Detective Comics Vol 1 #28, June 1939
“Frenchy Blake’s Jewel Gang”
If you’ve ever played any of the Arkham series of games, you will know that with the faintest twitch of your trigger finger, Batman will fire his grapple-gun and almost instantly be propelled to safety, or abruptly catapulted over a skyscraper. In The Animated Series, when someone is falling to their death, it takes Batman just moments to lasso a nearby gargoyle and swing to their rescue. Or who can forget the scene in Batman Begins where Batman takes on Falcone’s thugs at the the docks, using a succession of ropes to rappel swiftly and silently in and out of the fight to awesome and terrifying effect?
Okay, so I’ve just listed three things that are better than anything that happens in this issue, but when the Bat-Man uses the batrope for the first time to evade capture by the police, it literally makes the headlines. Well, fictionally makes the headlines. It literally makes the fictional headlines. Whatever.
Hang on, why’s the Bat-Man fleeing the police? I thought he was the good guy, right? Well, hold on bat-fans, because this month’s story is chock-full of overly-laboured intrigue!
The strip starts with Bruce Wayne, tired of the spate of multi-thousand dollar jewel robberies going down on his turf, shaking down a police informant. And by shaking down, I mean pretending to be the commissioner over the phone, and simply asking him who’s responsible. The informant, the aptly-named Gimpy, sings like a canary and gives Wayne every last detail about the heists, as well as where and when the next one is occurring. The World’s Greatest Detective has done it again! Why didn’t the police think of doing that after the first robbery?
Joking aside, this shows that already the Bat-Man has a lot of inside intelligence on the criminal underground and somehow has access to information that only the police should have. I mean, surely the identity of police informants isn’t usually common knowledge. The “bored socialite” Bruce Wayne is evidently holding more cards than we’ve yet been shown.
That night, the jewel thieves appear on the roof of the Vandersmith’s apartment, just as Gimpy predicted. Suddenly, quote: “like a huge bat, the figure of the ‘Bat-man’ sails through the air,” unquote. (Like a bat, eh? Now you mention it, I can start to see a similarity. He should call himself “The Bat-Man” or something.) One of the thieves, Ricky, finding it very inconvenient that a six foot bat-creature has landed on top of his mate, draws a knife. The Bat-Man takes exception to this and immediately throws Ricky from the rooftop with extreme prejudice, taking his kill-count to two. (That’s including last issue’s chemical syndicate boss. Yes, I’m keeping record.)
The Bat-Man knocks out the other thief just as the police arrive. It seems the cops had finally cottoned on to the idea of investigating the robberies, presumably leading to a confused Gimpy saying to Commissioner Gordon, “but I’ve just told you all of this!”
The Bat-Man hangs around just long enough to implicate himself before fleeing the scene in a most spectacular fashion. He somersaults down to a lower level before using his batrope to swing a tremendous distance to the safety of a lower building, leaving both the police and the press suitably impressed.
It’s over in less than a page, but it’s a pretty cool sequence. Okay, so it’s hardly Superman-lifting-a-green-sedan-above-his-head-and-smashing-it-on-a-rock-levels of exciting, but in some ways it’s better. Its simplicity and plausibility is what makes it; you can almost imagine that someone could actually do it. And don’t forget, kids in 1939 hadn’t seen that dock-yard scene in Batman Begins, nor were there any parkour videos up on YouTube yet. What the Bat-Man just did was awesome.
What he’s also done is purposefully incriminate himself in the jewel thefts so that the police go after him, making the real thieves think they’ve got away with it scot-free and tricking them into letting their guard down. Not only does this plan not really make any sense, but my word is it laboured. Almost every other panel has a caption saying things like, “[the police] ‘seem’ to ‘surprise’ the ‘Bat-Man’ who ‘drops’ the bag of jewels,” (seriously with that level of punctuation – I can imagine the narrator doing sarcastically over-the-top air-quotes as he’s saying it.) And when the police decide the Bat-Man must be involved in the thefts, “this is exactly what the ‘Bat-Man’ wants them to think – we’ll see why in a moment,” followed by, a couple of panels later, “this is why the ‘Bat-Man’ wanted to be connected with the robberies…” I’m aware this is a story for kids, and any complications or twists might need to be spelled out a little, but if you need this level of hand-holding to get through a story, maybe you’re not ready for something as complicated as “detective” comics. I mean, it’s one little deception, it’s hardly Primer.
Actually, maybe we do need that bit of extra confirmation because although it makes sense on the surface, when you think about it, this plan completely falls apart. Because the gang think they’re not being watched, they plan another theft, which the Bat-Man is free to intercept. But that’s exactly the position he was in anyway, the night before, on the Vandersmith’s roof. I’m struggling to see how deceiving the police and the jewel gang has offered any advantage at all, other than wasting a day and giving him the opportunity to ponce about in the air a bit for the entertainment of the journalists at The Tribune. We’re honestly no further with the case than we were at the top of the very first page when Gimpy explained literally everything.
The Bat-Man proceeds to thwart that evening’s crime while in progress at the Nortons’, whoever they are. He leaves the two culprits unconscious, tipping off the police by phone before leaving to deal with the mastermind behind the entire raft of thefts: Frenchy Blake.
Blake is a dapper, pointy-faced gentleman with a monocle, who is somehow solely responsible for the jewel thefts, although other than saying, “let’s continue with the plan,” all of his crimes must’ve occurred off-page. Whatever his offences, the Bat-Man is sick of his shit and bursts into his apartment to beat him to a pulp. He then tortures a confession out of him in the first occurrence of what is now a very familiar battribute: dangling the suspect out of a very high window until they blab.
With the gentle persuasion of a few more right hooks to the jaw, Blake agrees to draft and sign a full confession. The Bat-Man hogties him and leaves him outside the police station along with the confession and the stolen jewelry, thus bringing the reign of Frenchy Blake’s Jewel Gang to a swift end.
It’s been and odd issue, really. When Batman’s being Batman, it’s actually pretty cool, but sadly the story isn’t as clever as it seems to think it is. Luckily these early stories are mercifully short, although it does give a nice picture of the Batman working above the law, showing that he’s not afraid to even go against the law if he needs to, to achieve what the police maybe couldn’t.
Bat Channel 