Detective Comics #29 and #30: Doctor Death

Detective Comics Vol 1 #29, July 1939
“The Batman Meets Doctor Death”
Detective Comics Vol 1 #30, August 1939
“The Return Of Doctor Death”

3-1 — *Doctor Death has been taking pointy-faced arch-criminal styling tips from Frenchy Blake, by the look of it.*

What makes a villain a Supervillain? It’s not necessarily “super powers” per se; neither Joker, Riddler nor Penguin have super-speed or x-ray vision or the like, but there’s something that elevates them above the usual thugs and crime bosses. A physical deformity here and there, or a penchant for dressing up perhaps, almost certainly some sort of severe mental health issues. Maybe Supervillain isn’t the best word exactly, but Batman’s adversary in this issue is definitely one step up from the bounders in three piece suits he’s been pushing into vats of acid for the past couple of months. Enter Doctor Death!

The story takes very little time getting going, opening with a Doctor Hellfern explaining to his servant Jabah that he has perfected a poison he was working on and intends to use it to exact tribute from the rich. Or at least he would if it wasn’t for that darn Bat Man. (The hyphen in Bat Man is now absent everywhere except for in the header panel.) He decides to set a trap for the Bat Man and arranges to meet him via an ad in the daily newspapers.

3-2 — *“Have you a letter addressed to John Jones?”*
*“Yes. Do you have any ID?”*
*“No, because I am not John Jones.”*
*“Oh.”*
*THE END*

The notice tells the Bat Man to go to the post office and ask for a letter addressed to “John Jones”. This falls a bit flat for me. Firstly, he’d have to put a notice in every local paper, because he doesn’t know which one the Bat Man reads. Then he’d have to hope that only the Bat Man saw any of the notices, otherwise you’d have crowds of reporters and curious public turning up claiming to be John Jones. Later, the Bat Man uses the same method to send a message back to Hellfern. Surely the public notice column isn’t free, so how does that work? “I am the Bat Man” – paid for by Bruce Wayne. It wouldn’t take the World’s Greatest Detective to follow that trail of breadcrumbs. Anyway, we’ll suspend disbelief briefly on this subject in the interests of getting on with the story.

The subject of the letter is perfect bat-bait: I’m going to kill a man at 10pm tonight at the following address, and what are you gonna do about it? Well, he’s going to do what any self-respecting vigilante superhero would, get suited and booted and head out to kick some ass. There’s a brief sequence where Bat Man decides what gadgets he might need – this time gas pellets and climbing gear, which is pretty cool to see. The Batcave hasn’t been invented yet so he does all this out of a trunk in his house somewhere, and shoots off in the Batmobile, which hasn’t been invented yet, either.

3-3 — *No Batmobile yet – Batman’s still running around town in Bruce Wayne’s little red coupé.*

Arriving at the given address, the Bat Man climbs the outside of the building using some pretty nifty suction pads, (quote – “like a bat,” in case there was any lingering doubt.) He arrives at a penthouse, penthouses swiftly becoming the natural habitat of the Bat Man, where he is startled by two armed thugs shining a bright light in his face. Of course, they hadn’t counted on the fact this is the goddamn Bat Man and he swiftly gets the upper hand by knocking them over and grabbing their guns. He then proceeds to lose his cool in a most un-Batmanlike way, waving the gun at them and threatening to kill them.

: It’s never explained why Dr. Death wants the body inside, to make it look like self-defence perhaps?

Luckily for the gunmen, because they’ve made a right pig’s ear of this set-up, Jabah turns up to sort out their mess and shoots the Bat Man before he can carry out his threats. “Doctor Death sends his greetings,” he tells him. Clue that Hellfern is a “supervillain” #1: he has chosen himself an alias, specifically one that’s supposed to be badass, but is actually a bit dorky. Presumably xXx_DoCt0r_De4tH_420_xXx was already taken.

