BATMAN #8
December 1941-January 1942
"The Strange Case of Professor Radium!"
Writer: Bill Finger
Pencils: Bob Kane
Inks: Jerry Robinson and George Roussos
This is not the first Batman story with elements of science fiction. And it's not the first time Batman matched wits with a mad scientist. I chose "The Strange Case of Professor Radium!" to represent Batman's earliest run-ins with the "Science Gone Mad" theme because it's such a great story and it's just so nuts! It has a lot of grisly elements that make me think of those black-and-white "mad scientist" movies with Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff and Lionel Atwill, like The Ape Man or The Man They Couldn't Hang or The Mad Doctor of Market Street.
It starts at the city dog pound. Professor Ross has a permit that allows him to take the bodies of dogs that have just been euthanized in the gas chamber. He's taking them to his laboratory for experiments with radium. He hopes to bring them back from the dead.
It's really horrifying. On so many levels. I know I must have read this story back when I first bought The Dark Knight Archives, Volume Two, back in the 1990s. But it's been a while. Reading it again last week, the whole idea just seems gruesome and thoughtless. These poor dogs were put down because nobody wanted them. And now Professor Ross is bringing them back to life to go through the same soul-crushing ordeal. If they're lucky! What if there's some kind of horribly negative side effects from this process? That depressing possibility doesn't seem particularly unlikely, does it?
The dogs are subjected to Professor Ross’s radium resurrection process and he dozes off while waiting for the results. The next morning, he wakes up at the science institute where he has been conducting the experiments and the dogs are alive! His colleagues wonder if he is starting a dog kennel. No, no, he says. It's my experiments! I’ve brought these dogs back to life!
Well, the directors of the institute are a bit dubious. They think Ross is trying to pull off a scam, taking the institute's money and trying to say he brought these dogs back to life when he’s really just substituting live dogs at some point. The magnanimous director of the institute says they won't prosecute Ross for stealing thousands of dollars of radium but he will have to resign!
(It doesn’t say what happened to the dogs. It seems likely they were sent back to the pound.)
Professor Ross has a plan to show everybody in the Scientific Establishment that he was right! He drinks poison in his lab! On the table next to his body there is a note explaining how to bring him back to life! One of his colleagues at the institute finds his body and follows the instructions … and Professor Ross comes back to life!
But a few hours later, Ross finds out that, yes, there are side effects. The flowers in his garden wilt and decay in seconds if he touches them. Then, when he's feeding the birds, a sparrow lands in his hand to get some bread crumbs … and it falls over dead.
The radium treatment gives you the touch of death! Those dogs he resurrected must have it too! Did they accidentally kill any of the non-resurrected dogs at the pound? Or the city employees who were handling them? Were any of these radium zombie dogs adopted by an unknowing Gotham citizen? And if word gets out, will there be a bunch of Gotham weirdos flocking to the pound to get one of these radium zombie dogs with the touch of death? I half-expect to see the Spectre or Dr. Fate or Hawkman fighting some crazed sorcerer whose secret weapon is Zombie Murder Dogs from Gotham!
We never hear any of that. It's not worthy of mention. Gotham City is a horrible place to live and it goes back to the early 1940s, when packs of Glowing Death Dogs roaming the streets was just a thing you had to deal with, and not even considered important enough to write a story about.
Professor Ross spends the rest of the story coping with his awful new reality. He starts to glow. He accidentally kills the colleague who brought him back to life. (The coroner calls it heart failure, so Ross is off the hook … for a page or two.) Further work in his laboratory shows that a substance called volitell will cure his condition. But volitell is rare and expensive. He makes a suit for himself that has two purposes. It disguises his identity and it will protect anyone who touches him from perishing from his death touch. Then he goes out to steal some volitell. He eventually has his first encounter with Batman but he manages to escape with the volitell.
He cures himself with further experiments and treatment. Elated, he goes to see his fiancée, Mary, to tell her about the success of his wonderful experiments and how he brought himself and a bunch of dogs back from the dead. And he accidentally kills her too! His volitell cure was only temporary! It takes a lot more volitell than he realized to minimize the death-touch effect for more than a few minutes.
It's pretty cold. Mary is alive and running to meet her fiancé and then … DEAD! Writer Bill Finger has Mary there for one reason and one reason only … to add to Professor Ross's growing isolation and misery.
By now, Ross's costumed identity is known as Professor Radium. And Batman and Robin figured out that Ross is Professor Radium because of fingerprints left at the scene of Mary's death.
And Ross, overcome by guilt and his brain afire from the effects of the radium, is going insane. He needs the volitell that was hidden at his house, but since the police know he is Professor Radium, they are all over the place and he can't get to his stash.
Eventually, Batman and Robin chase Professor Radium (in his suit) to the shipyard, where he loses his balance and falls into the ocean where he sinks like a stone!
And that's the end of the Golden Age Professor Radium. He never came back.
But his legacy lives on whenever old-time Gothamites remember the Murder Dog Zombie Plague of the winter of 1941 to 1942.
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Detective Comics #261
November 1958
"The Amazing Dr. Double X!"
