Bill did a post about coloring in the Watchmen comic and movie, inspiring me to finally get to this post I’ve been sitting on for some time now.

A little while back Tucker Stone and I coblogged our way through the 2nd phonebook volume of Bob Haney Brave and Bold stories. Our mutual favorite of the tales was an amazing Batman/Deadman crossover, which is pretty easily The Best Batman Story I’ve Ever Read.

Anyway, after we’d finished the series, Tucker (who, unlike me, occasionally visits comics stores) purchased and sent me a copy of the original Batman/Deadman team-up which he’d found in one of those storied longboxes. If I’d found it myself, of course, I would have just kept it…but Tucker’s a better person than I am (like Kim Deitch…and probably most other folks for that matter….)

But to get back to the point at hand; I was especially excited to see the original artwork, because I was curious how the color would affect the visuals. The story is a bleak noir, for the most part, so black and white suited it well, I thought. I wasn’t sure whether the color would help or hinder.

I think overall it helps. I’m not sure who the colorist is (could it be Aparo himself? Probably not…though I know he did his own inks) but whoever had the chores does a very nice job. Take the panel below:

The muted blues in the costume and the weird neutral orange/red background actually accentuate the shadow on the face; Batman ends up looking pretty scruffy, which I think is just right.

Similarly, this image is great in black and white:

But I think it’s equally good in color; where, again, the brown really brings out the crazy shadow, actually emphasizing the noir feel rather than detracting from it. (Plus it really drives home the “this is a minority bit” — if you’re going to be racist, I guess it’s best to be as explicit as possible. Or, actually, maybe not, on second thought….)

The panel below is improved too, I think; in black and white it’s not clear where your eye is supposed to go. With the yellow and red added, the contrast is much clearer. I love the way the car is turned more or less red to match the flames, so you have basically a few solid areas of color; yellow, black, red…and even white, as the speech bubbles are nicely incorporated into the aesthetics of the image as well. It emphasizes the stylization of the flames and of the truck…and really of the whole composition. It has a poster art, almost constructivist feel.

Everything doesn’t work equally well. The color on the lips here makes Lilly (the woman in the center) look oddly unnatural.

Though, on the other hand, I think the color helps add to her dyspeptically fierce expression here:

And I love the way the touch of red shading makes Deadman’s path out of the body here more solid; it’s almost like he’s at the end of a twisty ectoplasmic fabric; an effect which is present, but more muted, in the black and white:

So the color was quite successful overall, I think. Things really were better back there in the days before computers….

This is it: the frightening and bloody end. Tucker Stone and I have waded through the entire Showcase Presents: Brave and the Bold volume 2. For the complete experience of the Cowardly and the Castrated, read part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six.

Then read the first half of the final, pulse-pounding conversation about all things brave and a few things bold between me and Tucker at his blog, The Factual Opinion. Then, come back here and read the second half right below.

Whadaya want, it’s a crossover event. You’re lucky we didn’t have variant covers.
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cover for Brave and Bold #106 by Jim Aparo

Noah: I did want to ask you…in your review of the Metamorpho one, at the end of it you mentioned that comics aren’t really made this well anymore. You’re way more tuned into the current mainstream stuff than I am, but I feel that way too…especially in regards to the art. I know that Aparo, Cardy, and Adams are all very highly regarded…but even Ross Andru and Bob Brown have a level of professionalism — they can put a story together in a way that’s easy to follow, at least, and which has some sense of consistent, workmanlike style. What happened to that? Or am I just being horribly unfair to contemporary mainstream illustrators?

Tucker: I think there’s a level of unfairness to that, sure–there’s plenty of comics I don’t particularly find enjoyable to read, but it’s not because of any particular lack of artistic consistency–but there’s something definitely missing. I don’t know what you can attribute that too–obviously, these Brave & The Bold’s were all bi-monthly, so it can’t be filed under the now-common complaint of missed deadlines. I’d argue that it’s more of a problem of scripts–there just aren’t that many scripts that hit all the beats well, and I think that’s what is most valuable about the best of these Haney stories. Each issue doles out some type of plot, some type of villian, some type of action, and some level of humor and emotional content.

Most of the stuff that’s out today–and this is “intentionality” again–relies on the longer arc to deal out all that sort of stuff. A six-issue mini-series delivers what might be a more heightened version of all of those things, but it takes so long to get to it–six months, if the team is on time–that everything depends on the reader caring about what is, at the core, a repetitive form of plot and story. Very few of these–even the bad ones, like that Wonder Woman thing–don’t move forward in consistent fashion, and that makes them easier to swallow.

I think guys like Stuart Immonen (Ultimate Spider-Man, Nextwave) or Dustin Nguyen (Detective Comics) have an interesting style that works with the script, makes it stronger, and helps to make it more readable.

But yes, there are people who just can’t. Tony Daniel–he’s responsible for most of the art on Grant Morrison’s Batman run–can’t draw a decent fight scene to save his life, he can’t pull off an iconic splash page, he can’t even make it look like somebody is talking to another person without a lot of work on the part of the reader. Ed Benes, who handles the Justice League, is just as bad.

Noah: Fair enough on the art…though is there anyone in mainstream you like as much as Aparo or Cardy or Adams? (You’re going to say Eduardo Risso just to irritate me, aren’t you?)

Tucker: Well, it’s a different skill set with Risso–I liked his run on Batman well enough, but Aparo’s work is far preferable. But yeah, I don’t think Aparo could pull off 100 Bullets–he has a problem doing male faces and making them look distinctive. Lemme think for a second! That’s a good question.

Alex Maleev–he did the art for Brian Bendis run on Daredevil–I loved that. It’s nothing like Aparo, but it’s fantastic stuff. Guy Davis–he does the B.P.R.D. series for Dark Horse. And I’ve really enjoyed keeping up with this lesser known guy named Tan Eng Huat–he did this Doom Patrol revamp years ago, and now he’s exaggerated his work even more, and is currently doing Ghost Rider for Marvel. He’s too weird to get a standard gig, but he’s got a style that’s pretty unique for super-hero books. Michael Allred/Cameron Stewart and Darywn Cooke also did this great tag-team work on Catwoman for a while, until DC threw that book into the toilet.

cover for Brave and Bold #108 by Jim Aparo

Noah: On the story; I think these are obviously aimed at a more general audience, right? I mean, there’s a sense in these that somebody who doesn’t necessarily define themselves as a comic-book fan might pick one up…say, from a 7-11 rack (which is where I got my comics way back when.) Haney clearly, clearly, doesn’t give a crap about continuity…which is pretty darn funny considering this is a team-up title. Today, I think writers tend to aim their work at people who they figure are already invested; if you’ve got the comic in the first place, then that indicates a certain level of knowledge about the DC universe, and a willingness to follow a series month after month after month. That makes it possible to attempt more complicated stories, which can be great at times (Swamp Thing, Animal Man, etc.) But I think though it can be great, there are diminishing returns at some point, mainly because super-heroes really weren’t ever originally intended for that kind of story. It’s a silly idea, when you come right down to it, and there’s only a certain amount of mileage to be gotten from debunking or complicating it. I think we’ve passed that point, myself.

I haven’t seen any of those artists you mention, alas…except for Darwyn Cooke…who I like all right…. Would you agree at all that contemporary mainstream art is generally not as good as the older stuff, or is my whole thesis misguided?

Tucker: ….off the cuff, I’d agree, sure–but then again, there’s such a massive amount of stuff that i’ve got zero relationship with. If it’s reprinted–and as much I’ll joke that everything is reprinted, that’s not really true–then it’s got to have some potential value to it. There’s a ton of comics that get mentioned in Haney’s interview that I’ve never seen available except in the quarter bins, and I’m sure there’s got to be a lot of crap there, you know? It’s sort of unfair to use some of Jim Aparo and Nick Cardy–while they were at work on a successful title, which B & B was–to showcase how bad the art is on Uncanny X-Men.

Noah: Oooh…here’s some Maleev. Very nice.

Tucker: At the same time, fuck comics. Old stuff > new stuff. I don’t think you have to go to the Library of Congress to figure out if that’s true or not.

Noah: All right; well a slightly different tack…what do you think the best stories in the volume were? We seem to be agreed Deadman was the best; I think my second favorite is probably that Black Canary one from #91, mainly because of the great Noir art…but the story was also pretty fantastically preposterous from beginning to end. After that maybe the insane Phantom Stranger one with the paranoid covens and Batman killing his godson and not really giving a crap. What do you think?

The evil Mormons and the crazy Adam Strange evil-future-Batman and the one with Flash where Batman becomes an obsessed, possessed paranoid nutjob were all great too…but the art kind of drags them down a bit….

Tucker: My favorite panel in the entire book was the guy going off the bridge “nononononon” in the Black Canary story. That’s my number two as well. After that, I’d probably go with the Sgt. Rock story–the violence, the Alfred kills the dude ending–I just loved everything about that one. It also had “Bat-Hombre” which is something I’d sort of like framed in my home. No love for Metamorpho? I loved that there was no real team-up, and that Metamorpho didn’t seem to have any interest in doing anything but saving his lady. Bad guys? Rex doesn’t care. Rex just likes saving that girl and punching that monkey.

from Brave and Bold #91, art by Nick Cardy, story by Bob Haney

Noah: That panel is amazing. And the Dinah Lance cheesecake. The Sgt. Rock one didn’t do as much for me, though your review did make me appreciate it more. I think, though, that I liked the depressed Plastic-Man as noir avenger more than you did; that was just so, so wrong I had to love it.

from Brave and Bold #91, art by Nick Cardy, story by Bob Haney

Tucker: Well, the Plastic Man went for that whole “hangs-on-a-spoiler” thing that just…I just can’t do it anymore. Keyser Soze, heads in boxes, that Shamalame guy and his dead people–I’m just tired of “you’ll never guess what comes next” kind of stuff. It wears me out, and while I had some appreciation for the weirdness of Plastic Man continuing to maintain his false identity months longer then sanity or logic required, that story was a spoiler end, and that part of me is just dead in the ground.

