lelak wrote:
The only Batman titles I regularly bought were the Giant Annuals. I never really cared for the monthly issues, probably because of the editorial direction and weird/space opera slant of the late 1950s and early 1960s.


That was my attitude also. The first three Batman Annuals of 1961-63 were gems
that had a lot of wonderful atmospheric art by Dick Sprang and Lew Sayer Schwartz and surprisingly good stories. I particularly remember the one in which Batman is shot and seriously wounded by a ruthless criminal doctor then left for dead and Robin has to take his place with a specially designed built-up Batman suit. I also liked the inclusion of then-cutting edge technology in the plots; "Batman's Electronic Crime File" featured one of the earliest mentions of computers in comics, and "The 1001 Inventions of Batman" had an assortment of really cool looking creations:



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"Batman's Most Fantastic Foes" in issue number three were as seriously twisted a bunch as the villains that appeared in Dick Tracy.  Here's Garfield Lynns, the "Human Firefly": a genius at creating spectacular lighting effects who goes completely off his rocker, utterly consumed by jealousy of the rich:




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I was really taken with Sprang's frenetic, barrel-chested Batman of the early 1950s: continually in motion-- running everywhere, leaping, somersaulting-- a supremely athletic detective with that dark, billowing cape.  It was a great visual interpretation of the character:


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By the mid-1950s the stories were beginning to deteriorate, but for me the worst part of it was the illustration. I just could not get past lousy or indifferent hacked-out art, and Moldoff was a complete deal-breaker for me. And I wasn't the only one who felt that way either.  In an interview conducted some years ago DC writer Bob Haney recalled about Bob Kane that:


He had ghosts and we all knew it. People used to complain about it. Jack Liebowitz would fight with him. I heard some of the arguments, “We’re paying you all this money!” Well, they did pay him well... [But he] would get back at them by just hiring these bad ghosts and doing bad work. He did a lot of bad work for years and the character kept selling because everything was selling but it wasn’t as good as his early stuff.



Last Edited By: alizarin1 Oct 18 13 3:04 PM. Edited 1 times.