Batman Got Busted In Brooklyn

People seem to have really enjoyed that first column written by Pete Hamill about a comic book collector whose life goes wrong, so I also wanted to share this earlier piece by Hamill, which was dug up by Ken Quattro.

This piece saw print a decade earlier, at a time when the Silver Age of Comics was in full swing, but the super hero fad hadn’t quite peaked yet. The ABC BATMAN television show was still a year in the future at this point, so Hamill’s recollections are untainted by any contemporary POWs or WHAMs. What is apparent is that he had a love and an appreciation for the medium–it was virtually impossible to find anybody writing about comic books in such sympathetic terms in 1965. It’s a fun snapshot, and it’s clear that Hamill retained a clear memory of reading and enjoying the adventures of a bevy of the early costumed crusaders even decades after he’d first encountered them.

Hamill does use some derogatory language of the era in talking about Batman and Robin, so a heads up warning to anybody who is going to be triggered by that. I don’t know the man, but I expect this was just a product of the era.