I read a few Golden Age Batman stories online over the last week or so. I already mentioned "The Case of the Practical Joker" from Detective #91.

I read all the stories in Detective Comics #171. In addition to the Batman vs Penguin story, there was also Impossible But True (Roy Raymond), Robotman and Pow Wow Smith!



I only read the Catwoman story in Batman #84, but I'm planning on reading the rest tonight.

I didn't mean to get to Detective Comics #500 quite so fast! But it was pretty easy on a not-particularly busy Saturday to read #498 this morning and then #499 in the afternoon, and then I read the first story in Detective Comics #500. (It's quite a package. Aparo, Giordano, Infantino, I don't know who all. Also, a text story by Shadow-scribe Walter Gibson!)

#498 and #499 feature a two-parter with Blockbuster. And I guess the big lug is growing on me because I really liked this story, in contrast to how I felt about it when I read it for the first time five or six years ago when I was fairly indifferent. Since then, I've read all of Blockbusters Silver Age stories, and the story here actually moves the character forward a little as he has somehow wandered to a West Virginia mining town and made friends with the miners, and there's a local crooked union guy and two competing factions and it gets TV coverage and Batman sees Blockbuster on TV and goes to W.V. to see what's going on. A nice change of pace for Blockbuster.

These two issues also feature the last two parts of the "Batgirl ... Murderer!" storyline, and I like it as much as ever.

I'll probably read the rest of Detective Comics #500 when I get home from work later tonight.

After I read Detective Comics #510, I decided to read Batman #339 to #344 before going on because I'm very close to the point where the continuity in the main Batman books runs directly from the Batman comic right into Detective Comics. (I think it starts in Batman #345 which then flows directly into Detective Comics #512, and this very tight continuity between the two books goes on for several years, up to about Detective Comics #565 or so and Batman #400.)

The continuity in the two books is already much tighter than it used to be because there are several developing subplots that are each given a little attention (even if it's sometimes only a couple of word balloons) in just about every issue. These subjects include, but are not necessarily limited to: Poison Ivy's hostile takeover of the Wayne Foundation's assets, the upcoming election for the mayor of Gotham City between Arthur Reeves (anti-Batman) and Hamilton Hill (anti-Gordon), a mysterious figure from the past showing up and giving Reeves a packet to influence the election, the departure of Selina Kyle from these pages (for a while), and the return of Vicki Vale.

I then went ahead and read Detective Comics #511 (which tied up most of the loose ends not already tied up).

So that's where I am. But I don't really want to talk about the series as a whole right now. I want to talk about Poison Ivy.

I'm wondering when Poison Ivy became one of the top malefactors in Batman rogues gallery. Oh yes, she's hugely popular today (and perhaps suffering a bit from overexposure at times), but I don't remember her being such a big deal in the late 1970s.

Probably my first exposure to Poison Ivy was her small role in the infamous "Where Were You the Night Batman Was Killed?" storyline in Batman #291 to #294. She was one of the members of the jury.

Catwoman, the Riddler, Lex Luthor and the Joker were the "defendants." Ra's al Ghul was the judge. Two-Face was the "prosecutor." (Not really.)

And serving on the jury with Poison Ivy were Mr. Freeze (who's much more popular today then he was in the 1970s), the Scarecrow, the Mad Hatter, the Spook, and the Signalman.

It's kind of an odd mixture of almost A-listers (Scarecrow, Mr. Freeze) a pretty solid B-lister (the Mad Hatter) and then the Spook and then ... Signalman!

Re-reading the Poison Ivy storyline in Batman comics from early 1981 and late 1982 made me kind of curious about Poison Ivy's trajectory as a major fixture in the Batman rogues gallery. I got to looking around on the Internet and was surprised at how few adventures she'd had as strictly a Batman villainess. She'd been around for 15 years in 1982 and has appeared about 20 times, but it's interesting (to me anyway) that she made so many appearances outside of Batman and Detective, in several issues of JLA, in the Secret Society, in the Rose and Thorn backup in the Lois Lane comic book, even fighting Wonder Woman in World's Finest during the Dollar Comics days.

(And pretty much the only issue where I had seen Poison Ivy (aside from being on the jury in Batman #291 to #294) before I started reading the Batman books regularly in 1982 was her appearance in the DC Special where she joined up with an offshoot of the Secret Society of Super-Villains (Grodd, Bizarro, the Angle Man and Sinestro) to get revenge on their respective super-hero foes. It would have been GREAT to see her as a regular member in the regular SSOSV series.)