Noah: But it’s such a stupid spoiler…don’t you want to be meta? Sigh. I guess post-ironic irony is dead….

Tucker: I don’t know what those words mean!

Noah: Anyway, I wanted to ask you too what you made of the whole Haney-intentionality quandary I wandered into. Especially in relationship to that Deadman story. Is Batman in that supposed to come off as an unfeeling cad, do you think? Does it matter? It seems to me like he had several modes; one where the story was just completely off the wall and running in every which direction (Adam Strange, both Phantom Strangers, the beginning of the Sgt. Rock one) one where you basically get a fairly straightforward adventure story (Metamorpho, Green Arrow, etc.) and then the Deadman one, where it’s just a brilliant noir plot. It’s awfully hard to resolve all of that into some kind of auteur function. I wonder how much of the scattershot quality, in every sense, is the result of just having to grind out so much material….?

Alex Maleev is the Kabuki guy! I do like him…though possibly not as much as Aparo or Cardy. There’s a bit of slickness in his realism that sets my teeth on edge…I haven’t seen the Daredevil stuff though. He’s obviously extremely talented, in any case.

Tucker: It’s difficult for me to reconcile Haney into the category of a guy who was just working to finish product, just grinding out scripts to meet deadlines. At the same time, i think it’s difficult because I don’t want to believe that people go into the creative field–any creative field–and do that. (But that’s an optimistic, unrealistic fantasy, and it’s just as likely that comics writers end up doing the same kind of grunt work that people do when they work on Gray’s Anatomy, so on.) Of course, some of them go on to do good work–Shawn Ryan, who did the Shield, always talks about the time he spent on Nash Bridges as being an excellent writing/creative school. The thing is that with comics guys you’ve got evidence of their actual goal. Brian Azzarello (who i know you don’t like) did these really terrible Comico books, and then he did short stories for Vertigo, and then he got the freedom to do 100 Bullets.

Haney doesn’t have that in his catalog. He was a comics guy who did comics-as-product.

Sometimes he did them really well, but his limitations were vast. He couldn’t do a four-issue Noir Batman story, because that wasn’t what he was hired for.

He had to make do with a bunch of titles, different art teams, and an editorial group he doesn’t seem to have had much love for. So sometimes he could take shit and make it fly–like Deadman, where he made the story the primary engine–or he made do with letting the heroes carry the weight, like he did with the Bat-Metamorpho story.

I went a different way with your question: I think Haney felt that he was free to do with Batman whatever he needed to so he could fit his story. More and more, the problem is that comics writers seem to worry that they’ll “break” Batman, and they cater the story to fit in with his ridiculous “mythos” or whatever.

We’d be a hell of a lot better off if Batman was just left as more of a reactionary force, which is pretty much what he is throughout this entire series.

Noah: I don’t think grinding stuff out has to necessarily be a sign of bad art or anything. There’s not necessarily any correlation between how something is made and whether it’s good. Philip K. Dick basically wrote as fast as he could type, and that’s how his books read…but they use that, too, and they’re incredible. Haney sometimes seems to be doing something a little like what Dick did; all that amnesia, storylines that can’t stay straight for more than a panel, Batman going off the deep end again and again; it’s pulp crap as metaphor for the way the world falls apart if you look too closely at it. At the same time, you never get a moment where he manages to make that explicit, the way Dick frequently does.

Tucker: Don’t get me wrong–grinding it out isn’t indicative of bad art. But if we’re talking about what Haney’s intentions are, it’s hard to reconcile “intention” with “finish this comic and get it to the artist and get my paycheck for this comic.” There weren’t opportunities in comics for the kind of creative freedom that Image or some Vertigo titles allow. Haney was in a one-job market, and what he wanted was never going to be met by what was available.

Noah: I agree that the Batman mythos has become a problem. Again, it’s that comics cater more towards a specific community; consistency is much, much more important. Haney’s Batman is way more flexible; he isn’t just a reactionary force right? I mean, sometimes he’s a mad scientist, sometimes he’s an advocate for teens, sometimes he’s dumb as dirt, sometimes he’s a murderer…and my point is there’s something a lot more realistic there than having him be a consistent archetype.

Tucker: I couldn’t agree more. Having a flexible Batman opens the gates for more stories.

Just “more” though. Not necessarily “better.” Grim and dirty bludgeon for justice though–that’s getting old.

Noah: Which suggests that Haney did in some ways have more creative freedom than someone like Grant Morrison or Frank Miller, who, despite having more control over plot and length of story and so forth, have to fulfill these expectations for the character that are quite, quite strict.

Tucker: Yeah, I don’t think that’s what you’d be saying if you were reading Batman RIP. Grant’s got all kinds of freedom there, and wow. Not great. He’d be better off if he did have some type of Denny O’Neill controller making him hit some beats, deliver some payout. Haney though–I just can’t see the creative freedom thing. He could improvise, sure, but the level of improvisation was limited to this story, which is why so many of these stories are so widely divergent in level of quality. Guys like Grant and Frank–they have open contracts to do what they’d like. Haney was working in a shop where he knew he could lose his books, because he took those books from the guys who lost them. Did you read how Levitz ran him out of hte store? They clearly didn’t give a shit about him..

Nowadays, after the Alan Moore debacle, you know DC has to worry about burning bridges. They can shit on Chuck Dixon, but they know that Frank Miller, Jim Lee–guys like that could sell Aquaman. They have to keep them relatively happy, even though the real draw might be Batman.

Noah: Well, once again I will defer to your willingness to actually read all this stuff. Still…I don’t know. Frank Miller clearly doesn’t feel he can, or isn’t able to see his way clear to, or just doesn’t want to do anything else with Batman than what he’s done already. There’s a way in which…a small, focused, in-group audience — a real fan base — can be the ultimate creative trap. I mean, yes, you read that stuff about Haney was treated, and those people were obviously (at least in this way) evil corporate drones who didn’t care about him at all. But there is some kind of freedom in that. Nobody cared about him. He had to put Batman together with some other DC hero. After that…he could have Batman kill people. He could have him suffer a mental breakdown. He could have an entire robot liberation movement for an issue. He had to deliver payout, but if he did, it didn’t really matter much how he treated Batman, or even that the story made logical sense. There’s maybe a little bit of an analogy with exploitation films, where you had to have the T, you had to have the A, and you had to have the violence, but after that there was really a surprising variety of things you could do precisely because nobody was really paying attention. In comics now, people are really paying attention. Morrison and Miller can do what they want…but they write in a way and for an audience that brings a ton of expectations to their work. That’s part of why Alan Moore’s career has been so interesting to watch; he’s been desperately trying to jettison expectations. It hasn’t exactly worked, but I think the impulse makes sense. I think…it’s a little like why rock bands have trouble not sucking after the first couple of albums. There’s an intensity of attention which is strangling.

Just as an example…could you have Batman walking down the street in broad daylight admiring pretty girls in a comic today? That seemed totally like a personal touch by Haney…and I wonder if you could get away with it now.

from Brave and the Bold #102, art Jim Aparo, story Bob Haney

Tucker: Again…there’s little there I can argue with. No, you couldn’t get away with a lot of what happens in these stories. (Of course, that’s part due to the popularity of those writers to meet expectations, like you said.) But still: is that all Haney wanted? One-shot stories?

Noah: Yeah…I mean obviously, the gig sucked. He was treated like crap. I would love to know what Haney would have done with the gloves off (Metamorpho is a taste I think.) At the same time, artistic freedom…there’s some sense in which it’s what you make of it. You look at alt comics autobio stuff, where personal vision is the buzzword…and then you look at Jack Hill’s women-in-prison movies where he has to hit trope after trope…and the one that seems more free isn’t that one where the creators are doing whatever they want.

Tucker: Oh, there’s definitely a lot of truth to that. I think improvisation language works well–the way guys like Meisner defined it was that it would always work best within a forced structure. My problem with painting Haney as a free spirit is just that he didn’t have the wide range of time to operate with–it was all these closed chapters. There’s a lot of horrible shit about serialized stories that never end–see super-hero comics as an example–but sometimes that long-form range works. Animal Man–Swamp Thing–to some extent, even something like Punisher MAX. Haney didn’t get that opportunity, and I’d kill to see what he did with it.

Noah: It’s funny we were talking about Haney not having any control over what he did or how…and here’s Morrison, who’s got all this creative freedom, and what he wants to do with it, is he kind of wants to be Haney. Bring back all the goofy silver age stories, nut-job plots, etc. etc. Except it’s all wrong precisely because he *wants* to do it, which means he’s reverent of the material in a way Haney never would be. I mean, Haney would never write a story just to say, “There will always be a Batman.” Why would it occur to him to do that? Batman’s not an icon; he’s a steady paying gig.
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And that’s all she (or in this case, we) wrote. Thanks to all of you who read and/or commented; it’s been a blast.

