This comic book wasn’t actually the first time that Neal Adams had ever drawn Batman, of course. By the time that DC published Batman #217 - the issue in which the hero leaves both Wayne Manor and the Batcave behind (though only temporarily, as it turned out) - Adams’ vision of the Caped Crusader had become the new standard, making it entirely appropriate that that issue, though featuring interior art by Irv Novick and Dick Giordano, was fronted by an Adams cover (as shown at left, above).Īnd the starting point for it all - the launch pad for DC’s reinvention of Batman - was Brave and the Bold #79, a comic book published when the fountainhead of the previous, camp era, the Batman television series, had been off the air for only three short months. Those changes were relatively simple, even cosmetic - lengthening Batman’s cape as well as the ears on his cowl, setting scenes at night whenever possible - but they had a huge impact on fans. These changes made it easier to depict Batman as a mysterious, lone-wolf vigilante, swooping down from rooftops to terrify criminals.īut all of these changes and innovations were preceded by the ones already instituted by Adams, working on Brave and the Bold with the book’s longtime writer Bob Haney and new editor Murray Boltinoff. Working with writer Frank Robbins and artists Irv Novick and Bob Brown, Schwartz made a clean break with the hero’s preceding, TV-driven “camp” era, by breaking up the Dynamic Duo of Batman and Robin (via shipping the Boy Wonder off to college) and closing up the Batcave, as Bruce Wayne moved out of stately Wayne Manor and into a high-rise Gotham penthouse. And it’s true that O’Neil’s understanding of Batman’s psychology, of the obsessive nature of his crusade, was a critically important part of what made the revamp work, and gave it traction - helping it to shape other creators’ as well as fans’ conception of who “The Batman” was for generations to come.Īnd it’s also true that efforts made by editor Julius Schwartz in the months immediately before that Detective issue’s appearance did much to lay the groundwork the Darknight Detective’s new/old direction. To be sure, there’s an argument that can be made that this major revamping of Batman didn’t get fully underway until late 1969, when Adams and O’Neil teamed up on the character for the first time in Detective Comics #395’s “The Secret of the Waiting Graves”. And it all started with Brave and the Bold #79, and the art of Neal Adams. It was an approach which returned an air of mystery, a touch of noir, to Batman and his milieu - one which did indeed recover visual and thematic elements that had been present, or at least implicit, in the character’s earliest published adventures, but which explored and elaborated on those elements in a more sophisticated fashion than readers had ever seen before. That’s because “The Track of the Hook”, written by Bob Haney and illustrated by Neal Adams, serves as the clearest point of origin for the most thorough overhaul ever of one of comics’ most iconic heroes - an overhaul that has often been called a return to the character’s original 1939 roots, but is probably more accurately viewed as an approach based on what comics writer Denny O’Neil once described as “remembering how we thought it should have been”. Chronologically speaking, it’s certainly the most important Batman comic that DC Comics had published since 1964’s Detective Comics #327, the issue in which editor Julius Schwartz and artist Carmine Infantino debuted a “New Look” for the Caped Crusader - and I think that a strong case can be made that there wouldn’t be another single Bat-book quite so significant until the publication of the first installment of Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight, in 1986. The topic of today’s post is, I believe, one of the most important single comic books in the evolution of Batman to appear during the character’s nearly eighty-year history - probably ranking in the top five or so such comics.