Detective Comics Vol 1 #31, September 1939
“Batman Versus The Vampire, Part 1”
Detective Comics Vol 1 #32, October 1939
“Batman Versus The Vampire, Part 2”

I’ve always liked the idea of Batman as a realistic superhero. There’s a certain pragmatism to his world. He has no superpowers; he’s strong because he trains. His opponents aren’t gods or alien cyborgs, they’re usually just sociopaths with questionable dress sense. Rather than answering to a glowing green spectral shark in the centre of the universe, he’s friends with the police commissioner.

On the other hand, technically he does exist in the same universe as Superman and the Green Lantern, and yes, later in his career he’ll be teaming up with an immortal Amazon and the king of Atlantis to do battle with parademons from between dimensions. But, where we are in September 1939, the strangest thing to happen to the Batman so far was when Doctor Death’s face came off. However, in this week’s story, as the title might suggest, a little bit of weird is about to enter the Batman’s domain.

We join Batman as he’s flouncing around the city skies, looking for trouble to extinguish. He spots a man calling for help and swoops in to lasso him away from danger. The man was being attacked by, of all people, Bruce Wayne’s fiancée. He kept that quiet, didn’t he? She’s called Julie Madison and appears to have been under the influence of some weird trance, but the Batman snaps her out of it.

We don’t know enough about the Bruce Wayne/Batman character yet to be able to tell the nature of the relationship. Is Bruce Wayne truly in love with this woman and if so, what are his plans to conciliate this with his life as the Batman? Or is it assumed that a wealthy young socialite would naturally be engaged to a beautiful young woman, so as part of his cover the Batman is coldly stringing her along, doing, as he sees it, what is necessary to protect his identity? Julie becomes a recurring character for a few issues so, while I can’t imagine this will be dealt with in any depth, I hope it will be at least mentioned, rather than disregarded as immaterial.

 

Julie also appears to be suffering from Lois Lane syndrome. The Batman knows her name, address, the name of her fiancé, and even drives her home in her fiancé’s car. He’s the same height, build, presumably wears the same eau de toilette. “But… Won’t you tell me who you are?” We’ll go easy on her; she’s had a rough night.

 

The following morning, she tells her fantastical tale to Bruce, who takes her to the doctor. The doctor is completely out of his gourd and recommends as a cure “an ocean voyage to Paris… and perhaps, later, to Hungary – the land of history and werewolves”.

“Oh, okay. That seems completely fucking reasonable, doctor,” thinks Julie, and off she fucks to France. Luckily, Bruce is a bit more rational and, believing that both his fiancée and maybe the doctor too had been hypnotised, decides he better follow her as the Batman. In order to do so, he needs two of his latest gadgets, and both are quite remarkable for different reasons.

First, a flying machine. It seems fairly logical that Batman would need some sort of aircraft, particularly for jobs outside the city limits. These days, we’re familiar with the streamlined, silent Batwing, but the Batman of Detective Comics #31 is operating in an era when even the helicopter was in its infancy.

Hence we have the Batgyro, based on the autogyros of the ’30s, which were like early helicopters, but kept aloft by unpowered rotors. The autogyro wasn’t necessarily the cutting edge of aviation in 1939, as both jet engines and helicopters were just about to become the next big thing, but it does make some sense as the aerial transport of choice for the budding Batman. It’s small, manoeuvrable and relatively unobtrusive, compared to contemporary aircraft at least.

It’s also capable of vertical take-off and landing, something else that would have been quite leading-edge at the time, meaning the Batman can operate it directly out of a secret hangar without requiring an entire airfield. It looks a bit archaic in certain panels, but when it’s casting its bat-shaped shadow across terrified onlookers, it’s actually pretty phenomenal.

His second new toy is something a bit more enduring than the Batgyro. In fact, as bat-gadgets go, this one is up there with the Batrope and the Batmobile: the Batarang. (It’s spelled Baterang at this early stage, but I’m immediately retconning it to the more familiar spelling.)

This early version is larger and less stylised than modern Batarangs, and more closely modelled on a standard aboriginal boomerang, although it does have a charming bat-wing motif on the inner edge. I’m not sure how familiar ’30s children would be with the idea of a boomerang – it’s hard to picture a world before Crocodile Dundee – but I remember I was amazed at the idea when I first got a toy one as a kid. Maybe Wayne lived in the outback for a while to learn tracking and survival while he was travelling the world as a young adult.

Batman takes to the sky in the Batgyro, scaring the ever-loving shit out of absolutely everyone who sees it, and flies out to sea to catch up with Julie, who’s on an ocean liner halfway to her ever-so relaxing convalescence in the land of werewolves. On approaching the ship, Batman sets the autopilot to hover overhead. At first, I thought this was a bit far-fetched for 1939, but while this wouldn’t have been a complicated computerised system capable of course adjustments and the like, gyroscopic autopilots did exist in the ’30s that would have been able to keep the Batgyro’s heading and altitude stable.

He finds Julie, but while she’s trying to explain what on earth has possessed her to go in search of werewolves across the ocean, this creepy dude with claws and his face covered by a red hood shows up and seems to transfix the Batman using some weird hoodoo. Being made of more resolute stuff than your average victim, the Batman has the strength of will to chuck the Batarang at the stranger, breaking his concentration long enough to escape his trance. He hurriedly returns to the Batgyro by rope ladder, little gained from his time on the liner.

The Batman follows the ship to France and, being the world’s greatest detective, manages to completely lose both Julie and the hooded stranger somewhere between the port and city. He then spends some time peering through café windows and pointlessly scaring the bejesus out of Parisian taxi drivers in what is the diminutive ‘detective’ segment of this detective comic. The narrative captions helpfully tell us, “The search begins… The trail leads everywhere,” but that’s all we’re getting for detective interest this issue.