The Bat Man manages to chuck some gas-filled pellets at Jabah and, despite having a bullet lodged in his shoulder, leaps from the window, swings from a rope, climbs down from the penthouse using the suction pads, gets changed in his car and even places an ad in the Daily Globe biting his thumb at

3-5 — *The world’s richest man has been shot under very suspicious circumstances, but your doctor here couldn’t give a tapdancing fuck.*

Doctor Death, all before even acknowledging that his shoulder maybe aches a bit. The Bat Man is fucking brick hard.

Doctor Death is furious when he finds outs that his useless henchmen have collectively dropped all their bollocks, and displaying a huge lapse in judgement decides to proceed with his extortion scheme despite the fact that the Bat Man is still at large. A man called Van Smith has refused to pay tribute and is therefore for it. Jabah is sent on his way with the deadly toxicant. In the mother of all coincidences, in a city of seven million Jabah just so happens to pass Bruce Wayne on his way to the hit. Being the only person of colour in Gotham, Jabah is instantly recognisable to Wayne as his attacker from the night before and follows him*. He witnesses the attack from a distance. Jabah administers the poison using some sort of blow pipe. It’s a passable way of silently targeting a victim in a public place, but as Jabah leaves, Wayne, still in his civvies, rushes over to Van Smith and prevents him from breathing in the toxin. Once he’s safe, Wayne trails Jabah back to Doctor Death’s house. (House! Shouldn’t a supervillain have a “lair”?)

That night the Bat Man breaks in to the house where Doctor Death and Jabah are fannying on with some sort of chemistry in the lab. Silently from the shadows the Bat Man throttles Jabah with a lasso and gives chase to Doctor Death. Finally cornered, Doctor Death grabs something explosive in a test tube but before he can throw it the Bat Man throws a fire extinguisher at him, ironically resulting in the whole place going up in flames.

3-7 — *“Is it death to this arch-criminal?”*
*Probably not, otherwise you wouldn’t be asking.*

The story in “The Batman Meets Doctor Death” is certainly less detective-y than we’ve been given so far. There’s no real mystery and the Bat Man brings “justice” based on no evidence other than his own eyewitness account, but the whole thing is deliberately more action packed and even approaches exciting in places. This is probably due in part to a change in authorship. Whilst the first two stories were written by Batman co-creator Bill Finger, this one was penned by Gardner Fox, a DC employee who had been writing for both Detective and Action Comics. Although the concept of a superhero (or supervillain, for that matter) was very much in its infancy, Fox swings the Bat Man away from the hardboiled stories he shares the pages of Detective Comics with and well and truly into the realms of pulp.

3-8 — *The Depression has hit Gotham’s gentry hard, and they are reduced to collecting diamonds like damn dirty peasants.*

Both Fox and Doctor Death return for the story in Detective Comics #30, which takes place one week after the events of “The Batman Meets Doctor Death”. Despite seeing Doctor Death burn in the laboratory fire, Bruce Wayne is convinced that the M.O. of a recent murder feels all too familiar. Posing as a reporter, he heads out to see the deceased’s widow. It appears his fears were well-founded as the widow, Mrs Jones, reveals that Doctor Death was blackmailing her husband, seemingly from beyond the grave. She also lets on that she has a load of her husband’s diamonds that they weren’t willing to pawn to pay for the blackmail, but now her husband’s gone, she’s going to need the money. Wayne assumes that Doctor Death would be aware of the diamonds and would likely come for them. At night he secretly returns to the Jones’ to lie in wait for him as the Bat Man. For no given reason he decides to open the safe, and similarly unexplained, he appears to know the exact combination.

3-9 — *Bob Kane’s artwork seems to be really improving in this issue…*

Meanwhile, Doctor Death is revealed to have survived, although covered in bandages. As the Bat Man suspected, he’s penniless and needs Jones’ diamonds to re-establish himself as shithead-in-chief of Gotham. He sends out his latest servant, Mikhail, to go purloin them.