Writer: Dave Wood
Penciller: Sheldon Moldoff
Inker: Charles Paris
Which brings us to Detective Comics #261 from 1958, during the latter part of Jack Schiff's editorial tenure, when a lot of the stories veered off into science fiction, random aliens, giant monsters, strange transformations, space travel and other themes that seem inappropriate for Batman, who is supposed to mostly fight weird costumed villains and generic, fedora-wearing Gotham gangsters, solve weird problems in the city, examine weird mysteries of his past, protect his secret identity, help the police, appear at charity events and get involved and help out in whatever mundane challenge pops up.
I'm trying to keep track of how often Batman gets sidetracked into inappropriate sci-fi adventures in the late 1960s. It's not always easy. Because some of these stories involve science fiction themes that Batman has been dealing with from the earliest issues of the late 1930s and the early 1940s. I’m writing a few words about #261 and trying to sort it out. If we look at the previous two issues, we find Batman fighting the Calendar Man, a theme villain that is pretty much Batman’s bread and butter, in #259, and then an issue later, in #260, Batman is diverted by aliens to participate in the Olympics of Outer Space!
These two are pretty straightforward. The Calendar Man is a clever villain with a gimmick and there's no science fiction involved. The Olympics of Outer Space is way out of Batman's usual path to adventure, the kind of off-the-hook sci-fi shenanigans that this era gets ridiculed for.
But what about the next issue? It's about a misguided scientist who has somehow summoned a flickering energy double of himself, and this other self persuades him to put on an orange and yellow costume and roam the city and steal things.
The scientist's name is Dr. Simon Ecks, and he has a theory that a person's personality can be isolated from his or her body. After the Scientific Community laughs at him, he starts his experiments at a secret mountain laboratory and uses himself as a subject, eventually conjuring up an energy duplicate of himself called Double X.
It seems that Double X is Simon Ecks’ personality, separated from his physical body. The story doesn't go into detail about how this works. The energy double urges Ecks, now known as Dr. X, to steal jewels from the diamond district and then to steal gold bars from a watch-making factory. Dr. X doesn’t have a will of his own anymore. He needs money to further his research, and Double X tells him to take it. Double X has great strength, he can fly, he has power over electricity, and he uses these abilities to help Dr. X further his plans.
The story doesn't implicitly say it, but it seems reasonable to assume that, separated from his personality, Dr. X has no agency of his own. He is easily persuaded by Double X, and has very little power to resist this evil energy twin. But it's not a process that's been completed. When Double X is about to run Batman through with a giant watch hand (it's like an iron spear), Dr. X tells him to stop. He has enough of his moral character left that he can occasionally muster up the willpower to stop Double X's worst impulses.
With this demonstration of a tiny fragment of independent will, Double X vanishes and Dr. X looks around, confused, with no idea where he is or why he's wearing a dumb costume with a multi-pronged fin on his head.
Double X returns and busts Dr. X out of jail and they go back to the secret laboratory. Double X has a plan to lure Batman and Robin into a trap, and Dr. X promises he won't weaken this time and they will soon be rid of the Dynamic Duo!
It doesn't work, of course. Batman has anticipated that he is walking into a trap and he outsmarts them, wrecking the machine that creates an energy double out of your personality and freeing Dr. X from the pernicious influence of Double X. Simon Ecks has no memory of anything he did while he was being controlled by Double X. Batman tells Robin he will have to go to a sanitarium and be treated there.
I think Dr. X is a great villain! He's really just another mad scientist, much like Dr. Death, Hugo Strange and Professor Radium. Because of the Comics Code, he didn't kill anybody, and there aren't any murder zombie dogs running around and he didn't accidentally kill his fiancée!
He has so much potential! The energy duplicate doesn't really have a filter. It’s Dr. Ecks' unfettered personality. Double X urges his host to turn to crime to fund further experiments, to make Double X stronger, to push the envelope of the scientific knowledge of psychology and personality.
(Dr. X should team up with Priscilla Rich, the Golden Age Cheetah, another character with a dual personality, an evil dual personality! The Cheetah also has super-powers even if they aren't clearly defined. How else could she be a threat to Wonder Woman?” And Dr. X (with Double X, of course) would be a great crime partner for Two-Face!)
It's too bad he has been used so sparingly. Double X returned in the early 1960s and then appeared a few times in the 1980s. I assume he has appeared a few times in the modern era (because everybody comes back at some point) but I've not read any of his later appearances.
I find it hard to consider the presence of Dr. X and Double X to be an anomaly for the Batman stories, and it shouldn't be considered sci-fi overreach of the Jack Schiff era. Maybe it's weird for Batman to be fighting marauding aliens three or four times a year, and maybe he shouldn't be galivanting across the galaxy for the Olympics of Outer Space. But mad scientists in secret mountain laboratory hide-outs are not unknown on the outskirts of Gotham City, I'm not sure they could even be considered a rarity. Dr. X is just another devoted scientist whose experiments got a little out of hand. The results are a little more cerebral and philosophical than usual, though the published stories barely scratch the surface of these psychological issues.
Jack Schiff gets no guff from me on whether or not this is a suitable challenge for Batman. Gotham City is crawling with guys like Simon Ecks. Somebody has to be there to pick up the pieces and minimize the damage when unconventional science goes awry.
