Batman #105

            

                     Let me tell you about buying comics in the late 1950s.

                Sometimes it wasn't easy. During that time, there were no comic book specialty stores. There weren't even any WaWa or 7-11 stores with magazine shelves. However, comic books were on sale almost everywhere. They could be found at pharmacies (called "drug stores" back then), grocery stores, department stores, magazine stores, candy stores and at bus and train stations.  Just about every "Mom & Pop" general store had a wall of shelves for magazines and comics or a spinner rack.

                Of course, at only 8 or 9 years old, a comic book fan would have to depend on his or her parents to take him or her to one or more of these stores unless he or she was lucky enough to have one in his or her neighborhood. I was lucky. Within walking distance of my house, there was Tigue's Drug Store, which had a pharmacist, a lunch counter and soda fountain, racks of greeting cards, dozens upon dozens of convenience items and a large selection of magazines and comic books.

                I had a modest allowance, and if I could save it and scrape up a few extra found pennies, nickels and dimes, I could toddle over to Tigue's and buy some comic books. After all, back then, they were only ten cents apiece!

                Unfortunately, this didn't happen often enough for me. I rarely had the funds, time or unsupervised freedom to dash off and buy comic books. But once I had the opportunity to buy comic books at the most wondrous place I had ever encountered in my young life.

                Let me tell you about Booth's Corner.   

                Tucked along a side road, about a half mile from the Delaware and Pennsylvania border,

lies the Booth's Corner Farmers' Market. Originally, Booth’s Corner was opened by Earl Phillips, a farmer, in the 1930s. He used his 13-acre farm as a sales ground for local Amish farmers and other merchants looking for a friendly place to sell their goods. The site consisted of a huge open farmland with a large wooden barn. As the years passed, more sheds and buildings were added to the original, as more merchants wanted to become part of the community that was quickly forming. People from across the county soon considered it to be the best place for farm fresh produce, poultry, and meats.

                In 1973, fire destroyed the original barn, but today, Booth's Corner is a huge building, on the original site, housing over 100 merchants and several dozen food vendors.

                In the summer of 1957, my parents took my brother and me to Booth's Corner. I guess curiosity took them there, and once that was satisfied, they never returned. But for me, it was a dirt-floored wonderland. In my memory, the entrance, at the time, was a huge tent, probably just some kind of temporary opening. It was evening and the whole interior was lit by a string of hanging light bulbs. Just inside this entrance was a man selling roasted peanuts, and the aroma permeated the entire place.

                As my brother and I approached the second table in the building, we stopped short. At about waist level in front of us was a huge plywood table covered with comic books! We had never seen so many scattered in one location. There must have been hundreds of them. Behind the table, selling these books was, I swear, the Wicked Witch of the West herself: an old woman with a scarf around her head, hunched over, with a scowl on her face. She was selling the comics for a nickel apiece. She wouldn't let us page through them. We could just select the ones we wanted, pay her, and move on.

                There were all kinds of old, back-issue comic books there: horror, funny animals, westerns romance, mystery, science-fiction, and super-heroes. The variety seemed endless. The first one I saw (as later research told me) was, Mystic #53, November, 1956. The cover, by artist Bill Everett, terrified me. As a couple cowered in terror, monstrous hands were bursting through a wooden door.

Although mesmerized by this cover, I wasn't about to buy a comic that was certain to give me nightmares. I dropped it like a hot potato and looked for something else.

                (A brief aside: The image of that particular Mystic cover, however, was burned forever in my brain. Some 24 years after I originally saw it, as an editor at DC Comics, I commissioned a cover from artists Rich Buckler and Steve Mitchell. It was for the Mister E character in Secrets of Haunted House #34, March, 1981. That cover paid homage to the Mystic cover that had terrified my 9-year-old sensibilities.)

                The next book I saw on the Booth's Corner table was Batman #105, February, 1957.

                Let me tell you about Batman and me.

                I met first Batman in Joe's Barber Shop on the Concord Pike in my Wilmington neighborhood (right across the street from Tigue's Drug Store). It was there I read many a comic book while waiting to get my hair cut. I remember glancing at a Batman comic there, but didn't have time to read it. The first Batman story I actually read was at my cousin's house in Kentucky, some months later, and it wasn't strictly a Batman story. It was a Batman-Superman team-up in World's Finest Comics #90, September/October, 1957, entitled "The

Super-Batwoman", written by Edmond Hamilton and drawn by Dick Sprang and Stan Kay. The cover was by Curt Swan and Ray Burnley. In that story, Batwoman gained temporary super-powers in an adventure with Superman, Batman and Robin.

                Picking up Batman #105, there were three characters I immediately recognized on the Sheldon Moldoff cover: Batman, Robin and their guest-star: Batwoman. I couldn’t give the old witch of Booth's Corner my nickel fast enough so that I could actually have my first-owned issue of Batman! I was so excited I didn't even look at any of the other old comics on that table.

                One of the great things about collecting comics in the

late 1950s and early '60s was the hunt! Searching for the best and newest places to purchase or read comic books added to the excitement of the books themselves. Tigue's Drug Store is gone. Sadly, I recently learned that Joe the Barber has passed away. The original Booth's Corner barn has been replaced by a modern building. The memories of these places are all that's left, fueled by the re-reading of the comic books found at these wonderful places.

