DETECTIVE COMICS #426, #429, & #435

"KILLER'S ROULETTE!" | "MAN-BAT OVER VEGAS!"
"MASTER CRIME-FILE OF JASON BARD: CASE OF THE DEAD-ON TARGET!"
Story & Art by: Frank Robbins

And now the actual, honest-to-goodness conclusion to my look at "Batman in the Seventies", featuring Frank Robbins' final three stories as writer/artist. The first of these is by far my favorite: "Killer's Roulette" sees Batman investigating a string of suicides. Three of Gotham's wealthy citizens have killed themselves with a bullet to the head, and the Caped Crusader wants to know why. Batman goes undercover as a high roller at an offshore casino, where he meets a man named Conway Treach, who challenges him to the biggest game of chance anyone can ever play: Russian Roulette.

Batman and Treach head to Treach's cabin, where the villain explains the rules of his challenge: they will each write out a suicide note, then begin their game with a single bullet in Treach's revolver. After each pull of the trigger, one bullet will be added, until one of them dies -- at which point the survivor will take his own note and depart. At this point Batman reveals his true identity to Treach, but insists on playing the game anyway, and this is where Robbins' already excellent artwork becomes brilliant, as he captures the intensity on each man's face with every pull of the trigger, until Batman finally emerges victorious, deducing that Treach has a trick gun which will never kill him.

Even though this story's subject matter would never have cleared broadcast censors for a kids' show in 1992 (or today), I can't help feeling it would have been a really great adaptation into an episode of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES. I can't really explain why, but something about it just feels like a B:TAS story.

Next up is "Man-Bat Over Vegas", which I actually wrote about back in May... so if no one minds, I'll just quote my previous thoughts on the story here, with a few minor edits:

The story begins 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 he wrote Batman for around six years, Robbins illustrated few Batman stories. 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 THE GREATEST BATMAN STORIES EVER TOLD, 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 by using his own signature.

And now we come to Frank Robbins' final DETECTIVE COMICS tale as writer/artist -- and note that I call it a DETECTIVE story rather than a Batman story, because this one isn't about the Caped Crusader. Printed as a backup feature in DETECTIVE #435, this one focuses on Jason Bard rather than the Batman. Bard is a private detective created by Robbins and Gil Kane in 1969, and featured regularly in "Casebook of Jason Bard" backup stories in Batman's corner of the DC line throughout the seventies. I believe at some point during that span he became Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon's boyfriend, too. A little research indicates that the character survived into the post-CRISIS era, even making appearances into the twenty-first century.

Here, Bard witnesses a skydiving exhibition gone awry, as one of the jumpers' chute fails to deploy and he perishes. (Didn't Denny O'Neil go on to do something similar as the setup to a Maxie Zeus story later in the decade? Weird.) Bard investigates and eventually comes to the conclusion that the jumper's wife is having an affair with the plane's pilot, and they conspired to off him. It's a pretty straightforward detective story with an unnecessary climax -- Bard recreates the ill-fated jump with himself in the dead man's spot in order to figure out who sabotaged his chute when some extremely rudimentary deduction would have led him to the conclusion he sought -- but as usual, Robbins' artwork elevates it. Drawing on his newspaper strip roots, with no costumed characters in sight, he presents a simple story about people dressed in normal clothes involved in a pretty basic murder mystery.

And now, like I said above, our sojourn into Batman's 1970s adventures comes to a real and true end. Next Monday I'll put up my annual New Year's post, and then reviews will begin again in January. Happy holidays, everyone!