BATMAN #346

"HALF A HERO..."
Writer Gerry Conway | Artists: Don Newton & Frank Chiaramonte
Letterer: Ben Oda | Colorist: Adrienne Roy | Editor: Dick Giordano

The Plot: Two-Face stages an escape from Arkham Asylum with the use of a hypnotic coin. Batman and Commissioner Gordon investigate the scene, then return to Gotham City. The next night, Bruce Wayne is out on a date with Vicki Vale when he realizes that Two-Face had applied for early parole at a halfway house. Bruce changes to Batman and investigates the house, where he makes his way through an army of goons and a few deathtraps, eventually coming face-to-faces with Two-Face. But when Batman tries to arrest the villain, he unmasks himself as a woman named Margo; Two-Face's girlfriend. Two-Face seals the duo behind glass and floods the room with nerve gas. Margo is unharmed thanks to special filters, but Batman passes out.

Continuity Notes: That's not all! The summary above is quite thin, because this issue is crawling with soap opera:

Batman gives Commissioner Gordon a ride back to Gotham, and during their drive, the commissioner comments that he may well accede to newly-elected Mayor Hill's demand for his resignation. After he gets home, Gordon finds his concerned daughter, Barbara, visiting and fixing dinner. In the issue's final scene, the following night, Gordon turns in his badge and gun to Hill -- and after he leaves, Rupert Thorne shows himself and introduces Hill to his new police commissioner, Mister Pauling.

Lucious Fox visits Bruce to request advice on a business matter, but in order to cement the idea that he no longer has interest in running the Wayne Foundation, Bruce brusquely insults Fox and sends him away.

At Gotham University the day after Two-Face's escape, Dick Grayson confonts Dala, who has been avoiding him for a few days. She gets into a car with a man Dick doesn't recognize, and as they drive off, she thinks to herself that Dick is doing exactly what she expected.

As mentioned above, Bruce and Vicki go on a date, but Bruce blows her off when she says something that makes him realize where Two-Face is holed up. After he makes a lame excuse for his departure, Vicki realizes that he must be running off to change into Batman. (And by the way, if there was ever dialogue tailor-made (pun absolutely intended) to be read in Kevin Conroy's "disinterested playboy voice", it's this bit:

Two-Face and Margo discuss how they met in the prison library, and how she helped him to escape Arkham. Two-Face also has a gang composed of half erudiate gangsters and half thugs. The cover copy suggests this is extreme even for Two-Face, but it feels like pretty standard behavior for him to me...

Thorne notes that he offered Hill political help "months ago," though it's unclear exactly when that would've been. Presumably after Thorne got out of Arkham, which would fit with previous dialogue regarding Robin spending six months away with the circus, but in any case, this suggests that Hill has been in Thorne's pocket for most of the mayoral race. It's so weird to see Hill out-and-out corrupt here, when in BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, he was simply a little pompous but otherwise seemed a decent man.

My Thoughts: I've come to the conclusion that I have kind of a weird relationship with Gerry Conway's Batman stories. I like them and I look forward to reading them, but I'm often let down by the issues' various "A" stories. Batman fighting the villain of the month. It's not that I don't enjoy stories where our heroes fight their villains -- of course I do, or I wouldn't be a comic book reader! I love nearly all of the Denny O'Neil/Neal Adams Batman stories, and most of the issues Archie Goodwin scripted, and all of the Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers run -- but I find that Conway's "Batman vs. the bad guy of the month" stories often leave me cold. Not always, mind you. There have certainly been issues I've enjoyed, some quite a bit. But for the most part, Conway's action/adventure/detective stories almost feel "phoned in".

Yet at the same time, as I've mentioned ad nauseum, I love the sub-plots; the soap opera content. I almost feel like Conway would've rather been writing a straight soap opera comic, avoiding the superheroics altogether. Stuff like Gordon's resignation, the mystery of Dala (which I know will become entwined with the super-stuff eventually), the machinations of Thorne (ditto)... it all feels more... genuine? Is that the right word? Like when you read those scenes, you're reading what Conway really wanted to be writing, and when you read the stuff with Two-Face (or Doctor Death or Mirage or Poison Ivy), you're seeing the stuff he felt obligated to write, but in which he may not have had as much interest.

Which is probably not a surprise. As I mentioned a while back, in Tom DeFalco's COMICS CREATORS ON SPIDER-MAN book, Conway mentioned that when he was writing SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN and WEB OF SPIDER-MAN in the late eighties, he came up with his sub-plots first, and then wrote the super-hero stuff over, around, and through them. And I speculated that this run on BATMAN and DETECTIVE could've been a "prototype" for that Spidey stuff of a few years later. Now, moving further into this Bat-material, I feel more strongly that's exactly what it is. The Spider-issues by Conway had perfected this formula. They were soap operas, almost first and foremost, but the Spider-action was usually threaded through the soap in a way that often (but not always) felt more organic.

Here, however, one gets the feeling Conway is still feeling out that approach. The question is whether he will perfect it before his run ends. We're only about halfway through at this point, with twenty-seven combined issues of both titles remaining, and a lot can happen in that time!