Comic Book Review Batman THE 50 Story Killer

COMIC BOOK REVIEW BATMAN THE 50 STORY KILLER 1974 DC

Artists Joe Aparo, Joe Kubert & George Papp.

A Batman story that is both brilliant and deeply flawed at the same time.

A new mayor is elected in Gotham City who immediately makes the ageing Police Commissioner Gordon retires. Batman is saddened by this, but finds it justified. Gordon is clearly too old for the job, but Batman is in for a shock when he is also told to quit crime fighting. Though reluctant, he accepts his fate.

This is a deeply flawed premise, as Batman is not a Cop or a licensed private detective. He is a vigilante, tolerated by the police for his good results. His very existence is in defiance of the law, but he accepts his enforced resignation rather too easily.

The reason for his resignation is that the new Mayor has hired a whole band of heroes, The Metal Men, a group of elastic metal robots of considerable skill in their own right. The army of robots (who have assisted Batman in the past) have names like Lead, Gold, Iron, Steel, Mercury, etc.

Though he has quit, Batman tries to intervene when he witnesses a robbery in progress only to be beaten to the scene by the Metal Men. Batman accepts that they may well be better than him, and seems prepared to accept his resignation at last.

All seems over for the Caped Crusader, and the action in the robbery scene highlights a further flaw in the story (actually in this whole period of Batman writing). Batman has a sixth sense intuition power called his Bat-Sense This is something akin to Marvel comic hero Spiderman’s Spider-sense, but where Spiderman is a superhero, Batman has no true super-powers. He is a man – not half-bat. The stories in this period insinuated otherwise.

Just as Bruce Wayne thinks his day couldn’t get worse, he is visiting one of his business skyscrapers when he is kidnapped himself, along with everyone in the building. The 50 storys, (a mis-spelling of storeys), refers to the office block held hostage. The attackers have knocked everyone else out with a dangerous gas that will eventually kill them all if not switched off. Bruce Wayne is kept alive so that he can withdraw his entire personal business fortune, (which we are now told stands at twenty-seven million, four hundred thousand dollars.

Wayne seems willing to cooperate with the kidnappers, led by a mysterious man called One Arm, and as might be expected, The Metal Men attempt a rescue challenge, but fail to locate the source of the gas. Their rescue bid fails and they withdraw, defeated. The new mayor is so unhappy with the results that he orders that Commissioner Gordon and batman are reinstated to handle the case, at which point Wayne becomes Batman and deals with the crisis in the way only he could – turning the story into a precursor to the Bruce Willis die Hard films by several years. He even finds a role for the Metal Men who are actually quite fun characters to have around.

A cool story, with a silly premise as Batman is hardly following the rules set by authoritarians anyway.

Arthur Chappell