Her plot against the Wayne Foundation in Batman #339 to #344 is very intriguing and well-planned, and I think she would have pulled it off except for the unforeseen little detail that Bruce Wayne is Batman!

That Gene Colan/Klaus Janson art in the conclusion is sweet!

I have read Batman #181 and #183 and I've read the Poison Ivy appearance in the Rose and Thorn backup, but I haven't read very many of her other 1970s appearances. I'm wondering if the ambitious scheme in Batman #339 to #344 marks a major departure in the way Poison Ivy operates. I'll certainly be taking a close look at her future appearances as I read through the next 400 (and more) issues of Detective Comics. The next important Poison Ivy arc that I remember is not that far away, during the Doug Moench era, in Batman #367 and Detective Comics #534.

I forgot to mention that writer Conway was revamping and remodeling some of the storylines from the Batman stories in the early issues of Detective Comics. It was one of the things I thought was pretty cool about those 1982 issues. I had seen a reprint of the Monk story in Detective #30 and #31 (Is it in Batman from the 30s to the 70s?) and I knew about some of the other stories (like Dr. Death) because of Michael Fleischer's Batman Encyclopedia.

So I remember being at the drug store and looking at the spinner rack and thinking about expanding my reading a bit and I decided to see what was going on in the latest issue of Batman. And I saw Dr. Death on the cover of #345 and I remember thinking "Oh yeah! That's cool! That's the guy who had those bodyguards that Batman killed by snapping their necks or strangling them!" (Which doesn't happen in the 1982 version.)

And then it was continued in Detective Comics #512 and I had to but that two weeks later.

I didn't know until years later that this was the first time that the continuity in the Batman books was so tight that a cliffhanger in Batman would flow right into Detective. Before Batman #345, they were tightening up the continuity a bit by mentioning most of the subplots in every issue, but whatever cliffhangers there were would be wrapped up in the next issue of the comic where they had started.

Batman #345 was a really good place to start, but I wouldn't know that for years and years.

I just read Detective Comics #514 this afternoon. It's the one titled "Haven" and Batman is chasing Maxie Zeus and they crash in the snow.

This is one of the issues I missed in the 1980s. I didn't read it until just a few years ago and it's pretty good! Very possibly the best Maxie Zeus story.

And in the Batgirl back-up, Babs meets a lady who turns into a snake!  

I'm up to Detective Comics #516 and I read the Batman story in Batman #350 but not the Catwoman back-up. Batman went to Hollywood to bust up a Crime Academy. Robin is stalking a beautiful woman who turns out to be a vampire! Alfred has hired Christopher Chance, the Human Target, to foil Vicki Vale's latest scheme to prove that Bruce Wayne is Batman. (I get why so many people hate Vicki, but she's grown on me over the years. I love it when she shows up at random in those Jack Schiff era Batman comics of the early 1960s.) Vicki's editor, it turns out, is a tool of Boss Thorne. Jim Gordon has been forced to resign as police commissioner but Jason Bard has taken him on as a partner in his private detective agency. (I guess Man-Bat didn't work out so well.) Catwoman has her own backup in the Batman series with very nice Trevor von Eeden art. Batgirl just got turned into a giant snake lady. (If I was writing Batgirl I would bring back Lady Viper SO FAST!)

Yeah. This run is awesome! And lots of nice Ross Andru covers on both series lately!

I'm getting ahead of myself because I still haven't written very much about Two-Face, but I have a few things to do today and a limited amount of time to do them in, so I'll just post the covers of all the comic books I had read with Two-Face in them at the time that I read the two-parter in Batman #346 and Detective Comics #513. And hopefully I can get to my Two-Face essay later in the week.



This is probably the first time I ever saw Two-Face. It reprints a Batman comic strip from the 1940s that is a pretty faithful re-telling of Two-Face's origin. Not a bad place to start.





Wow, did I love The Brave and the Bold the first year I was collecting comics or what! This two-parter is SO MUCH FUN! And probably the first comic I ever read where I actually liked Green Arrow or the Atom.



I thought this comic was SO COOL! It's probably the first comic book I ever read where I liked Green Lantern.



