Adam Graham's Blog: Christians and Superheroes - Posts Tagged "1960s"

Batman: In the Sixties by Gardner F. Fox

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This third Batman decade collection collects a generous amount of comics and had some nice features. Including a look at the first Batgirl (Betty Kane), the first Poison Ivy story, the return of the Penguin after many years in retirement, two Joker stories, a Scarecrow story,and a Catwoman story. Few books have given such a wide range of Batman villains and that's to the book's credit. Although not all of these are high quality.

There are also stories featuring Barbara Gordon as the best known Batgirl. She appears in, "Batgirl Breaks up the Dynamic Duo" which is a kind of a silly story and a more serious solo story which has Batgirl facing a team of criminals dressed as the Justice League and she has been set up by a red haired member of their gang who was supposed to come dressed as Batgirl.

My favorite story in the book in addition to that tale is, "The Riddle-less Robberies of the Riddler"in which the Riddler tries to commit crimes without giving the game away with hilarious results. The story, "One Bullet Too Many" i sees a shift in Batman as Dick Grayson goes to college and the series takes a new direction with the shuttering of Wayne Manor and the Batcave as Batman works more on the street level in a key story.

The worst story in here is the boring two part Robin solo story from Detective Comics #390 and #391. The other fault of this book is the lack of information on the decade. Previous installments in this series and the Superman series up through the 1960s had a well-written introduction from a comic expert. This was foregone for an introduction by Adam West. I like having the intro from West but a more informed intro would have made for a better reading experience.

While this was the worst of the decade collections, it was still a decent book.



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Batman '66: The Lost Episode #1 by Len Wein

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Len Wein adapts Harland Ellison's script for a 1960s Batman episode featuring Two-Face.

This story is a somewhat typical Two-Face origin story like you might read in the 1960s. As a story, it felt like this needed to be fleshed out a bit (particularly the second part) in order to make it really feel like an episode of the TV show. That said, it's still an okay story and the art is nice to look at. It's just not a lost classic.



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