BATMAN #251 & #255

"THE JOKER'S FIVE-WAY REVENGE!"
Story: Denny O'Neil | Art: Neal Adams | 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).

Neal Adams' brief time with Batman comes to an end in these two tales, and the first teams him with his most frequent collaborator, Denny O'Neil, for the return of Batman's best-known villain. As discussed when we looked at "Half An Evil" a while back, my understanding that in the late sixties, after the Batman TV show ended and DC wanted to reestablish the character as something closer to his puply roots, there was a conscious decision made to retire the classic rogues gallery for a time, to allow the campy screen versions to fade from memory before reintroducing them. Now, I have no idea whether this is true, but in any case the Joker returns here four or so years after his last appearance.

I've said before that the Joker isn't my favorite Batman villain -- but, nonetheless, for my money "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge!" is pretty much the quintessential Batman story, and probably one of the few I might show somebody to introduce them to what exactly I believe Batman is all about. To wit: we have, as noted above, the best-known member of Batman's rogues gallery. We have Commissioner Gordon summoning Batman to the scene of a murder for investigative assistance. We have Batman setting out to track down the Joker, using his detective skills to do so. We have him demonstrating his "ultra-competence" as he easily catches up with a hoodlum who believes he's given Batman the slip. Yet we also have a fallible Batman, who's clubbed from behind by that same hood after turning his back on him. But most importantly, we have a Batman who refuses to give up; who, when thrown into a death trap by the Joker, uses his wits and athleticism to find a way out.

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From the darkness of a country road somewhere north of Gotham City... and from the greater dark of a past filled with evil... comes a terrifyingly familiar face!

Thunder racks the earth and lightning scars the sky and wetness streams from the clouds like tears of mourning! It is as though nature itself were weeping!

And well it might, for there is death abroad this night!

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The full plot is more or less exactly what I described above: the Joker has escaped a mental institution upstate (I believe the first reference to Arkham Asylum, which will be named by O'Neil at some point in the next few months) and is systematically murdering his former gang members because one of them ratted him out to the authorities months earlier. Batman has kept the gang under surveillance and now finds himself in a race against the Joker as he attempts to keep them safe -- but he fails at every turn, until finally tracking the Joker to his hideout, a beachfront aquarium. There, Batman manages to save the life of the final gang member, and captures the Joker.

Besides all the iconic elements above, this story also features the most dramatic full-page splash of Batman ever drawn. You know it. You love it. It's been used for licensed products countless times over the decades, and redrawn and/or reinterpreted by many different artists over that time as well. Batman, one arm outstretched before him, sprinting across the sand in pursuit of the Joker. I think I mentioned some time back that I actually find Irv Novick to be a more definitive artist for Batman in the seventies than Neal Adams -- partially simply due to the fact that Novick draw far more Bat-pages that Adams did in the decade -- but nonetheless, I'll concede that this illustration is easily the most definitive image of Batman to come out of those years.

Adding to "Five-Way Revenge"'s iconic status is the fact that the deathtrap scene, which sees Batman thrown, manacled and without his utility belt, into a tank with a bound hostage and a hungry shark, was adapted into a sequence for BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES. The bulk of the episode "The Laughing Fish" was adapted from the comic book story of the same name (which we'll look at here in a couple months) -- but when the producers wanted a climax more exciting than that in the comic, they turned to "The Joker's Five-Way Revenge!" for the moment they were looking for.

"MOON OF THE WOLF"
Writer: Len Wein | Artists: Neal Adams & Dick Giordano | Editor: Julius Schwartz

Another BATMAN issue adapted to the screen was "Moon of the Wolf", which became a B:TAS episode as well, with less spectacular results. This is Neal Adams' final Bat-story of the seventies, and finds him teamed once more with Len Wein, who co-wrote "The House That Haunted Batman" for Adams nearly three years earlier. Wein's script introduces us via flashbacks to Tony Romulus, star athlete and wealthy man-about-Gotham, who, when stricken with inexplicable headaches, ran through every doctor in town until reaching the sinister Doctor Milo. Milo realized Romulus suffered from a form of lycanthropy, and gave him a purported antidote which actually exacerbated his condition and turned him into a werewolf.

Milo blackmails Romulus into attempting to kill Batman for him, but the Masked Manhunter naturally wins in the end. Milo, a character with only a couple of appearances since his debut in DETECTIVE COMICS circa 1957, is apparently killed here by the werewolf -- but he turns out to be a pet character of Wein and his friend, Marv Wolfman, and I believe we'll see him again before the decade is out.

Wein's script is pretty good, though the narration is, in my opinion, a little overwrought -- which is something I find often in his work from the early to mid-seventies. But I've always loved his dialogue, and this story is no different. That said, I do take issue with him having the werewolf kill a guard dog early in the story. As I've said before around here, "kill the dog" is a cheap way to build manufactured drama and sympathy in my opinion. (I should note that there's a lot of violence against animals this week, as Batman killed the shark in "Joker's Five-Way Revenge!", too.

So, with that, the Neal Adams era on Batman ends (for us). Denny O'Neil will stick around here and there for the remainder of this retrospective, but not to the extent we've seen so far. Next week, the brief era of Archie Goodwin as writer will begin with another story from THE GREATEST BATMAN STORIES EVER TOLD, "Deathmask", as well as a sequel of sorts to O'Neil's Ra's al Ghul saga in "A Monster Walks Wayne Manor".