The Black Bat by Fabio Alves

The image below, of the Dynamite Entertainment version of the Black Bat was included along with several others in a Facebook post by artist Fabio Alves. Alves was displaying his considerable skills in a group designed to help comic book creators connect.

I am always surprised when I see artists take a stab at the Dynamite Bat. His series from a few years back was not particularly popular, to my knowledge, and he has made very few appearances since. Yet that version of the character is still the model for some people.

Fortunately, Alves also graced us with a take much closer to the original version.

That's some good stuff, Fabio!

Murder Town

The previous post about 31 Deadly Guns was actually in draft for about four weeks. I had neglected to publish the post and only noticed this today.

At the time that I finished 31DG, I thought that it would be a while until I got my hands on more original material. Instead, I found a good deal on Murder Town (Winter 1950) and jumped at it. I finished Murder Town this past weekend and in beginning to write about it, I noticed the earlier unpublished post about 31 Deadly Guns. This is why the two posts appear on the same day.

So then...Murder Town. I enjoyed this one a great deal.

The story begins with a failed suicide attempt. The gentleman attempting to kill himself confesses to a murder but then is himself murdered while incarcerated, no less. What's going on? Anthony "Black Bat" Quinn and his team are out to find out.

There are a number of highlights in this book. I found McGrath hilarious. He's again working with Quinn more so than attempting to arrest him but his conviction that Quinn is the Black Bat has not gone anywhere and it demonstrates itself through sarcastic comments along the lines of "The Black Bat showed up tonight, Quinn...But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you??" He has a strong, hands-on role in this one and his back-and-forth with Quinn is highly entertaining.

This is good because Silk is essentially written out of the story at one point. It is hardly a Black Bat adventure without at least one member of the entourage being abducted and tortured or beaten. Normally he or she returns by story's end but not this time. For quite some time, Silk is out of circulation.

Silk's absence creates a challenge in that Silk tends to assist Quinn with the latter's pretense of blindness. Without someone to guide him around, Quinn struggles to continue to "act blind".

It also creates an unusual anger in The Black Bat. The hired gun who takes out Silk also threatens Carol. He comes across as more psychotic, and therefore threatening, than the muscle usually does in these stories. When The Black Bat catches up to him, Tony Quinn let's him have it a bit. I found it more intense than usual.

There was another moment which I found interesting. The Black Bat and McGrath are reviewing evidence when...The Black Bat suddenly disappears on McGrath.

"You may keep the picture," The Black Bat said. "There isn't much we can do tonight. Show it to Quinn in the morning." 

"Okay," McGrath nodded. "I'm done in anyhow. Let's go!" 

The Black Bat had been moving toward the door as McGrath still studied the picture. When there was no reply, McGrath turned. He was alone in the room.

According to this cbr article, it would seem that Batman first pulled that sort of trick on Commissioner Gordon in 1972 or so. I doubt that it was inspired by a Black Book Detective issue from 1950 and there would be no evidence I'm aware of to support the notion that it was. Still, like the use of the name Red Hood in a Black Book Detective story well before it was applied to the Joker, it appears to be another of a great many coincidental similarities between the two characters.

This is just one small, enjoyable moment in an overall good book. The Black Bat entered his final full year of publication in full stride with this one.

Edit: I read The Black Bat's Justice during a mid-October vacation and the Black Bat pulls the disappearing act twice on McGrath in that book. I can't believe this didn't jump out at me upon my first reading of the story a couple of years ago. It is cover-dated March 1941 so well before the book above and, obviously, even much earlier than when Batman first did it to Gordon.

31 Deadly Guns

My reading of original Black Bat material continues with 31 Deadly Guns from January 1949 (cover date).  It was the character's 50th published story and it's a pretty good one, though many of the elements that made the early stories interesting are not present.

Shortly after making an urgent phone call to Tony Quinn to arrange a meeting, a prominent politician named Victor Dermont is shot dead on the courthouse steps. The shooter, named Ernie Ward, is apprehended but he is expected to succumb to a terminal disease in a short amount of time.

Tony Quinn believes that Ward was put up to to the task of killing Dermont and wants to track down who pulled the strings before the case dies along with the uncooperative shooter. There are, of course, several people with a variety of motives to investigate.

An interesting aspect of Ward's character is that Quinn knows him from one of his first cases as a young lawyer starting out. Black Bat stories, at least those penned by Norman A. Daniels, often to appear to be written in "real time". Tony Quinn is said to have worked Ward's case 13 years prior which would put us in 1936, prior to Quinn being a young district attorney that would become the Black bat in 1939.

Among the Black Bat's crew, Silk Kirby is the only one to be featured. Carol Baldwin and Butch O'Leary have only small roles. McGrath is present but very much working with the Black Bat rather than trying to apprehend him. I believe that by this far into the series, that was the norm. Still, it does feel like something is missing but overall this was an entertaining read.