DETECTIVE COMICS #478 & #479

Hey, everybody -- remember Len Wein? He co-wrote "The House That Haunted Batman" in 1971's DETECTIVE COMICS #408, then returned a few years later for 1975's "Bat-Murderer" storyline in DETECTIVE COMICS 444 - 448. You may also recall that he provided a coda to Steve Englehart's DETECTIVE run in issue 477, which I mentioned last week.

Well, he's back -- and we're going to see a lot more of him for the rest of this retrospective. Up until this point, my focus was on the "greatest hits" of the 1970s Batman -- the evergreen stuff that's been reprinted in various formats over the years by DC. But now we're segueing into a proper "run" on the character by a single writer. See, a few years back, DC released TALES OF THE BATMAN: LEN WEIN, a book collecting all of Wein's work on the Caped Crusader -- and that includes his term as the regular, ongoing writer of BATMAN in the late seventies. It seems that, following the success of Englehart's "Marvelized" DETECTIVE COMICS, DC must have decided to keep the approach going -- and Wein, fresh off a stint writing AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, among other titles, at Marvel, was tapped for the job.

So Wein comes aboard DETECTIVE immediately after Englehart's run for a three-issue stint in mid-1978 (one of which is a mere framing sequence as mentioned last week), then he will take of the reins of BATMAN for a full two years beginning with the January 1979 installment, which we'll get to in a couple weeks. And while Wein was the writer of BATMAN an a Marvel-ish fashion, stalwart Denny O'Neil (for the most part) continued a more traditional "business as usual" approach on DETECTIVE during the same span. So as we read Wein's run over the next few months, we'll also check in periodically with O'Neil as well.

And with that mini-announcement out of the way, it's onward to this week's post proper, as Wein introduces us to the all-new, all-different Clayface!

"THE COMING OF... CLAYFACE III!" | "IF A MAN BE MADE OF CLAY!"
Writer: Len Wein | Artists: Marshall Rogers & Dick Giordano
Letterer: Ben Oda | Colorist: Marshall Rogers | Editor: Julius Schwartz

Wein begins his story the night after Batman's encounter with the Joker in issue 476, as he muses on Silver St. Cloud leaving him earlier in the morning. As was the case with the "Bat-Murderer" story, Wein's Batman engages in the sort of hyper-melodramatic brooding that was typical of Marvel characters, but feels out of place for a DC stalwart. Angry and hurt over Silver's departure, the Caped Crusader flies off the handle and begins savagely beating a petty crook until the authorities arrive to rein him in. While this sort of behavior would eventually become common for Batman, at this point it reads as grossly out of character -- and even the cops agree, as they note that they've never seen Batman so grim.

While we've seen hints of it before, I have to say that I feel like this may be the true birth of the modern-day Batman. Wein's Batman calls criminals things like "scum" and "punk". He has a hair trigger that will set him toward excessive violence. He broods over portraits of his dead parents. As we'll see momentarily, he's extremely callous toward a fairly sympathetic villain. And! For the first time I can recall in any of these seventies stories, he's referred to in narration as (drum roll) the Dark Knight.

Now, I'm not saying that Wein singlehandedly created the modern "psycho-ninja" Batman -- and as we review his full run on the character in coming weeks, we may well find this story to be an outlier -- but I will say that the character as depicted in this story bears more overall resemblance to the modern Batman than any other interpretation we've seen thus far.

Moving along -- the main story of this two-parter follows Preston Payne, a scientist born with a pituitary condition that left him deformed. Using a blood sample from the original Clayface, Matt Hagen, Payne attempts to give himself more normal features -- but instead, he becomes a claylike creature, and needs to drain life force from other beings in order to sustain himself. Batman crosses paths with this new Clayface several times and ultimately defeats him, but the villain's fate is left nebulous when he retreats into a burning wax museum to save a dummy with whom he had fallen in love.

So like I said, Batman is kind of a jerk here with regards to Clayface/Payne. Let me state up front that yes, he is a murderer. He kills a number of people during this story and prior to it -- but he shows remorse every time, stating that he would not kill if he had any other choice, but that he must in order to live. This doesn't excuse him, but it does give the reader some sympathy for him. Then there's the fact that he falls in love with a wax dummy, something Wein does quite obviously to illustrate that Payne has lost his marbles. The cliche is true in this instance: he's not evil; he's just misunderstood.

And while Batman isn't privy to all this info as readers are, he does know something else which makes his actions toward Payne inexcusable: see, it turns out that Payne -- who, remember, is a brilliant scientist and whose scientific knowledge should therefore be given the benefit of the doubt -- has found a way to turn himself normal again, but he needs a special McGuffin in order to do so. He steals it early on, but it's destroyed in the attempt. Later, he snatches another one, and Batman tries to stop him, but Payne escapes. However, Batman tracks Payne to his hideout, overhears the villain babbling about how he can turn himself back to normal, and still shuts off the power, taunting and beating Payne before arresting him.

Payne's procedure wasn't going to hurt anyone! There was no innocent life at stake; he didn't have some ritual to perform to transform another person into Clayface in his stead. He could've easily and cleanly restored himself, but Batman just won't let him do it. It's inhumane, unheroic behavior from the Caped Crusader. There's no reason Batman couldn't have let Payne complete his procedure, become a normal human again, and then arrest him for Clayface's murders -- heck, it would've even been easier for him, since he would no longer be fighting a guy who could drain his life force (and who wears a super-strong exoskeleton to boot)!

So the story -- specifically Batman's behavior in it -- leaves me pretty cold. But I harbor higher hopes for Wein's run on BATMAN. And speaking of that upcoming run, there's one last thing to mention before we wrap up for the week: even though he's jumping titles and he won't get there for almost another half-year, Wein begins a sub-plot here, as a mysterious dark-haired woman shows up at Bruce Wayne's office, inquiring after him. Who could it be...? We'll find out in two weeks as we begin our extended look at Wein's BATMAN -- but first, next Monday we'll look in on Denny O'Neil for Marshall Rogers' final issue of DETECTIVE, and a Ra's al Ghul story from the pages of DC SPECIAL SERIES.