After the break, check out the latest episode of Batman Books Are Burning In Hell, with cartoonist Chris Mautner joining your hosts Tucker Stone & Matt Seneca!
Welcome once again to Batman Books Are Burning In Hell, this week featuring special guest sta- hey wait a second, how'd he get in here? Chris Mautner? It's Chris Mautner, people! If you've literally never listened to an episode of our eleven year old comic book podcast before, Chris boasts a top-5 resume as a comics critic, with a portfolio of work for The Comics Journal, Blog@Newsarama, Robot 6, The Smart Set, and probably ten or twelve other publications I'm forgetting. He's also 1/4th of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell, and a big nerd who really took this show's bit between his teeth and made us talk about some completely random comic I'd never heard of. So here we go with more discourse than you ever imagined could exist about Murder in the Night, as presented in Detective Comics #481-482 by Jim Starlin and P. Craig Russell! Reach between your legs and hold on tight!
0:02:19 - Almost immediately following Detective Comics' presentation of Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers' masterpiece Strange Apparitions (the Batman comic we'll mention in every episode of this show without actually doing one about it) in issues 469-479, the book switched over to a giant 68-page format, re-titling itself Detective Comics/Batman Family for numbers 481-3 (1978-9) and absorbing a recently canceled 20-issue series that had presented tales of the Batman universe's side characters in addition to its leading man. Always the weak sister to the eponymous Batman series, Detective Comics has gone through many periodic re-inventions along these lines, usually to some initial success, then a sales doldrums that reminds the editors that Just More Batman has always been one of the comics industry's top sales strategies. Detective's run as a 68-pager lasted until issue #495 (1980), with the book throttling down to a bimonthly schedule for all of 1979.
0:02:58 - Step right up! See the Hydrocephalic Batman for yourself!
0:04:33 - More about the Dollar Comics/DC Implosion era, including a comprehensive list of the publisher's oversized dollar titles, can be read here. Only The Superman Family, a clearinghouse for DC's badly waning titles featuring that character's supporting cast (Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, etc.) had a longer run than Detective as a Dollar Comic.
0:06:19 - "Right this second" as in Jesus Christ July 2019 when we recorded this. Still standing by every word about the failures of mainstream comics' ability to market itself two and a half years later!
0:09:28 - Sometimes what real life serves you is straight out of a Rankin & Bass Christmas special. More on the Blizzard of '77, during which the New York City area, then home to a plurality of direct market comic book shops, was declared a federal disaster area, can be read here.
0:12:19 - Here's DC's latest collaboration with Wal-Mart, which rhymes perfectly with the point Tucker's making. Batman Family: LeBron James sounds like an intriguing spot for, oh, say, a guy like Jim Starlin to putter away his senescence, no?
0:14:29 - The Detective #481 cover-credited artist who had yet to make his biggest splash was P. Craig Russell, later to enjoy star turns at independent companies like Pacific, Dark Horse, and Eclipse during the direct market's imperial period in the late '80s and early '90s.
0:19:02 - DC's (and soon Marvel's) abandonment of the newsstands paid incredible dividends in the short term, with the boom of the direct market, a flowering of smaller publishers to feed it, and the development of an international network of specialty comic book stores and distributors. More lately, that refusal to present a public face to non-fans has cost the comic book industry dearly, and things like DC's Walmart initiatives can be viewed as desperate attempts to correct a 40-year mistake.
0:29:12 - We're always gonna find our way back to Legends of the Dark Knight eventually on this show! Some other Batman/Poe mashups of note include Len Wein and Guy Davis' terrific-looking, incredibly stupid miniseries Batman: Nevermore (2003), in which the Caped Crusader and the Master of the Grotesque and Arabesque team up to apprehend the imaginatively named Raven Murderer; and Ron Marz and Cully Hamner's Legends of the Dark Knight: Nevermore (2014), which oh come on you guys, real fuckin' original there. What, Legends of the Dark Knight: The Homo-Cameleopard wasn't good enough for you?
0:30:14 - Guido Crepax's adaptation of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, an interesting if tentative early outing from a cartoonist who'd later master a very Poe-ish brand of decadent erotica, is collected in Fantagraphics' Complete Crepax vol. 3. Introductions by Me and CBABIH's own Joe McCulloch!
0:31:11 - Check it out!
0:31:59 - Here's this guy. Lot of Gil Kane in this drawing too.
0:32:36 - Starlin turned in a very high quality run on the immediately post-Year One Batman #414-430 (1987-89), which includes the classic Ten Nights of the Beast and Death in the Family storylines - but for my money his farewell issue Fatal Wish is the pick of the litter. Better still is his completely unhinged miniseries The Cult, with fantastic art by Berni Wrightson, nauseating colors courtesy of Bill Wray, and a storyline that is probably the first Batman plot to amplify the sturm und drang of Dark Knight Returns to the level of the absurd. The Cult is such a bizarre, somehow absent-feeling thing that this absurdity never becomes humor; it's one of the most effective readings of Batman as horror. For Thee most effective one of those, stay tuned for a future episode...
0:42:13 - Starlin co-created the recently filmed Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu, and drew the character's first three issues - confusingly numbered #15-17. Another axe for him to grind against Marvel after they rewarded him with Nothing for creating Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet! You love to see it!
0:43:42 - Take a look:
0:47:06 - Etrigan the Demon, then only a few years removed from his bonkers original Jack Kirby series, is by far the least obvious character to appear in these issues of Batman Family, but hey, he's kinda dark and spooky like Batman... right? At any rate, after Kirby's 1976 return to Marvel, DC got busy sanding all the coolness off of the library of characters he'd created in his half-decade there, and humping the ultra-weird Etrigan right the Christ into a Batman book actually ended up as one of the less-egregious resurrections. This was due entirely to the Studio-influenced art of a young Michael Golden, dripping with ink and menace and lasting just the one issue before being replaced on the feature by none other than Steve Ditko. "It's a Kirby thing? Get one of those other old Marvel guys to do it!" Golden would shortly go on to stardom across town at Marvel with the cult classic Micronauts series.
0:51:41 - Golden and Bob Rozakis' "Bat-Mite's New York Adventure", a curdled attempt at Marvel-style metafiction in which a comic book publisher's offices are visited by one of their characters, catching the comic's creators up in the whirl of their own plot, is an extremely nothing story that was inexplicably included in the classic Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told collection.
0:54:09 - For more on 52 and more of Chris in the spotlight, check out this recent episode of our non-Batman show. If you can stomach a podcast that isn't about Batman, that is.
1:01:14 - Indeed, Marshall Rogers was one of the early Marvel/DC stars to test the waters of independently published comics for the nascent direct market, hopping straight from his star turn on Batman to the early graphic novel Detectives Inc. (1980) with Don McGregor, before eventually returning to superheroes. His work was never quite the same after, leaving Strange Apparitions as his obvious career peak.
1:07:05 - Don Newton is the artist responsible for the bad Robin art Tucker roasts here, which tells you how seriously artists took their work for Batman Family. On the main Batman series, Newton was capable and well-remembered enough to be honored with a Tales of the Batman greatest-hits hardcover, a laurel only afforded to a handful of first-class artists like J.H. Williams and Carmine Infantino. Maybe we'll talk about those guys next time! Later
started to read these on that DC app because of this episode
the decision to make Barbara Gordon a congresswoman is a wild one
Posted by: eric | 2021.11.26 at 17:11