DETECTIVE COMICS #395 & #397

"THE SECRET OF THE WAITING GRAVES" | "PAINT A PICTURE OF PERIL!"
Story by: Denny O'Neil | Art by: Neal Adams & Dick Giordano

Note: Screenshots below come from BATMAN ILLUSTRATED BY NEAL ADAMS VOLUME 2 and are not representative of these stories' original colors (the covers are presented as published, however).

Last week's "One Bullet Too Many!", by Frank Robbins, Irv Novick, and Dick Giordano, set up the status quo which would define Batman for the full decade of the seventies (and even in to the early eighties) -- but it's DETECTIVE COMICS 395's lead story, "The Secret of the Waiting Graves", which I've seen identified in more than one place as the tale that set the mood for the upcoming decade. Certainly it unites the Caped Crusader's definitive creative team of that era, in Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams.

And there definitely is a mood here! While "One Bullet Too Many" was a decent introduction to the setup of the seventies and the sorts of Batman stories the decade would present, it also felt very straightforward and not all that different from what had come before. Even though the action was set mostly at night, it was still a fairly bright four-color adventure. But thanks primarily to Adams' artwork, "The Secret of the Waiting Graves" and "Paint a Picture of Peril" both drip with the sort of dark, gothic atmosphere one would expect from a Darknight Detective.