Comic Book Resources

I find it interesting how people say they like the O’Neil/Adams version, but seem to forget that they didn’t portray him as the completely repressed, obsessive ass that they want him to be.

Man, that is such a James Bond moment…

Bats did have a lot in common with Bond back then. Less so now.

This is my Batman. A little melancholic maybe, but not the ill mannered revenge-obsessed psycho, he is so often portrayed as these days.

This was the first Batman story I ever read. I found it while helping my dad clean out our garage. Needless to say, I didn’t leave the garage for a week after finding his huge stash of comics from this era. This should be the story you use to introduce someone to Batman…

Talia makes so much more sense to me as a love interest for Bats than Catwoman ever did.

“I must! I am sorry!”

Man, that’s an awful line of dialogue. It reads like a comic ten years older than the one it’s in.

Ya, I usually love O’Neil’s dialog, but that was just terrible.

That’s pretty indicative of O’Neil’s dialogue around that time. His GL/GA run had tons of preachy moments and lame expletives from characters. It’s pretty much how everyone wrote back then (for superhero books).

I have to agree with stealthwise, for better or worse, that is pretty standard comic book dialogue for it’s time.

Yeah, “I MUST! I am sorry” is kinda lame, but overall it’s a fantastic story, well worth revisiting.
Especially by the writers who keep coming up with stories of a younger Batman creating the Matches Malone identity out of whole cloth…

maybe without the exclamation marks (!!) it would have sounded a little less soppy

i think there is a vein tapped here about overall tone versus dialog. if you compare even the best writers of this era, even the later silver/early modern age, the writing uniformly sounds stilted. almost anything today reads more natural. the beauty of these older stories is the overall vision and ideas and plotlines and moments, the never-done-before feel, as opposed to the dialog, which doesn’t stand up all that often. you have to find the groundbreaking nature of what Lee and Thomas and O’Neill and the rest were doing, rather than the words, to get why they are important. A good example is Miller, reading his early Daredevil, which i love, is not too different an experience than reading this..compare it to your fav writer of today, be it Bendis or whoever, and it is like night and day

I agree. this is my Batman. Too bad he doesn’t exist anymore.

Yeah this is the Batman that I loved reading, starting reading in the mid 60′s, was ok but this was mind blowing compared to what I read previously