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By October 1963, I had been reading comics for about 18 months, and I had been reading Batman for almost all of that time.  I owned nearly every Batman and Detective in that period, which surprises me because Batman was never my favorite character.  It may be that Batman comics were never sold out so I never missed an issue like I did with Flash, GL, and JLA.     

So starting from Detective 302 ("The Bronze Menace") and Batman 147 ("Batman Becomes Bat-Baby"), I bought roughly 35 Batman comics (not including annuals) by October 1963.  Of those--looking back through Mike's Time Machine--I find that about 8 (22%) were about some sort of weird transformation.  Batman to Bat-baby, Bathound to SuperBathound, Mummy Batman, etc.  About 7 were about Batman's rogues gallery (Penguin, Joker, Terrible Trio, Clayface, Catman).  About 6 involved aliens or mad scientists.   So out of 35 issues of Batman and Detective, about 60% represented Schiff's formulaic aliens/villains/weird transformations stories.  The rest were sort of adventure and mystery type stories, which mostly I do not have strong memories of--EXCEPT for the mystery stories, like this month's "Mystery of Madcap Island."

My favorite strain of Batman story was the Batman as Hercule Peroit story, like "Madcap Island."  Out of my 35 Batman stories, I count 4 as being this variety:  Murder in Skyland, the Mardi Gras Murders, Murder in Movieland, and Murder on Madcap Island.  They were your sort of Agatha Christie drawing room mysteries, with suspects identified and clues presented, and then the big reveal at the end.  Out of all the Schiff era Batman stories, they were really my favorites.  The rogue's gallery stuff I didn't mind so much, they were pretty good villains, although I thought Joker was over-used.  Aliens and transformations--and Bat mite!--irritated me, and they were a big piece of the Schiff agenda.  

Madcap Island, as I recall, was the sort of weird oversized objects kind of environment that Batman often operated in.  He was always encountering giant typewriters and engagement rings and hubcaps--sort of an inverse version of the Atom, not a small human in a normal world, but a normal sized human dealing with oversized versions of ordinary objects. 



Last Edited By: Yossarian Oct 5 13 8:52 AM. Edited 1 times.