Detective Comics Vol 1 #33, November 1939

“Batman Wars Against The Dirigible Of Doom”

Other than Batman making his début in 1939, something else almost equally as notable occurred that year.

Although dated November, Detective Comics #33 was published on 30^th September 1939, thirty days after Germany invaded Poland and the world was plunged into war. Given that fiction tends to act as a mirror to the hopes and fears of its contemporary audience, it would seem a little odd if world affairs, which were rapidly destabilising across Europe and Africa, weren’t reflected in some way in the stories and comics of the time. In fact, I’m surprised such themes haven’t been more prevalent in the Batman tales so far. The Depression is mentioned once or twice, but there’s not really much else to date it. Maybe stories of communist creeps and unhinged dictators were starting to feel a tad old-hat twenty years after the Great War, but all that was about to change as the Second World War started to throw up its own villains that, had they appeared in a comic book, would have been too ridiculous to be believable. Admittedly the USA didn’t get directly involved for another couple of years, but I’m sure the 1930s readership would have been able to sense the general paranoia as their dads discussed what the war would do to international trade and business, and how long it would be before they were dragged in and cousins and uncles might end up being drafted.

So it’s no real surprise that this issue plays on the fears simmering over the pond in the form of a massive military threat to homeland security. That threat is a terrorist army called The Scarlet Horde. The Horde doesn’t appear to be a direct caricature of either the Nazis or the Soviets, instead taking cues here and there from contemporary and historical bad guys to give an air of general bastard-ness. Their leader, the suitably Germanic-sounding Professor Carl Kruger, is dangerously obsessed with Napoleon; he even looks like him with a bit of Göring thrown in for good measure. While the initial Red Scare following the October Revolution might have died down a little by the end of the ’30s, there’s no arguing with the hue of The Horde.

The story starts with Bruce Wayne wandering the streets of Manhattan one evening (for Manhattan read Gotham Upper West Side), when a futuristic looking airship appears over the city –a cross between a Zeppelin and a classic sci-fi finned rocket ship. Most worryingly, the airship is in a tell-tale red and gold livery. Suddenly, red rays shoot from the ship and almost immediately disintegrate every building in sight. “We come to rule the world,” a voice booms from the ship, and from that display it would certainly seem they have the means. “Thousands are dead… etc,” a blithe voice reports on the radio.

Hang on… What?

Thousands? Thousands are dead from an attack on American soil? This is massive! To put this into perspective, and I don’t mean to be irreverent here, that’s on a par with 9/11. This is now an international issue. Surely this is a job for the army. What’s the president got to say? Never touched on. This potentially world-changing event apparently falls into the jurisdiction of a single man. Not a world leader or a military officer. A vigilante. Luckily, that vigilante happens to be the goddamn Batman, but still. The police don’t even get involved. What the fuck is wrong with the America of ’30s Detective Comics?

Of course, this sort of thing is always going to land in the Batman’s lap, but we’re not even shown the government or army trying and failing. There is no other authority shown at all in the story. After six months in the job, the Batman seems to be the sole protector of the entire United States.

It seems Wayne realises this and, after lending a hand to rescue a few survivors from the rubble, heads home to find out more about who could be responsible for the attack, and how they’d managed to form an entire army on home soil without even slightly raising the suspicions of anyone at all in the US Intelligence Community. Once home, he opens a hidden panel in a wall to reveal a secret lab. Not quite the Batcave yet, but we’re getting there. He checks his file, where he finds a newspaper clipping: “Prof. Carl Kruger released from insane asylum. Suffered from Napoleon Complex. Now working on new type death-ray.” For fuck’s sake, where do I start?

For one, imagine having such a bad Napoleon Complex that you get sectioned for it. I don’t think there’s really such a thing as Napoleon Complex anyway, it’s just something you say to wind up a short person if they’re already wound up. That doesn’t matter, though, because the writers don’t seem to know what it means anyway. What’s wrong with this guy is that he’s obsessed with Napoleon to the point that sometimes he thinks he is him and starts massacring. I’m no psychologist, but I think that’s probably some kind of severe psychosis. But yeah, we’ll go with the pseudo-scientific term that’s usually used as a punchline.

Not only that, but he’s “now working on a death-ray”. A man with a history of violent mental illness is developing something he calls a “death-ray”. He has enough success with it that the papers think it noteworthy enough to report on, yet the authorities do nothing. No wonder the FBI daren’t show their faces when he starts razing downtown Manhattan.

Using his bat-intuition, Batman just knows that this Kruger guy is responsible for the attack, suits up, grabs his silk rope and shoots off to pay him a visit in his car, which is starting to look more and more like a Mk I Batmobile.

