When I started rereading Silver Age comics a few years ago I picked up BATMAN IN THE SIXTIES (by various writers and artists) to fill in some of the many Bat-gaps in my collection. Since then I’ve signed up for the DC app which has unsurprisingly an exhaustive list of Bat-stories. Rather than dip into this TPB when a story turned up I went and read the whole thing. It’s pleasant to read but I don’t think it captures its decade as well as Batman in the Fifties.
Admittedly it’s a tougher decade to capture. We start the decade in the 1950s tradition with stories of Batman and his “Bat-Family” such as the first Batwoman, Bat-Girl and Ace the Bat-Hound. Then Julius Schwartz took over and gave the book a New Look that lasted until 1969, when the darker, more ominous Batman of the Bronze Age appeared.
The book gives us a couple of 1950s style stories at the start, and ends with some Robin and Batgirl stories showing they’d broken away from Batman for their own adventures. In between, however, the New Look stuff focuses almost entirely on supervillains: Joker, Riddler, Catwoman (who hardly appeared in the 1960s), Blockbuster and Poison Ivy.
That does a disservice to the New Look era. Why not a story of the Outsider, Batman’s running mystery foe who first appears in Detective #334?
Or one of the series’ many straight mysteries, showcasing Batman as a detective (something that had gotten lost by the early 1960s).
It’s still a fun book to read, though. And it’s better than Batman: From the Thirties to the Seventies which barely acknowledges the New Look era existed.
WHO KILLED KENNEDY by David Bishop is the only Doctor Who spinoff novel I’ve ever bought. Inspired partly by the Kurt Busiek/Alex Ross Marvels books showing everyday life in the MU, this looks at everyday life in the Whoniverse. Protagonist James Stevens is an ambitious, rather odious Fleet Street reporter in the late 1960s when he looks into a minor story involving meteors crashing down in part of England, a strange man found in the wreckage and rumors he’s not quite human (if you can’t guess, it’s the first Jon Pertwee story Spearhead From Space). Minor, but why would a UN task force be providing security? Where did the man disappear to? Who are the “Doctors,” the code name for multiple operatives who’ve been showing up in crises since WW II, then disappearing?
These are not questions UNIT wants discussed. Stevens soon finds himself in the soup as the Pertwee era progresses, the Master appears and Stevens meets Dodo, the companion we last saw in The War Machines, now partially amnesiac from WOTAN’s mind control.
It’s very well done, mixing in elements of the spin-off novels and video productions (Liz Shaw smokes a pipe because she smoked one in the spin-off direct-to-video series P.R.O.B.E.). Unlike the first time I read it back in 1996, I could look up stuff I don’t understand online, which helps. If you have no interest in a mythos-dense spin-off novel, this is probably not going to change your mind, but a big thumbs up from me.
#SFWApro. Top image by Sheldon Moldoff, other art by Carmine Infantino, all rights remain with current holders.
