Night of the Stalker!

 

cover art by Neal Adams

 Detective Comics #439 (February-March 1974) was one of those awesome 100-pagers that DC used to do, often (as in this case) containing one original story and a bunch of reprints. Growing up, it was the reprints in these and in Marvel's Giant-Size books that first taught me so much about the history of the comic book universes I loved. 

Today, though, we're going to look at this issue's original story. "Night of the Stalker!" was written by Stevel Englehart, from a plot by Vin and Sal Amendola. Sal Amendola did the pencils. 

It's a pretty simple story. A bank robbery goes wrong and the robbers gun down a young, married couple, leaving a child weeping over the corpses of his parents.

Sound familar? Batman is close enough to witness this, but not close enough to stop it. He immediately takes a VERY personal interest, taking out one of the robbers at the scene while the other three speed off in the getaway car.

What follows is Batman stalking the remaining bad guys as they speed out of the city, nearly crash the car when a shadow seems to indicate Batman is on the roof, then jump out of the car to find him. He takes their car keys and manages to scare the snot out of them by just standing there. 

He dodges bullets, but apparently falls to his death when one of the robbers tackles him. The remaining two crooks recover the car keys and speed off, thinking they're safe. Silly crooks.

Batman chases one of the two remaining crooks into a shallow river, where he lets the guy briefly think that he (the crook) has just killed the superhero. His glee does not last long.

Batman confronts the last crook, who falls to his knees, sobbing that he never wanted to be involved in murder. Batman shows a modicum of mercy here, choosing not to terrorize him any longer. Back in Wayne Manor, Batman thinks about the crying child outside the bank and the crying young crook while looking at a portrait of his parents. He begins to cry himself.

That's the perfect ending to this story. Batman SHOULD be scary and relentless from the crooks' point-of-view, but 1970s Batman is my favorite iteration of the character in part because the writers understood he needed this human moments. The darkness inherent in the character had to be balanced by Bruce Wayne's humanity and his ability to still shed tears.

The cover is a fantastic example of Neal Adams' skill as a Batman artist. Sal Amendola does a bang-up job drawing this story, but that cover makes me wish we'd seen an Adams-illustrated version of it. I do realize, though, that this is an unfair, knee-jerk reaction. Amendola does make scary Batman look scary and crying Bruce Wayne look tragic. The artist does his job well.

Next week, we're going to begin a look at a superb WWII story arc published by Charlton beginning in 1967, but I think we'll intersperse that with looks at the various reprint stories from this issue. So get ready to be shoved from week to week from World War II to DC superheroes and back again.