He arrives at Kruger’s home and makes an entrance through the only window with a light on. Inside, Kruger is promoting three of his mad scientist mates to lieutenants and unveiling his plans to attack again, then, during the panic, loot the banks to fund the building of more death-ray-carrying dirigibles. (It’s also worth noting that Kruger is no longer a professor and is now a doctor, in a classic bit of Bob Kane inconsistency.) As soon as the new lieutenants have left, the Batman pounces and tries to take Kruger out with his batarang. Unfortunately, Kruger is prepared. He’s actually protected by a thick sheet of glass, (Batmen can’t see glass,) and while Batman is busy being confounded by this, he’s knocked out by a man who was hiding in a painting of Napoleon, of course.

Batman is securely bound, and Kruger’s bat-shit plan is to blow up his own house so that the torpid authorities would find the Batman’s remains and think Kruger dead. Fairly unnecessary, but it adds a bit of excitement as the Batman uses a blade hidden in his boot to miraculously escape at the last minute. Perhaps wisely, the Batman calls it a night.

The following evening, Batman pays a visit to Ryder, one of the new lieutenants. How he found him is anyone’s guess, but it’s Batman, yeah? He’s a detective. Suck it up. Anyway, he’s here to try a trick which worked on one of Dr. Death’s goons a few issues ago, namely confuse the hell out of them in the middle of the night, disappear, then hope that they lead you to their secret hideout. Incredibly, it works a second time. While Ryder is making a witless dash for the dirigible’s secret hanger, the Batman discreetly tails him in the Batgyro, which has a cool new feature: it can shroud itself in a plume of black smoke, keeping it hidden from onlookers on the ground.

A second lieutenant, Bixley, is overseeing the installation of some van-mounted death-rays as the Batman gasses him and a couple of guards, and sneaks into the base. He destroys a couple of the death-rays with his trusty batgun, (which is just a gun actually. Even though this is after the inception of the parents-are-dead origin story, the Batman still seems to have no particular aversion to guns. In fact the bat-suit even seems to have a holster incorporated into it in some panels of this strip). He then sets about the dirigible with a fucking axe, of all things. Doubtless amused at the sight of the Batman trying to twat up an 800-foot Zeppelin with a fire axe, Kruger sneaks up on him and shoots him in the back. Once again we are reminded that ’30s Batman perhaps isn’t the seasoned tactical genius we’re familiar with.

Leaving the body with a guard, Kruger fetches a portable death-ray and zaps the Batman into a tiny pile of ash. The Batman is dead, the reader an inconsolable ruin. For a panel or two. Then the Batman is alive again! He was wearing a bulletproof vest, overpowered the guard while Kruger was gone, and switched clothes! And other such contrivances! Dry your eyes, it’s just some feckless mook that’s lost his life!

The Batman returns home and, after briefly tending his wounds, spends the rest of the night in his lab mucking about with test tubes. I’m not sure what he’s basing his experiments on—Kruger was wittering on about gamma rays and ozone earlier, which he may have overheard before he made his escape—but in a matter of hours he perfects a “mysterious chemical” that seems to nullify the effects of Kruger’s death-ray. He sprays the chemical all over the Batgyro. We established Wayne was a master scientist, didn’t we? Good, that means that we can just accept that this chemical will definitely work, no matter what, even though he’s had no means to test it.

The next day the deadly dirigible appears over the city again, apparently unscathed by the Batman’s best efforts with the fire axe. As you might expect, everybody loses their shit, but the Batman is on his way. The chemical seems to work perfectly as the Batgyro comfortably deflects the death-ray.

Ejecting at the last minute, he crashes the Batgyro into the dirigble, easily destroying both completely, and once again highlighting the incompetence of the armed forces and their inability to act on the issue.

Just before the crash, Kruger escapes in a biplane catapulted from the dirigible. Batman ditches his parachute mid-air and bat-ropes the plane. He climbs onto the wing and throws a glass pellet into the cockpit (no mean feat, considering they’re travelling through the air at over a hundred miles an hour) which shatters, gassing Kruger, who is at the controls, and causing the plane to crash into the river.

Somehow, the Batman survives, but Kruger doesn’t and his dead body is later dragged from the water. That blasé voice is on the radio again, this time announcing the capture of the entire Scarlet Horde. There were 2,000 of them! Are we to believe that with the death of Kruger they just gave up? I’m not even sure if they had any sort of ideology that they’d cling on to, as the whole thing was fairly undelineated. In fact, I feel this story’s reach far exceeded its grasp. The scope of the plot was so huge that a lot had to be glossed over, or simply left as gaping plot holes to fit it in a single issue. In fact, I sort of feel like the opening gambit of killing several thousand innocent people, only to have the catastrophe never spoken of again, is a sort of metaphor for the preposterousness of the whole thing; the implied severity but ultimately superficial handling of the story.

It could have made a good two- or three-parter—it arguably had more substance than the previous two-parter—and that bit where you were supposed to think the Batman had been vaporised would have even made a nice cheesy cliffhanger. The story was another Gardner Fox oeuvre and, once again, it didn’t quite have the time or effort put into it to translate a reasonable idea into a properly good read.