“Ein Fledermausmann! Schiessen! Schiessen!”
It’s the spring of 1969. You pick up a copy of The Brave and the Bold 84 from the spinner rack and open it at random.
What you see is a lushly illustrated, tuxedoed Bruce Wayne on a motorcycle, charging across a World War II airstrip the day before D-Day.
What th —?
You flip through the issue and find the melodramatic action thrilling (and then realize that it’s been a long time since you’ve been thrilled by the action in a Batman comic).
The story by writer Bob Haney featured an unlikely team-up between the Caped Crusader and Sgt. Rock, the WWII infantry noncom featured in Our Army at War.
The story began and ended in 1969 in Gotham City, with Batman thinking back on an Allied mission he performed in France a quarter-century before on June 5, 1944.
Continuity problems aside, for me, this was the issue that signaled the direction Batman needed to go.
By 1969, the Masked Manhunter was stuck with a tired and played-out image as “camp,” a legacy of the Adam West TV show that had ended the year before. We long-time fans were aware that the character needed a complete change — leaving the garish, clownish spotlight behind and returning to the shadows from which he emerged.
And here was just such a change, in both art and story. Nazis, after all, are not the Penguin or Mr. Freeze. They always make perfect villains, and have the advantage of being real.
The art by 27-year-old Neal Adams was breathtakingly fresh, and the inking by Adams and Sgt. Rock’s Joe Kubert reinforced the new approach — muting the silliness of the superhero genre by enfolding it into the more “realistic” atmosphere of war comics.
In fact, without fanfare, Adams had started subtly reshaping Batman a couple of issues before, in Brave and Bold 79, when the Caped Crusader teamed up with the grim ghost Deadman.
“What Adams wanted, tucked away in his relatively out-of-the-way pocket of National’s superhero universe, was a quiet revolution,” observed Glen Weldon in The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. “ ‘It just didn’t seem to me that the people at DC Comics knew what Batman should be,’ he told interviewer Michael Eury years later. Like all hard-core fans of the time, he fervently believed that ‘the TV show had run roughshod over the Batman character … It’s hard to think of Batman walking around in the daytime in his underwear.’”
Adams “…proceeded to alter (Batman’s) mood in small, palpable ways. He began by lengthening Batman’s ears slightly and making his cape longer, fuller, more dramatic. Scenes that Haney had written as taking place in broad daylight, Adams drew under the inky cloak of night.”
“If (editor Murray) Boltinoff noticed any of these changes, he let them pass,” Weldon noted. “The fans, however, did not. In their zeal to disavow and dispel any lingering traces of the television series’ existence, they seized upon the way Adams’s approach to photo-realism managed to save room for something sleek stylized, and uncanny. They wrote to the comics and the fanzines, wondering why the ‘good’ Batman was relegated to The Brave and the Bold.”
In the story The Angel, the Rock and the Cowl, Bruce Wayne unexpectedly encounters an old enemy from occupied France, Von Stauffer, who gets the drop on Wayne with his Luger.
Thinking back, Wayne gives us a first-person account of his experience in World War II as an Allied agent “…tracking down saboteurs (and) observing British methods, using my Wayne identity as a cover.”
Winston Churchill himself sends Wayne to uncover a secret Nazi defensive plan at Chateaurouge. Wayne hitches a ride with Sgt. Rock and Easy Company.
“You got a name, Fancy Dan?” Rock asks.
“Why … er … Pimpernel. Jack Pimpernel!” Wayne replies, thinking, “Uh-oh! I hope this goon didn’t read The Scarlet Pimpernel, or he’ll have guessed I lied…”
His spur-of-the-moment nickname proves prophetic because before the adventure is over, Batman-like Sir Percy Blakeney— will have rescued innocent French citizens from execution.
Colonel Van Stauffen’s suspicious behavior concerning the chateau’s wine cellar prompts a clandestine visit from Wayne, who learns that the wine bottles are loaded with nerve gas for “Operation Barbarian.” Nazi troops who attempt to corner the spy meet Batman instead.
Meanwhile, Easy Company’s mission of sabotage is imperiled by all the Nazi troop activity, so Batman goes into action to lead the German troops away from Sgt. Rock, thwarting the firing-squad execution of French villagers in the process.
As the story ends in 1969, Von Stauffen is about to shoot Wayne when his head gets slammed into a statue.
“Okay, Ratzi, the game’s over!” says a gray-haired Sgt. Rock, who had spotted Von Stauffen as a wanted criminal followed him.
The Army 30-year-man bids goodbye to “Jack Pimpernel,” and Wayne thinks, “Look at him — tough, indestructible! Uncle Sam’s got nothing to worry about with men like him defending America!”
Earth One, Earth-Two, Earth Whatever. Who cared? This was one good story.
The idea of Bruce Wayne/Batman as an Allied secret agent had even had a precedent. That was his status in the 1943 Batman movie serial.
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