Mikhail turns up at the Jones’ where Mrs Jones is wandering around in the middle of the night. The Bat Man has to knock him out to prevent him from shooting her and conveniently, she faints. Realising that Mikhail would be able to lead him back to Doctor Death, the Bat Man plants the diamonds on him and leaves him to come around in the garden. With all the cognitive prowess of a cartoon villain, Mikhail wakes up, basically says, “Gee, who turned out the lights?” and carries on like the goddamn Bat Man never happened. The Bat Man follows him to a pawn shop which Doctor Death is using as a front to launder his blackmail money then on to a grubby apartment.

3-10 — *Yeah, ‘cos Indians and cossacks are the same thing, you racist twat.*

The Bat Man breaks in through a sky light to look around, and when his gas pellets fail to keep Mikhail unconscious, the Bat Man responds very reasonably by snapping his neck. The death penalty for burglary without trial is fair enough, right?

Other than first-degree murder, the Bat Man’s search of Mikhail’s apartment proves fruitless, so he returns to the pawn shop to grill it’s owner, some Geppetto-looking geezer called Herd. Only it’s not Herd, it’s Doctor Death in a wig and when he makes a break for it the Bat Man lassos him, knocking off his disguise. Doctor Death’s face is revealed as a badly burnt, nose-less mess. He blames the Bat Man for the fire and vows revenge as he gets hogtied and left for the police. The cops show up, the Bat Man having tipped them off earlier, and find the bound Doctor Death, the missing diamonds and the usual Bat-note explaining everything. But the Bat Man has done his disappearing act again.

3-11 — *Don’t act so surprised, Bats. You were there.*

The reveal of his disfigured face in the penultimate panel along with a crazed, “this is your fault, I’ll have my revenge!” feels a lot like an origin story, but strangely that’s pretty much the last we see of Doctor Death. He doesn’t reappear in the comics for another 40-odd years, and even that’s something of a reboot. But Doctor Death is not without a legacy. As the initial entry in Batman’s Rogue’s Gallery he’s an almost perfect textbook example. A crazed scientist, (how many of Batman’s foes are deranged scientists?) a maniacal disregard for his own health, (very Joker-y,) airborne toxins, (Scarecrow, Joker, Poison Ivy et al,) seemingly returning from the dead, (almost every comic-book character ever,) grotesque facial disfigurement, (an image we’ll get used to with the likes of Two-Face and Black Mask,) it’s all here.

It also establishes the Bat Man as a force to be dealt with. Previous workaday villains’ plots were foiled when some anonymous freak in a bat costume turned up; the Supervillain recognises the bat-freak as a threat that must be neutralised before chaos can reign supreme. With the normal criminals running scared, it takes a special kind of monster to step up and face someone like the Bat Man. The Supervillains are on their way.
___

* Okay, so it’s not been identified as Gotham yet. The DC wiki lists these stories as taking place in New York (!) up until the release of Batman #4 in 1940. I’ll be intrigued to see if the location is mentioned at all in the issues prior to that.

Detective Comics #28: “Frenchy Blake’s Jewel Gang”

Detective Comics Vol 1 #28, June 1939
“Frenchy Blake’s Jewel Gang”

2_1 — *“There’s not going to be room on this header for my full name. What’s that thing that everyone calls me for short? Robt?” – Bob Kane, presumably.*

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!

2-2 — *Wuxtry! Wuxtry! Very first panel sends blogger straight to dictionary for ’30s slang! Wuxtry!*

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.

2-6 — *Interestingly, it seems the Bat-Man doesn’t refer to himself as such just yet, preferring to sign his name using just a symbol, much like his idol, Prince.*

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.

Detective Comics #27: “The Case Of The Chemical Syndicate”

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.

*An example of some actual detective work by Buck Marshall – Range Detective.*

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

Cosmo, The Phantom Of Disguise — *I’ve no idea what they’re saying, I don’t speak Mandarin.*

“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.

Ruthless Bat-Man — *The Bat-Man’s respect for the sanctity of all human life apparently comes later, with the ears.*

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!