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!

And don't forget that last week, I said I really enjoyed the soap opera stylings of his AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, which preceded this BATMAN run over at Marvel. I'm not sure what turns me off of Wein's stuff here when I liked it there, but his soapiness just feels ham-handed and clumsy in these pages versus (what I recall from decade-old memories) a much more natural and entertaining approach at Marvel.

On the plus side, Wein puts in an appearance from Denny O'Neil's favorite obnoxious city commissioner, Arthur Reeves, in this story, which is a nice bit of continuity with the early seventies stuff. Also, in the opening pages, when a thug with nunchucks attacks Batman, the Caped Crusader remarks that this is the second time in a month he's been threatened that way -- we saw the first occasion in O'Neil's League of Assassins story from last week's DETECTIVE COMICS issue -- making for another nice nod on Wein's part.

It's kinda weird that there was a period when
Robin would be identified as a "special guest star"
on the cover of an issue of BATMAN!

Issue 316 finds Batman and Robin working together against the villainous Crazy Quilt. We're told that Robin is on summer vacation from college, and has come home to spend some time with Bruce and Alfred. So when Crazy Quilt, who is going blind, steals a device that can restore his sight and then kidnaps a doctor to perform the operation, the Dynamic Duo head out to stop him.

Wein makes mention of the Selina Kyle plot here, and we get an appearance from an unusually preoccupied Lucius Fox, paying lip service to his ever-ongoing sub-plots, but the majority of the story is taken up by the Crazy Quilt business. And maybe I was just in a better mood than usual when I read this one, or perhaps Wein actually did put some extra effort into it, but for whatever reason, I actually liked this issue a lot more than Wein's past few offerings. I don't know anything about Crazy Quilt aside from what's presented here, but Wein writes the Batman/Robin partnership well, he gives us a nicely plotted story (though this makes two issues in a row where Batman deals with an apparently random crime in the opening pages which turns out to be related to the main villain's plot by story's end), and even the art from Irv Novick and Frank McLaughlin looks sharper and more exciting than usual.

So hopefully whatever secret formula Wein and company stumbled onto for this installment will stick around next week, when Batman and Robin fight the Riddler, then Batman goes solo to tackle Firebug.