Detective 67 – the Penguin opens shop, and the Boy Commandos befriend a hoodlum

The Penguin returns in this story by Bill Finger, with art by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson.  There are a number of good ideas, but it lacks something.

The Penguin opens up a store dealing with birds, and shows off his skills with the animals.  He gets called up to come to people’s homes, to care for the birds.

The Penguin then sends out trained falcons to steal from the places he has cased as part of his work.

The Penguin does ride off on an ostrich at one point, as per the cover.  The story concludes in a battle in a belfry.

The main character in this Simon and Kirby tale is a gangster, Horsehoes Corona, who joined the army while on the run.

As he is introduced to the kids, we learn that Pierre has a brother in the French Resistance.  Corona is friendly with the kids, but hardly a role model.  But the Boys are idealists, and talk to him of bravery and duty and country.

The former gangster winds up leading a charge during an assault at the Rock of Gibraltar and heroically dies.  The Boy Commandos carry on.

Detective 66 – Two-Face debuts, the Boy Commandos in Egypt, and Air Wave gets framed

Two-Face makes his debut a Bill Finger/Bob Kane/Jerry Robinson story in Detective 66 (Aug. 42).

The story jumps right into his origin.  Harvey Kent (not Dent) is a crusading District Attorney, prosecuting Boss Moroni.  Moroni throws acid into his face while on the witness stand.  Harvey has a devoted fiancee, Gilda.

Despite Gilda’s attempts to help him, Harvey runs off, scars a two-headed coin, and cuts his wardrobe to pieces as he becomes Two-Face.

Two-Face decides everything with a flip of the coin.  In this story, and only this story, he also decides what to do with the take from his robberies with the coin, giving them to those in need when the coin comes up good.  Of course, giving away stolen money just means those that took it accepted stolen goods, and were all hauled off to prison, so that idea was quietly dropped.

The story belongs almost entirely to Harvey, Batman and Robin only show up at the end.  It’s a great scene, as Two-Face is robbing a movie theatre, using a film clip of himself to command the audience, while at the same time he and Batman are fighting on the stage in front of the screen.

The story ends with a genuine cliff-hanger.  Two-Face has Batman at gun point, but the coin lands on its edge.  The story continues, but not in the next issue.

Simon and Kirby send the Boy Commandos to Egypt in this story.

Just as the last story opened in the past, this one opens in the far future, as a mummy is brought back to life, and tells the story of his encounter with the Commandos during World War 2.

It’s Egypt, so we are into desert, and tank warfare against the Germans, all stunningly illustrated by Kirby.

Air Wave faces off against a gang that dress like Halloween ghosts, but are not racists or trying to be spooky.  So basically, they are just content to look stupid.

They are pretty smart,in fact, and manage to frame Larry Jordan for murder, and he has to escape, and then prove his innocence as Air Wave.

The narration refers to Larry as an “assistant district attorney,” so he is moving up in the office.

Detective 64 – the execution of the Joker, the Boy Commandos debut, and Air Wave gets Static

The Joker once again fails to get onto the cover with Detective 64 (June 1942).  Its a generic Batman and Robin picture, vaguely militaristic, with the airplane.  But I may just be reading that into it, as this is the first issue to be written after the attack on Pearl Harbour.

Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson send the Joker to the electric chair in this tale.  The Joker turns himself in, and confesses to all his past crimes.  He gets sentenced to death, and executed.

And that’s just the beginning of the story!  His men take his corpse and revive it, and he begins another spree.

The Joker at least puts up a front, pretending to be honest.  Batman tries to have him executed again, but the sentence was carried out, and the Joker is no longer wanted for his past crimes.

Of course Batman exposes him, and there is a battle, and the Joker appears to die.  We clearly see that he did survive.  The Joker appearing to die at the end is almost mandatory by this point.

But a real change did happen.  From this point on, the Joker does not kill, he is just a thief.   All the way until the 70s.

