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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good for Batman completists, 6 Aug 2001
What we have here is Batman Archives volume 1. A book that collects "Detective Comic"s #27-50 which include the first appereances of Batman (#27), Robin (#38) and Clayface (#40) and features a very early Joker story as well (#45). This is a Batman who is labelled 'pre-crisis' now (see "Crisis on Infinite Earths") and is said to not be exactly the same Batman that's in comics in the present, a Batman who isn't affraid to use any sort of violence (including murder !) to get the job done. What we see is Batman dealing almost exclusively with common criminals in very harsh ways and acting as the avenging detective. Extravagant villains like he later faced (Pinguin, Riddler etc.) aren't really an issue here yet, despite of that single Joker story. There's some remarkably solid storytelling going on here though, especially for the day and age these stories were first published (unlike a lot of other comic-titles in that period of time which mostly were very corny). The art isn't very great and a little confusing at times (there isn't a lot of difference in facial expressions, the two expressions you see almost all the time are "intrigued" and "shocked"), but it's sufficient. In conclussion I can say that it's a very nice collection for Batman completists AND for people who like to see how it al began and how the character evolved over the (more than 60 !) years. But it isn't really neccesary reading for people who are looking for great Batman stories. In that case you're better of getting something like "Batman: Gothic", "Batman: Prey", "The Long Halloween", "Joker: Devil's Advocate" or the obvious "Return of the Dark Knight" by Frank Miller.People who DO love this trip in nostalgia will also have a good time with "The Dark Knight Archives", "The Greatest Joker Stories ever Told", "The Greatest Batman Stories ever Told" and the more recent "Batman: Strange Apparitions".
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A nice surprise..., 8 Sep 2004
I must confess that I didn't know what to expect from the first issues of Detective Comics that featured Batman. sure, I've been a Batman fan all my life, and I had already read some stories drawn by Bob Kane, but I didn't know the early ones. I only bought this Hardcover because I got a good deal and paid only half the price.
But anyway, when I started reading the book, I felt highly entertained, and while Kane is no Neal Adams or Marshall Rogers or any other Batman great that came later, the stories in this book were actually better than most stories from the fifties and the sixties.
This Batman is very different from the character that most people know now. There are no gadgets, no batmobile, no batplane. You only see a batarang. With the exception of Joker and Clayface, there are no supervillains; Batman seems focus on gangsters, spies and mad scientists. He even carries a gun and threatens and kills criminals (things that would be unthinkable) nowadays.
Overall, this is an essential piece for anyone interested in knowing how this became one of the major charcters of the twentieth century.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
How he came to be, 7 Feb 2007
I had never read these earliest tales of 'The Bat-Man', all I knew was this:
Batman started out as a dark, gothic loner, was turned into a camp parody of himself by the 60's TV show, then was returned to his dark roots by Frank Miller in the 80's.
Well, it wasn't far off the mark.
Yes, the very early tales are considerably more mean spirited than future outings, but within a few issues Batman was already a smiling, snappy patter-spewing, atypical superhero.
No matter how you cut it, the addition of Robin in issue 38 of Detective Comics was a bad, bad thing. The tone became considerably lighter in subsequent issues, Batman started fantasizing over Catwoman... it was headed downhill all by itself pretty early on.
When the TV show debutted it really wasn't doing anything the comic-book wasn't already doing. Except, I have to say, the show was intentionally playing for laughs. The comic... I don't think so.
It's fascinating to see the development of the character. Regardless of the period, the art is crude to the point of awfulness by anyones standards. There were many talented artists in the comics industry at that time. Kane & co were not among them.
Frequently the same images crop up throughout various issues, and backgrounds are often minimal. But still, there are ocassionally some fantastic panels.
And pretty much all the basic ingredients that survive in the stories published today that make the series so successful are set in stone within this first collection of stories, including the debut of The Joker.
Despite my criticisms, I wouldn't have it any other way. There is a creepy, sinister atmosphere throughout the book that must be attributed wholly to the art.
There's something fascinating about seeing these early adventures for the first time, regardless of what it lacks in good art or good storytelling. They're the building blocks for 70 odd years of character history.
But more than that, they're just great fun to read. Plain and simple.
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