GIANT BATMAN ANNUAL #1

By: Tony Whitt
Date: Saturday, September 15, 2001

Holy flashback, Batman! DC goes back to the vaults once again to unveil yet another reproduction, "re-presented in its entirety," of a Silver Age annual. But is it worth your five dollars to go back on this magical mystery tour to the days when Robin was still Dick Grayson, Bruce Wayne still knew how to smile, and Batman still called his faithful sidekick "chum"?

Well, that all depends on your answer to another question: what's your tolerance for silliness? There's silliness galore in this annual, subtitled "1,001 Secrets of Batman and Robin." It's more like eight or nine things that we never knew and never really wanted to know, and all of them are pretty weird. That wouldn't be so bad in and of itself, but the stories in this volume range from being so stupid that they're kind of funny to just plain bad.

One of the latter category is Bill Finger's "Origin of the Bat Cave," originally presented in DETECTIVE COMICS #205. In this sad story (and we don't mean depressing), Batman and Robin travel back in time to the pioneer days to solve the mystery of an inscription on a piece of "Indian" pottery they find in the Bat Cave it reads "Death To The Man of Two Identities." The Dynamic Duo travel back in time via hypnosis(!) and there they discover that a frontiersman working undercover as a "redman" has been using what will later become the Bat Cave as his hideout while infiltrating the Indian tribes. No, wait, it gets better. All of this inspires a very politically incorrect Batman to help the frontiersman recreate his own Bat Cave, complete with trophy collection and disguise wardrobe and all with helpful little signs. They then go and kick some Indian butt. If these were "more innocent times," thank goodness for the wisdom experience brings.

Another clunker is Edmond Hamilton's "The Strange Costumes of Batman" presented in DETECTIVE COMICS #165. Betcha never knew that Batman had an all-white costume for fighting crooks in the snow, or a gold one to trick a criminal who had the Midas Touch, or a luminous one to scare superstitious criminals? No? Me neither. And did you care? I'll admit my favorite is the super-thin cellophane one he can hide in his boot and destroy with a match if he needs to, but that's getting into some truly weird territory. But the weirdest thing is the costume for the "worst emergency only," a costume with a bird instead of a bat crest. Guess what that's for, boys and girls? And aren't you glad Dick Grayson never wore such a thing when he became Nightwing?

And the not-so-bad ones? "How to Be The Batman" from DETECTIVE COMICS #190 has its high points, especially as it's one of the earliest retellings of Batman's origin; and some of the items in "The Amazing Inventions of Batman" from BATMAN #109 are so kitschy they end up being way cool, a coolness that hits its peak when Batman and Robin start flying around on gliders like something straight out of a '50s-era BATMAN BEYOND. And if you're a fan of the artwork of Dick Sprang, there's plenty of it here, all in the bright vibrant colors that are such a far cry from modern BATMAN books.

But by the time you've "thrilled" to masterpieces such as "Untold Tales of the Bat-Signal," in which you learn fascinating tidbits like the fact that the Bat-Signal is made of bulletproof glass and can pierce through the thickest fog (ooh, ahh), you may decide that enough is enough. Granted, it really was a more innocent age, and the only reason that many of these stories are so hard to take now is because we've all moved so far beyond them as readers. For their day, though, this was the good stuff, and it still has that slight sheen of wonderment and surprise to it. Taken in that spirit, even learning all the secrets of Batman's utility belt seems like taking a tour of the Taj Mahal.

Just don't take any of it too seriously it's pretty hard to believe that they did.

GIANT BATMAN ANNUAL

Grade: C

Issue: No. 1

Author(s): Edmond Hamilton, Lew Schwartz, Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff, Dick Sprang, Charles Paris, Curt Swan

Publisher: DC Comics

Price: $4.95