Exciting recap:

In our last episode, Tucker Stone and I had decided, for obscure and probably nefarious reasons, to blog our way through the 2nd DC phonebook collection of Brave and Bold strips. Tucker does #88-#90, I do #91-#93, Tucker did #94-#96,; I do #97-#99Tucker does #100-#102, and Haney’s your uncle.

First, a correction to Tucker’s last, in which he said:

“Black Canary ignores her assignment because she is getting her hair done. Wait, really? Yes, really.”

Tucker misses the true beauty of that moment. You see, according to canon, Black Canary…wears a blonde wig. She wasn’t getting her hair done. She was blow-drying her wig.

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Okay. So it’s time now to show you the difference between Bob Haney and a serious artist.

What is the difference you ask? Well, Bob Haney writes impersonal crap about corporate characters. Real artists, on the other hand — like R. Crumb or Joe Matt — indulge in personal revelations which show you their innermost souls. The more embarrassing the better. Because anyone can come up with clever plots, but boring your audience with squicky, tedious details of your personal life — that takes talent.

So right up front I’m going to demonstrate Why You Should Take Me Seriously by making some painful confessions.

Painful confession #1 — After excoriating Tucker for his rank professionalism” for doing research on Bob Haney for his blog post, I have gone and done research myself.

First, I’ve found out some more about Nick Cardy, the artist who has been wowing me on a bunch of these issues. As several people have pointed out in comics, Cardy worked in comics for a good long time, starting in 1939 (!) He worked on tons of titles, from romance comics to super-heroes to horror to westerns. His best known runs were on Aquaman, Teen Titans, and Batlash…and for being DCs number-two go-to guy for cover-art after Neal Adams. He quit the business in the 70s for reasons which aren’t clear — I guess he was just sick of it. Brave and Bold was one of the last series he worked on, it looks like. Then he went into advertising, where he stayed until retirement. There’s a long bio here for those who are interested.

Also, I found a brief summation of his work on Brave and Bold on this website. To quote:

Number 91, the Black Canary issue is especially good, even if the Black Canary doesn’t appear in but a couple of pages, Dinah Lance (her alter ego) is gorgeously drawn.

…which is exactly what I said about the Black Canary issue. So, you ask, do I feel validated by random semi-anonymous Internet quotation? Yes, I do, thanks so much for asking. (I may have to try to track that issue down, actually. I’m not at all sure it will look better in color, but I want to find out.)

Anyway the site has a ton of covers and images by Cardy, which are beautiful. I’ve picked a sample of some of my favorite below because I’m a pack rat like that. First, the Bat Squad cover from 92, which I didn’t put up before; it’s amazing in color.

Here’s a Batlash cover which is supposed to have been one of Cardy’s personal favorites:

A lovely interior page from Fight Comics, whatever that might have been:

And a bunch more:

I think the romance comics cover is my favorite. The leaping-towards the viewer action cover in this context pretty much can’t be beat. Also…and I know it’s probably indelicate to point this out…the woman in the wheelchair appears to have breasts roughly the size of Ecuador.

Painful Confession #2:
Tucker quoted from a Bob Haney interview in the Comics Journal. I made fun of him for having issues of TCJ by his bed. But, as Tucker correctly pointed out, I have a piece in the issue with the Haney interview. Which means it’s not only by my bed, but under my pillow. But I didn’t read the interview…because in 2006 when it came out, I didn’t know who Haney was. Really, I hadn’t realized he’d written all those old B&Bs I loved. And I didn’t know he’d created Metamorpho. Much less B’wana Beast! And when did I realize all this? Um…yesterday.

Anyway, one interesting thing Haney said in the interview was this:

“Every month, we’d look at the sales figures and if he was teaming with Wildcat, how did it do? Well, if it did all right, we’d throw in Wildcat again. So it was a very cold, calculating thing.”

So that answers my question about why they reused certain guest-stars. It was purely logical — except, not so much. Because looking at sales figures to determine whether Wildcat was popular, in the absence of any kind of marketing data strikes me as almost entirely random. Interest in an issue could vary for tons of reasons. It could well be seasonal, for example. It could have to do with the cover or with the interior art. It could just be random statistical blips, for that matter. Assuming that people were buying the issue because they loved, loved, loved that second-string, aging boxer known as the Wildcat is…well, let’s put it kindly and say it’s a stretch.

I’m not blaming Haney; it wasn’t his responsibility to come up with a non-idiotic marketing strategy for his corporate overlords. It’s just kind of fun to realize that the ouija-board approach to sales that we’ve grown to expect from the Big Two has roots going way back. Also, good to remember that “cold and calculating” as often as not means “naive and deeply confused.”

Painful Confession #3: I had a dream the other night that Heidi at the Beat linked to our Brave and Bold blogathon and we got hundreds of hits and true happiness was mine.

Maybe this is why I misstated Neal Adams name in an earlier post; I subconsciously was trying to misidentify a mainstream artists and so best get Heidi’s attention.

Anyway, that’s way more embarrassing than David Heatley admitting to sodomizing himself with a dildo or Joe Matt admitting to peeing in a jar or whatever. I hope somebody at Fantagraphics is reading this. Maybe I can be in MOME now.

ALL RIGHT! Enough of this nonsense. It’s time for…the credits!

Brave and Bold #103
Writer: Bob “Feminine Mystique” Haney
Pencils: Bob “The Ballot or the Bullet” Brown
Inks: Frank ” Soul on Ice” McLaughlin
Cover: Nick “Female Eunuch” Cardy
Published by The Movement, 1972

That is just not Nick Cardy’s greatest cover, there. As with Plastic Man, the cartooniness of the Metal Men doesn’t really seem to inspire him. I do like that he threw in some gratuitous cheesecake; the Mom on the screen with the mini-skirt is pretty obviously where he wants you to be looking.

On the other hand, I like Bob Brown’s interior art on this more than his preceding efforts. Maybe he and inker McLaughlin are more simpatico than Brown and Cardy were?
I think the real difference, though, is that the Metal Men’s seem to bring out Brown’s best. The more realistic pulp illustration isn’t his bag, but he does better with cutesy robots. His design for the military-computer-gone-wild is also appealing in a clunky analog future-past kind of way.

The story goes like this: the U.S. has handed over its missile system to a robot intelligence stashed at the bottom of an impenetrable volcano. Said robot attains sentience and decides (with some justification) that humans suck. Through its minions it starts a robot-liberation movement. The Metal Men join said movement…but when Batman asks them to save humanity in the name of their creator, Doc Magnus, they agree and plunge into the volcano. Then all the Metal Men discuss their boiling points, which is educational. Anyway, they get through the volcano, and…oh my gosh! They’re going to double-cross humans! Robot rights forever! No, not really. They’re just lame collaborationists after all, and together with Batman (who is led through the volcano by bats who bonk into sonar dishes…no, it doesn’t make any sense to me either)they kill the evil robot. Though, to be fair, they do seem to feel bad about it for a second or two.

This is maybe Haney’s most interesting effort to incorporate politics into a script. Robot-liberation obviously has parallels with both women’s lib and the black rights movement, and Haney uses it for a few brilliant riffs. Maybe my favorite bit is the name of the evil robot. He’s called John Doe, granting him both an eerie anonymity (he’s a robot, after all) and a kind of jokey downtrodden everyschlub status. It also emphasizes that he’s been named by a master rather than a parent — which is what happened to slaves of course.

Though there’s obviously a huge debt to 2001, John Doe is a good bit more complicated than HAL. HAL was just insane; John Doe, on the other hand, is a revolutionary, with a fairly coherent social critique (by comic book standards, anyway). “You humans have loused up the world…we robots can hardly fail to do better!” he declares. Nobody ever even really tries to refute him (Batman’s best effort amounts to little more than “You’re another!”) Indeed, you get the sense at moments that Batman and his government backers would be a lot happier with the situation if the robot were just nutty. As Batman says, the problem with Doe is that “He not only thinks and feels like a human…he’s developed a moral sense too!” You’ve got to watch that last one, obviously; no telling what will happen if just anybody starts developing a moral sense.

The robot-liberation bit also has some great aspects. It’s fun to watch Gold (the assimilationist, wearing a human mask) argue with Mercury (the Robot Power advocate:”The Metal Men should be there to learn to be proud of their robotness…their non-humanness!”) I also like the way Haney has most of the Metal Men engaged in working-class laboring jobs — including Platinum, who works dancing in a girly bar (Tin lives a more bourgie life in the suburbs…and he’s the most diminutive and nerdy…he’s not supposed to be Jewish, is he?)

Alan Moore did something similar in Top Ten with robots-as-oppressed class of course. The difference is that, as is his wont, Moore really thought it through; he’s got a distinctive robot sub-culture, particular anti-robot epithets, and so on and so forth. Whereas, for Haney, robot lib is just another throwaway gag — look! It’s an entire amphitheater full of disgruntled robot peons, dissatisfied with their place in the DC universe! Where do they come from? What are their lives like? Well…oops, story moving on. Time to talk about boiling points!

