This is an amazingly impactful cover, especially as originally seen in the context of a 1968 newsstand. There’s no way that this image wouldn’t grab your attention more violently than the comics scattered around it. That extreme close-up–so much so that the logo is shunted off to the side and made smaller–the danger to Batman and Robin reflected in the glasses, and the detail of the gunman in the lower left corner–everything about it works perfectly. it was executed for editor Julie Schwartz by Irv Novick, almost certainly working from a sketch by Carmine Infantino. Infantino had been brought on staff to make the covers of the DC titles less clinical and more exciting, more representative of the times, and with pieces such as this one, he succeeded. How much that did to improve sales was another story–something the DC editors of this period could never quite grasp is that, while the cover pulled readers in, it was the contents that kept them coming back, and too many of their covers were put-ons, or concealed a dull or silly story concept.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 
I remember this story. It would not have brought many people back for the following issue.
Irv Novick is much underrated.
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I agree about Novick. His Flash is my Flash, after all.
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As an editor, would you have spent a minute or two wrestling with whether or not Robin’s “R” should be reversed in the lens before deciding to leave it as is?
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I’m reminded of the scene in ‘Diamonds Are Forever’ where James Bond get a very wide car through a very narrow alley tilted on two wheels. Unfortunately, it enters the alley on the wheels on one side of the car and exits it on the other two. When this was pointed out there were those worried at the extra cost of reshooting. In the event it was decided to leave it in because few people would notice – and few people did. Same with this cover.
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Actually, they inserted a scene which shows Bond tilting over onto the other two wheels in a wider area around halfway along the alley.
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This certainly brought me back to Batman, though the campy last panel almost made me drop Batman again.
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For Irv to go from a “Dick Sprang” Batman model to a “Neal Adams” model in the 70’s was a real feat. Irv wasn’t 1 of my faves, but he’s on the same high professional level as Dillin, Heck, & many others.
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One of my favorite Batman covers. I first saw it reproduced in the “Batman from the 30s to the 70s” hardcover.
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I just reread Part One to this one. It’s not a good story—Gordon’s definitely been hit with the Idiot Stick—but Irv Novick’s dark, shadowy art, particularly in the opening, is, I think, the beginning of the transition from the New Look of the Silver Age to the Dark Knight of the Bronze Age.
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