BATMAN #245 & DETECTIVE COMICS #429

"THE BRUCE WAYNE MURDER CASE!"
Story: Denny O'Neil | Art: Neal Adams & Dick Giordano | Editor: Julius Schwartz

Note: Screenshots below come from BATMAN ILLUSTRATED BY NEAL ADAMS VOLUME 2 and are not representative of these stories' original colors (the covers are presented as published, however).

The Ra's al Ghul saga is done, the villain has been brought to justice, but there's one loose end yet to tie up. Back when Batman started his crusade against the Demon in issue 242, he faked Bruce Wayne's death via a plane accident in South America. Now it's time to resurrect Wayne, but the deed is complicated when two rival political bosses get involved, one of them accusing the other of murdering Wayne. What ensues is a mystery Batman doesn't want to solve. He must, in order to bring Bruce Wayne back from the dead, but he knows that to do so will pave the way to get a dirty politician into office. However Batman does what he must, and by the story's final page, Gotham is as corrupt as ever and Bruce Wayne is alive again.

This is one of those stories that I feel should be included in any printing of TALES OF THE DEMON, but at the same time I understand why it isn't. Ra's al Ghul is never mentioned at any point; the entire saga is pretty much ignored. But it does show us how Batman brings Bruce Wayne back to life following his "death", tying up the one remaining plot thread from the O'Neil/Adams opus of preceding issues. But at the same time, TALES does not include issue 242 either, and that one is far more essential -- plus, without it, this story is even less important. If you're not gonna print the story that actually does further the main plot, why print a story that wraps up a sub-plot from it?

Otherwise, this is a decent story -- a nice palate cleanser after the globetrotting of the previous installments, it plants Batman firmly back in Gotham and sets him against that staple of his early seventies adventures: normal, everyday criminals in business suits.

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"From the darkness of the city's secret heart comes the... Batman!

In the sky, the silent call for the dread Batman! And, on a Gotham City avenue, a far from silent argument--

In these shrill, heated words is the beginning of what is perhaps the Batman's most bizarre exploit--the Bruce Wayne murder case!

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We next move ahead one month and jump titles to DETECTIVE COMICS #429, our last look at Frank Robbins -- and at Man-Bat -- in this sojourn through Batman's defining decade. Robbins had come aboard the Bat-titles in 1968, writing both BATMAN and DETECTIVE for over a year before "One Bullet Too Many" redefined the character's status quo. He stuck around, continuing to write both books in tandem with Denny O'Neil, all the way until early 1974 -- so, while we haven't looked at much Robbins in this retrospective, and while this is our final encounter with him, this isn't the end of his time with Batman. He still has another year-plus left before leaving the series.

"MAN-BAT OVER VEGAS!"
Story & Art by Frank Robbins | Edited by Julius Schwartz

The story starts as your typical "Uh oh, Kirk Langstrom's at it again!" adventure, as sightings of a giant vampire bat in Las Vegas at the exact time Langstrom is nearby conducting research draw Batman to the Strip. But since this is an issue of DETECTIVE COMICS, there's a twist as we learn that this time, Langstrom is innocent and his wife, Francine, has transformed again thanks to a prick from a vampire bat's fang interacting with her mutated blood.

It's a fun adventure in an interesting locale, but the real treat of this one is seeing Robbins draw his own story. Though he was an accomplished cartoonist, having drawn his JOHNNY HAZARD newspaper strip for over twenty-five years at this point, and though -- as noted above -- he wrote Batman stories for around six years -- Robbins illustrated few Batman stories. (I should note that if I could, I'd look at all of the half-dozen or so Batman stories Robbins drew, but over all these years, so far as I can see, DC has only ever collected "Man-Bat Over Vegas", which was in THE GREATEST BATMAN STORIES EVER TOLD. Anyone else up for a TALES OF THE BATMAN: FRANK ROBBINS book??)

Anyway -- Robbins has a style uniquely his own; I've seen some of his superhero work criticized over the years (though he definitely has his fans and I think many readers have come around on him with time), but even as a kid I thought this was a really cool-looking story. Different from anything else GREATEST STORIES, to be sure -- Robbins looks nothing like Kane & Finger, Sprang, Infantino, or his contemporaries from the seventies, Novick, Adams, and Giordano -- but he has a brilliant command of black, his character designs and facial expressions are really fun in a cartoony way, and he draws word balloons with these funky little tails that I like.

Plus, for some reason I always find it cool when a writer/artist credits himself on the splash page in his own signature.

There's one more notable Robbins-scripted Bat-story from this period, a backup from BATMAN #250 called "The Batman Nobody Knows". With Dick Giordano turning in both pencils and inks, it features Bruce Wayne on a camping trip with a youth group. The subject of conversation turns to the Caped Crusader, and the three boys begin describing their various ideas of what Batman is like. It's pretty clearly the inspiration for the NEW BATMAN ADVENTURES episode "Legends of the Dark Knight", though the versions of Batman presented here are purely original, rather than the homages seen in that TV episode. But in any case, it's a cute story and was judged worthy of inclusion in THE GREATEST BATMAN STORIES EVER TOLD, hence my discussion of it here. It's probably the "quietest" of all the stories we'll look at in this retrospective, but it's definitely worth reading, allowing Robbins to tell a different sort of tale than any of his others.