Given the choice between Moore’s earnest, right-minded take on prejudice and Haney’s aphasiac slapstick approach…well, I wouldn’t necessarily choose Moore. Discrimination both erases and mocks, and that’s exactly what Haney and Brown do here. Except for the Metal Men, you never even see the faces of any of the other robots at the meeting – just the back of a few transistorized heads (wait a minute…is that a Sentinel?) And there’s also something true to life about the fact that the establishment hero isn’t so much opposed to the liberation movement as he is unable to take it seriously. Batman never for a second doubts his righteousness; the Metal Men repeatedly point out that he’s an asshole, (“Blast you, Batman!” as Tin says,) but Batman doesn’t even seem to notice.

Still…well, there are problems. It’s not that Haney is for women’s lib or against civil rights or whatever; it’s that, when you’re dealing with politics, there are limits to where you can go if you’re really committed to not thinking about anything for more than a panel or two. I think it’d have been great if Haney took a hardline, these-social-movements-must-be-crushed kind of stance in the Kipling vein. Kipling was a racist shithead, sure, but he had a firm grasp on the fact that power matters; actions, identity, morals all work differently depending on which side of the stick you’re holding. Kipling wanted lesser peoples pacified, but he was tuned in enough to know that if you took up the White Man’s Burden and pacified the lesser peoples, those lesser peoples weren’t going to thank you, even if, “objectively”, they’d be better off..

Haney doesn’t really get any of this. The Metal Men are absurdly grateful to their creator. Even John Doe (who kills his inventor) apparently regrets the necessity. Then, at the end, after John Doe has his logic circuits destroyed, he bizarrely takes on the personality of his inventor — and since the inventor was trying to kill Doe, the machine destroys itself. In other words, the robots — even the most rebellious — see their creators as parents, to be emulated. This gives the humans irresistible emotional leverage; it allows Batman to enlist the Metal Men’s aid (in the name of Doc Magnus) and it gets John Doe to destroy itself.

This particular little myth happens to be the most consistent way that people in power give themselves an out — from guilt, yes, but most especially from fear. Plantation-holders in the south were convinced that their slaves loved them and so did not want to be freed; men tend to assume their women love them and so won’t start a ruckus. When the slaves were freed, a lot of plantation owners had a rude awakening…nor did the bonds of romance put paid to the feminist movement. Sure, slaves and masters can sometimes care for one another; it just happens much, much less often than the masters like to believe. Certainly, it seems exceedingly optimistic to rely on the affection of one’s vassals to stave off Armageddon.

Just to return for a moment to something Tucker said about one of Haney’s Teen Titan politiical jaunts:

If for nothing else, the issue is actually more disappointing the more you get to know Haney’s past–unlike, Bob Kane for example, Haney actually lived in a Hooverville during the Great Depression, he was an active participant in 1960’s anti-war protests, defined himself as “an old socialist”–basically, he did all of the things these kids did, except he did them in real fucking life, for real fucking stakes. (Except for the atomic bomb thing.) At the same time, he’s trying to tell a story here, he was operating under a still enforced Comics Code, and he did the best he could. It doesn’t change the simple fact that this one just ain’t that fun, and–except for the raw emotion of that cover that tells Batman “Every grown-up will suffer [in a concentration camp] because you lied to us!”–it’s just too damn safe.

I think that’s right, and it applies here too. This issue is definitely less safe than the two Titans jaunts — it at least points in some potentially uncomfortable directions. But the conclusion carefully scuttles away from the suggestion that somebody, somewhere in society might be — for real, no fooling — reasonably disaffected. Tucker blames this on the Comic Code…but I think that’s probably letting Haney off too easily. Activism can be great, but it doesn’t necessarily have a ton to do with understanding how power works, or why. Haney has flashes of insight, and he’s a smart, funny guy. But I don’t think it’s the Code alone that tripped him up when he attempted to incorporate politics into his stories.

Brave and Bold #104
Writer: Bob “Cold Around the Heart” Haney
Art: Jim “Gutter to Gutter” Aparo
Cover: Nick “No Deal with a Dead Man” Cardy
Published by Jacques Tourneur, 1972

If #103 suffers from a lack of nerve, #104 has no such problems. This is a brilliant, cold, nasty little noir. It’s the best story in the book.

It starts off with an unusually brutal firefight; Commissioner Gordon and the police department are pinned down by a barrage of (extremely stylish, thanks to Jim Aparo) machine-gun fire. Much to everyone’s shock, Batman seizes an impressive looking weapon himself, leaps over a burning car, and precedes to give the baddies a whupping.

That’s “whupping” as in “fisticuffs,” because the gun was full of blanks. It was just a little old decoy to shock the baddies, who, along with the readers, presumably shouted in unison, “Hey! That’s not DC continuity! Is this dream, a hoax, an imaginary story!” Anyway, while they tried to check wikipedia to see if they were in a “real” title, Batman conks them.

So, typical doofy Haney plot reversal leading nowhere – “he’s using a gun! No he isn’t! Ha!” But there are signs that something a little odd is going on here. First and foremost, Gordon actually notices that the whole sequence makes no sense, and launches into a remarkably bitter speech.

“How can you hold to such an idiotic code — against today’s criminals — vicious unprincipled snakes!? In the old days, crooks had a little honor…and style!”

Then the next page we’ve got the Gotham City morgue described as “that grim, cold, way station for the unlucky, the losers, and the unloved…” which is kick ass noir prose, god damn it. Combine the two quotes and you’ve got some early signs that this issue is headed for a darker place.

But hey, we’ve still got to have plot, and if we do, it might as well be preposterous. Apparently criminals are getting their faces replaced through plastic surgery at a luxurious criminal spa. Batman figures out what’s going on when a villain he doesn’t recognize tries a gun trick on him that he does. And that, true believers, is pretty much the last competent bit of detective work we see from our hero. He heads to the island spa to dig up some evidence posing as a guest; but as soon as he leaps the fence into the restricted area, he’s caught, beaten up, and kicked off the reservation. Way to go, Bats.

So for his next brilliant move, Batman decides there’s no way anyone can get through this super-secure spa security — after all, he couldn’t. So he contacts Deadman, aka Boston Brand, who is, if you’re unfamiliar with the character, dead, depressed, and not all that stable. Perfect choice for an undercover operative! Deadman sees Bats’ add in the paper (I was hoping for a Dead-signal, but oh well) and agrees to possess the body of one of the baddies to gather information.

In case you missed that, let’s go through it again; Batman has hired a ghost to take over a man suspected of crimes. For an indefinite period, mind you. However long it takes. Warrantless wiretaps…pfft. Who needs ’em?

Brief interlude here while Deadman (a former aerielist) goes to the circus and mopes. Then Rama, the deity who gave his spirit life, speaks to him through a convenient ethnic minority. This is a great panel; Jim Aparo draws the minority-savant from neck level looking up, so his face is all cadaverous, creepy shadows. “Hark to me, my son…a man in love may only gain his heart’s desire by…losing it! For is not love stronger than death itself?”

The answer here, incidentally, is, no, not really — but Brand is a little slow on the uptake. Anyway, he heads off to violate some Constitutional rights.

And that’s not the half of what he’s violating, liberal wafflers. The spa is run by a couple: Lilly and Richie. Not only are they partners in crime..they’re also in love (awww.) You see what’s coming, right? Our pal Deadman possesses the guy, Richie…and to avoid suspicion, he naturally has to romance the girl. That romancing starts with a very sensual kiss, and then we’re told that “Batman’s ghostly ally plays his role to the full…” We get a panel showing the two dancing, running through the waves on the beach, watching dog-racing and jai-alai (jai-alai?)…well, not to put too fine a point on it, I think it’s clear that Lilly is cheerfully fucking the dead guy who has taken over her sweetie’s body. This is…well, it’s pretty squicky, is what it is. Take that, Comics Code.

Anyway, things now get complicated. Deadman hasn’t gotten any in a long time; besides that he’s a self-pitying drip (not without reason…but still) and besides that Jim Aparo has pulled out all the stops on Lilly, who looks like she has, as the old song goes, something between her legs that’ll make a dead man come.

So Brand promptly falls in love with her, and convincing himself that the love of his life is, deep down, a good girl who just wants to go straight. So he tries to cut a deal with Batman; Deadman promises to shut down the operation if Bats will let Lilly goes free. And Batman, the hero so compassionate he won’t even load a gun…responds by being a complete and total prick. Brand, a civilian with mega-problems of his own, has basically done all the work here, but is Batman grateful? Is he understanding? I she even just terse? Nope; he goes out of his way to taunt him. “How long would she stay in love with a ghost?” he mocks.

At least a little while, as it turns out. Brand tells Lilly that he’s possessed her boyfriend…and she’s into it. “The tender lover who lives in Richie Wandrus’ body! He’s the man I want–!” Gross or romantic? A bit of both surely. Haney’s scattershot characterization style works wonderfully here; we never do quite figure out what’s going on with Lilly. Does she actually care for Brand? Is there good in her? Does she want to retire? Or is she just a hardened manipulator, using Brand for her own purposes? There isn’t even an answer, I don’t think. Like a true femme fatale, her motives change with the observer and the situation. She’s a riddle without an answer.

Anyway, Deadman steals the evidence he got back from Wayne, and so Bats is back to square one. And it’s into disguise and off to the spa he goes, where…surprise!…his cover is immediately blown and he’s knocked unconscious. Then Lilly has him made-up to look like a wanted criminal and sends him out into the world, where the police almost kill him. Deadman saves him, though, by possessing his body and running away into the woods. He hurries back to Lilly…but she has figured out that he’s in league with Batman. She brandishes a gun…rather uselessly, as he points out, since you can’t shoot a ghost. But, hey! Right on time Batman shows up, and, with his usual panache, he lets Lilly get the drop on him.