                When I got home, later that night, I curled up on my bed to read the issue and it became (and still remains today), one of my favorite comic books!

                First of all, it retained the smell of roasted peanuts and, as I look back on it today, it is one of the quintessential Silver Age Batman comic books. All of the things that made the Batman of that era unique were contained in the three stories. It began with the cover tale, "The Challenge of the Batwoman", written by Batman co-creator Bill Finger and drawn by Moldoff and Charles Paris (ghosting for "Bob Kane" whose signature

appeared on every story). The story was an intricately-plotted tale wherein Batman injures his leg while pursuing a masked criminal with Robin. The criminal is also injured and loses his memory. Batwoman witnesses Robin pursuing the unmasked crook and mistakenly believes the crook to be Batman. She takes him back to her own Batcave beneath her mansion (It appears that all of Gotham City's millionaires have mansions built over caves. Wealthy heiress Kathy Kane, secretly Batwoman, was no exception--and there were at least two more that I can recall). There, she plans to re-train the amnesia-suffering criminal. Contacting Batman via his belt radio, Robin is instructed to go along with Batwoman's plan for awhile as it will prevent the Gotham City underworld from realizing the real Batman is laid up.

                (Another aside: "challenge" and "underworld" were two words I first learned from reading this comic book!)

                Of course all goes awry when the criminal regains his memory at just the wrong moment, but Batman comes to the rescue using a special leg brace to fool the criminals into believing he is uninjured. It also protects his secret identity when Kathy Kane later encounters Bruce Wayne with a sprained ankle. At the end of the 10-page fiasco, Batwoman promises to retire because she screwed up so badly. Since I bought this back issue  after I read the World's Finest Comics Batwoman story, things were out of order for

me. At the end of the Superman-Batman tale, the two established heroes agree to allow Batwoman to remain an active super-hero. (Really nice of the two chauvinists).

                Since Batwoman was in the first Batman story I ever read, I thought she was part of the series all along. In later years I realized this wasn't the case. She was a mystery to me on some levels. For example, I never understood her costume's color scheme. What did bright yellow and red have to do with bats? I thought she looked more like "Robingirl". I always wondered if her costume was originally designed to be more like Batman's but just ended up being colored wrong.

                The middle story in Batman #105, "The Second Boy Wonder", was Detective Comics!). In this tale, returning from a case, Batman is shocked to learn that the Robin role has been taken over by a young lad named Freddy Lloyd.

written by France Herron and drawn by the same Moldoff-Paris team as the first. This was my favorite tale in the book. Robin had been invented to give readers someone with whom they could identify in the Batman stories. That theory worked 100% for me when I was 9 years old. I loved stories that centered on Robin (22 years later, I would be writing his solo adventures in

                According to Freddy, Robin (Dick Grayson) had been injured and crawled to Freddy's home seeking aid. Freddy said he was the son of an Olympic decathlon champion and had the ability to substitute for Robin until he recovered. Later in the story, he proved himself every much the equal to Robin and received such praise from both Batman and Alfred the butler.

                "Freddy" is horrified to see how easily Batman and Alfred dismissed Dick Grayson and reveals himself to actually be Dick in disguise. He did this to prove he was every bit the disguise artist Batman was. When he sees Bruce Wayne and Alfred laughing at him, he realizes they knew all along he was the real Robin. Batman's detective skills had kicked in and he easily saw through Dick's disguise. I'll avoid any more spoilers and not reveal how Batman pierced Dick's disguise. All in all, it was a fun and informative 8-page story for this new Batman and Robin fan.

                The final story in my first Batman comic was written by Arnold Drake and was entitled
"The Mysterious Bat Missile", another Moldoff-Paris 8-page adventure. Pure science fiction, this tale begins with a strange "Bat-Missile" appearing in the Bat-Cave. Controlled by thought, the craft can fly and pass through solid objects. Even though they have no idea where it came from, the Dynamic Duo used the weird craft to thwart a gang of crooks. At the end, they find it was a gift from the "Batman of the future," who saw their current 1957 difficulties in his "time telescope". Using "chromium power units," he transported the "Batmobile of the future" to aid them as a thank-you for inspiring his career. He used the last of the "chromium power units" to retrieve the missile and thank them in person. He and the missile then vanish forever.

                The science fiction element was one of the things that distinguished the Batman of this era from all the others. Gone was the mysterious Batman of the pre-Robin days. Gone were the murderous villains, now replaced by various robbers, stealing money, furs, paintings or museum treasures. Gone were the dark, foreboding nighttime adventures as Batman and Robin cruised around in broad daylight, somehow responding to Commissioner Gordon's Bat-Signal projected onto a clear, blue sky.

                But this Batman had a cartoony appeal. He had the big, 1950s Batmobile. He had his utility belt and his silken cord with which to swing. He had science-fiction adventures. And he had Alfred the Butler and the Batcave. (Although in the second story, the entrance was shown to be on road high above a mountain cliff, a depiction I never saw again). Somehow, in some way, this issue still invokes the memory and atmosphere of the dark, but garishly lit interior of Booth's Corner. Re-reading it, I remember the smell of the roasted peanuts and the horrifying cover of the nearby Mystic comic. I remember the old witch who sold it to me and the excitement of actually owning my first Batman comic book.

                It has an honored place in my collection as one of my favorite comic books.        

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Next: Let me tell you about summer camp and the House of Mystery.