Thanks, spoon! I'm glad you mostly liked it!

I love "The Crime of Bruce Wayne"! It is so far off the rails. It doesn't bother me that it makes no sense because it's so darned entertaining! And I really love that panel where the Collector is leaning back in his chair and waving around the Gotham Gazette and gloating about how Bruce Wayne took the fall for the Collector's crimes!

Getting back to "The Outlaw Batman," I got #240 in the mail Wednesday and I read it immediately, but I only just now have a few free minutes to read it again and post my own thoughts! It should be posted in an hour or so.

Detective Comics #240
February 1957
"The Outlaw Batman"

The first thing I noticed when I opened up Detective Comics #240 was that gorgeous Dick Sprang art! He makes these 1950s Batman stories look so good!

He's one of my favorite Batman artists. He might even be my favorite! The other two top contenders are Sheldon Moldoff and Marchall Rogers. Moldoff gets a lot of points for being around so long and providing the art for so many of my favorite stories from the 1950s and the early 1960s. And even into the "New Look"! He drew the first Poison Ivy story! And Marshall Rogers did a stunning job on his short run in Detective Comics in the late 1970s. The two-part Joker story with The Laughing Fish is one of the greatest super-hero stories ever.

But ultimately, if I had to pick one of them, I'd go with Dick Sprang. He drew so many essential stories with the great villains, like the Joker, Catwoman, the Penguin and Two-Face. He drew both the Riddler stories in 1948. His credits include "Rackety Rax Racket" and "Ally Babble and the Fourteen Peeves," a couple of stories I read in reprints as a kid that I will never forget.

So it's a good bet that I would love this story. Partly because I love old Batman stories even when they aren't drawn by Dick Sprang!

Spoon has already described the plot, so I don't really need to go into any detail. I just have a few comments as I flip through the comic.

That is such a great splash page! It's like an old movie where the innocent hero is being led out of the courthouse in cuffs, with the crowds and the press and the mean-faced cops! And there's Robin, shouting that the jury will never convict him!

The fake Bat-Cave is kind of cool. No robot dinosaur and no giant penny, but there's a replica of the Sphinx and a giant scimitar for the hall of trophies. And along the back wall, there's the crime computer! It's probably not a bad job for being thrown together by this Gotham punk and his gang.

When they finally get to the real Bat-Cave, we get to see the giant penny and the dinosaur robot ... but the robot is a brontosaurus! Somewhere, I've written a few notes on the changing dinosaur robot. It's been pretty firmly established as a Tyrannosaurus rex for years now, but in the old days, it changed around a little bit. The 1948 story "The 1,000 Secrets of the Bat-Cave" features a Tyrannosaurus rex robot. He's nicknamed Rexie. In Detective Comics #158 (from 1950), the robot is a brontosaurus. There's a lot of time between 1950 and 1957, but it's a brontosaurus in 1957, so maybe it was a brontosaurus the whole time. But I kind of doubt it.

I'm pretty certain Batman does have an extra Bat-Cave. But it's not for stolen cash and rubies. It's for all the dinosaur robots he's accumulated.

I should mention one element of the story that actually impressed me. It was the way that the public didn't believe it. And the way that the police did their jobs and arrested him, and the district attorney prosecuted Batman, but they were skeptical. All too often, when the bad guys frame the hero, everybody seems too quick to believe it. I guess it makes sense for the poor sap in a 1940s film noir to be framed and trying to prove his innocence, but these heroes in super-hero comics gave been dealing with this for five, ten, twenty years, and they have all been framed numerous times. In "The Outlaw Batman," it was very nice to see a lot of people thinking that Batman's probably been framed and noticing that the trail to Batman's fake Bat-Cave was a little too easy to find. It looks like a classic frame-up! Gotham residents have seen this a few too many times to be so easily fooled.

This Wever guy was in way over his head! He should be glad he didn't succeed in getting rid of Batman. The Joker would probably be looking for the culprit, and it wouldn't be pretty for Wever when the Harlequin of Hate got hold of him.

Yes, I also liked how the story avoided the cliches of having the public instantly believe the frame-up. Batman had built up such a track record as a crime-fighter. Lots of folks should be willing to embrace "innocent until proven guilty" for Batman. It's also a motivation for Wever to include multiple elements to his plan to frame Batman rather than just relying on the fake Bat-Cave.

I am up to Detective Comics #390. And I came across the letters page where they are still calling it the New Look Batman! It was in Detective Comics #389, which I read last night.

I was wanting to use quotes from those letters in a short commentary about the end of the New Look. Now that I’ve found the quotes, I can actually write the commentary. I spent about an hour looking at the stats for the creators and the appearances of the characters, including the back-up features, and I have three or four pages of notes.

Maybe I’ll write it up tonight, or maybe I’ll get to it in the next few days.

Until then, I’m wondering if anybody has any thoughts on the end of the New Look. There’s no hard-and fast pronouncement that the New Look is over. So I’d sure like to hear anybody else’s opinion on it while I’m trying to figure out what mine is.

So when does the New Look end?

I've been working on my Detective Comics collection for a long time, and I tend to get issues from the same general time period when I'm collecting. So between 2012 to 2015, I bought a lot of New Look issues of Detective Comics. At some point, I noticed that the issues in the 370s and the 380s look a lot different from the New Look stories from 1964 and 1965. Instead of Infantino and New Look Moldoff, we were getting Bob Brown, not to mention Frank Springer inked by Chic Stone.

And I started to wonder ... Is this still the New Look?

Eventually I purchased Detective Comics #389, which featured two letters from Batman readers who acted like they thought it was still the New Look.

