Neal Adams (1941–2022)

I'm a huge fan of Ra's al Ghul, one of my favorite Bat villains. He, along with his daughter Talia, are showcased in this volume, and we even see appearances from the original Batwoman and the Bronze Tiger. Ra's and his daughter are pretty amazing in most of these stories but sadly time has not been as kind to the stories themselves. The dialogue is sometimes painful, especially when Batman uses "hip" words and phrases, and the plotting can be problematic. The longest storyline in the book, show more where Batman assembles a team to take Ra's down, is full of things that don't make sense. Not a bad volume, but it suffers when read in more modern times. show less

At last, the DC Showcase volumes have reached the point where Batman is getting good. I recently looked up the old Alley Awards on-line and the ‘Batman’ titles twice won the same award: strip most in need of improvement, even in 1962 when regular penciller Carmine Infantino scooped the best artist award. ‘Showcase Batman Volumes 1-4’ are interesting historical documents but reading them does not give great pleasure, though looking at the art gives some.

It does here, too. This fifth show more volume features a few issues pencilled by Neal Adams and a lot of covers by him. As Adams aficionados abound, I will do you the favour of listing which issues he drew so you can decide if the quantity warrants purchasing this book. It does. Adams pencilled: Detective Comics # 395 (16 pages); Batman # 219 (8 pages); Detective Comics # 397 (15 pages); Detective Comics # 400 (16 pages); Detective Comics # 402 (16 pages); Detective Comics # 404 (15 pages); Detective Comics # 407 (15 pages). The Man-Bat features in three of these. All of them are inked by Dick Giordano and look great. Adams also did most of the covers shown in this volume.

In paying proper respect to that maestro, I do not wish to belittle the art contributions of his colleagues. Irv Novick turned in very clean, elegant pencils with interesting layouts and dynamic figures. His work was also graced with Giordano’s inks, the quality of which are especially visible in these black and white reprints. While the pencils of Bob Brown, inked by Joe Giella and Frank Giacoia, are not quite as pleasing to the eye as those of his fellows he still did a competent, professional job.

The stories are mostly by Frank Robbins with a few by Dennis O’Neil and Mike Friedrich. Robbins does fairly decent detective yarns. DC Comics improved in the seventies but did not follow Stan Lee down the soap opera route. Variety being the spice of life, this was a good thing. Frank Robbins writer is the same Frank Robbins artist who did some work for Marvel later on ‘Captain America’. I’m not a big fan of his art but as a writer, he’s pretty good and apparently played a key part making the character more serious and restoring the creature of the night scenario. I was always under the impression that Dennis O’Neil led the way in that.

There are still some hangovers from the more childish age of DC Comics so Batman will wear a rubber mask, pretending to be someone else and get away with it, as do some of his opponents. Rubber masks look like rubber masks in real life. Ridiculously, he carries a bat-dummy of himself under his cape in ‘This Murder Has Been Pre-Recorded’ in Batman # 220 so that the misleading cover can show him being blown up in a phone booth. Again, this is not realistic.

Alas, DC still had a bit of a thing for misleading covers. Robin going off to university is milked for two: Detective Comics # 393 shows a tearful Boy Wonders saying, ‘The case is over, the team-up is finished! This is goodbye for Batman and Robin!’ Batman # 393 shows Batman storming off saying, ‘Take a last look Alfred then seal up the Batcave forever!’ In fact, these events ushered in a solo Batman fighting crime without bat-gadgets and led to the Dark Knight image he still has today. It was a conscious decision by the editors to strip the strip back to its roots. The television series was finished by this time and to keep that image would have been…well, batty.

Some of the stories by Dennis O’Neill are quite sophisticated. ‘Ghost Of The Killer Skies’ (Detective Comics # 404) is a biplane battle classic while ‘The Secret Of The Waiting Graves’ (Detective Comics # 395) and ‘Paint A Picture Of Peril’ (Detective Comics # 397) have dark romantic themes unusual for comics of the period. These three were drawn by Adams. The team of O’Neill and Adams was the talk of the town at the time and also revolutionised ‘Green Lantern’.