I had seen the Joker's Daughter in Batman Family, so I had to buy Teen Titans - just this once! - to find out what she was up to. Duela Dent is a very powerful reminder of how weird the DC Universe was in the late 1970s.

And of course, I saw Two-Face in the "Where Were You the Night Batman Was Killed?" storyline.

So the storyline in Batman #346 and Detective #513 was the first time I saw Batman vs. Two-Face in a story that wasn't an ancient reprint or a whacked-out tale of the Haneyverse. 

I've been talking about this Two-Face essay for a few days, and I am kind of busy again today, so I decided to just write it in installments. It's nothing fancy, just a few paragraphs on the career of Two-Face. Today, I tackle the Golden Age Two-Face.

Harvey Kent (later changed to Dent) was Gotham's crusading district attorney, who was disfigured in court by one of Gotham's generic gangster leaders, Boss Moroni. Acid was hurled at Dent's face and turned half his face and one of his hands to green. The disfigurement unhinged his mind and he became Two-Face, a colorful Gotham crime boss with an obsession with the number "two" and a stubborn reliance on a two-headed coin that he flipped to decided between good and evil.

Nowadays, he's quite an exalted figure in the Batman rogues gallery, right up there with the Joker and the Penguin. But before the 1970s, Two-Face was an interesting villain who appeared a little more than most Batman villains, but could hardly be considered one of the villains that defined Batman.

Two-Face only appeared three times before he got plastic surgery in Detective Comics #80 and was able to go back to a normal life. (Possibly as a Gotham celebrity. It's a very weird place, you know.)

In his next three appearances, Two-Face wasn't Harvey Dent. Twice, unscrupulous men pretended to be Two-Face in order to commit crimes and blame them on Dent. And in one of my favorite Two-Face stories, the actor Paul Sloane was disfigured by an explosion on a TV set while he was playing Two-Face. The accident made him a little crazy and he thought he literally was Two-Face. (I'm probably in a minority here, but I like Paul Sloane as Two-Face just as much as I like Harvey Dent. If I was writing Batman, I'd have them both running around, getting in fights at Arkham and maybe pitting them against each other for an extended storyline.)

Eventually, somebody must have decided that the "fake Two-Face" plot was getting old ... so they brought back Harvey Dent in the role that made him famous, in 1954's Batman #81. This story "Two-Face Strikes Again!" is one of the more famous stories written by much-maligned Batman writer David V. Reed.

And then Two-Face disappeared for a while. A long while. His next appearance is "Half an Evil" in 1971's Batman #234. So that's 17 years!

I have heard that Two-Face disappeared for so long because of the coming of the Comics Code. It sounds plausible. So maybe it's true. If anyone has ever heard anything from a Batman editor that Two-Face was officially scrapped because of the Code, please leave a comment.

I'm not so sure that it's not just a guess that sounds plausible. For one thing, I'm not totally convinced that Two-Face is such a frightening creation that comics-reading children had to be protected from his two-toned visage. I guess all it takes is one overzealous censor on the CCA board. But I'm not so sure that's what happened.



For one thing, he wasn't a Batman villain that was used a lot, like the Joker or the Penguin or Catwoman. Quite a few Batman villains appeared two to four times and then disappeared for decades, and it seems unlikely that these villains disappeared because anyone feared objections from the Code. For example, the Riddler, the Cavalier, Killer Moth and the Scarecrow. (Well, I guess the same objections to Two-Face could cover the Scarecrow as well. But the Scarecrow's second (and last Golden Age appearance) was in the early 1940s, so he was long gone by the time of the Code. And I really find it hard to believe the Code would censor the Scarecrow.)

I think it's just as likely that Two-Face's rather focused modus operandi might be a better explanation for why he disappeared for so long. How many times can Two-Face steal the payroll at a bicycle factory, rob the box office at a two-leveled theater showing a double feature of "It Takes Two" and "Two for the Road," and escape on a double-decker bus, a biplane or a two-headed donkey?

David V. Reed's 1954 story bringing back Two-Face does a pretty good job of stirring things up a bit and expanding the m.o. a bit, I'll have to admit.

Yeah, I don't know how many good Two-Face stories there were to wring out of the Golden Age formula. Or formulas, actually, because there were two Two-Face formulas! Crimes based on the number "two" and also the fake Two-Faces running around.

Somebody would have to think of another way to deal with Two-Face before he could be a major player in the DC Bataverse.