Uh!?! I didn't know it! When did Mon-El impersonate the Man Of Steel? I remember that sometime Kandorians impersonated him.

Comic books are stupid.

I’ve been reading Tommy Tomorrow lately.

Some comic books are REALLY stupid.

BUT ALSO HILARIOUS!!

Somebody on eBay was offering three Batman paperbacks from the 1960s, $25 for the whole batch.

Well, come on, I had to get that!

One of them is devoted entirely to reprints of old Penguin stories. And another one is a Batman novel.

The third one is a more general reprint of old Batman stories. And it includes two of the stories that shaxper has reviewed on this thread.

It includes “The Web of Doom” from Batman #90, as well as the one about the fan mail from #92. I’m looking forward to reading them, especially the latter.

That hammer chart is hilarious.

“Hey, Batman! I found some weird-looking pliers! Do you have a chart for that?”

“Yes, I do, Robin! It’s right here!”

Batman #95 (October 1955)



I'm really struggling to understand these cover choices. There are three stories within: one about a visually exciting city that contains all the wonders of the world at once, another about a visually exciting Bat Train, and a third about a fat folk singer following Batman and Robin around with a guitar. So which one did they go with?

This was actually the first Atom Age Batman comic I ever saw at the impressionable age of ten, and it's also why I initially decided to start collecting from the Silver Age up. It's taken three and a half decades for me to finally (and somewhat unwillingly) get around to reading this issue.



"The Guardian of 100 Cities!"
Script: Bill Finger
Pencils: Sheldon Moldoff
Inks: Charles Paris
Colors: ?
Letters: Pat Gordon

Grade: C+

As with so many of the stories of this era, this issue begins by teasing the same mystery twice: once in the opening panel ("Can you imagine a world where Batman and Robin need take but one step to get from Cairo to Calcutta--where another step can take them to a Mayan temple, and another step to the Eiffel Tower? You don't believe it's possible?...") and again in the two panels that follow on that same opening page ("It's not uncommon for a man to gaze with awe at The Sphinx, but it IS uncommon when this same man need only turn his head to look at the familiar landmark of far away Paris!"). The page ends with one final challenge: "How is it possible for this man to take only one step and suddenly be transported to another country?".

Well we find out on the next page that Finger was just f**king with us:



It's a movie studio storage area filled with props. Mystery over on page two. So, with that out of the way, all that's left for Batman and Robin to do is capture some criminals hiding in it. But OH NO! The security guard himself has cut the cord to the phone, preventing Batman from calling for police backup!



How ever will he and Robin alone fight FOUR ordinary criminals who even admit they are unarmed?



So Finger has to come up with some unnecessarily risky and unusual ways for Batman and Robin to capture these totally ordinary criminals in order to create some kind of tension for this story:




Fortunately, there is one saving grace to this otherwise entirely unnecessary tale. Finger returns to a theme he harped on quite a bit earlier in the year -- the responsibility each individual owes to the well-being of society. In this case, Batman must help the security guard/has-been actor realize that he has an obligation to help capture these criminals, even when it is easier for him to just let them pass through his warehouse without incident:



and when he makes the right choice, using his acting skills to pose as one of the gang and free Batman (yes, somehow he managed to get captured!), the story ends with a powerful celebration of the upstanding common man:



Wait. Did they just blow up the bad guys? What is that enormous indoor cloud behind them??

It's corny, but it's also inspiring. I so appreciate when Finger chooses to make his stories about something instead of just filling eight pages with mindless adventure and plot twists.


Minor Details:

1. Was this some kind of popular expression in 1955? Seems like such an odd reaction from Bruce:





"The Bat-Train"
Script: ?
Pencils: Sheldon Moldoff
Inks: Charles Paris
Colors: ?
Letters: Pat Gordon

Grade: F

Yet another story that teases us with a mystery twice on the first page, finally concluding with the challenge: "How is it that Batman and Robin have now acquired a train? The answer..."

Gee, maybe the Wayne fortune?

But no, the solution is even less creative. Yet again, we're going to blow the surprise right at the start of page two:



If you're not going to sustain the mystery over several pages, and you're not going to make the pay-off worthwile, you're just d**king the reader along.

