Matthew Sunrich Presents: Detective Comics #397
Detective Comics #397
By Matthew Sunrich
During the Bronze
Age, many of DC's comics split their page counts between two or more
characters. This was particularly true in the case (no pun intended) of Detective Comics. It made sense in a way,
though, because Detective was originally
an anthology about various sleuthing types rather than a Batman title (just as Action Comics was not originally
exclusively a Superman book). I don't understand why DC didn't just do away
with Detective as a title when it
rebooted its entire line in 2011, since it's been just a Batman book pretty
much since the late '80s, but whatever.
The cover of Detective #397 clearly states that it
features both Batman and Batgirl, so it should come as no surprise that almost a
third of the book features no Batman whatsoever. Quite honestly, I almost never
bother reading the non-Batman stories, as they focus on characters that don't
interest me and are frequently executed by second- or third-tier creative teams;
I can't help but think of these stories as filler. I mean, there may be
Elongated Man fans out there, but I've never encountered one.
The reason I mention
this is that many of the Batman stories of this period were short, typically
fifteen pages or so. Modern comics, which are usually twenty-two pages, tend to
have fewer captions and fewer panels per page because of the trend for stories
to be spread out over several issues. In Bronze-Age stories, writers had less
to work with, so they put in a lot of exposition to allow the stories to take
place over several days. In other words, the immediacy that we associate with
many modern comics didn't exist because the stories would be over too quickly,
leaving readers dissatisfied. The stories had to be broken up into chunks in
order to keep the pace under control, with the gutters (space between panels)
serving as literary speed bumps.
Maggie Thompson of Comics Buyer's Guide (may its soul rest
in peace) refers to these types of comics as "done in one," though I
don't know whether or not she came up with the term. The idea is that a story
is self-contained; it does not continue in the next issue. It exists within a
bubble of sorts. Everything is resolved at the end. While references to the
story may appear in future issues, it essentially stands on its own. There are,
of course, a few exceptions to this standard, but they are just that,
exceptions.
Despite what the
cover of Detective #397 (illustrated
by perennial favorite Neal Adams) might lead you to believe, the Batman story
within, "Paint a Picture of Peril" (by Denny O'Neil, Adams, and Dick
Giordano), is not about a man's desire for a ghost but, rather, explores the
potential for a jilted lover to go completely off the deep end.
Our story opens the
evening before Gotham's annual Marine Festival charity event. Four men in
wetsuits emerge from the harbor, intent on stealing a painting from the art
exhibit. Batman shows up and takes one of the men out before another threatens
to kill the hapless guard they had knocked out earlier. Having the Caped
Crusader at a disadvantage, two of the men shoot him with harpoons, and he
plunges into the water. Their mission accomplished, the frogmen dive back into
the harbor and disappear.
As he often does,
Batman was pretending to be more injured than he actually was, although he
caught the point of one of the spears in the bicep, making it impossible for
him to pursue the men. He does find, however, that the painting that was stolen
was the least valuable in the collection, the image of a mermaid.
When he returns to
the penthouse in his Bruce Wayne guise, he finds that the cleaning lady has
left the television on, and, as he tends to his wound, he halfway listens to a
documentary about the mysterious Orson Payne, whose opera-singer fiancée
disappeared, the heartbreak of which compelled him to become a recluse. When
the cleaning lady returns, she switches the set off, disgusted.
While underwater,
Batman noticed that the nearby seaweed was glowing, indicating that a nuclear
sub had been nearby. His arm healed well enough to investigate, he returns to
the harbor with an undersea craft and follows the trail of radiation left in
the sub's wake. It leads him to Payne's luxurious castle. Looking in the
window, he finds the eccentric recluse talking to an array of artworks, all of
which appear to be modeled after the same woman.
The Caped Crusader
makes his presence known, and Payne, clearly insane, admits that he collects paintings
and sculptures that resemble Caterina Valence, his lost love. He explains that
he has to steal the artworks because the owners refuse to sell them. He takes a
crossbow down from the wall and fires a bolt at Batman and then flees. Hidden
from the Dark Knight's view, Payne pulls a level that releases a trapdoor, and
Batman falls into a pit. The madman then pulls another lever, which lowers a
two-ton block of stone over the cavity, intending to drop it into the hole.
Thinking quickly,
Batman escapes and finds that Payne, in his desperation, has gone completely mad. An apparition of
Caterina appears, and he follows it off a high balcony. Batman manages to save
him just in time and has him taken away to the state mental hospital.
The next morning, the
cleaning lady finds Bruce watching a news report about Payne's capture and
turns the television off. A thought striking him, he asks her if she was once
an opera singer, and she tells him that she was but gave it up because she was
in a toxic relationship with, you guessed it, our art-loving madman.
The setup of this
story works really well. Any time a crime is committed in which a thief
purloins an object of ostensibly insignificant worth always works well because
it makes the reader question the nature of the concept of value. Why are gold
and jewels, for example, so valuable? Because they're shiny and rare. People
like them, and they show status, which many find appealing. The mermaid
painting, along with the other artworks, is priceless to Payne because he is
fixated on an ideal that escaped him, that he drove away. He ascribes value to
the images of Caterina to fill the void in his soul. Outside of the original
owners, few people would find the pieces worthwhile. It's something to
consider.
It goes without
saying that the art in this issue is fantastic. Adams, ever the versatile
artist, masterfully captures both the menace of Payne and the quotidian
interactions between Bruce and his cleaning lady. There has been a lot of
discussion over whose inks worked best with Adams' pencils, but I'll forever be
in the camp that prefers Giordano (no offense to Tom Palmer).
Like all of the issues of Batman and Detective that
Adams illustrated during the Bronze Age, an original of this issue, especially
in reasonable grade, will require a second mortgage, but, thankfully it can be
found reprinted in Batman Illustrated by
Neal Adams volume two (now in paperback) and the phonebook-sized yet
economical Showcase Presents: Batman
volume five.
Matt Sunrich, a great fan of the Bronze Age of comic books, maintains two blogs: The Other Other Castle, about Bronze-Age sword and sorcery, and Forging the Dark Knight, concerning Bronze-Age Batman.
Labels: Batman, Detective Comics, Guest Blog, Matt Sunrich
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