Batman #210 (all these covers are by Neal Adams) introduces Catwoman’s new costume —
— a little over a year after her last new costume.
Was the new costume meant to remove Selina further from the look of her television counterpart? I can’t say it works for me (not that the green one did, either). It worked for the Bat-creators as they kept using it until she went back to the old slit-skirt look in 1975.
The story behind the cover, the Frank Robbins/Irv Novick “Case of the Purr-loined Pearl” wasn’t much to celebrate either. Selina has apparently gone straight. Instead, her new weight-loss spa is the cover for training eight female ex-cons to impersonate her, thereby confusing the Dynamic Duo when Selina steals a priceless pearl from the visiting ruler of Nepal (capital: Katmandu). Selina pitches this to the women as getting revenge on men but that aspect doesn’t make much sense. Robbins’ strength as a Batman writer didn’t lie with the old Rogue’s Gallery — I believe this is the only time he used one of them.
Unfortunately after emerging from Bat-limbo the previous year, this story Selina’s swan song in the book until 1974. She battled Black Canary and Diana Prince in the early 1970s but not Batman. Of course, most of the Rogue’s Gallery were in limbo with her while Batman was being gritty, real and street-crime-oriented; even the Joker would disappear for four years. I suspect the thinking was to run away from anything that reminded people of the Batman TV show.
For the record I’ve no idea why this was one of the few books I bought in 1969. Maybe at 11 years old, the thought of so many women in one superhero book er, intrigued me?
Getting to Detective Comics #385 in my Silver Age Reread was a bit of a shock. Despite the opening page clearly identifying the author as Robert Kanigher, I’ve always remembered it as a Denny O’Neil story. Perhaps because this tale of an ordinary nobody who dies a hero felt like something he’d have written?
The story (art by Bob Brown) concerns terminally ill mailman Henry Small, whose condition also heightens his hearing to metahuman levels. When he overhears a plot to kill Batman while he’s off-guard in his secret identity. Small puts his own life at risk to save the Masked Manhunter. As the title suggests, Small ultimately “died big!” Showing the trend away from the New Look era, it’s markedly different from Kanigher’s scripts from mid-1966.
The Mike Friedrich/Gil Kane backup story is part two of Batgirl’s debut as a solo crimefighter. In Part One Babs became obsessed with a library patron, Mark Hanner, giving herself a makeover: hair down, eyeglasses gone. When he doesn’t show at the hours he regularly does, she turns stalker and discovers he’s in deadly danger. Enter Batgirl! In Part Two, she saves him and gets a date. I’ve no idea if Mark would have returned had Friedrich written more Batgirl stories or was meant as a one-time dude. The new look stuck around.
I suspect everyone over the age of seven knew without reading World’s Finest #183 that Superman had not, in fact committed the crime of the ages. The Leo Dorfman/Ross Andru story still surprised me. According to two masked time travelers, red kryptonite is about to turn Superman permanently evil (even though it’s not normally permanent) at which point he will fly into the future and transform Earth into a planet of … ape people!!!!! Check out the two unmasked men with Batman below.
They still have their normal minds and personalities but OMG, they all have monkey faces now! No wonder they wear masks to hide it!
It turns out the supposed time travelers are Luthor and Brainiac wearing ape masks over their real faces. They tricked Batman by taking him into the distant future where what he really saw was Future Hollywood remaking a famous classic — Planet of the Apes!
(May I say, by the way, that I love that poster).
While it’s hardly news comics would forge a connection with a current hit movie, this one is still kind of … weird. And if they were going to riff on Planet of the Apes why not put it on the cover to grab more attention on the spinner rack. Either way, there it is.
#SFWApro. Bat-covers by Neal Adams; Catwoman illustration by Frank Springer, Babs Gordon by Carmine Infantino. Wonder Woman cover by Dick Giordano
