BRAVE AND THE BOLD was still a series that I was lukewarm on, though I’d begun to follow it with a certain amount of regularity. Part of this was that at this point I had enough disposable income to drop on a couple of extra comics each week, as well as the fact (unrealized by me) that the editorship of the title had passed into the hands of Paul Levitz, whose sensibilities were more in line with my own younger preferences. So B & B still felt a little bit strange and discordant to me, particularly in any story written by Bob Haney, who was still the writer more often than not. But it wasn’t as pronounced a feeling, and so I could accept it as a legitimate DC super hero comic in a way that I couldn’t when I was younger. I’m sure some of this was that my tastes were broadening as I got older as well.
This particular issue, however, wasn’t produced by the typical creative team, but what I must assume was a fill-in squad–either scheduled or pulled from emergency inventory. This meant that one of the great strengths of the title, the always-excellent artwork of artist Jim Aparo, wasn’t in place this time. However, if you needed somebody to fill in for Aparo, you really couldn’t have done much better than Don Newton. Newton is one of those artists who might have become a bigger deal had he lived longer–he passed away at a relatively young age in the early 1980s, missing out on the expansion of the Direct Market. He’d been a longtime contributor to fanzines who had eventually broken in and made good–by following Aparo on Charlton’s PHANTOM comic, ironically enough. So his work was a welcome sight here. It always struck me as having a bit of the flavor of Gene Colan in terms of the construction of his figures and the manner in which he used lighting, but with a bit more control and refinement than Gene’s looser, more impressionistic approach. This made him a good artist for Batman.
The writer on this issue was also different. Cary Burkett kicked around at DC for a number of years in the late 1970s and early 1980s before shifting careers to become a radio broadcaster. He’s probably best remembered for creating the Nemesis series with Dan Spiegel that became a back-up in BRAVE AND THE BOLD a year or two down the line. I must confess that his work didn’t make a strong impression on me, so I remember him as a competent craftsman but not somebody who really stood out from the pack. And this story underscores that fact. It’s a fine potboiler, but isn’t especially memorable–which is to say I once again here didn’t remember much about it before cracking open the book again for this write-up, despite having read it again not that long ago when it was reprinted in one of those DC FINEST collections.
Batman’s team-up partner this time was the Red Tornado, a character that I liked from his appearances in JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA but who had an odd path to creation. The original Red Tornado of the 1940s was introduced in the Scribbly strip appearing in ALL_AMERICAN COMICS which was written and illustrated by DC editor Sheldon Mayer. That Red Tornado was overtly a comedic character, a pastiche of the mystery men who were then filling the pages of comic books left and right. That Tornado was Ma Hunkle, the mother of one of Scribbly’s neighbor friends, who wound up sewing together a makeshift costume to bail the kids out when they got into trouble, and then kept on doing so. For some reason, in the 1960s, writer Gardner Fox in his last JUSTICE LEAGUE story introduced a new iteration of the Red Tornado. This one was a faceless android who attempted to join the Justice Society so as to destroy it from within. But he’d broken his creator’s control and become his own person–though he was typically characterized as being underconfident and almost childlike in his demeanor, this despite possessing a computerized analytical brain. While he was beset with similar woes as his Marvel counterpart the Vision about his lack of humanity, Reddy was somehow less sophisticated in his longing for understanding of the human condition.
The story opens with Batman being summoned to the scene of a murder by Commissioner Gordon. The victim was apparently killed by something mechanical and inhuman twenty stories up. Ata a charity event that evening, Bruce Wayne notices that the dead man’s partner seems ill at ease, and so he follows the man back to his offices–only to wind up colliding with the Red Tornado as the two crime-fighters race to the rescue upon hearing the partner’s office being torn up by something. Reddy was often depicted as being a bit over-eager and clumsy, and here he berates himself inwardly for getting in the Caped Crusader’s way. The pair finds a group of robots tossing the office, but they’re unable to prevent the mechanoids from carrying out their task. The heroes head out to the partner’s home where he’s lying low, and the man tells them that he’s sure that the person targeting them is Dr. Gregory Tarre, who had been horribly injured in an accident while working on the firm’s space program. Tarre would also occasionally perform maintenance on the Red Tornado when his systems required it, and it’s concerning to Reddy that he has no memory of his reported most recent encounter with Tarre–indicating that his memory banks had been erased of the encounter.
Fortunately, the scientists at the firm are able to unlock Reddy’s mental block, and he suddenly recalls that during their last visit, Tarre had analyzed and duplicated his android power source to energize his robot assassin. But Tarre has done a botched job of it, and one of the scientists informs our heroes that if the robots are permitted to run for too long, they’ll explode violently. This lends a ticking clock to their efforts to locate tarre and stop his plans for revenge. Even with his computer mind and perfect recall, the Red Tornado can’t work out where Tarre is likely to be holed up–but Batman, with his detective’s instincts, reasons that with the main lab denied to him, Tarre would likely default to his previous digs at Gotham University.
Batman’s hunch is correct, of course, and the Masked Manhunter is able to overpower the wheelchair-bound scientist and switch his robotic killer off. But too much time has gone by and the robot’s systems are about to explode. It falls to the Red Tornado to draw off the excess energy of the power source into his own android body. Which he does. And so the case is closed, in a bit of an anticlimax to be honest.
This issue also included the week’s new edition of the Daily Planet promotional page, which as always incorporated a dopey cartoon strip by Fred Hembeck as well as Bob Rozakis’ popular Ask the Answer Man column. I inevitably found this page to be charming as a reader, and when it was eventually discontinued, I was a bit saddened.
The Tom Brevoort Experience 