Frequent comic-book correspondent Guy H. Lillian III of Berkeley said: "I haven't commented on the newest angle the New Look in Detective Comics has taken until now because, to be truthful, I feared the necessity of a negative response."

He doesn't like the new cover logo for Detective Comics. Shown below. The logo with "Batman and Batgirl" under "Detective Comics."

The other letter is from Mike Mallory of Boggstown, Indiana: "Just to name one fault - ever since the New Look has been installed, Batman's cape has been getting shorter and shorter."

He doesn't like the way that the current artists are drawing Batman ... except Neal Adams!

The specifics aren't that important. What's important is that the readers think it's still the New Look and the letter-page editor doesn't correct them.

I've been looking at the later New Look issues, and writing down all the changes as they were made, and the end of the New Look , unlike the beginning, is more of a whittling-down process. I made a few notes on it yesterday, and I'm working my way through the notes right down.

One of the fixtures of the early New Look was the Outsider. So I started with Detective Comics #356, the issue where the Outsider was revealed to be Alfred! The following issues are still Infantino and New Look Moldoff. So this is still clearly the New Look that we expect to see.

In #359, Batgirl is introduced. She appears a lot in the next few years, and she eventually (alternating with Robin) takes over the back-up from the Elongated Man. But it's drawn by regular New Look artist Carmine Infantino and Moldoff continues to be the only other artist on the lead Batman story. So it still looks and reads like the New Look.

In #369, Neal Adams draws the Elongated Man.

In #370, Adams inks Infantino on the cover. And Gil Kane draws the Elongated Man.

In #371, Gil Kane draws "Batgirl's Costume Cut-Ups," the lead story. And the art chores on the Elongated Man are Mike Sekowsky and Sid Greene.

And then comes Detective Comics #372. It has a Neal Adams cover. And the interior is Sheldon Moldoff's New Look style. And this is the last time we’ll see Sheldon Moldoff drawing Batman. He will only do two more stories for DC.

This is probably a great place to mark the end of the Old New Look. 

Over the next few issues, we'll see Chic Stone and Sid Greene in #373, #375 and #376. And also Gil Kane and Greene in #374 ("Hunt for a Robin-Killer"). And Frank Springer and Greene in #377.

It really doesn't seem like the New Look anymore.

Frank Robbin takes over the writing chores in #378 with art by Bob Brown and Joe Giella. This will be the primary creative team on most of the Batman stories for quite a while.

Meanwhile, in Detective Comics #380, Aunt Harriet appears for the last time (except for a cameo in Batman Family #4 in 1976). Poor Aunt Harriet! Introduced for the flimsiest of reasons, she was in fewer than 20 issues, just for a few panels here and there. But she was a creature of the New Look. With Aunt Harriet gone, it hardly looks like the New Look anymore.

The Elongated Man solves his last weird mystery in Detective Comics in #383. Batgirl and Robin start alternating two-part stories. It's getting harder and harder to pretend that this is till the New Look.

Mike Friedrich writes the main Batman story in #387. It's the 30th anniversary of Batman's debut in Detective Comics #27, and Friedrich has contributed an homage to "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate." The art is provided by the regular art team of Brown and Giella. The original story from #27 is also in these pages.

In #393, Robin leaves for college.

And in #395, Neal Adams draws the interior art for the Batman story for the first time.

The New Look is over and the Bronze Age has begun.

Last night I read Detective Comics #400, the first Man-Bat! It ends with Kirk, trapped in the Man-Bat form (but without his wings), running into the night and hoping to find a cure for his condition.

Great art by Neal Adams. The story’s OK, but it’s a little underdeveloped and not much happens. Kirk is the bat expert at the Gotham Museum of Natural History and he specializes in giant papier-mâché bats in the rafters. He’s also experimenting with live bats and developing a serum to see in the dark.

He unexpectedly turns into a bat/human hybrid and helps Batman nab some gem thieves with advanced crime technology.

In the back-up, Batgirl is at Hudson University, trying to prove that a hippie activist student is innocent of murder. She gets knocked unconscious and when she wakes up, she’s bound and gagged in an underground alcove, and somebody is erecting a stone wall to trap her there, as in The Cask of Amontillado.

(There’s a Poe theme. The university is hosting a Poe festival, and Barbara Gordon was nearby because she was delivering a rare Poe first edition from the Gotham Central Library.)

TO BE CONTINUED

The art in the back-up is Gil Kane inked by Vince Colletta. It’s not particularly bad inking by Colletta … but why? Nobody else was available to ink Gil Kane?

(I just read a 1970s issue of Action Comics wherein the art was by Kurt Schaffenberger and inks by Vince Colletta, and that’s another combination that makes me ask “Why?”)

I was going to stop and take a break from my Detective Comics reading project as of #400, but as the Batgirl story is continued in the next issue, I’ll be reading #401 before I take my break.

I think I’m going to read Alan Moore’s The Tempest on my break, and I’ll probably get back to Detective Comics in two weeks or so.

The idea that Bruce had an adoptive father who didn't care for him makes more sense to me than being raised by a lovable surrogate uncle in the form of Alfred. I know this post-Crisis change is very popular, but I somehow don't like it - even though it seems to be an absolutely immovable point in the Batman mythos of these days. Then there's Leslie Thompkins - formerly a totally different character, but now practically his adoptive mother through the chaos of the early post-Crisis years. So, in truth, Bruce had a kind of "family" again - why should he drift away then? As I said, give him an alcoholic Uncle Philip and it all makes more sense.