BATMAN #317 & #318

"THE 1,001 CLUE CAPER or WHY DID THE RIDDLER CROSS THE ROAD?"
"MY CITY BURNS AT BOTH ENDS -- IT WILL NOT LAST THE NIGHT!"
Writer: Len Wein | Artists: Irv Novick & Frank McLaughlin
Colorist: Glynis Wein | Letterer: Ben Oda | Editor: Julius Schwartz

BATMAN 317 picks up where issue 316 ended, with Batman and Robin wrapping up the Crazy Quilt caper at Gotham Police Headquarters. Their next case begins immediately as Batman receives a parcel care of the police -- a book of riddles from the Riddler. The Dynamic Duo head home so Bruce Wayne can tend to the day-to-day operations of his company, while Robin does some investigate legwork. Eventually the heroes figure out the Riddler has gotten into the lucrative game of selling guns to foreign powers, and shut him down at Gotham's waterfront.

Along the way, Bruce makes up (and makes out) with Selina Kyle following their argument a couple issues back, while Lucius Fox continues to worry over his upcoming meeting with Bruce's reclusive rival, Gregorian Falstaff. And then , in a glorious half-page panel to close out the issue, Lucius comes face-to-face with the gluttonous Falstaff.

I'm not sure what it is about this one that speaks to me... maybe it's as simple as the inclusion of the Riddler, who has long been one of my favorite Batman villains, and who has gotten pretty short shrift in these 1970s stories we've been examining. This is by no means the Riddler's first appearance of the decade, but it is the first time we've looked at a comic featuring him.

BATMAN #315 & #316

"DANGER ON THE WING!" | "COLOR ME DEADLY!"
Writer: Len Wein | Artists: Irv Novick & Frank McLaughlin
Colorist: Glynis Wein | Letterer: Ben Oda | Editor: Paul Levitz

BATMAN 315 continues Len Wein's string of sub-par one-off adventures, padded by slow-moving sub-plots. This time, Batman goes up against Kite-Man, stopping the obscure villain from stealing the final day's payroll of Trans-Atlantic Airways, an airline moving out of Gotham City. It's a pretty lame story that would fit in nicely among Batman's TV episodes, but it really doesn't fit the Darknight Detective. Plus, the plot is similar in some ways to the Calendar Man story Wein just wrote a couple months earlier.

The sub-plots do a bit to elevate this one, but not by much. We get a brief appearance from Selina Kyle, who confronts Bruce Wayne about his digging up dirt on her. She's none too pleased about it, and throws a drink in Bruce's face, then leaves their lunch date in a huff. And then there's Lucius Fox, who thinks a bit about his son, Tim, before he's accosted by Karlyle Krugerrand, right-hand man to Gregorian Falstaff. It seems Falstaff wants a meeting with Lucius, and seeing an opportunity to learn a bit about his boss's rival, Lucius agrees to this proposal.

...Then he heads over to Wayne Foundation and nearly tells Bruce about the upcoming meeting, but changes his mind at the last minute and decides to keep his boss in the dark -- I assume to give him plausible deniability, though it comes across here as Lucius simply making a dumb decision, as he did last issue when he blabbed to Selina about the dossier he had compiled on her. I can see that Wein is trying to lace his stories with soap opera angst and intrigue, but the problem is that for whatever reason, he's not very good at it!