Before she can shoot him, though, Brand remembers the prophetic minority from early in the comic. “Is not love stronger than death itself?” the replay asks again, and Brand gets a brilliant idea — he’ll shoot Lilly, and her spirit will join his in the afterlife forever! How will Lilly feel about this? Very unclear…but Brand is maybe not the sharpest pencil in the sea. And, admittedly, he’s under some pressure here, since, for obscure reasons, he doesn’t want her to shoot Bat-dick.

Anyway, he shoots her. And stays dead. No spirit love for our hero; just a big armful of corpse.

Deadman is fairly upset by this development, and rushes off into the ether cursing his god and, incidentally, referring to himself in third person (“You cheated Deadman!”) Though, again, you have to make allowances for stress. Meanwhile, Richie wakes up, remembering nothing of the past several weeks, to find his girlfriend in his fucking lap! and the always-sympathetic Batman putting cuffs on him.

So happy ending, yay! The bad guys are dead or bagged, no more criminals can change identity — a successful case! Batman is understandably pleased, “But,” he admits, “I feel badly about Boston…” Yeah, I bet you do.

So, yes, the story is ridiculous in lots of ways. Its real brilliance, though, is that all of Haney’s usual tricks — goofy plot twists, inconsistent characterization, melodramatic flights — end up registering, not as nonsensical fun, but as bitter irony. Batman comes across as a callow fool. His race into gunfire carrying an empty weapon isn’t about love of life — by the end of the story we know quite clearly that this is not an empathetic man. Instead, the affectation about not killing seems like the grandstanding of an incompetent prima donna, whose blundering self-absorption casually destroys the lives of friends and enemies alike. Boston may be more likable, but he’s hardly a moral icon. Self-absorbed and weak, he robs a man of his life, sleeps with a woman under about the falsest pretenses possible, and then murders her. Lilly does seem capable of love — but she’s also a vicious murderer — one who, incidentally, tosses former lovers aside with callous and practiced ease. Nobody comes out of this well…not even God, who seems to have deliberately tricked Boston into shooting his lover. Justice may triumph here, but it’s a stupid justice, an idiotic, smug, self-impressed justice, a justice whose compassion is indistinguishable from hypocrisy. The story’s denoument has the cold inevitability of bleak downbeat masterpieces like Out of the Past or Rififi. Jim Aparo’s dynamic, offbeat visual storytelling in the last pages is like a series of punches to the jaw; a shot of Boston’s gun; Lilly shot in silhouette, so small she looks like she’s at the end of a tunnel; falling into Boston’s arms, a three-quarter shot of Brand as he realizes he’s fucked up, and then Deadman racing out of Richie’s body, while Batman stands down below, looking all dark and menacing and useless.

Maybe I’m missing something…but how does this not kick the shit out of The Killing Joke? Or Arkham Asylum? Or Dark Knight Returns? Or the Dark Knight movie? Or the Morrison Batman run? All that bloated, Jungian, Batman-As-Ur-Hero crap which is supposed to be so dark and serious and impressive… I mean, I like all that stuff, pretty much, but when you get right down to it, underneath all the sophisticated posturing — it’s pretty dumb isn’t it? You show me a writer propounding Batman as archetype, and I’ll show you an author engaging in serious adolescent bloviating. Batman as clueless, dickhead cop, on the other hand — that’s a bleak vision. Or a farce. Or both.

*********
Just a final short thought; the issue of intentionality came up in one of the earlier comments threads, and it’s been on my mind as I wrote this post too. Was Haney really trying to say something about oppression in the Metal Men team-up? Did he really have a bleak vision in the Deadman team-up? Isn’t he just trying to tell a goofy Batman story? Why saddle him with all this heavy crap? Why make him something he’s not?

Intentionality is always hard to figure, especially for someone like Haney, a scattershot, seat-of-the-pants writer, working in a form and at a time where there was little emphasis on personal vision or auteurishness. Even in that TCJ interview, there’s little discussion of themes or story intention; it’s all about the business end and who worked with who when. The interviewer never asks, “Well, why were you so interested in amnesia?” Or “Bob, what was your take on Batman as a character? Was he a kind of moral center in your work, or did you feel he was sometimes in the wrong? Or even, “What did you like specifically about the comics you wrote?”

Obviously, Haney isn’t an especially self-conscious writer. But unselfconscious isn’t the same as stupid. Shakespeare wasn’t especially self-conscious either, I’d argue. He was mostly about goofy plots, and fights, and blood, and putting stuff in his characters’ mouths which sounded cool. Still, in his own unsystematic, pulpy way, he managed to use his plays to think about things that were worth thinking about, and to say some stuff that was worth saying.

I’m not saying Haney is as good as Shakespeare, because I don’t think that he is. But he is plenty good enough to come up with some interesting things to say about politics in the Metal Men issue (as well as a few dumb things). He’s good enough to realize that Batman-as-paragon is often less interesting than Batman-as-dick. And he’s good enough to have written at least one perfect, sad, oddly elegant noir.

________

…and after two remarkable issues, #105 is just…eh. Batman teams with Wonder Woman, who’s in that phase where she decided to actually wear clothes rather than underwear and in retaliation her Gods punish her by taking away her powers. She still has a guardian angel though, who saves her from being roadkill on one occasion…good guardian angel! Guardian biscuits for you! Batman is a cad to a damsel in distress, but then he comes to his senses and helps her brother ship arms to revolutionaries in South America. Wonder how that went over with all of Batman’s buddies at the Pentagon, huh? At least we throw a few more “Bat-Hombre”s on the fire. And there’s always Jim Aparo, who draws a mean aged duenna.

______________

And hey, we’re done! Sort of. We’ve still got three more issues, which Tucker and I will co-blog in some fashion after Thanksgiving. Hope to see you then.

Update: And the first part of our race-to-the-finish co-blogging is here

For those of you coming in late, Tucker Stone and I are cross-blogging our way through a massive selection of classic Batman team-ups. Tucker does #88-#90, I do #91-#93, Tucker did #94-#96, and that brings you up to Bat-date.

But first let me bat-back-track a bat-bit (sorry…it’s kind of addictive, the bat-thing. But I will bat-stop bat-now.)

Bat-Ahem.

What I’m trying to say is that Tucker underplayed some of the truly bizarre pleasures offered by the Plastic-Man team-up in Brave and Bold #95. For instance, Tucker fails to mention that Batman, before being sprayed with “Tiger-Lover cologne”, sings, “Mairzy dotes and dozey dotes and the blazes with Ruby Ryder,” and then visibly checks out the mini-skirted ass of a passing young thing.

As if that weren’t justification enough for the entire issue, I have to say that I just loved the fact that Nick Cardy seemed to die a little death every time he was forced to draw Plastic-Man stretching.

You can just see Cardy looking at some old Jack Cole comics for reference and positively rending his garments as he whipsaws back and forth, pen in hand. “But…I’m a noir artist! I’m not drawing this cartoony crap! Bob! Bob! You can’t make me…eeeeeeeeyeeeaaaarggggh!”

That last was the sound of Woozy Winks coming out of Cardy’s ribcage, belching foetid boogers, greasepaint, and ketchup. Even Haney staggered back in horror…and as Winks scuttled up into the ventilation shaft , Bob knelt, tears streaming down his face, and promised his brave, brave friend — “It’s okay, Nick. It’s okay. I’ll make Plastic Man tragically conflicted, betrayed by an evil dame! It’ll be noir! It’ll work! You’ll see!”

And Cardy half sat up, eyes glistening, and said, slowly, feelingly, his voice faltering and racked with pain:

“Fuck you, Bob.”

And the rest was silence.

Woozy Winks: Plastic Man’s Pal or Alien Parasite?

The Brave & The Bold # 97
Written by Bob “Bob” Haney
Pencils by Bob “I’m Bob Too” Brown
Inks and cover by Nick “Not Bob” Cardy
Published by NAFTA, 1971

Oh, wait, one more thing before we start…if you read Tucker’s last post, you’ll find that he went and read an extensive interview with Haney, and is cherry-picking quotes to show us all that he’s done research and is a real professional comics critic. Faced with such diligence on the part of their interlocutors, some critics might feel a little belittled. Some critics might say, “well, I’m going to try to keep up by, say, googling Nick Cardy and finding out who the hell he is.” Or they might even say, “ha! I will find and read that Bob Haney interview too, and cherry-pick some quotes of my own, nyaaah.” Some critics maybe. But I am not that some critic, by God! You hear that, Tucker Stone! You hear that you fancy-striped-pants elitist?! Your intellectyual wiles aren’t going to work on me. I’ve got a brand to protect here! When people think “Noah Berlatsky” they think “Blogger too lazy to do even elementary fact-checking!” And I’m not going to ruin the brand just because some snot-nosed punk has a complete collection of Comics Journals hidden under his bed!

Right. Enough ranting. Let’s get down to business. Start off with a gag-cartoon-Nick -Cardy cover which is pure slapstick and has absolutely nothing to do with the story. Once again, our boy Nick is clearly resentful of the whole situation; so what if he has to draw a totally stale joke which would only make sense if you had big-feet funny animals running around? He’s still going to give it the full moody pulp treatment, with lots of expressive scribbled shadows. Why the hell not? (Actually, that cover doesn’t really look as good with the coloring. Can’t see the nifty scribbles in the shadows. But, hey, I figured out where all these covers live online. Take that, Tucker!)