The Boy Commandos debut, a Joe Simon and Jack Kirby series with no connection at all to the concept of “Detective.”  But is was great, so who cares?

With little in the way of explanation, Rip Carter, from the US army, has assembled a group of orphaned children and leads them into battle during World War 2.  Pierre Chavard, from France, Jan Haasen, from the Netherlands, Alfy Twidgett from England, as well as the stand-out character, Brooklyn.

The main character in this first story is actually someone else entirely, a burned out Frenchman, Leon La Farge, who gets his spirits and fight back from the Boys, and becomes a major resistance fighter.

The war scenes are vivid, but while the Commandos are involved, they are not focussed on.

As the opening narration informs us, Batman, Green Arrow and the Crimson Avenger all have sidekicks, so clearly Air Wave needs one as well.

And like all the other heroes, he gets a talking parrot as a sidekick.  Hmm, no, that’s not right.  The parrot is of use in this story, as it helps Air Wave prove his innocence after being framed for murder.

Larry names the parrot Static, which is a great name for a sidekick for Air Wave, but not so great for the parrot of a law clerk.

As

Detective 63 – Batman vs Mr. Baffle, Cliff Crosby and Larry Steele end

Another generic Batman and Robin cover for Detective 63 (May 1942).  Mr. Baffle was good enough to mention, but not to show.

Mr. Baffle is blatantly patterned after the character Raffles, the gentleman thief.  But it has been stated by one of the Bill Finger/Bob Kane/Jerry Robinson team that the Penguin was based on Raffles as well.  This leads me to wonder if the one time appearance of Mr. Baffle was really a rough draft of the Penguin, printed later.  Either that, or they wanted a version of Raffles that retained the qualities the Penguin lacked.

Mr. Baffle arrives from Europe, and is already notorious.  Batman almost nabs him the moment he arrives.  But he eludes capture, trims his facial hair, and begins moving in high society, while scoping out the sites for his thefts.

Linda Page gets to have significance in the story.  She spots the rough fingertips on Baffle, and doubts he is really part of the upper crust.  Snobbery as a super-power!

When Baffle later tries to wiggle out of things by claiming to be secretly Batman, Linda exposes his lies.

Baffle and Batman have a swordfight battle, and Baffle dives off a tower.  He claims he will return, but as he never did, he must have just gone splat on the ground.

Much of this character, including the swordfighting, would be reworked into the Cavalier.

In his final tale, Cliff Crosby solves the murder of a circus lion tamer, which was done by coating the lion’s mane with nicotine.  Often the crimes were needlessly elaborate that way.

With Cliff’s series ending so soon after the attack on Pearl Harbour, I suspect he joined the army, perhaps as a journalist, but did not survive the war.

The Seal returns for Larry Steele’s final case.  His scheme has some creativity to it, as he uses blinding light to disorient the tellers when his men rob their banks.

As with Cliff Crosby, one cannot help but suspect that Larry’s series ended because he enlisted immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbour.

 

Detective 62 – the Joker goes vaudeville, Air Wave vs Mr. Mystery, and Slam Bradley goes to the fair

Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson put together a tale in Detective 62 (April 1942) that likely was more fun when it came out.

An aging comedian has died, and left clues to his fortune to a number of his comedian friends.  The way they are all introduced, in the long panel, indicates that they must have been based on real comics of the time, now forgotten.

The Joker starts killing off the comedians and stealing their clues.  The Bat Signal, still new, gets a prominent place in the page it’s used on.

The Joker has the opportunity to unmask Batman in this story, but chooses not to, so that the game will go on.  That same scene will play out many time over the decades.  This is also one of the last stories with a murderous Joker, until the 1970s.

The splash page to the Air Wave story in this issue appears to be at least partly done after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, with the “America at War”  blurb along the side.  But I have no idea what to make of Uncle Sam pouring out a bag of money.  Neither the image nor the statement have anything at all to do with the story.

