DETECTIVE COMICS #444 - 448

"BAT-MURDERER" | "BREAK-IN AT THE BIG HOUSE" | "SLAUGHTER IN SILVER"
"ENTER: THE CREEPER" | "BEDLAM BENEATH THE BIG TOP!"
Writer: Len Wein
Art: Jim Aparo (Chapters 1 - 3); Ernie Chua & Dick Giordano (Chapters 4 & 5)
Editor: Julius Schwartz

I believe DC's first intentional attempt to "Marvelize" their line came in 1977, when Steve Englehart was hired to bring his AVENGERS-honed sensibilities to the pages of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA (and as part of that deal, he also scripted several issues of DETECTIVE COMICS, which we'll begin to examine here in just a couple weeks). But in 1975, an earlier, "under the radar" Marvelization occurred. It only lasted a few months, but it's clear that DETECTIVE COMICS' new writer, Len Wein, was intent on bringing some of that Marvel flavor to DC's Caped Crusader.

The opening chapter of this five-part serial sees Batman working to thwart a crime ring whose leader turns out to be Talia. Batman, who happens to be holding a gun he lifted from the Daughter of the Demon, shoots her dead. The police attempt to arrest him, but the Masked Manhunter flees to clear his name. Chapter two finds our hero breaking into Gotham's new state-of-the-art prison to question an incarcerated Ra's al Ghul about the incident. But after al Ghul boasts that he did indeed engineer Tali'a death and Batman's frame-up, the Demon's Head kills himself, framing Batman for a second murder and sending the Caped Crusader on the lam once more.

Aside from the fact that it seems incredibly odd that an international terrorist like Ra's al Ghul is being held in jail in Gotham City of all places, these opening chapters are pretty good. Commissioner Gordon goes a bit overboard in accusing Batman of murder and not even considering, even after all their years of working together, than he could be innocent -- and Batman flies off the handle in the same scene, grabbing Gordon's lapels like a madman and raving about his innocence.

But then you remember that key word, "Marvelization", and it all comes into focus. DC's characters behave like rational grown-ups most of the time, but Marvel's don't. It's all too easy to envision Stan Lee's Spider-Man losing his wits and roughing up Captain Stacy, a man he otherwise greatly admires and respects, in a moment of unbridled emotion. That sort of over-the-top hyper-melodrama was what built the Marvel Universe. And Wein is clearly looking to emulate Stan's trademark style here.

The third chapter, "Slaughter in Silver", sends the storyline's main plot to the backburner and functions as your typical Batman adventure story -- with the added twist that our hero is wanted by the police even as he tracks down and apprehends the villain of the piece, a silver-obsessed crime lord named Sterling Silversmith. And it's this issue which gets my wheels spinning on the subject of Wein's true intention for the "Bat-Murderer" storyline: as was the case with Archie Goodwin's Manhunter serial, I've wondered for several years whether Wein had intended the setup presented here to last longer than it ultimately did.

Around ten years ago, I read several 1970s era Batman comics, this five-parter among them -- and it was very different from anything that came before. It was a continuing serial, but unlike Denny O'Neil's Ra's al Ghul saga, which was a four-part story clearly intended to be finite, "Bat-Murderer" seems as if Wein wanted its status quo to stick for a while. Setting up Batman in a storyline where he's wanted by the police, stepping away from that main plot to show him going about his normal business even as he is a wanted man... this was, again, the stuff of which Spider-Man comics were made, as the web-slinger was wanted by the police for a very long time.

But of course, such a setup could never work long-term for Batman without many other parties on board. For one thing, the writer(s) of BATMAN would need to go along with it. For another, the writers and editors of THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD and JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA would need to play along as well. And, at this point in DC's history, I'm not sure they were ready to commit to a long-term development, with that much inter-series coordination in that way. Certainly it would be possible within another decade, but not in 1975.

So while I do wonder if Wein wanted his changes to be permanent (or as permanent as an ongoing comic would allow), common sense dictates this probably wasn't the case.

And with that little sidebar out of the way, let's get back to the storyline at hand. Wein returns to the main plot for a two-part wrap-up teaming Batman with the Creeper. In the first of these installments, the laughing vigilante tries to capture Batman, but sees the error of his ways by the chapter's end, and agrees to aid Batman in the subsequent finale. I'm pretty sure this is the only comic I've ever read with the Creeper, and in general I'm not a huge fan of the character. Here, he simply serves to add some color and assistance to Batman's predicament (a role which Robin would serve much more logically, but Wein had Batman order his ward to stay out of the case early on for some reason).

In the fifth and final part of the saga, Batman -- having decided al Ghul and Talia are both actually still alive -- follows their trail to a circus outside of Gotham. He and the Creeper get into a fight with the League of Assassins (not so disbanded as Denny O'Neil had us think a couple weeks back) and the big top catches fire during the skirmish. While Batman apprehends Talia, al Ghul is consumed by the flames. In the end, Commissioner Gordon and the Gotham police arrive and Batman exonerates himself by presenting the very much alive Talia and the rigged murder weapon to Gordon.

I noted above the oddity of Ra's al Ghul being imprisoned in Gotham City, but even odder, at least to me, is the fact that he and Talia are interred in Gotham as well following their deaths, as seen when Batman goes to dig them up as part of his investigation. I don't know what's normally done when an international terrorist dies on U.S. soil, but I imagine there's some sort of extradition process involved to get him back to his native country. I suppose the case can be made that, since al Ghul is countless hundreds of years old, no one knows where he's from -- and he probably had records on Talia erased around the world as well -- but even if that's the case, it still seems odd that they're buried in some random public cemetery in Gotham City!

These final two installments are drawn by Ernie Chan (using his DC alias of Ernie Chua), and while Chan is a fine artist, he's a definite step down from the brilliant work Jim Aparo did on parts one through three. I do like Chan's rendition of Ra's al Ghul, though -- his style lends itself well to the Neal Adams/Irv Novick look for the character, which was most familiar to readers at this point.

"Bat-Murderer" starts off pretty strong, and if it had been an ongoing sub-plot as I speculated above -- something more spread out over a year or so's worth of issues -- I think it would've been a lot of fun. But as it is, it reads a little disjointed, with two chapters devoted to the main plot, one stand-alone installment, and then two more "main" stories to wrap things up. On top of that, while the method by which al Ghul framed Batman turns out to be pretty ingenious in a comic booky way, the actual detecting that our hero engages in is a little wanting. He finds, of all things, a lion's hair in the gun that "killed" Talia, and that leads him first to Gotham Zoo and then, ultimately, to al Ghul's circus. It's a weird clue discovered in a really weird place, and feels a little too... pedestrian, I guess, for the story Wein is trying to tell.

Like I said up top, this storyline seems to be remembered fondly among fans, but I have to imagine most fans don't really recall the final couple chapters all that well (this is supported by the fact that I often see the story credited solely to Wein and Aparo with no mention of Chan). And if that's the case, I agree -- the setup is great, but the finale is weak.

Next week, we'll check in with Denny O'Neil again for an appearance from the Joker and the classic "No Hope in Crime Alley".