Anyway, in the issue itself Cardy (recovering from his chest wound) passed the penciling chores off to Bob Brown, who lives up to his generic moniker by plopping down some thoroughly pedestrian Bat-art. It’s not embarrassing or anything. It’s just like…you know, when I was a kid, right around the time I first started reading the Brave and Bold, actually, I was really unclear on how art worked. I couldn’t draw myself, and it seemed to me impossible that anyone actually just sat down and drew all these pictures. So I imagined that there was, somewhere, a huge number of super-hero stamps, capturing every possible stance or position, and that when they needed a particular pose, they just found the stamp and thumped it down on the page in the proper place. (But then, of course, who drew the stamps, I wondered?) Anyway, Bob Brown’s the kind of professional, adequate, impersonal artist who seems to be working from those stamps. (As opposed to, say, Ross Andru, whose Batman looks like he was die-cast by a toy company.)

In the writing, the main point of interest is that the story is set in Mexico where everybody speaks English. The only English word they don’t seem to know is “man,” which is why they all call our hero “Bat-Hombre.” A similar thing happened in the issue set in England, you’ll remember, where the natives called him “Bat-Chap.” I’m looking forward to Australia (“Bat-Mate”); Japan (“Bat-Otaku,”) Communist Russia (“Bat-Imperialist-Pig-Dog”) and sunken R’leyah (“Bat-F’htagn”).

So in this issue Haney brings back Wildcat, who just teamed up with Bat-Whats-his-name like nine issues ago. I guess DC second-stringers were scarcer on the ground then.

(And how did they choose who co-starred, anyway? Were there polls? When I started picking up issues — around 130 or so, I think — I remember people writing in to ask for their favorite characters. Which is especially funny because the more you read these things, the more you realize the extent to which the guest-stars are beside the point; the goal often seems to be to give them as little face time as possible. And, of course, they’re personalities and even their powers are often virtually unrecognizable. Plastic-Man as whiny, tormented, love-sick, vengeful soul is a particularly egregious case of fan-scruff, but I don’t think the whiny, love-sick Black Canary is exactly canon either, nor the whiny, self-doubting Wildcat. At least he’s not love-sick…maybe because he’s got all those boy sidekicks?)

Anyway, this Wildcat might as well be a whole new character because, in typical Haney fashion, he spends the entire issue in an amnesiac fugue which renders him both speechless and useless. For all intents and purposes Batman is actually teamed up with some random Mexican boy diver named Luis. They’re searching for the treasure of Choclotan, which, it turns out, is a giant cache of Hershey Bars. Alas, the guy you think is going to double-cross everyone does, and a giant hulking baddy gets to box with Wildcat and bashes him in the head curing his amnesia. Then the recovered Wildcat duplicitously arranges for all the bad guys to die horribly by drowning, because, as Tucker points out, back then killing wasn’t exactly a super-hero’s business but still, business wasn’t bad.

Favorite quotes: “Now as knives flash in the limpid Mexican dusk, a brave boy stands at bay — and a man from far northern haunts comes face to face with the mystery, the mastery of the past, meeting an old ally, finding new foes, as fate flaunts the Batman with ….The Smile of Choclotan!”

“All of Mexico’s other gods were sourpusses, but legend says Choclotan, greatest god of all…alone wears a smile!”

Why does he wear a smile, you ask? Because he’s thinking about people drowning. That always cheers me up, too.

Extra fun fact: Judging from this issue, it appears that no women live in Mexico.

The Brave & The Bold # 98
Written by Bob “Haunted” Haney
Art by Jim “Apparition” Aparo
Cover by Nick “Casper” Cardy
Published by Roman Polanski, 1971

Enter, Jim Aparo.

I tried to make the best of it, but I’ve got to admit that #97 was…well, maybe not the apogee of Batness. #98, though, is the bat-shit, the whole bat-shit, and nothing but the bat-shit.

As I said, I love the way Cardy and Haney work at cross-purposes. You can see it on this cover, too, where Cardy goes balls-to-the-wall-pulp; a curvaceous lovely in a slit skirt, monstrous silhouette, ugly demonic caricatures, amorphous ghostly figure, Batman laid out on a slab. It’s awesome…and then you realize the evil lady is declaring, “Now come forth…and kill the godfather!” And you dissolve into giggles.

Jim Aparo, though, is a whole different thing. Where Cardy tries to ground Haney’s drug-addled scripts with solid, working-class pulp and action tropes, Aparo just grins and says, “Pass the bong”. The result is an effervescently escalating edifice of tomfoolery. Haney churns out one of his most gloriously doddering efforts, with witches’ covens, evil twin doubles, wicked townsfolk, voodoo, hexes, a guest appearance by Lucifer, and the Phantom Stranger beating the tar out of Batman every other panel, supposedly for the Bat-guys own good (suuuuure.) Also, Batman, the Stranger and a psychiatrist commit what the psychiatrist refers to as “technically” child abduction — they throw a seven-year-old in a sack, steal him from his house, and then lock him in a room with a bunch of scary-looking occult objects. For, like, several. days. Because they think he’s a warlock. But he isn’t. So he’s traumatized for life, and when he grows up he’s probably going to draw gratuitously vertiginous panels like this one:

Or this:

Can I say how much I love that? Just as Haney is willing to chuck sense and coherence out the window the minute he lights on the next shiny bit of alliteration, so Aparo will cheerily defenestrate visual coherence for the chance to draw the ensuing oddly contorted wreckage. And, by the same token, where Cardy seemed a little hesitant about all the wacky super-hero special effects, Aparo just lives for it. Check this out:

Or how about this?

Total beautiful mystical wackiness. And then, after that glorious money shot, does Batman leap in and heroically save the day? Uh-uh; he just gets decked by a chimney pot.

Stuff like that is always happening to Haney’s Batman; he’s constantly walking into traps, or being forced to clean up Gotham by a bunch of adolescents, or discovering that his oldest friend married a witch, or that his godchild is demonspawn, or getting kicked around by the Phantom Stranger. I mean, he’s obviously ripped, and he swings around on a rope and stuff but overall, he seems pretty…well, not very super-heroic. He’s just some guy who wears a funny suit…which, yeah, is kind of a faux pas, but people let him get away with it because, you know, he’s clearly just trying to help.

What I’m saying here is that the whole driven, super-ninja, ultra-competent Batman…it’s pretty recent, I think. It’s probably Frank Miller’s fault, or maybe Denny O’Neill’s. Bob Haney’s Batman is, if anything, smaller-than-life. He’s not mysterious at all; in theory he’s got a double-identity going, but in practice he acts as if he’s got his own Bat-Social Security Card and a bat-driver’s license with his cowl on it (maybe he does; I wouldn’t put it past Haney.) He gives a member of the coven his autograph (again,the whole Greatest Detective thing is just not happening) and she uses it to hex him. And the hex works, because even Satan didn’t bother to think for a second: “Hey…wait a minute…Batman isn’t his real name.”

Oddly the extent to which Haney obviously doesn’t give two bat-farts about the dual identity thing is even clearer when Bruce Wayne ostensibly plays a bigger role. In the next issue, #99, the plot starts off at the Wayne summer home…but Batman goes dressed in his costume! There’s some reference made to Wayne leasing the home to Batman…but for God’s sake, why? Just go to your summer home in your civvies, man! It’s your house!

But if you did that, of course, you’d have to spend almost the entire issue drawing pictures of Bruce Wayne, not Batman, which is, presumably, not what the kiddies are paying for. (Though it’s fine for the guest stars…Flash spends most of the comic dressed as Barry Allen.)

Hey, we’ve started to talk about the next issue, it looks like. Let’s throw one of these on the fire then…

The Brave & The Bold # 99
Written by Bob “the Slob” Haney
Art by Bob “the Blob” Brown
Cover by Neal “the Real” Adams and Dick “the Slick” Giordano
Published by Wayne Enterprises, 1971

Back to Bob Brown, alas. It’s a shame too, because Jim Aparo would have had a blast with this one. (Nice cover, though. Neal Adam’s stuff actually looks better in color, I think, whereas Cardy’s loses something. Maybe another reason the first is a household name (if you’re in a nerd household, anyway) and the second not quite so much.)

In the comments to my last post, my brother Eric made a crack suggesting that Haney doesn’t have that many ideas. Not to start something with my own flesh and blood, but this story demonstrates why that claim is completely bass ackwards. The truth is that Haney’s got ideas coming out of his gazebo. When he scratches his head, ideas come flaking off like dandruff. They’re not all original or good of course — but if you’ve got enough of them, that starts to matter less than you might think.

The plot here for instance. On the one hand, you’ve got a storyline about Bruce Wayne (always in costume) discovering that his father was a mad scientist who had figured out how to come back from the dead — so Bruce decides to finish the experiments and bring his parents back. Then, on the other hand, you’ve got a storyline about Batman being possessed by an evil pirate who wants to bring back all the spirits from limbo to possess the living and take over the world.

Obviously, these plots overlap. But the point is that either one by itself is sufficient for a solid pulp comic-book plot. Either one, by itself, would make sense (in the way comic-book plots usually make sense, anyway.)