Instead, Air Wave contends with Mr. Mystery, a gang leader who turns out to be the one-legged mayor of the city Larry Jordan lives in!

Some very nice Howard Sherman art as Slam Bradley and Shorty head to a fair run by an old friend, who is being forced to use unionized clowns.

Yes, unionized clowns are the root of this story.

As one might expect, the union bosses are all gangsters, but the clowns themselves turn out to be criminals as well.

Detective 61 – The Three Racketeers, Larry Steele vs the Seal, and Air Wave short circuits

From one extreme to the other, instead of having a generic cover, Detective 61 (March 1942) uses the splash page as the cover.

This would become commonplace, although most had a bit more divergence than the two shown.  Because of this, I will often just show the cover and skip the splash.

Bill Finger scripts a gem of a tale in this issue, with Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson on the art.  Three aging hoodlums sit around a table, playing poker and chatting about great criminal schemes they had, which were routed by Batman.

So it’s basically three brief stories, linked by the hoods.  A Batmobile with a shield, and a weird paint job, appears in this issue.

The final of the three tales involves the thieves using tanks, so Batman and Robin take to the air in the Batplane for the climax.

The story has the perfect coda, the revelation that the men are all incarcerated while their poker game is going on.

Larry Steele is given a recurring villain just before his series concludes, the Seal.  The Seal is the leader of a gang of thieves, who wears a costume that gives him big flippers over his fists. He looks so absurd that he adds no menace at all to the stories.

Air Wave goes up against a man simply called the Professor in this story.  He is part of the mob, wanting vengeance on Air Wave for his exploits in the previous story.

The Professor may not have a decent name,but he does have a mighty distinctive head.  Larry meets socialite Sandra Stowe, who is hanging with his boss, the D.A. Cole.

The Professor builds a machine that shorts out Air Wave circuits, but he also nabs Sandra, who smashes the machine, which lets Air Wave take down the bad guys.  The fight scenes are kinetic, but not impressive.

Detective 60 – the Joker and the Bat Signal, and Air Wave begins

Lots of fighting on the cover of Detective 60 (Feb. 42), but no sign of the Joker, who appears in the issue itself.

The Joker returns, now fully into the habit of adopting themes for a series of robberies.  In this case, wearing costumes.  But he doesn’t choose wild costumes, as the splash page implies.  Instead, he commits crimes while his men are dressed as policemen, and firemen.

Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson are still on the art, but Jack Schiff wrote this one.

The Bat Signal makes its first appearance in this story.  The most ostentatious paging device ever, it somehow fit the mood of the character.

We also see a new Batmobile.  It has the great fin at the back, but no shield on the front yet.  The peculiar red and blue paint job was never seen again.

Air Wave makes his debut in this issue.  Larry Jordan is a lowly clerk in the District Attorney’s office who goes out and fights crime on roller skates as Air Wave.

In his spare time, Larry has develope a sophisticated device capable of tracking, intercepting and transmitting sound, enabling him to spy and communicate at a distance.  The retractable skates are kind of odd, but roller skating on telephone wires is unique.

On the other hand, his way of going down a chimney needs work.

In his first story, Air Wave helps his boss retrieve vital information needed during a gangsters trial, which has been stolen by his mob.

Detective 59 – the Penguin returns, Wing gets a costume, Steve Malone ends, and Slam Bradley gets an agency

Robin is really happy to not be involved in the action on the cover of Detective 59 (Jan. 42).  Perhaps he was tired from the events of the Batman story in the issue.

The Penguin returns in this story by Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson.  The story picks up immediately after the conclusion of last issue’s tale, as the Penguin meets the various other companions of the boxcar he escaped town in.

When he realizes that so many of them have rewards out for their capture, he devises a scheme to turn them in, collect the reward, and then have other members of the group break them out of jail.

Batman gets onto his scheme and breaks it up.  He uses a crime file in this story, very rudimentary, though of course snazzy for the era.  Batman also relies on the normal radio for news alerts.

