BATMAN #345

"CALLING DOCTOR DEATH"
Writer Gerry Conway | Artists: Gene Colan & Klaus Janson
Letterer: Ben Oda | Colorist: Adrienne Roy | Editor: Dick Giordano

The Plot: In a location unknown, a stoolpigeon named Keswick is brought before a mystery man in a wheelchair. The man chastizes Keswick for attempting to betry him to the police, then sprays Keswick with some dust. Later, Batman arrives at the Gotham waterfront, where Commissioner Gordon presides over the recovery of Keswick's body. Batman requests the autopsy, and then departs to rejoin a party in progress downtown as Bruce Wayne. There, he notes several revelers engaged with a wheelchair-bound man named Doctor Karl Hellfern. Meanwhile, Dick Grayson exits the party with his date, Dala, and they spot a cloud of dust raining down on Gotham. Dick is struck on the hand by some of the dust. Later, Bruce joins Robin in the Batcave, where the Teen Wonder is analyzing the dust. The Batcomputer comes up with a prognosis of death for anyone sprinkled with it.

Elsewhere, Commissioner Gordon meets with Gotham's new mayor, Hamilton Hill. As Gordon expected, Hill demands Gordon's resignation and gives him twenty-four hours to comply before he will proceed with an impeachment effort. Later, Gordon meets with Batman and Robin, revealing that Keswick died of an extreme allergic reaction to the same dust which hit Robin and countless other Gothamites. The Dynamic Duo go in search of Keswick's killer, and are referred by a stoolpigeon to Gotham's long-abandoned Relief Island. The heroes take the Batboat to the island and are ambushed upon arrival by a group of martial artists. Robin, weakened by his reaction to the dust, is knocked out. And when Batman is distracted by his partner's defeat, he too is beaten. Batman awakens later, hanging with Robin from a bridge passing over the island. Below, Doctor Hellfern -- a.k.a. Doctor Death -- gloats over his prisoners.

Continuity Notes: Batman notes in the opening pages that Gordon is distracted, and chalks it up (correctly, as we see a couple pages later) to the commissioner's problems with Mayor Hill. A footnote informs readers that Hill was elected "Last month" in the prior issues of BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS.

A page later, Bruce recalls resigning as the Wayne Foundation's chairman, thinking about how he now has more freedom to act as Batman as a result. It's perhaps neither here nor there, but Bruce did a lot of this sort of waffling back-and-forth throughout the seventies and into the eighties. Back circa the early seventies, he was presented by Frank Robbins as the dynamic, crusading head of the Wayne Foundation. But by the mid-seventies, when Archie Goodwin briefly took over writing chores on DETECTIVE COMICS, Bruce explicitly went out of his way to play up the "playboy" aspect of his persona, behaving often like a bored man-child. But in the ensuing years, we saw him become more serious again, as shown in the Len Wein run on BATMAN. Now Conway moves back the other direction, going so far as to jettison Bruce's professional responsibilites entirely in order to make him a full-time debutante -- though hopefully not as vapid as Goodwin tried to play him!

As noted above, Dick brings Dala to the party as his date. Bruce's "plus-one", meanwhile, is Vicki Vale. Bruce reintroduces Dick to Vicki, telling her that Dick was "in grade school" the last time they met. Robin then introduces Dala to Bruce and Vicki, then slips outside with her. Vicki snaps a photo of Dala as the two leave, and then notes to Bruce that Dala seems a bit old to be dating Dick. A page later, Dick recalls meeting Dala at Gotham University in last month's issue of DETECTIVE COMICS.

After his confrontation with Commissioner Gordon, a pager in Hill's pocket goes off. Hill wonders what "he" wants, a narration tells us the scene will be continued next issue.

We learn a bit more about Gotham's geography in this one, which, along with timeline continuity, is another thing I enjoy, and something you really only see in DC comics. I love getting bits and pieces of these fictional cities trickled out. Has anyone ever compiled some sort of DC Almanac or Atlas, breaking down the geographies of Gotham, Metropolis, Coast City, etc.? That would be a cool book. But anyway, the party attended by Bruce and Dick is at an apartment in the city's posh "Gold Coast" district, and the island Doctor Death uses as his hideout, has a well-conceived history spelled out by Conway in the passage below:

My Thoughts: This issue is fine. It's good. Soap opera, sub-plots, yadda yadda yadda. I'm sure I could write something about it, because I do like it, but instead i'm going to spend the next few paragraphs geeking out about the continuity note above regarding Robin's age.

But first, for those wondering if any of this Dick/Dala stuff contradicts the Robin/Starfire relationship in NEW TEEN TITANS, I checked and it doesn't -- yet. In fact, just last month, publication-wise, was NEW TEEN TITANS #16, in which Starfire had a whirlwind romance with a young man named Franklin Crandall -- though that was also the issue that established, much to my surprise, that Robin and Starfire were "teammates with benefits" even before they got together romantically! I went back and checked my issue summaries of NTT, and it looks like Robin and Starfire started officially dating in issue 26, published ten months after this one, so it'll be interesting to keep an eye on Robin's love life here to see how these things line up.

And now I must confess that -- as you might expect if you've spent any amount of time reading my posts here -- I'm fascinated by Bruce's comment about Dick's age here. If Dick was "in grade school" the last time he and Vicki met, he couldn't have been any older than roughly ten or eleven back then. And now he's in college -- having started at Hudson University roughly twelve years earlier in terms of publicatin time, having dropped out, and having re-enrolled at Gotham U. You have to figure he's at least a sophomore or junior in terms of age by this point, so probably twenty or twenty-one by now -- meaning it's roughly ten years since he last saw Vicki. Meaning, since that was early in the careers of Batman and Robin, Bruce had been Batman for at least a few years prior to Vicki showing up. Meaning if Bruce was, say, in his early twenties when he started as Batman -- which I think is fairly accepted logic, given he spent what would've been his college years traveling the world and learning how to be the World's Greatest Detective -- then he's probably thirteen or fourteen years older here. Meaning (drum roll) Bruce Wayne/Batman is in his mid-thirties at this point!

Which sounds just about right to me. As I understand it, there is -- or least there used to be -- a school of thought at DC that the flagship characters, Batman and Superman, were "eternally twenty-nine". I've never liked that. I generally assume that's because of the versions of these characters I grew up with on-screen: George Reeves was in his late thirties when he starred in the ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN television series, which I watched on Nick at Nite as a child. Adam West was of similar age when he signed on to play Batman. Christopher Reeve was, admittedly, younger -- a mere twenty-six when he played Superman! -- but Michael Keaton was, again, in his late thirties when he donned Batman's cowl in 1989. And then there are the animated versions; most notably from my childhood Danny Dark and Olan Soule as Superman and Batman, who were respectively in their thirties and fifites (!) througout their time voicing the characters in SUPER FRIENDS -- and their voices sounded suitably mature in those roles.

But whatever the case, I think, and have always thought, that Batman and Superman make sense as men in their thirties. Especially in Batman's case due to his long history of fighting crime solo, then with a young partner who grew up during their time together and eventually went off to college. And for that matter, Clark Kent makes a lot more sense as a seasoned star reporter if he's in his thirties than if he's twenty-nine.

So if Bruce is, say, thirty-four or so here, while Dick is maybe twenty-one, I'm all for it! But the real question, the one I'm sure nagging at all of us, is -- how old is Doctor Death?? Sadly, it's unlikely we'll find out next issue.