Look at the cover before you read it. The house is a face.
Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson designed Detective Comics #365 around a single idea and then refused to wink at it. The stone building Batman and Robin are storming has white brick teeth and a red mouth and one visible eye, and men are shooting out of all of them. The gag lands in under a second, from across a room, which in July 1967 meant from across a drugstore spinner rack.
Infantino is the reason Batman survived the fifties. The “New Look” he brought to the character in 1964 dragged him out of a decade of alien encounters and back toward detective fiction, and by 1967 — the peak of the television show, the peak of Batmania, the peak of the character’s mass-market visibility in his first thirty years — Infantino was designing covers with the confidence of someone who no longer needed to explain anything. This is one of the best of them.
Inside, John Broome and Gardner Fox write, Sheldon Moldoff and Sid Greene draw, and an Elongated Man backup closes the issue.
And then there is the back cover, which is a small piece of accidental history. Revell is selling an Apollo spacecraft model kit for a dollar fifty. “1967 is the year for Apollo,” the copy begins, “the spacecraft that will place the first man on the moon.” It was not, quite — Apollo 1 had burned on the pad that January, and the landing was still two years out. But the certainty in the sentence is undiluted, printed on the back of a Batman comic, sold to children who would be teenagers when it came true.
This copy grades CGC 9.0, Very Fine/Near Mint, with cream to off-white pages. High-grade survivors from this stretch of Detective are genuinely uncommon; the boom that made the book popular is the same boom that got most copies read to pieces.
Look at the cover before you read it. The house is a face.
Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson designed Detective Comics #365 around a single idea and then refused to wink at it. The stone building Batman and Robin are storming has white brick teeth and a red mouth and one visible eye, and men are shooting out of all of them. The gag lands in under a second, from across a room, which in July 1967 meant from across a drugstore spinner rack.
Infantino is the reason Batman survived the fifties. The “New Look” he brought to the character in 1964 dragged him out of a decade of alien encounters and back toward detective fiction, and by 1967 — the peak of the television show, the peak of Batmania, the peak of the character’s mass-market visibility in his first thirty years — Infantino was designing covers with the confidence of someone who no longer needed to explain anything. This is one of the best of them.
Inside, John Broome and Gardner Fox write, Sheldon Moldoff and Sid Greene draw, and an Elongated Man backup closes the issue.
And then there is the back cover, which is a small piece of accidental history. Revell is selling an Apollo spacecraft model kit for a dollar fifty. “1967 is the year for Apollo,” the copy begins, “the spacecraft that will place the first man on the moon.” It was not, quite — Apollo 1 had burned on the pad that January, and the landing was still two years out. But the certainty in the sentence is undiluted, printed on the back of a Batman comic, sold to children who would be teenagers when it came true.
This copy grades CGC 9.0, Very Fine/Near Mint, with cream to off-white pages. High-grade survivors from this stretch of Detective are genuinely uncommon; the boom that made the book popular is the same boom that got most copies read to pieces.
