[Comics]: Detective Comics #53, [untitled]

Publication date: July 1941
Author: Bob Kane

It's the height of summer, and you know what that means--Batman and Robin are going to fight some poor window washer!

What did he ever do to you? And what does this have to do with Detectives? I'm so confused!

Ah, summer. When a young man's thoughts turn to guns:

Is it just me or is it weird to advertise an air rifle right before a Batman story, which is usually very anti-gun? Maybe this is the one where Bruce Wayne gets sick of pretending to be bored and goes postal on his high-society buddies.

No, apparently it's about one of my favorite subjects--cities.

Perhaps!

Our story opens with a declaration of theme. Bruce is having lunch with a friend, one Jim Daly. Daly believes that Gotham is a cold and heartless place, its citizens bustling but without empathy. Bruce disagrees. Our dialectic set, it is up to some gangsters or something to prove the point one way or the other.

Our next page is an interesting illustration. Normally one would think of Batman himself as a refutation of Daly's point--here is a man who dedicates his life to the service of others in his city. Yet here he throws himself off a pier in order to save a girl from committing suicide. Is this empathy, or a self-serving savoir complex, unable to afford others the same autonomy he demands for himself?

Anyway, having saved her, Batman suggests she tell him her tale of woe. Perhaps he can solve her problem with punching?

"If only the artist had drawn me more attractive!"

Ms. Vane (get it? get it? aw, forget it) goes on to explain that she's been deceiving her parents, claiming wild success on the stage in the letters she sends them. And in a shocking twist worthy of every sitcom ever, her parents are now coming to town for a few days to watch Viola's performance and exclaim how proud they are in person. And rather than face their disappointment, she's chosen to throw herself in the river.

Batman to the rescue! With his strong muscles, he's able to hold her head underwater for much longer than the required--

Oh, wait. He's going to help with his super-selfishness, instead.

"This is my chance to use her suicide attempt to a prove a point in an argument!"

Later, Batman shows up at a nightclub and outlines his plan to help Viola. Bizarrely, the rich assholes agree.

"Tell me again how good looking Bruce is."

Bruce "goes from nightspot to nightspot, telling everyone of Viola Vane," and thanks to all those two-drink minimums, he's pretty smashed by the time he gets to the next stage of his plan: media blackout.

Mack: "Here's to you, Mr. Robinson! Jesus loves you more--"

Mr. Robinson: "And someone's sneakin' round the corner. Could that someone be Mack the Knife?"

Batman: *backs out of the door slowly*

What Batman has set up here is actually very precarious. By making it clear that he's telling this to every news organization in town, both the papers and the radio stations, he's set up a sort of Prisoner's Dilemma. The first person to break the press embargo gets the scoop of a lifetime (I can see the headlines now: "Viola Vane Not Actually Famous! Batman Tries to Stifle Freedom of Speech! Read All About It!"), and everybody else gets screwed for toeing the line. So each individual's best move is to get the story out as fast as possible--which means that they all will, and thus get screwed, because nobody will have the story out significantly faster than anyone else. So what holds this embargo together? The threat of physical violence, of course.

His words say "I'll start a Senate investigation" but his eyes say "I will punch anyone you have ever loved."

Time for step 3--Miss Vane. Bruce shows up ("There's no need for you to understand. The Batman told me what you're to do. ...now take off that dress. That's right. Now dance a little.") and takes her to first the beauty parlor for a makeover, and then to her home for the duration of her parents' visit.

"Your stage name, Miss Ophelia Thunderstorme!"

Viola is so touched by the kindness of her betters that she starts crying tears of joy. Gee, this sounds like a crackerjack new reality TV show. "Famous for a Day", or maybe "We Help You Lie to Your Loved Ones".

Finally her parents arrive, stunned by Viola's apparent wealth and fame.

Here the letterer has helpfully bolded all the failures of imagination.

After the tour, Bruce and Viola take the Vanes to a nightclub (her father has never even seen one, outside of the movies), and everybody applauds her arrival.

