Just checked my copy of the Archives. The Detective #70 story is "The Man Who Could Read Minds", and Robin does indeed get trapped in a bathysphere. The cover is a reasonably accurate depiction (with much better art) of a scene in the comic.

I have always wanted to ask this about Batman. He has a lot of other names that he goes by in the comic books. Two of them in particular are The Dark Knight and The Caped Crusader. Can I just ask your opinion on this guys as to what is the difference in the two in terms of Batman stories. Let's say a writer is writing Batman as The Dark Knight, and another is writing Batman as The Caped Crusader. What are the difference between lets say the difference between those two kinds of stories and the difference in the Batman character in terms of lets say a writer's approach to writing the two kind of subcategory for the character of Batman. Thanks.

Artist Joe Phillips may have had a similar dream:

I just had to check

Creature From the Black Lagoon movie... 1954
Detective Comics #252... 1958

Joe thought that Rosalind was better suited for the role of Lois Lane:

Looks like Madge Blake is miffed that Barbara Billingsley gets to play Aunt Harriet.

I got Detective Comics #370 (December 1967) a few weeks ago and I meant to write it up but my computer was down for ten days and I've been pretty busy even after I got my computer running again.

I make fun of "The New Look" a lot, but as time passes, I find myself warming to a lot of the stories in Detective Comics from the late 1960s that I used to think were pretty bad. There were always a number of New Look stories that I liked for one reason or another. Like that one in Detective Comics #339 where the gorilla has a psychic link with a scientist that gives him intelligence, but he's a bad primate and he straps a bomb around his chest to blow up Gotham City and he's only defeated because Batman figures out that holding the gorilla up in the air will disarm the bomb. (I would call that a design flaw. But I guess he did OK for a gorilla!)

And Sheldon Moldoff's New Look art has also grown on me. I love Moldoff's work! This is no-frills comic book action, a bit stiff compared to Infantino or Murphy Anderson, but still fun to read!

The Batman story in Detective Comics #370 - "The Nemesis from Batman's Boyhood" - is another one that I like. It's a pretty good story. The idea is what's great! It seems that young Bruce Wayne had problems with a bully during grade school!

Bruce Wayne's life is a bit of a blank slate in the period after the murder of his parents and that famous moment when he was smoking a pipe and wearing a dinner jacket in the study and a bat crashed through his window. Yes, I know there are plenty of stories about that period of his life. He was Robin for a while. He was acquainted with Thomas Elliott, who later became Hush. He met Zatanna at a birthday party? He ran away from home and lived on the streets with Selina Kyle for one episode.

But none of these things are consistent from one version of Batman to the next. It just happened again, with Rebirth, where we have a new DC continuity (again) and who knows whether or not any of that stuff happened to this new Batman?

I would love it if a few elements of Bruce Wayne's pre-Batman existence would become a little more firmly established as canon for every version of Batman. And I think the antagonist in "The Nemesis from Batman's Boyhood" contains a good character that should be brought back in some form or another.

He's Bart Lambert, a big kid who took advantage of his larger size to do mean things to young Bruce Wayne. He tripped Bruce and beat him up when he tried to fight back. He pushed his books out of his hands! He gave him a 'Three-Six-Nine,' the ultimate disgrace in the neighborhood. (A 'Three-Six-Nine' seems to consist of numerous punches to the shoulder while chanting:

THREE-SIX-NINE!
A BOTTLE OF WINE!
I CAN LICK YOU ...
ANY OLD TIME!

Well, Bart moves away within a few years and Bruce doesn't know what happens to him. Until ...

Batman and Robin spot a shadowy figure coming out of a window on an upper story of the jewelry building. It's great. He's dressed in a purple suit and wearing a fedora. Which I find amusing. No fancy gimmicks or practical clothing for this guy! He just dresses like a gangster sent over from Warner Brothers Central Casting for a 1930s gangster movie, calls himself the Blitzkrieg Bandit and travels from city to city, never staying for more than 48 hours and stealing jewels and paintings and things.

He's a pretty tough customer. Batman and Bart Lambert get into a fistfight and Batman recognizes Lambert as the bully from his childhood! And suddenly, he's not Batman, he's eight-year-old Bruce Wayne facing his bully on the streets of Gotham ... and he freezes up! Lambert beats the snot out of him and seems in a position to finish the job when he hears sirens and decides to bug out.

What a great ides for a conflict for New Look Batman! I don't think the people who run DC would accept "Bat-God" freezing up just because he meets the schoolyard bully of his youth. But I like the idea of a bigger cast for Bruce Wayne's childhood, and Bart Lambert would fit in nicely as the big mean kid. Thomas Elliott could be the Eddie Haskell character. Linda Page (Bruce Wayne's girlfriend from the earliest stories in Detective Comics) would be the girl who really likes Bruce. Eventually he has to give her up because he's married to his mission. And maybe she guess the truth.

That's the version of Bruce Wayne's childhood going on in my head.

Anyway, getting back to Detective Comics #370, they deal with it. Because that's what New Look Batman and Robin do. There's an interesting (if not particularly complex) psychology angle to this story that makes it one of the best New Look stories I've read for a while.

There's also an Elongated Man story with art by Gil Kane and Sid Greene. It's OK. Great art. The usual Dibny shenanigans.