than the fact that Eerie was series-centric and Creepy wasn’t, I can’t explain it. 🙁
I was nine years old when Creepy #63 with “Jenifer,” written by Bruce Jones and drawn by Berni Wrightson, was published. It was a very disturbing read for a pre-teen (and obviously intended for an older audience). Berni’s Warren work was deliberately edgier than what DC and the comics code had permitted him to do (an axe in the head of the wife in his Poe adaptation, “The Black Cat” in Creepy #62; the protagonist stoned to death in Eerie #58’s “The Pepper Lake Monster;” the doctor melting into a putresecent corpse in Lovecraft’s “Cool Air” in Eerie #62; and so on. I was delighted to see that the frontispieces Wrightson had done for DC ‘s House of Mystery and House of Secrets he was now doing for Warren’s Creepy and Eerie in 1974-75, with even greater refinement. It really was the pinnacle of his comics work.
I just want to say (since I commented in reply to a general topic above) that while I almost never comment anymore, it is not because I have stopped reading the posts and comments, have stopped enjoying the posts and comments, or have nothing to add. Usually, by the time I get to the end (and I read them slowly), almost all of the things that I want to say have already been said. However, I just wanted to drop in and write to tell you Alan and everybody else to keep up the great work and interesting comments. I still am here soaking up the nostalgia even if silently.
I will say though that starting with 1973, outside of Steve Englehart and to a certain extent Steve Gerber, I became less excited about comic books in general for a few years, so there is that. Also, although I did not have a cost problem for the 100 page spectaculars, I did find them annoying because I only cared for some of the reprints and I thought that the covers were extremely cluttered and boring.
I’m glad to know you’re still out there, Stuart!