The best idea Batman had here was convincing the MacGianthands family to participate in the scheme.

While Viola is soaking up all the charitable glory, however, a trio of gangsters has designs on the furs and jewels on loan to her in her penthouse. Oh no! How could she ever live without them?

"No, dis is a laugh: Hah!"

Robin is guarding the penthouse. Do I even need to tell you what happens next, or can I skip right to the Boy Wonder's embarrassing failure?

"I tried to fight, but I just suck so much! I'm sorry for being totally worthless, Batman." is what he should have said.

Inside the penthouse, Vane's borrowed furs and jewels have been stolen back, and her rented Rolls has turned into a pumpkin, too. Batman's only fear is that Viola's parents might know of the theft, because... uh... rich people never get robbed? I dunno. Vane suggests calling the police, but Batman doesn't want publicity. "Robin and I will handle this in our own quiet way," he says, a line which tells us that this story is finally going to start trending towards this:

"Then why did you enter by breaking our skylight?"

After panel after panel of Batman and Robin saying, "Please stop fighting so we can talk" while they beat the living crap out of these gangsters, the hoods finally decide to listen. At least, the conscious ones.

Batman actually appeals to their common decency, telling them it's a rotten trick that's been played on Viola Vane. Most of them still deny any knowledge, but one rat-faced fellow tells Batman, "I may be a crook, but I never pulled a doity stunt like Toothy done." He tells our heroes where they can find Toothy (who can be seen a few panels up in this entry).

Apparently, he lives in "The Shacks", a "crooked row of weather-beaten old houses" on the waterfront, home mostly to criminals. Even Batman and Robin tread softly here... but not softly enough.

"The Batman is here!"

"The Batman!"

"He'll ruin his surprise party!"

"We must stab him!"

"We must stab the Batman!"

With difficulty, Batman and Robin fight their way through the crook-infested house, and then sleeping-gas the lot of them. They make their way to Toothy's room, only to be greeted by a hail of bullets. (Man, nobody ever has anything nice to say.) Toothy goes down the fire escape, and in a fit of pique at his earlier humiliation, Robin launches himself out the window and into Toothy's car. The two of them end up driving right off the pier. Robin takes the opportunity to turn Toothy into Toothless (haha, childhood brutality!), and all's well that ends--

Goddammit woman, will you ever be happy?!

Ugh. Batman has to schlep down to the theater, and convince the star and director to let little miss entitled star in the play, too. Luckily they're amenable--it's the star's last performance before she leaves for Hollywood, anyway.

"You'll do it even if I have to beat up you and half the audience," growled the Batman.

And she does and it's a big hit, of course, and the play's director wants her to stay on to take over for the real star, and her parents are happy, and everyone applauds...

And she never sees Batman again, because he all he ever wanted was this:

"Deep enough and no deeper! Certainly not deep enough to find all the criminals, or the class system driving thousands of Viola Vanes to desperate, dashed dreams, or the selfish superhero who uses violence to enforce the status quo, or..."

[Comics]: World's Finest Comics #2, "The Man Who Couldn't Remember!"

Publication date: Summer, 1941
Author: No Man Can Say

Summer heat, and World's Finest, formerly World's Best, is on the bookshelves. And with the heat wave comes another wave--a wave of crime. Gang crime. The war between rival gangs has been going on for two months, and frankly the Gotham public has had enough of this shit.

"I don't know why we keep voting for that guy."

The disastrous drive-by shooting brings public opinion from a slow simmer to a full boil (add in a little sage, remove from heat, serves 4), and the end result is the governor appointing a special prosecutor, William Kendrick, as an end-run around the crooked DA. Kendrick, we're told, is on the straight and narrow, and promises to get the racketeers. Our story does a nice round-up of bad guy reaction shots, which also has the benefit of introducing our cast.

There's "Big Tim" Bannon, Gotham's political boss, who is skeptical that Kendrick will follow through on his heated promises.

