DETECTIVE COMICS #497

"BAD NIGHT IN BAJA"
Writer Gerry Conway | Artists: Don Newton & Dan Adkins
Colorist: Adrienne Roy | Letterer: Ben Oda | Editor: Paul Levitz

The Plot: At a ramshackle hotel bar on a dark and stormy night in Baja California, several men go about their evening's business, including the establishment's owner, who plans to burn the place down for insurance money. Suddenly, an injured man staggers in. He drops a briefcase and goes for the telephone. The man is Bruce Wayne, and he calls his butler, Alfred, for help.

Flashbacks explain how Bruce wound up in this situation: the Batman was called to Baja by the FBI for help in catching "The Squid", a mobster from Gotham who is in town to meet a buyer for some top-secret defense documents. Bruce and Alfred checked into their hotel, then Batman confronted the Squid and his men at their estate. Batman procured the documents, but was shot in the process. He escaped and changed to Bruce Wayne in order to travel anonymously.

Now, the hotel barkeep finds the documents in the briefcase and stashes them. Meanwhile, a newlywed couple arges in one of the small hotel's dingy rooms. The wife leaves and finds Bruce, helping him to safety outside just as the Squid and his men show up. Bruce changes back to Batman and, with help from the barkeep's can of gasoline hidden behind the bar, rigs an explosion to blow up the villains' car before they can escape. The police arrive and arrest the Squid and his men, and Batman and Alfred go on their way.

Continuity Notes: None to speak of. Though I will point out, for those curious, that the above cover illustrates the issue's "B" story (which we're not covering here since it isn't reprinted in TALES OF THE BATMAN: GERRY CONWAY), and has nothing to do with "Bad Night in Baja"!

My Thoughts: An inauspicious start to Gerry Conway's run on the Batman? Possibly, but to be fair, I'm not sure how long he was intended to remain at this point. He had done several fill-ins throughout the seventies (as evidenced by the fact that his "run" proper begins on page 220 of TALES OF THE BATMAN: GERRY CONWAY vol. 1!), and this may well have been intended to be another such short run, to kill some time on DETECTIVE while Marv Wolfman was busy tying up Len Wein's loose ends with the "Lazarus Affair" serial in the pages of BATMAN. (And in case you weren't here in 2019, I took a look at that storyline when I covered Batman in the Seventies back then. You'll find it at the bottom of the page, starting with the BATMAN #330 & #331 post.)

So it's entirely possible that, as Wolfman had a limited run, essentially finishing off Wein's storylines in BATMAN, Conway was intended to do the same here, just writing a few issues of DETECTIVE until Wolfman was done and a new writer or writers could be found for both titles. I know that eventually, Conway will take over BATMAN and begin writing both series, threading an ongoing soap opera through them, and that's what I'm really here for. But in the meantime, we have some one-offs to get through first. And despite my opening line above, I really don't find this one inauspicious at all. Perhaps in terms of what I undersand Conway's run to become, it could be -- but on its own, it's a fine done-in-one in the vein of many other 1970s-era Batman tales. Indeed, I'd rank it fairly high in that regard; it's got a nice pulpy feel that fits Batman like a glove, and it's something that feels like it could've been produced by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams a decade earlier -- which, as far as I'm concerned, is some of the highest praise that can be paid a Batman story.

More likely, this is simply an inauspicious post to begin our look at Conway's run! And I imagine there will be a few more until we reach the point where Conway slides fully into the driver's seat. We have four or five more DETECTIVE issues before June/July of 1981, when Conway takes over both books and, from what I can tell, begins treating them like a permanent assignment. But if those remaining installments can live up to the "Batman in the Seventies" paradigm seen here, I'm more than happy to wait!