In this instalment of the Crimson Avenger Wing suddenly gets a costume as well, if not a codename.  His outfit matches the Crimson Avenger’s though with the colour scheme reversed, much like the way Kid Flash’s reversed the Flash’s colour scheme.  As his crest he has something stylized, which for many years I thought might be a “7”, or perhaps a question mark.  Now I realize it is a letter, probably Chinese.  I wonder what it means?

Crimson Avenger and Wing started appearing in Leading Comics as part of the Seven Soldiers of Victory at this time.  His team would never get mentioned in the pages of his own series.  Odd, considering that Batman was mentioned in this strip, along with the Joker and the Penguin.

As well as a costume, Wing seems to have changed his body, as well as his ability to speak English.  He is shorter and thinner than he used to be, and his face now an Asian caricature.

In his final story Steve is called to the home of a wealthy retired judge with a gambling son and a niece begging for money for her husband.  When the judge is killed, Steve figures out that its the jewelled-earring wearing nurse who was the killer, not the money hungry youths.

Steve Malone’s series ends at this point, and his character is never seen again, but after such a high-profile career I would expect that Steve went into politics and had a long and lucrative tenure in Washington D.C.

Howard Sherman has been doing the art on Slam Bradley’s series for a while now.  The stories have been decent, but none had anything that made them stand out.  Slam continues to frequently take on manly jobs as he solves crimes with Shorty providing comic relief.

In this story, we are told, for the first time, that Slam and Shorty work for the Wide-Awake Detective Agency.  It is never given that name again, though.

The story involves a casino that has its winning patrons robbed on the way home.  Slam is hired by one of the victims, and infiltrates the casino, causing a big ruckus and bringing down the house.

 

 

Detective 58 – the Penguin debuts, Cliff Crosby comes to Canada, and Speed Saunders ends

The cover of Detective 58 (Dec.41) is an entertaining composition, but has no connection to the important Batman story the issue contains.

The Penguin gets introduced, created by Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson.  Inspired by Raffles, the gentleman thief, this character would quickly become a staple in Batman stories.

Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson first encounter the villain at an art gallery, and Dick gives him the Penguin nickname before they have any reason to suspect him of anything.  He uses his umbrella to conceal the stolen art, as well as other items he snags during the story.

He also uses the umbrella as a gas gun.  It’s a good prop, many uses, and adds to his ensemble.

The one moment I do not care for in the story occurs when Batman has been captured by the Penguin.  There is a cool cutaway of a communication device in Batman’s heel, but his excuse for using it, “tap-dancing sitting down.” is painful.

Robin frees Batman, and they take down the Penguin’s gang and recover the loot, but the Penguin himself escapes, hopping a passing freight. The story concludes telling us he will return, and he does, in the following issue.

Cliff Crosby heads to Canada in this story, taking Kay with him on a skiing vacation, and stumbling into a bizarre set-up.

A father refuses to let his daughter marry unless someone can beat him in a ski race.  Cliff wins the race, by rigging the father’s skis.

Speed Saunders has his final adventure in this story.  It’s called “The Cigarette Murder,” and Speed solves it by noticing the ashes left in an ashtray even though the butts were removed.

It’s late 1941, and it’s safe to say that at this point, Speed goes into the O.S.S.  He does not return again until the late 90s, but is given that bit of backstory to his World War 2 days.

Detective 57 – 24 Hours to Live

Still going for generic covers with Detective 57 (Nov 41), despite a perfectly good story by Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson, that easily could have donated a scene.

The story, “24 Hours to Live,” deals with a wealthy man who learns that he has been poisoned, and the horrible deaths he plots for those close to him, before he dies himself.  I want to say it’s like a reverse version of the movie “D.O.A.,” except it predates that movie by a decade.

Once again, Linda Page functions as the link between Bruce Wayne, and the events of the story, as her friend is part of the family involved.

The story is only ruined by the unreal and unneeded twists at the end.  I won’t spoil it, go ahead and read the last three panels for yourself.