DETECTIVE COMICS #505

"WEREWOLF MOON"
Writer Gerry Conway | Artists: Don Newton & Dan Adkins
Letterer: Ben Oda | Colorist: Adrienne Roy | Editor: Dick Giordano

The Plot: Inside a hospital room, a woman pleads for Batman's help to save the life of her daughter, who is dying of leukemia and who needs bone marrow transplant from her brother. Out in the hospital corridor, Batman and Commissioner Gordon discuss the identity of the girl's brother -- he is Anthony Lupus, a werewolf apparently killed years earlier. But Gordon reveals to Batman that Lupus may yet live, in Alaska. The Darknight Detective heads north and, as Bruce Wayne, recruits a guide from the local EPA office to help him find Lupus. They locate a wooden shack in the wilderness, but find it empty. Then, as they wait, the werewolf bursts in and attacks. Bruce drives it out the door, and the next morning his guide leaves.

Bruce changes to Batman and hunts Lupus, eventually finding and fighting him under the full moon. The Caped Crusader wins and Lupus turns back to normal. Batman holds him captive in a silver net for one more night of the full moon before the pair returns to Gotham City.

Continuity Notes: Per Batman's exposition and a footnote, Anthony Lupus first appeared in BATMAN #255, by Len Wein and Neal Adams, where he was a star athlete mutated by the fiendish Professor Milo. Batman believed Lupus was killed by a lightning bolt, but apparently Gordon has known for a couple of months that he may be alive and has elected not to mention it to Batman.

Strangely, Batman says that he fought Lupus "six years ago" -- which is more-or-less true in terms of publication time; the original story was published in 1974 -- but which makes no sense in terms of the sliding timeline, when one considered Robin was in college back then, and that would put him somewhere in his mid-twenties at this point if that were the case.

Mayoral candidate and city councilman Athur Reeves puts in another appearance to harass Batman with the aid of a TV news crew. But this time, already rattled by the Lupus situation, Batman loses his cool and smacks Reeves aside, making the evening news and the next morning's headlines.

My Thoughts: It's step back up in quality for Gerry Conway, bearing out my theory that, with the assistance of Roy Thomas, he was merely phoning it in on the past couple issues of BATMAN. Mind you, this isn't the cream of Conway's crop; indeed it's fairly lackluster as far as the main story goes. Bringing back Lupus seems unnecessary following his original story, which was a decent done-in-one with a definitive ending. And (Bat)man vs. nature is nearly always a compelling hook in any genre. Yet somehow, things don't quite "click" here.

Nonteheless, even if the plot doesn't quite reach the level of Conway's better previous efforts, his scripting is at the top of his game here, and the return of the Reeves sub-plot, brief though it may be, is welcome. I can't say this is a true return to form, but it gives me hope for upcoming installments. Again, like I said last week, I've read that this is a very good run, so I'm hopeful it's just a little bumpy getting off the ground -- and with forty-four combined issues of BATMAN and DETECTIVE remaining after this one, I also hope that I'm not still waiting for things to "get good" in another few months!

And to that point, you may have noticed that I'm not covering these BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS issues in the order in which they were released, but rather in chronological story order as presented in the TALES OF THE BATMAN: GERRY CONWAY volumes. So this is our first of three DETECTIVE issues in a row, following from two BATMAN issues in a row. I know, again from what I've read online elsewhere, that Conway will eventually sync the titles up, treating them as basically one bi-weekly series. It's a format he would use a few years later (to resounding success in my own opinion) when he returned to Marvel and wrote both SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN and WEB OF SPIDER-MAN concurrently. And I find myself wondering if that point, when BATMAN and DETECTIVE become joined at the hip, is when this run truly clicks and takes off. I guess we'll find out soon enough!