I believe that this is the first new “Goofiest Moments” entries in…oh…about six years. Fun!
Anyhow, in this feature, I examine the goofiest moments from a specific stretch of a particular comic book series.
This week, we look at the next ten issues of the Batman feature in Detective Comics #27-36, written by Bill Finger (#27-28, #35-36) and Gardner Fox (#29-34) and drawn by Bob Kane, with backgrounds by Sheldon Moldoff (#30-35) and Jerry Robinson (#36).
As always, this is all in good fun. I don’t mean any of this as a serious criticism of the comics in question. Not only were these writers certainly never imagining people still reading these comics decades after they were written, great comics often have goofy moments (Kirby/Lee’s Fantastic Four is one of the best comic book runs of all-time and there were TONS of goofy stuff in those 100 plus issues!).
NOT-SO HONORABLE MENTION
In Detective Comics #35, the bad guy turns out to be in disguise as a Chinese man. It’s super-racist, so I didn’t feel right including it on the list, but at the same time, it was also super goofy, so I figure I had to at least MENTION it…
HONORABLE MENTIONS
In Detective Comics #33, Batman defeats a villain who has a Dirigible of Death. Here’s the thing, though, in the opening of the story, the bad guy kills THOUSANDS of people!!!
That’s hilariously messed up. They get that a thousand people dying is a super huge deal, right?
We can’t look at early issue of Detective Comics without noting that, yes, in Batman’s first appearance, he wore purple gloves…
It likely was just a coloring mistake and they intended for him to actually not be wearing any gloves at all and they just colored his hands as if they were gloves, but either way, it looks ridiculous. After going to glove-less for the next issue, he went to the traditional gloves pretty soon afterwards. This would be higher except, like I said, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t intentional.
In Detective Comics #31, Batman stops a young woman from killing a guy and then, hilariously enough, it’s his fiancee!!
Yes, that is how Julie Madison, Bruce Wayne’s fiancee, was introduced into the comics. “Oh, hey, it’s that fiancee that I never mentioned before! Fancy meeting you here!”
Later on in that adventure, Bruce is just talking out loud to himself, you know, just the way that any normal person would…
Couldn’t that have just been in a thought balloon? Now we know why he got a sidekick, he just really really needed someone to talk to!
Finally, before we get into the top ten, we look at what happened when Batman arrived at the home of the Mad Monk, the guy who hypnotized Julie. Why, what’s that, an APE?!?
Nobody ever expects to suddenly be attacked by an ape.