Added Bannon, "Nyah, see?"

Big Tim is played by a toad.

There's the ousted crooked DA Graves, who complains that getting rid of rackets is really hard (especially when the racketeers are paying for his summer home).

Fun fact: he once killed a man with his chin.

Graves is played by the creepy neighbor who won't stop watching you.

There's Mitch Mason, of the West Side mob, who isn't too worried;

Mitch: "I don't worry about anything, thanks to the opium! Wink!"

Mitch is played by Jude Law.

And his rival, Trig Cooler, head of the East Side mob, who makes oblique threats on Kendrick's life.

Trig Cooler is played by Frank Sobotka from The Wire (season 2).

Finally, there's a citizen's committee intended to give Kendrick all the support he needs, headed by wealthy businessman Ambrose Taylor.

Ambrose Taylor is played by Mr. Potato Head.

These are today's players in... "As Gotham City Turns"

Hey, I know what this plot is missing! A plot! Let's add a MacGuffin, shall we?

Kendrick is played by Vampire Charlton Heston.

The next day, Kendrick is having lunch with his friend, Bruce Wayne, who helpfully explains that Kendrick has signed his own death warrant.

Bruce Wayne is played by the stern face of justice.

Kendrick brushes off Bruce's fears, and invites him to dinner, telling him "It's the servant's night off. I'll be all alone!" He makes sure to yell it loudly enough so that the whole restaurant hears. Naturally, the creepy eavesdropping waiter (played by the reanimated corpse of Peter Lorre) wastes no time in taking the news of Kendrick's vulnerability to Boss Bannon. Bannon takes it to "a certain mobster", and later in a shadowy smoke-filled room, shadowy silhouettes plot the murder of the new prosecutor, invisibly.

But two unexpected elements will alter their plans. First, the Potato Head of the Citizen's Committee requests a meeting with Kendrick. Second, a worried Bruce puts on his costume and heads over to Kendrick's, where he sees a car belonging to Boss Bannon out front. Climbing silently up the fire escape, Batman finds himself confronted with a blood-drenched horror:

No jokes here--I just think this is a beautifully laid-out panel, and the surreal red coloring adds a very Dario Argento sort of macabre-ness to the scene. While Batman usually tries for mood, it rarely goes for expressionistic effects like this which key into emotion--here, Batman's shock and horror at finding his friend murdered (and Mr. Potato Head french-fried).

Batman's response is to get so angry that the narration describing his punches needs to use three exclamation marks!!! It doesn't help, though. Batman can fight a lot of things but he can't fight this graph:

Batman's fighting skill is inversely related to how many pages there are left in the issue.

Batman can fight anything at the beginning of the issue, but after that there's a severe drop-off as the true antagonists are introduced. After that, his prowess steadily increases, peaking with the climax and resolution, at which point Batman is so awesome he could punch through the fourth wall, hitting you, the reader.

You can also imagine a similar, but completely inverted graph showing the likelihood that at any given time, Batman will be easily knocked unconscious. Mathematologists are not yet sure how often that's going to result in him waking up just in time to hear a cryptic dying confession, but their computing machines are working day and night on the question.

Devil's Dungeon? Sounds like he's talking about a very different little black book.

With that, Vampire Charlton Heston crumbled into a small pile of fine dust.

Carrying Ambrose "My head was in Toy Story!" Taylor down the fire escape, Batman sees ex-DA (and now DA again?) Graves running away. The mysteries are sure piling up and holy shit:

"In the meantime, at least being covered in Taylor's blood will strike fear into the hearts of my enemies. So much fear."

When he gets to the street, Batman is shot at by a carful of gangsters with machine guns, who must be blind, because:

a) they don't hit him
b) they are shooting at Batman when he is covered in freaking blood


Batman's response is another one of those "I'm so glad I read these comics" moments:

Somehow the bizarre amount of useless "headroom" at the top of this panel just makes this funnier. Or maybe it's just that the brick has knocked his hat off.

