Batman has existed in a swarm of guises. He’s been a comic
book and a campy live-action TV series and a Saturday morning cartoon and a
Mego action figure and more than one movie franchise. One of the guy’s
lesser-discussed incarnations is his turn as a newspaper comic strip. Batman
first popped up in your local paper in 1943, only lasting there a few years
before flapping back to the funny books. He had more success during his return
run from 1966 to 1970 thanks to Adam West and Burt Ward.
At first the black & white daily and full-color Sunday
strips skipped in the TV show’s boot prints quite faithfully. They were zany,
funny, corny, campy, peppered with “special guest stars,” and very much of
their time. You could see Batman examining a parrot’s rap sheet, foiling a
quartet of crooks “dressed in extreme mod fashion,” bumping and grinding with
Poison Ivy at a discotheque, opening a hotel with Conrad Hilton, or standing
aside while Jack Benny punches a gorilla. He faced off against all of the
series’ most memorable fiends: the Joker, Cat Woman, the Penguin, and even the
Riddler, who always enjoyed more exposure on the screen than on the page. Then
halfway through 1967, the newspaper strip started to shift back to the caped
crusader’s more serious side with an epic, winding eight-month storyline that found Batgirl
discovering Batman’s secret identity after he loses his memory when Blue Max
nearly kills him.
Reading these strips in the first of The Library of American
Comics/IDW’s new omnibus series, Batman:
The Silver Age Dailies and Sundays, it’s hard to imagine reading the measly
three-panels doled out from Monday to Saturday back in the sixties. Whether
they’re daffy or dark, these stories demand to be read continuously. As written
by Whitney Ellsworth and illustrated by Sheldon Moldoff, Joe Giella, and on a
few occasions, the legendary Carmine Infantino (though always credited to Bob Kane), they are as strong as the
stories appearing in the Batman comic books of the day. The Silver Age Dailies and Sundays 1966-1967 is the ideal presentation in every imaginable way,
compiling the tales in a much more readable fashion than they originally
received. The daily stories were independent of the Sunday ones through 1966.
In this new book, those particular Sunday stories are grouped together without
interruption. It is also a splendidly designed hardcover with ribbon-strip bookmark.
The pages are heavy stock and the color Sundays are recreated flawlessly without
digital alterations. There’s also a nice splash of additional memorabilia—ads,
comic book covers, stills from the TV series, press kit materials, etc.—among
Joe Desris’s introductory chapter and the storyline annotations that close the
book.