He eventually finds Julie, somewhere. It’s not revealed where, but she’s guarded by an abnormally large gorilla. The Batman is as surprised as we are and falls into a trap where he is caught in a net. That spooky guy from the boat turns up and introduces himself as “The Monk.” He calls the Batman a mortal – an insult usually only used by those that don’t consider themselves mortal – and lowers him into a pit.

The next part of the story is so absurd and occurs so quickly, it almost feels like a six-year-old is telling it: “And then there were snakes but he escaped and then some metal bars came out of the wall but he got past and then, and then there was a huge gorilla! But he threw the Batarang at a guard and got away.”

The Monk falls into the perennial supervillain cliché of announcing his masterplan before escaping: he has tricked Julie into going to Hungary to feed her to his werewolves. Well, that’s a bit shit. As flapdoodle plots go, this one takes the biscuit. Why not just feed your wolves a local? Why travel halfway around the planet to kidnap some lass who just so happens to be engaged to the world’s number one vigilante crimefighter? We’ll grit our teeth, pretend that Hungarian werewolves can only digest New World debutantes and press on.

The Batman rushes to stop Julie. He’s left the Batgyro idling overhead. He jumps in, picks a car that’s heading roughly in the general direction of Hungary and follows it. In an exciting but reckless stunt, the Batman descends onto the roof of the car from the Batgyro’s rope ladder, and gasses everyone inside causing them to crash. Providentially, this is the car Julie’s in. He grabs her and takes her back to the safety of the Batgyro. Damsel no longer in distress, that’s the end of the Batman’s adventure for this issue, but this is the Batman’s first two-parter proper, so the search for the Monk continues uninterrupted in Detective Comics #32.

By now, the Batman has reached Hungary. He spots a horse-drawn carriage and, seemingly on nothing more than a whim, assaults the driver and kidnaps the passenger, taking her back to a hotel where he’s left Julie. The abductee is called Dala and for some reason is okay with this. We can assume that the Batman had some reason for suspecting the occupant of the carriage might have been the Monk or someone affiliated, but it’s annoying and lazy that it’s not even touched upon. For all we know, she’s just some random Hungarian lady. But she’s not. She’s a vampire and attacks Julie in the night. The Batman apprehends her and she professes she is a servant of the Monk, but she is afraid of him and will lead the Batman to him if he will kill him. They ditch Julie in the hotel, who I assume doesn’t have much blood left anyway, and head for the Monk’s stronghold by the River Dess in the Carlathan mountains. (These are fictitious places, but the Carpathians stretch into Hungary, so I imagine there’s some basis for the name there.)

It turns out Dala’s led the Batman right into the Monk’s clutches. He wizards the Batgyro out of the sky using a magic net or some daft shit. I could just about get on board with a bit of remote hypnotism and psychic powers. I let the twelve-foot gorilla slide. But with the likes of vampires and magic traps starting to come thick and fast, it’s beginning to get a bit exhausting.

Using his magic brain thing, the Monk freezes the Batman in a trance then hypnotises Julie from a distance, compelling her to come to him. “Soon your Julie will be as we are – werewolves!” threatens the Monk, forgetting for a moment that he’s a vampire. Then, as if to prove a point, he transforms into a wolf to call the wild wolves down from the mountain to tear the Batman apart. The Batman is pushed into the wolves’ pit. This is my favourite bit of the whole story: as he’s falling, he tries to stop himself by using the Batrope, but misses. I don’t know why, but I just feel like it’s a really nice touch. To be fair, it’s the first believable thing to have happened in pages.

In the wolves’ den, the Batman has a torrid time. He’s almost used up all his gas pellets keeping the wolves at bay, when he has the brainwave of tying the Batrope to the Batarang to latch it around a stone pillar. He’s otherwise unguarded, so slips out of the pit unnoticed. The Monk and Dala have decided they’re vampires again and are sleeping, as is their wont, in coffins. Everybody knows that only silver bullets may kill vampires, so the Batman jury-rigs a couple by melting down a silver statue he’s found. (He uses a candle, which I don’t think would be hot enough, but given the brainlessness of the rest of the plot, this is the least of our worries.) Of course, the Batman carries a gun and shoots the two vampires in their sleep. Because that’s what the Batman does. He kills people with guns.

With The Monk and Dala dead, Julie is free of her curse and she and the Batman head home in the Batgryo. (Just a thought – but a transatlantic flight in an autogyro is going to be long, uncomfortable and noisy. New York is 4,350 miles from Budapest, so even in the world’s fastest autogyro, that’s a 30-hour journey with no toilet breaks or buffet car.)

I can’t help but think, thank god that’s over. The Monk is an alright character; Batman stories should have a bit of weird darkness to them. The spooky bits are occasionally legitimately creepy, if not all that scary, but too little of it makes sense. The story is one tedious contrivance after another. The nonsense about magic and vampires and werewolves almost has me longing for the good old days of white-collar crime and jewel thieves. The Mad Monk’s motive is never revealed, nor the significance of his interest in Julie.

This is another tale by Gardner Fox, and it’s not been his greatest moment. The Monk never really lived up to his potential, but we’ll hear from him again at some point down the line in various reboots and re-tellings. All is not lost: Fox has given us the Batplane, which is ace, and the Batarang, which will appear in nearly every Batman story from now on.

Not only that, but a villain with actual superpowers has been added to the mix, so that’s going to change everything in the Batman’s world for ever.