And boy does this story end up full of problems. For one, there is absolutely nothing cool about the Bat Train beyond the Bat head on the front of it. A "traveling Bat-Cave" could be such a fun idea, but it's utterly wasted here.



Couldn't there at least be a car within which the Batmobile actually fits?? If you're going to devote an entire story to this idea, why not use a little imagination on it!

So Batman and Robin apparently have nothing better to do than a multi-city tour where they show off the train while doing the fearless job of an average tour guide as crime goes totally unaddressed in their absence:



Sure enough, when criminals manage to get onboard the train and steal sensitive secrets from the Bat Train, Batman decides that they cannot pursue the perpetrators because they have a tour schedule to keep:



because ALLOWING CRIMINALS TO STEAL FROM BATMAN HIMSELF AND THEN GET AWAY WITH IT certainly doesn't send a powerful message that undermines the entire point of showing off this crime-fighting train to the bored middle class in major cities nationwide.

It's become a common problem in these stories that the writers don't seem to understand what Batman and Robin's responsibilities are to Gotham. Here, they're not just tour guides; they're also the first people the police call when two lions escape from the zoo:



instead of...I don't know...zoo keepers, or even a game warden?

And the weirdest part is that this is the first story we've seen since the implementation of the Comics Code to address the brutality of crime in Gotham, all while Batman and Robin are completely turning their backs to it in order to be tour guides and lion tamers:



Criminals actually dying? A comic panel actually showing it? That's all pretty shocking for 1955 DC.


The GCD speculates that Edmund Hamilton wrote this disaster of a story, but I don't buy it. Aside from the totally out of character decision to depict crime with such brutal realism (or even mentioning "killing," really), there's something off about the writing throughout this story. So many phrases are awkwardly jumbled tongue-twisters, so many words used in odd and unconventional ways, that this almost couldn't have been done by a professional writer:



Don't ask me how long I spent in photoshop just to make a "Clippy" joke!


Nothing about this story feels like Hamilton, nor Finger for that matter. I speculated last month that Kane or Schiff had brought in some freelancers, and I get that feeling here again.

"The Bat Train." Such a wasted opportunity.



"The Ballad of Batman"

Script: Edmond Hamilton
Pencils: Dick Sprang
Inks: Charles Paris
Colors: ?
Letters: Pat Gordon

Grade: D

I sincerely don't get it. Is "Sam Strong" supposed to be a nod to some cultural icon of the era that readers would have understood and appreciated? Without that background, this is just the story of a well meaning fat guy and his guitar, following Batman and Robin around and singing about them to their mild annoyance.



Golden Age of television my a$$.


Hamilton and Sprang actually spend an entire page depicting some of the ballad, and I can't help but wonder why they would do this when we can't even hear the tune:




Sure enough, the mildly irritating singer/songwriter ends up proving useful to Batman when he needs to feed some false information to a gang he is trying to thwart, after which Sam Strong then conveniently goes away forever, feeling like he helped to save the day. However, the one slightly endearing aspect of this utterly predictable plot is that Batman actually flies ten miles out to sea and then comes back just so that he didn't make Sam a liar when he told him to sing that Batman and Robin were going overseas:



I think that level of concern for Sam is a little endearing.

Not that there's really anything else to like about this stupid stupid story.


Minor Details:

1. Once again, I'm really not clear on what Batman considers to be high priority. Giving tours on a train while crime is rampant, catching lions at the zoo while crime is rampant, and now dedicating two entire nights to making sure no one scrambles a television station's signal and hurts their profits while crime is rampant:



Well of course that's the only logical explanation, Batman!


2. Gotta love Batman patiently explaining stuff to a jumper in a lengthy, unhurried way while falling dozens of feet off the side of a bridge:



For what it's worth, Bill Finger did this exact same schtick four months ago in Batman #92:

Hey, do you remember that 50s' movie with Jerry Lewis where everyone treats him as a weirdo because he's an adult who reads comics?

They were right.

Artists and Models. With Lewis, Dean Martin, Shirley McClain, Dorothy Malone, and a few other famous people.