Probably the most notable thing about this collection is that it gets better and better as you read your way through it. These stories mark the turnaround from strip most in need of improvement to strip destined to be taken up by Hollywood and turned into a series of blockbuster movies, albeit some years later. Great stuff and soon to be released – July 2015 – is ‘DC Showcase Presents Batman Volume 6’ which will be even better if Ra’s al Ghul has anything to do with it and I think he does.

Eamonn Murphy
This review first appeared at https://www.sfcrowsnest.info/ show less

I almost quit comics yesterday. Three hours (because I don't get in to read them much) catching up on my stories in Yellowjacket Comics & Games, surrounded by Magic players and their particular funk, and I swear a full 50 per cent of the recent Marvels I flipped through were all about Marvel Zombies. There's even a pointless Marvel Zombies/Army of Darkness crossover.

And it's just pornography. At first maybe there's a "Ha ha, Spider-Man ate Aunt May," kind of skewering-of-sacred-cows action, show more and the whole thing is good enough for a scary dead-world "What If?" or a crossdimensional horrorshow for the Ultimate FF, but it just keeps going and going. The pretense is that it's a legitimate world, and so they make Captain America president or whatever, but there are no other differences. It's all just an excuse to see everyone die. It's profaning the sacred so long and perversely that by the end the sacredness is long gone and you're just profaning the profane, spreading shit on shit. And guys like the Magic kids who can't get a girl to touch them and get slowly twisted on Consumptionjunction or its modern equivalent, guys like Adam for whom no asshole is gaping enough, eat it up. Guess it should be no wonder: first heroism became a subculture; then, and separately, sex became a subculture; now the thing is to keep going lower and lower, to find something that will deliver some response, some brute shock, through the layers of "seen worse." Faugh. Faugh.

Thus my review of Marvel Zombies (ha!). Anyway, I was about to walk out when I came across this little number in the bargain bin - so classic silver-age pop-art awesome, with characters that, like, change over time and still are fresh and brave. Because, like, look at them now. They've fought evil every day for almost fifty years. EVERYONE around them has died and come back. It's completely meaningless, and you know that the writers are pulling their strings and that under the compulsions of the authorial pen they're all in constant bone pain and irrevocably insane. Because nobody can go through constant horror and they don't even have private lives anymore.

I take it back. This story was lovely, but I think I'm done with new Marvel. I'll still pick up a "New Mutants" or a "Beta Ray Bill" or maybe even a "New Warriors," but nothing new because the seams are bare and it's all for kids who can't tell that nobody ever really dies.

As far as I'm concerned the only job left is figuring out where, in fact, each individual character's story really ended, where it stopped being symbolic and cogent and got gratuitous. Like, for Daredevil it was as late as the end of the Bendis run (and then he gets out in 20 and has some kids with a nice Irish girl. What a powerful story, superhero lawyer in jail for life). For Spider-Man it was a long time ago, like when he married MJ and got a teaching job. Hell, for Rick Jones it was probably at the end of the Kree-Skrull War. This book was really fun and good and made me feel good about loving these old clapped-out bastards, like "Fairytale of New York" or a picture of your incontinent old dog when it was a pup. show less

This collection of Conan stories was a bit of a mixed bag. By far the weakest story for me was the title story, 'The Curse of the Golden Skull'. This was partially adapted from an L. Sprague De Camp Conan tale -- before he pulled out and it became a bit of a mishmash of a tale full of inconsistencies. Not only that, but I wasn't greatly impressed with Neal Adam's rendering of Conan. And his evil golden wizard wore a leotard. There was also a side character, Juma (an allowed creation of show more DeCamp's) , who was OK but who tended to steal Conan's thunder. Unlike Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Conan works best alone, or at least in charge. I noticed the same thing (but better written) with the Michael Moorcock Conan story in volume 3, where Elric was basically calling the shots.

Apart from that tale, the quality was pretty good. I particularly liked the penultimate tale 'The Garden of Death and Life' adapted from C.L. Moore's 'Shambleau'. As usual, I also appreciated Roy Thomas' retrospective commentary. It seems the Conan comics were doing very well at that time. Perhaps that led to a little bit of complacency in this volume. show less