DETECTIVE COMICS #501 & #502

"THE MAN WHO KILLED MLLE. MARIE! | "WHO SHOT MLLE. MARIE?"
Writer Gerry Conway | Artists: Don Newton & Dan Adkins
Letterer: Ben Oda | Colorist: Adrienne Roy | Editor: Paul Levitz

The Plot: (Issue 501) Batman watches from hiding as Alfred and Lucius Fox board a flight to France, then recalls earlier in the day, when first Alfred, then Lucius, each recieved a mysterious telegram from Paris. Bruce then found that Alfred had packed up and left the Wayne penthouse, leaving the telegram behind. Bruce buys his way aboard the plane and shortly after landing, stops a man from shooting at Alfred or Lucius. He changes to Batman and trails the man to an office, where the would-be assassin is berated by another man for failing to kill "the traitor."

Batman takes out both men and turns them over to the local police, speaking with an Inspector Dupre and showing him the telegram, which summoned both Alfred and Lucius to France and instructed them to contact Julia if they wanted "justice for Mademoiselle Marie." The inspector tells Batman the story of Marie, a famous French resistance fighter during World War II, and explains that she knew both Alfred and Lucius at various points during the war, and that she was apparently murdered near its end. He also reveals that Julia is rumored to be Marie's daughter. Batman next confronts Alfred and Lucius at their hotel, but the metting is interrupted by Julia and some henchmen. When Julia tries to shoot Batman, the Darknight Detective moves to stop her -- but he himself is stopped by Alfred, who clobbers him with a fireplace poker. But Julia turns on her savior, accusing him of killing her mother, Mademoiselle Marie.

(Issue 502) Batman is held by Julia and her men in a barn on the French countryside. As he watches, Julia declares that Alfred killed her mother, and she has convened a court of Marie's resistance peers, including Lucius, to observe his execution. But Batman convinces the group that Alfred deserves a trial, and Lucius volunteers to defend him. A witness, a young girl whose grandmother knew Marie, says that Marie was indeed shot in the final days of the war, but her grandmother and her sister, Gizelle, nursed her back to health, and during that time, Marie gave birth to Julia. Then one day, Marie left, and soon afterward a body was discovered in the St. Joan River. Julia was raised by Jaques Remarque, a friend of her mother's, and he recently told her the truth, as he knew it, of Marie's demise.

Batman, having surreptitiously freed himself, asks Julia for twelve hours to find proof of Alfred's innocence, then he leaves. He visits Inspector Dupre again for information on the body recovered from the river, then goes in search of either of the elderly women who found Marie. He eventually locates Gizelle in the hospital and speaks with her about a French collaborator named Roget, who Gizelle believes killed Marie. Gizelle saved the bullet the women removed from Marie, and Batman heads to her house for it. But he finds Dupre already there. Dupre attacks but Batman defeats him, having deduced that Dupre is actually Roget with extensive plastic surgery.

Batman brings Dupre back to the barn and provides his gun and bullet as proof. Later, at the airport, Batman and Lucius watch from a distance as Alfred speaks with Jaques Remarque about Julia and Marie. Alfred is Julia's father, though he has hidden that fact from her his entire life, and he implores Jaques to continue to keep his secret. Then Alfred and Lucius board their plane to fly home.

Continuity Notes: Bruce notes that he always carries his passport for emergencies requiring international travel, which seems kind of a dangerous thing to keep in the ol' utility belt if he wants to safeguard his secret identity!

When Dupre tells the legend of Mademoiselle Marie, a footnote says that her stories were told in the pages of STAR SPANGLED WAR STORIES.

As noted above, issue 502 reveals that Alfred is Julia's father. Batman also discovers during the course of his investigaton that the body found in the St. Joan River showed no sign of ever having been shot, suggesting that Mademoiselle Marie may not have died after leaving Gizelle and her sister. To that point, from that moment forward, though he never voices a theory that she is alive, Batman consistently corrects everyone who says Marie was killed by saying she was "shot."

My Thoughts: For me, apparently all roads lead back to the roleplaying games I enjoyed in my adolescence. I know I've spoken here mostly (or possibly even exclusively) about TSR's MARVEL SUPER HEROES ROLEPLAYING GAME, but it was by no means the only one. Indeed, there were many more. MARVEL was my favorite and the one we played most frequently, but there were also RIFTS, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES AND OTHER STRANGENESS, GURPS, STAR WARS, and more and more and more. And among all these other RPGs was DC HEROES by Mayfair Games. My recollection is that we didn't play that one much... the rules, at least for a bunch of thirteen year-olds, involved far, far too much math. But in spite of that, the game was a treasure trove of information on the DC Universe. I wasn't a big DC reader, but I knew a decent amount about the universe anyway, thanks in large part to the DC HEROES game.

It was in the pages of DC HEROES' BATMAN SOURCEBOOK (written by future prolific STAR WARS novelist Michael A. Stackpole) that I discovered way more about Batman and his world than I had ever learned from the likes of the Adam West TV series or SUPER FRIENDS. It was the BATMAN SOURCEBOOK that introduced me to Ra's al Ghul and Talia, to Killer Croc, to Two-Face. And it also introduced me to the idea that Alfred had been a British agent during World War II, during which time he had fathered a daughter with a French resistance fighter.

"Get to the point," I hear you saying, and so I will -- what I'm getting to is the fact that I've known about this story for decades, yet I've never read it. And typically when that's the case, when you finally get around to reading the story, it won't live up to whatever expectations you've placed on it in your head. This has happened to me more often than not over the years; one example that springs to mind is the X-Men's "Fall of the Mutants" event -- I read a summary of it in (surprise) the MARVEL SUPER HEROES ROLEPLAYING GAME's CHILDREN OF THE ATOM supplement, and then within another couple years, I read the story itself. And the story dramatically failed to meet whatever impossible romanticization I had conceived in my head.*

But that's not the case here! Perhaps because it's been many, many years and I haven't thought much about Alfred, Marie, and Julia since I first learned about them in the BATMAN SOURCEBOOK -- but I'd say it's more likely that this is simply a well-conceived, well-written two-part mystery. Everything adds up and ties together by the end, and nothing about it feels off (aside from Batman apparently carrying Bruce Wayne's passport around everywhere he goes). I'm pleased to say that Gerry Conway's run on DETECTIVE COMICS is off to a fine start, with a string of excellent one- (or two-) off stories to open it up. And as of this point, Marv Wolfman has finished his contempraneous run on BATMAN, cleaning up all of Len Wein's loose ends and clearing the way for Conway to take over that title as well. So with any luck, the "Conway run" proper will really start to pick up over the next couple weeks.

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*Which is not to say "Fall of the Mutants" is a bad story; indeed, it's probably my favorite X-event of the Chris Claremont era! But I recall that when I read about it, detailed as the summary was in terms of the broad strokes, it was vague enough on the granular details that I was picturing something vastly different -- and most likely something drawn by John Byrne with all the characters in their 1970s costumes -- in my head.