BATMAN #338

"THIS SPORTING DEATH!"
Script: Gerry Conway | Plot Assist: Roy Thomas
Artists: Irv Novick & Frank McLaughlin
Letters: John Costanza | Colos: Adrienne Roy | Editor: Dick Giordano

The Plot: Late at night on the field of Gotham Stadium, a man in sports gear kills a sportswriter named Hank Klugmann. Later, Commissioner Gordon calls Batman to assist with the investigation, which is the latest in a series of sports-related murders. The next morning, Bruce Wayne inspects the field in the daylight, but finds no leads. Later that night, the Batman stakes out a Sunday Night Hockey game. The mysterious "Sportsman" skates onto the ice and blows up star player Pierre Foote with an exploding basketball. Batman chases the Sportsman out of the arena, but the villain escapes by throwing a razor-edged tennis raquet at the Caped Crusader.

The next day, Bruce Wayne visits Gotham's Sports World Mall, looking for leads on the raquet. As he asks a saleswoman about it, a shop buyer named Martin Mantle makes a break for it. Bruce follows, but loses Mantle. He changes to Batman and finds the Sportsman terrorizing the mall patrons. Batman falls into a pitching machine's net, and elicits a confession from the Sportsman -- he was an unathletic child, and his father, a sports physician, concocted a formula to make an athlete of anyone. He injected young Mantle with the formula, and the boy grew up to become a sports star, dominating every school and collegiate sport in which he participated. But eventually he learned that the formula in his veins was killing him, and he became the Sportsman to take revenge on all the sporting world.

Batman then triggers the pitching machine, which launches a ball at Mantle. Briefly stunned, the Sportsman is easily dispatched by Batman and arrested by the police.

Continuity Notes: As with last week's issue of BATMAN, this is a done-in-one with no continuity to speak of.

My Thoughts: I have a theory... so far we've looked at a number of Gerry Conway Batman stories. Most were pretty good, but a small handful haven't been. And of those, two of them are co-plotted by Roy Thomas! I kind of feel like Conway is phoning it in a bit at this point. This Sportsman story is really pretty lame. Again we have a villain with a bizarre motive and a zany backstory, plus a rather lackluster "mystery" -- exactly like the previous issue. I just have this impression that Conway is a bit aimless here, or perhaps overly busy (I don't know what else he was up to at this point) to the extent that he is soliciting assistance from Thomas for his plots, and turning in some very half-baked scripts just to get the issues out.

I know things will get better; I've read that this run is actually quite good. But at this point, in the early going, it's become a little dire. And I have a hard time reconciling this version of Conway with the guy who wrote the earliest stories we examined! It's like night and day. However, as with last issue's story, I can at least say that the artwork is good here, supplied by mainstay 1970s Batman penciler Irv Novick and his regular inker of the day, Frank McLaughlin (recall that this duo illustrated nearly the entire Len Wein and Marv Wolfman BATMAN runs when I looked at those issues some years back).

And unfortunately, our Robin backup story, written by Conway with art from Don Newton and Steve Mitchell, fares little better. To be fair, it definitely is superior to the lead story, as was the case last week. But the quality of "Killer Under the Big Top" has taken a bit of a dip following from last issue's part one. Here, Robin confronts circus owner Lourna Hill, but someone sics a pair of lions on both of them. Robin catches up with Magnificent Melanie, the lion tamer, but she says she only did it because she thought Robin was helping the police build a case against her lover, Dick Grayson's friend, Waldo the Clown.

Soon after, Waldo comes around in the hospital (apparently Robin really hit him hard when he caught him last issue!), and says that in the lead-up to the muder of his rival, Jo-Jo, the two argued over their respective feelings for Melanie, and then as Jo-Jo stormed off, someone tossed a gun to Waldo, and then it went off and Jo-Jo died. Only the gun wasn't aimed at Jo-Jo when it fired! So Robin further investigates, finds a gun hidden under a bleacher seat, and deduces that Jo-Jo rigged that gun to kill himself right when he tossed the other gun to Waldo. It turns out Jo-Jo had terminal cancer, so he decided to frame his rival for Melanie's affection. But apparently all this circumstantial evidence is enough for the police to drop any charges against Waldo, and he goes free.

I mean, it's not awful, and it's not as downright bizarre as the Sportsman story, but I still feel that it doesn't live up to the promise of last issue's first part. But anyway, next week we jump back over to DETECTIVE COMICS, and Gerry Conway will be flying solo again without Roy Thomas, so let's see if things start to improve!