Tuesday, May 4, 2010
Mining for Gold(en): "If Justice Be Served"
What's happening, Groove-ophiles! Ready to dig on a shiny Golden nugget? Yeah, Ol' Groove thought you might be! In Batman #303 (June 1978), the first issue of the legendary-yet-short-lived DC Explosion-era issues, the mag kicked off the first of it's 8-page back-up features with a new alternating series called "Unsolved Cases of The Batman"--and man, was it a doozy! Denny O'Neil was still proving that he could write the best straight-crime Batman tales bar none with his taut, dramatic, "If Justice Be Served", but the thing that put this story over into the "Dy-no-mite!" category is, of course, the pulse-pounding pencils of Mr. Michael Golden. One glance at that sensational splash-page told us that we were in for a real treat! Golden's Batman is sleek and powerful, perfectly walking the line between Bob Kane cartooniness and Neal Adams realism. Most surprisingly is how well Jack Abel's usually overpowering inks work with Golden's pencils. While not as dense or dark as better-suited inkers like P. Craig Russell or Joe Rubinstein, it still looks pretty far-out. Enjoy!
Wow! All that in just 8 pages. The hero couldn't save anybody...just a dead man's reputation. You never see a costumed guy fail to catch someone falling. This was the realistic exception. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThat certainly is a cool intro splash page - though one wonders why Batman couldn't use some of those Wayne millions to buy himself an ottoman to rest his feet on.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this(and everything else here,for that matter). I wish DC would just release the complete works that Golden in hardcover or tpb(they'd probably fit in one book).
ReplyDeleteUnrelated to Golden: I recently read your post about the Black Panther story from 'Jungle Action' 6-24. As you probably know, Marvel is (finally) releasing this in a Marvel Masterworks collection:
http://marvel.com/catalog/?id=14763
But it only collects the 'Jungle Action' issues, not the 'Marvel Premiere' conclusion of the Klan storyline. Weird. Maybe those issues will show up a collection with BP 14-15(the end of the Kirby series after Kirby left)if the Masterworks volume sells. We can only hope,thanks again for all the "groovy" stuff posted here.