Detective Comics Vol 1 #27, May 1939
“The Case Of The Chemical Syndicate”
“The World’s Greatest Detective.” To a modern audience, this is probably one of Batman’s lesser-known epithets. He’s now better known to the cinema-going public as a card-carrying ultra-hero who drives flashy flying cars and is mates with gods and fish-people and the like, so it’s easy to forget that he cut his teeth punching fat, balding executives in three-piece suits and solving tediously-titled mysteries such as this.
But that he makes his debut in issue 27 of Detective Comics ostensively makes Batman a detective first and foremost. This intrigues me. It’s not a side of the Dark Knight that I’m overly familiar with, so I’m ready for some classic noir intrigue and sleuthing. To whet my appetite further, Detective Comics #27 opens with a page of facts and quiz questions about real police cases and forensic techniques.
Sadly, all might not be quite what I’ve built it up to be. A quick glance at the other characters in the book show that it doesn’t take much to beat them to the title of
“World’s Greatest Detective.” In addition to the most all-American-sounding name I think I’ve ever heard, Buck Marshall – Range Detective displays some fairly impressive tracking abilities, but other than that, the detectives in Detective Comics #27 leave a little to be desired. Bart Regan‘s M.O. appears to be pointing at bodies saying, “He’s dead! Oh… and this guy’s dead, too. And this one, I think he’s dead as well,” while ace investigator Speed Saunders solves a mystery by staring down a woman’s top, and the less said about Cosmo, The Phantom Of Disguise‘s Chinese impression the better. The bar is set low – what can we expect from the all-new caped detective?
Batman’s first appearance opens with the police commissioner, Gordon, having a smoke with his young socialite friend, one Bruce Wayne, and musing over the puzzle of “this fellow they call the ‘Bat-Man’,” (Batman isn’t Batman yet, he’s still very much The “Bat-Man”) when the commissioner gets a phone call. Old Lambert’s dead! (Not Old Lambert!) And his son’s prints are on the weapon! (Not Young Lambert!) Gordon invites Wayne to the murder scene, because that’s apparently where young socialites liked to hang out in 1939, and off they scoot in a nice red coupé.
It turns out it wasn’t Young Lambert who killed his father. Instead, someone broke in, opened his safe then stabbed Old Lambert and his son found him just in time to get his fingerprints on the knife and hear his last words, “contract, contract.”
The police investigate Lambert’s former partners in the chemical industry only to find out someone’s been handing out death threats to the lot of them. Pretty soon, Lambert’s first associate, Crane, is shot dead and as the perpetrators try to escape with a paper they’ve taken from Crane’s safe, they are apprehended by a mysterious figure. The Bat-Man proceeds to knock seven shades out of the pair of them, seizes the stolen paper and disappears before the filth turn up.
Meanwhile, Lambert’s two remaining associates, Rogers and Stryker, learn of the deaths and plan to meet up at Stryker’s lab. Rogers arrives at the lab where he is knocked out by Stryker’s assistant, and put in some sort of bell jar-cum-gas chamber contraption. Why he couldn’t have just shot or stabbed him like the others is anyone’s guess, but this is a convoluted means of execution befitting a Batman Villain.
Luckily, The Bat-Man is on hand to smash open the glass and rescue Rogers, much to Stryker’s chagrin, who threatens to toss him in a nearby and conveniently accessible acid vat. Not having any of it, The Bat-Man blithely socks Stryker into the acid bath instead and fucks off.
It turns out Stryker was buying the company, Apex Chemicals, from the other three in yearly installments, and decided it would be cheaper to knock them off and become the sole owner that way. He was stealing back the contracts he’d made to cover his tracks. Edge-of-your-seat stuff this isn’t.
Overall, apart from the action scenes, it’s pretty dry. The exposition is at the same time sudden and wordy. The reader is encumbered with lists of names to remember. And the mystery isn’t even that good. The World’s Greatest Detective basically solves his first case by witnessing it.
Still, while it’s hard to imagine even a 1930s kid getting excited at the tale of corporate backstabbing, it’s not difficult to see why the character of the Bat-Man captured imaginations and endured. From the very first header panel he’s a menacing figure, stood on the roof tops, silhouetted against a full moon. He’s always right behind you, striking from the shadows.
Even in his first appearance, The Bat-Man is fairly fleshed out and recognisable as the character we know today. Although he doesn’t do so in the story, on the front cover he’s seen swinging through the sky on a rope, which, although nowadays he tends to use his grapple gun, is basically the defining Batman action. The suit’s all there, too: grey with a bat insignia on the chest, black cape and a yellow utility belt, although the cowl is a bit of a weird shape. The ears are so low down the head that sometimes, in profile, you can’t see them at all, which for some reason, I find really unsettling. It’s good to see that Commissioner Gordon has been there right from the very first panel. There’s also an instantly recognisable Bat-trait near the end when, after having had his life saved, Rogers turns to thank The Bat-Man, but he’s already disappeared through a skylight into the night. Nice.
Okay, so The Bat-Man murders a man in cold blood, without trial, which is about the most un-Batmanlike thing you can do save doing it with a gun, but other than that.
At the very end we are treated to a reveal. The identity of The Bat-Man! Remember that weird guy who likes to lurk behind the police commissioner and chill out at murder scenes? Wayne… something, I think his name was. Well, anyway it was him all along. Wow!
Bat Channel 