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