Finally regaining their sight or sanity, the gangsters take off. Batman brings the wounded Taylor to Bruce Wayne's nurse girlfriend, Linda Page. She's able to treat him physically, but the bullet that creased his scalp appears to have given him--

*GASP*

AMNESIA!


With Batman's witness unable to give testimony, he falls back on the only other clue he's got--Kendrick's cryptic last words. Unfortunately, that clue is known to the conspirators, too.

Wait, what? Sounds like Kendrick had some bizarre hobbies. (Probably BDSM, but I'm not ruling out LARPing just yet.)

The bad guys ride up to Kendrick's house; so does Batman, Robin, Taylor (in case he suddenly regains his memory) and Linda ("I'm coming with you then. He's still a sick man and may have a relapse and don't argue with me I'm a nurse"), in the Batmobile. Because the Batmobile is an especially-designed billions-of-dollars crime-fighting machine, it goes very very fast.

If only it had GPS.

"Wow! The Batmobile must be doing at least 45 miles an hour! That's way too fast, even for our modern times!"

Rather than using the shortcut to get to their actual destination and find the black book without Batman's interference, they decide to set a trap for him. They put their two cars end to end across the road next to a curve, intending for Batman to crash.

Batman, rounding the corner and seeing the cars, realizes he can't stop in time, he can't turn aside.... There's only one thing to do: accelerate.

Go, Speed Racer! Go, Speed Racer! Go--oh, right. Wrong hero. Anyway this is still pretty awesome.

As it turns out, the Batmobile is made of reinforced glass, steel, and man.

Our heroes successfully get to Kendrick's house first, and spend a few panels wandering around a spooky Gothic house in the dark (the power's out for some reason), complete with those creepy paintings you'd always see in Scooby Doo that were actually disguised peepholes. Batman eventually finds a "Roussal" painting, titled "Devil's Dungeon", which for some reason is not actually in Kendrick's basement-slash-LARP-lair. Anyway behind the painting is the black book.

No sooner have they found it, however, than Bannon's men come charging into the house. Robin takes out a few of them, like a responsible crime-fighter would.

Hey, kids! You know all those lessons Batman and Robin are always trying to teach you? This is one of them.

Meanwhile, Bannon and Graves stumble around, unable to find a damn thing for lack of light. Batman puts on those ridiculously dorky night-vision glasses of his and starts throwing his voice around, ventriloqly.

Either that man is terrified, or his face is made out of cookie dough. Either way it's delicious.

By the time Batman's finished toying with them, thugs downstairs have found Linda and Taylor. In the ensuing struggle, Taylor gets a second bump on the head, which is of course the cure for Fictional Amnesia. His memory regained, Taylor delivers a startling twist:

dun dun DUHNNNNN

Taylor then pulls a gun out of his pocket. Really? I mean, come on, Batman. Everybody knows the first thing you do with an amnesia victim is check his pockets to see what clues he may have left himself. (Also mysterious tattoos.)

Anyway, it's clear that now that Taylor's realized he's a bad guy, he should probably be trying to kill Batman. On the plus side, he does have the gun, and Batman's so absolutely startled by Taylor's retarded confession that he's frozen for an instant. On the other hand, Batman's "instant" is shorter than you'd think. To be fair, Taylor is suffering from a pair of head wounds and isn't thinking clearly. But still, come on. Isn't it better to avoid fighting Batman, even if you're guilty? I mean, he'll beat you up pretty badly. Or, you know, this:

Damn, Batman. What did Mr. Potato Head ever do to you?

The tied-up crooks reveal the rest of the story. Apparently Taylor was publicly the head of the Citizen's Committee to help Kendrick fight the mob, and privately... Mitch Mason's superior and head of the West Side mobsters.

Batman pulls the appropriate lesson from all of this: he should have known the amnesiac was the killer. ...huh.

You're a grown man in a bat costume talking to his costumed ward and his nurse sort-of double girlfriend and together you fight the mob. Earth is a long way away.