But Haney is too enamored of his ideas to let any of them go; he shoehorns both storylines into one story, and lets them fight it out. And pretty soon, instead of a nice, clean story with a beginning, middle, and end, you’ve got severed bits of plot lying strewn across the panels, twitching and occasionally rising to struggle hideously onto the next page. Batman experiences not one, but two bizarre personality transformations. First, he becomes obsessed with resurrecting his parents, heedless of the consequences — basically, he forgets he’s a super-hero and starts acting like the protagonist in a Lovecraft story (Bat-F’htagn!) But, at the same time, he’s suffering bouts of possession, where he’s taken over by the spirit of dead Manuel, the Port-a-gee. (Yes, that’s how everyone spells it.)

In other words, what should, in some world, be a classic gothic story, dripping with repression, displacement, and the anxiety of doubling, instead fractures. Confusion of identity plays out not as tragedy or horror, but as self-parodic farce. There are lots of references to bifurcated identity, but they all tend to add up to pratfalls. In the very first line of the story, Batman says he’s rushed to his summer house so quickly that “he didn’t even change the old Bat-Suit!” The probable presence of BO becomes even stronger shortly thereafter, when Barry Allen explains that Batman has to wear his suit all the time, even when he sleeps. Why? Because when he’s possessed, Batman has a distinctive walk — the pirate, you see, had a wooden leg, which he apparently retains even in death. So Bruce Wayne must continue to wear his smelly mask lest everyone discover that it is he, not Batman, possessed by the improbably limping ghost.When Barry Allen earnestly worries, “Poor guy — under that tough, super-hero hide is a sensitive, lonely man!” you’ve got to wonder…is the costume tough from grime? And why’s Batman so lonely, anyway? There are like three people in there, depending on whether you count that wooden leg separately. The perfect coup-de-gras is when Batman discovers that the urn with his parents ashes contains only sand — but don’t worry! Flash finds an exactly identical urn with the real ashes instantly. And then he sends Batman off the island, promising the authorities the Caped Crusader will get psychiatric help — which is a lie because we all know Batman wasn’t really nuts, he was just possessed…except that he was really nuts…but presumably both he and the Flash forgot that, since it happened on the last page. It’s too bad; I’d have liked to see Batman, in full costume, lying on a couch and getting the talking cure.

The multiple-multiple-personality Batman is emblematic of the way Haney writes everybody; characterization for him seems to be a function…not of the plot, exactly, but just of whatever fleeting idea he gets in his head while he’s working on any particular speech bubble.

The funny thing is, this is maybe the single “truest” version of Batman…or of any of his guest stars. People like to say, “Oh, Batman should be dark and dangerous” or “Superman should be noble,” or “Green Lantern should be Hal Jordan.” Whatever. They’re all corporate-owned properties; they’ve been passed around, fondled, and abused by so many different manipulators and users that they’re all pretty much just gibbering, drooling slabs of meat by this point. They don’t have souls; they don’t have identities. They’re just zombie bricks for the bricolage, and Bob Haney’s the zombie king.

Update: Edited for various embarrassing name mix-ups.

Update 2: Tucker does part five here

Yes, it’s the continuation of our exploitative, unmotivated cross-over event. At the end, Flash will be anally raped with Sue Dibny’s elongated corpse and then time will jump forward three years, back four, and marinate in fermented nerd juice for six, and yet, strangely, nobody will care. Till, then…start at the beginning why don’t you?

The Brave & The Bold # 91
Written by Bob “Hammering” Haney
Art by Nick “Fucking” Cardy
Cover by Nick ” Insert Hard-Boiled Metaphor for Intercourse Here ” Cardy
Published by Chip Kidd, 1970

So Tucker has this thing where he’s all super professional and posts credits and covers and stuff. I am trying to keep up, but probably can’t. [And, indeed, I haven’t figured out the covers thing. Maybe next time.]

I wasn’t going to bother with the clever nicknames for all the contributors, but I couldn’t resist repeating Tucker’s “Bob ‘Hammering’ Haney gag. Mainly because as I was reading these I kept imagining Haney sitting there, way back in the day, when they still made the computers out of wood and cardboard, staring at his stapled together Commodore 64 screen, typing hunt-and-peck style with one hand, and using the other forepaw to bash himself repeatedly in the head with a giant ball-peen hammer.

You read through those first few issues that Tucker reviewed and you can see it happening.

“Here we go….Gotham is being invaded by an old sect of…um…”

WHACK!

“Mormons! That’s it…and they want reparations, but then…uh,”

WHACK!

“GAH! Wait, there are ghost Mormons too, and the Phantom Stranger…and…”

CRACK!

“Oh, lord, the pain! Flashing lights…yes, it’s Doctor Thirteen! And, uh…Dick Grayson is a… boy warlock! And the head Mormon is actually an amnesiac criminal who has to come to his senses if the town is to be saved….”

WHAM!

“Where wuz I…what the…Hellerites?…Bat-Arrest? (slumps to ground, lights dim, exeunt omnes.)

Haney had that hammer swinging good and hard for this Bat-team-up with Black Canary too, let me tell you. Right from the cover, which features a giant billboard declaring “You Are Now Entering Gotham: Welcome to Fun City.” So…when exactly did Gotham become “Fun City”? Is it a Joker prank? An alternate earth? A new crossover fiat? Nah…it’s just Bob Haney staggering around and drooling after repeated blows to the head. That’s also why everyone in the comic talks in this bizarre alliterative aphasiac hipster patois

“Good Blazes! That bundle was booby-trapped — that rooftop buzzard was “fingering” me!”

“Black Canary! You hurled that bomb-bundle away with your sonic powers! But how’d you know?”

“Clever girl! I owe you one Bat-life!”

When Haney teams with Jim Aparo, the cheekily doddering dialogue makes a kind of sense. Aparo, at least, has an analogous sense of fun; he loves drawing bizarre, visually uninterpretable perspectives and kooky power displays — you can feel him and Haney riffing off each other, enjoying the Bat-bonkosity of it all.

Nick Cardy, the artist here, is a different stripe of preposterousness. Not that he’s a bad artist. Or a mediocre artist. Okay, let me just come out and say it — Nick Cardy is a fucking great noir artist. I’d never heard of him before, but I was totally sold from the first page. Some poor schmo gets tossed off a bridge, and it’s all shadows and the bridge’s support structures forming an ominous pattern and the guy’s screams curving up with the swooping motion lines that trace his descent — “NO, NO, NO, NO.” I love that.

Shortly thereafter you’re into the smoke-filled den where you can actually see the smoke hovering around…then there’s a great shot from up on the bridge down to a barge with Batman and Gordon in silhouette far below…. None of it’s super-flashy, but it’s visceral and moody and elegant. Cardy’s Batman is a little stocky, a little brutal; he looks built to hurt people. The pulp tropes are done with panache and conviction; the requisite shot with a pair of crossed legs in the foreground and the guy standing in the back is, for example, handled marvelously.

Those legs, incidentally, belong to Black Canary who, in Cardy’s rendering, is absolutely dazzlingly hot. Indeed, this may be the one and only time that she actually looks better in her civilian identity than in uniform. You can have the fishnet tights, heels, and breasts straining to leap out of the top of a brassiere. Give me the short, tight, patterned miniskirt and that clinging sweater with the two top buttons undone, or the number below…

When Canary in costume tells Batman she has to go change into something more feminine, it’s not quite as ridiculous as it sounds.

Where was I? Oh right….

So Cardy trots out the pulp tropes; action sequences loaded with physicality, light and shadow effects, hourglass figures straining against fabric. Haney tries to live up to it, he really does; he throws in an ambiguously moral private dick; he’s got betrayal, he’s got complicated underworld sheanigans…and yet it all just keeps disintegrating, doesn’t it? Dinah in civilian clothes looks the part of the innocent secretary…but then she goes into a mental fugue and starts filling her thought-bubble with unintelligible continuity burble about Earth One and Earth Two. Batman is talking earnestly about how he suspects Canary’s lover of foul play…and then he drops a reference to how his “Bat-sense” is twitching, which is a conversation killer if ever I’ve heard one. Canary accuses Batman of trying to get between her and her guy because he’s jealous, and she slaps him in full-on pulp mode…and then Batman admits in a single thought-bubble that he does like Black Canary — and then the whole sexual jealousy theme just disappears, like an effervescent dream, or a passing raunchy senior moment. Best of all, though, is when Haney demonstrates the evil villain’s cleverness by having him dress up one of his henchmen as Batman, and then having the henchman…impersonate Batman, you think? Cause havoc in the Caped Crusader’s name? Nah. The becowled baddy just sits in on meetings and role-plays the real Batman so that the crooks can know Batman’s “slant on things, like he was here himself.” Yep, the criminal mastermind seems to have read one too many books on management theory. (That’s okay, though, because Batman and the Black Canary are every, every bit as stupid. In fact, they’re stupider. Batman takes on the disguised evildoer as his partner, and Canary takes the same evil-doer on as her lover. Whoops. (Also, Haney has Canary say, “I’m a woman first — and a super-heroine second!” Eat your heart out, Roy Lichtenstein.))

So you’ve got great intense noir visuals, but Haney is still Haney. The effect is vertiginous; it’s as if you were watching Out of the Past and Robert Mitchum suddenly strolled from the shadows strumming a ukulele with his underwear draped over his head. There are times when the whole thing reads like parody, times when it reads like a disaster…and times when it becomes a sort of transcendent dada epiphany. Your attention please, as I present: The High Point of Comics As We Know It!

There’s really nothing else to say after that.

The Brave & The Bold # 93
Written by Bob “Cor’ Blimey”Haney
Art and cover by Nick “It’s a Fair Cop” Cardy
Published by the Masons, 1970

So this is all about Jack-the-Ripper and holes in the space-time continuum. In other words, it’s just like “From Hell,” except that, instead of the Ripper murders, the founding moment of modernity is the instant some elderly goober chomping on a pipe first called our hero “Bat-chap.” The whole bloody, tragic 20th century — the World Wars, the Holocaust, Eric Fucking Clapton, acid-washed jeans — originated in that one awful instant, reverberating backwards and forwards through time.

This issue is also notable as the moment when Bob Haney put his foot down. “I am not teaming up Batman with another stupid DCU second stringer! No Adam Stranger! No Phantom Strangest! I’m done, finished, kaput!” he shouted. “And also, I want to write endearing British accents!” Then he leaned over and started foaming. So editorial said, “S-S-S-sure Bob. Whatever you want, Bob. English accents…you got it,” and Haney tripped off happily, chortling to himself “‘Cheerio, ducks!’ heh heh ‘It’s your show, old chap,’ giggle, snort, ‘Bat-chap’ HAW!”

So this issue introduces…The Bat Squad! What is the Bat Squad, you ask? Would you believe…a team of super-cricketers?

No? How about three boring British civilians? Margot — script girl! Major Dabney — ex-Scotland yard detective! Mick Murdock — guitar player! Separately, they don’t look like much, but together they can completely fill a panel with clunky expository dialog. Also, Margot knows karate, and Murdock was a pickpocket, and Dabney knows a lot about beetles. That qualifies them as crimefighters in Batman’s book, and he cheerfully sends them into danger, armed only with walkie-talkies and, in Margot’s case, a wicked mini-skirt. Perhaps inspired by said skirt, Batman occasionally encourages her by exclaiming, “Good girl!”

Nick Cardy draws a mean mad strangler, but otherwise the art doesn’t seem as motivated on this outing — possibly because Cardy found it hard to concentrate while shaking his head in disbelief In any case, Haney staggers about with his usual aplomb, thunking into several of his favorite theme — like, for instance, convenient bouts of amnesia and deadly gaping plot holes.

In other high points: Batman refers to his friend “old Archimedes.” Yes, he’s talking about the Greek thinker; specifically about buoyancy and how it can help you lift an unexploded Nazi bomb, which proves that the date must be later than 1945 even if the fetching actress unaccountably believes she’s actually the strangler’s first victim from decades before and you’ve found a newspaper from 1906. Isn’t that all educational?

No. No it isn’t. Bless Bob Haney’s heart. If he was your secondary school teacher, he’d start off trying to teach you the principles of physics and end up with Batman paying a bunch of thugs to attack Archimedes to convince the Greek heavyweight that he still has that old pizazz. Then, inspired, he’ll build a better Bat-lever just like he did when he was young and peppy. And Archimedes would talk in a cockney accent and would turn out not to be Archimedes at all, but Archimedes’ great-grandson, who thinks he’s his ancestor, but actually turns out to be an avenging bearded Mormon. Wearing a mini-skirt and a Sherlock Holmes cap and…nothing else!

So what I want to know is…did the Bat Squad ever come back? Google doesn’t seem to know…any continuity experts out there remember? Surely, surely, they must have vanished into oblivion? Right? I said, right?

The Brave & The Bold # 93
Written by Denny “Zimmerman” O’Neil
Art and cover by Neal “Eddie Van” Adams
Published by DC Comics, 1970

You turn that page and…wham! It’s Neal Adams! I’m not even sure I necessarily like his art better than Nick Cardy’s, but it’s completely different…like the CD changer switched from Muddy Waters to Led Zeppelin. I think Cardy’s actually better at conveying motion, but Adams’ poses are much more dramatic, and his faces are beautiful. But the thing that hits you and makes you go, uh! is the design. He’s just got a much more expansive approach to layout; varying panel size and shape and even the spaces between panels so the whole page pops out at you.

(Just as a side note, it’s kind of hard to believe that there was a time when you could actually look at some random mainstream artist you’d never heard of and say, “You know, this guy is not clearly in every way worse than Neal Adams.”)

Anyway, Neal Adams has apparently seen the drooling, gibbering husks of artists who try to render Bob Haney’s scripts into some sort of coherent dramatic form, and he’s having none of it. Instead, he’s teamed with Denny O’Neill.

I think this is actually the only issue in this volume written by someone other than Bob Haney, so it was an interesting way to test my growing enthusiasm for Haney’s writing, particularly in light of what Tucker said in his his review of the first three issues said

Look, you either ride this bull because you fucking like this bull or you don’t. It’s a metaphor! It’s an allegory! It’s all rife with the meaning of the Heroic Saga, as written by Joseph Campbell “The Dumbest Literary Philosopher In The Bargain Bin Of Literary Philosophy” and popularized by George Lucas, the patron saint of “If something has a double meaning, it’s clearly, oh so clearly, better then Tolstoy.” No. Don’t get your pretension in here. Take it and shove it up your ass, and take Mallard Fillmore with you: those are your comics. Not for us, for us, it’s Bob Fucking Haney, and Haney understands you, 1970. Haney is going to teach you that when it wears spandex, and when it punches shit, that it is to scream like a housewife, worry about Dick Grayson, and entertain. This is entertainment, it’s pure. If Stan Lee knew that a bunch of people with way more time on their hands then they had sense were going to write terrible books about how Spider-man defined a culture, he would’ve jumped out a window and shot up the floors he passed on the way down. And we would be a better race of knuckle-draggers for it.

I don’t exactly disagree with that (especially the stuff about Joseph Campbell — whose totem animal (little known fact, here) is the Boomer Turd.) Still…I don’t think the whole appeal, or maybe even the primary appeal, of Bob Haney is lack of pretense. In the first place, he does have certain pretensions — there’s an awful lot of self-actualization gibberish, for example. And in the second…I don’t know that what’s great about Haney is just his desire to entertain. I mean, lots of people just want to entertain.

Take, for example, Denny O’Neill. I like Denny O’Neill; I still think his run on the Question was pretty terrific. And it’s certainly true that O’Neill has various pretentious instincts…but he’s got them well-muzzled in this outing. He’s telling a straight pulp adventure story with some horror twinges. And you can see right away why O’Neill is generally, I believe, thought of as a good comics writer, and Haney isn’t thought of at all. In terms of actual, textbook, by-the-numbers storytelling, O’Neill is clearly superior. He has a set-up — Batman’s exhausted and needs a vacation — and follows it through all the way from beginning to end. You don’t, for instance, find out on page 6 that Batman is exhausted, and then have him well-rested on page 8, or getting amnesia and forgetting he’s exhausted and so being able to overcome hordes of Mormons on page 11. He’s exhausted at the beginning, he’s exhausted in the middle, he’s exhausted at the end. When there are unexplained blips (Batman’s costume keeps appearing and disappearing from his suitcase) they are clearly marked as unexplained — Batman wonders about them just as the reader would. Foreshadowing is used in a way that makes sense, or at least suggests that O’Neill actually knows what the end of the story is supposed to be before he gets there. He’s even able to use a consistent framing device; Cain from House of Mystery narrates throughout, in a consistent semi-ironic voice. The rest of the dialog sounds like O’Neill might have, at some point in his past, actually heard real people conversing. And so on.

So on some scale, O’Neill’s clearly a better writer. But you know what? It’s boring. And more than boring. O’Neill’s story hinges on a child in danger, and it feels cheap and stupid. Cain’s narration is irritatingly unctuous; it’s not an interesting enough device to justify the extent to which the character seems pleased with himself. There is one bizarre Haney-like moment when Batman is poisoned and the villain offers him a choice of antidotes for no good reason. But because it’s the only such moment, it sticks out as deliberate padding: a bug rather than a feature.

What I’m saying is that, the problem isn’t that O’Neill is more pretentious; the problem is that…for this kind of short super-hero story, that comes out of nowhere and goes to nowhere…Haney is, despite initial appearances, a much superior writer. The stuff O’Neill is worried about —realistic dialog, consistent plot, consistent characterization — don’t matter nearly as much as the stuff Haney cares about —certain kinds of language games, something (anything!) unexpected happening every two or three panels, melodramatic effusions.

All of which is to say, I want to avoid going down a road where you end up at some sort of statement like “Haney is so bad he’s good!” (I don’t think Tucker said or thinks this at all; it just seems like a place somebody might get to from reading parts of his post.) It’s easy to laugh at Haney’s dialog — but does that mean that Haney isn’t laughing too? Those British accents; they’re not right, but they’re enjoyable, and I bet Haney enjoyed the hell out of writing them. His penchant for employing amnesia as a plot device — it’s not an accident or a blip or a mistake. It’s thematic; it’s how he sees stories: as chains of events where the actual links are always on the verge of fading away, leaving characters, readers, and creators delightfully rudderless.

Not that everything Haney does is equally great, or that he can’t make bad choices (Tucker almost redeemed that Wildcat story for me with the Rocky comparison…but, alas, not quite.) But he’s not just a stumbling clod who’s enjoyable because you get to make fun of him. He’s got a vision of how super-hero comics can work, and it’s unique and exhilarating and often brilliant. Denny O’Neill’s effort here, by contrast, seems very pedestrian.

Late Breaking Update: Tucker’s next installment is here

Tucker Stone has the first bat-post in our bat-blogging of the brave and the bold. check it out