PARADIGM SCHIFF

 

On occasion I’ve found fault with the kind of criticism that concentrates only on the “firsts” or the “big events” in comic book history (or in any arena of fiction, genre or otherwise). While no one can read everything— sometimes, not even all the stories centered around an evergreen serial character like Batman—it should be kept in mind, as I mentioned here, that the first Joker story is not necessarily the best Joker story.

When I picked up a cheap copy of 2018’s DC COMICS SUPER HEROINES: 100 GREATEST MOMENTS, I knew that “firsts” and “big events” would be the main concern of the book’s author, Robert Greenberger. All of the “100 Greatest Moments” tomes are big, heavily illustrated coffee-table books, spotlighting various aspects of DC comics history. Usually the book touch only adequately upon the history of the company’s first forty years while giving heavier coverage to the developments of the last four decades. I don’t especially begrudge this editorial decision. Every generation has its own preferences in popular culture, and if you’re selling a coffee table book to readers in the 2010s, it probably ought to concentrate on subject matter of interest to readers in the 2010s.

For that reason, I won’t cavil at the choices made by Greenberger and/or his editors. I could complain, say, that a major Silver Age heroine like Elasti-Girl gets only two pages, and that she’s only given a couple of panels fighting (or just starting to fight) a giant robot. But I can appreciate that the comics-reading paradigm has shifted: that, from the eighties onward, super heroines became a lot more important to hardcore comics-fans than they ever were to the more casual readers who used to pick up funnybooks at the corner store. So it’s all but inevitable that Harley Quinn gets a lot more coverage than Elasti-Girl, and I don’t take issue with Greenberger’s choices in any serious way.

What does give me pause, though, is a passage in which he puts forth an inaccurate paradigm with respect to the history of DC’s treatment of its super villains. I think it’s more a mistake than anything, based on inaccurate recollections. Still, the way in which DC changed its practice of using bizarre villains in the Silver Age made a difference to the way they told superhero stories for all future decades. Today, almost every superhero published by every publisher has a “rogue’s gallery.” It’s hard to remember that even a hero like Batman, renowned for a memorable cast of villains since the 1940s, spent his first fifteen years fighting ordinary crooks rather than super-criminals. A shift in this paradigm did occur after the establishment of the Comics Code in 1954, but it’s not quite the same as what Greenberger reports on page 156, where he’s trying to sum up the involved history of how Catwoman, absent from DC titles for twelve years, was returned to “active service” in a 1966 issue of LOIS LANE. Greenberger writes:

In the 1950s, DC Comics decided to retire its costumed criminals in reaction to congressional scrutiny of the comic book field. That all changed in the 1960s as the New Look Batman titles began to reintroduce the villains, fueled by the January 1966 debut of the ABC BATMAN series.

The short version of my disagreement with Greenberger is this: if anything, it was the non-costumed criminals who started appearing less, while in the post-1954 BATMAN comics, long-time editor Jack Schiff continued to add to the rogues in the gallery of the Caped Crusader.

To begin the long version, though, Greenberger’s sweeping statement, applied not just to Batman but to the whole DC line of the 1950s (by which I think the writer really means 1954-1959), makes no sense. Throughout the decade the company published the Superman and Wonder Woman features, and though neither feature boasted a huge rogues’ gallery in the fifties, I see no evidence of a moratorium in those stories, given that Brainiac appeared in 1958 and Angle Man in 1954. Further, in the late 1950s, some time after the institution of the Comics Code, the company launched titles for three key superhero titles: the Flash, Green Lantern, and the Justice League. True, not until the 1960s proper did these three features soon generating large quantities of rogues. But when these respective features got going, those heroes’ opponents were usually either alien menaces or costumed crooks, with a steadily diminishing presence of non-costumed lawbreakers.

I should mention that before the publication of the Hal Jordan Green Lantern and Justice League features, and before the Barry Allen Flash’s official series began—all in 1959-- editor Jack Schiff was also giving Batman a combination of both costumed crooks and alien menaces. It’s for the “aliens in BATMAN” that Schiff became reviled by early fans, partly because most of the stories were pretty bad. Editors Mort Weisinger and Julie Schwartz—the one known respectively for most of the Superman features, while the other was renowned for those three fledgling series of the late fifties (among others)—had been SF-fans in youth, and so they understood how to use SF-tropes in kids’ comics books. Jack Schiff was not a SF-fan, and so he accepted a lot of bad space-opera stories that clashed with the basic concept of the Caped Crusader.

But Batman’s ET-encounters didn’t crowd out the super-villain tales, though they might have helped edge out the mundane crime stories. (It’s worth remembering that when Frederic Wertham launched the public jeremiad that led to the Comics Code’s formation, the psychiatrist ranted far more against crime comics than those featuring long-underwear heroes.) Between 1954 and 1959 the Joker appeared four times, and that’s without counting an appearance in the Superman-Batman feature in WORLD’S FINEST. The Penguin may have had a mild moratorium on his adventures, since he only appeared once in 1956 and didn’t show his beak again until 1963, though that second appearance is still way in advance of the 1966 TV show. Two-Face was revived in 1954 and never appeared for the rest of the decade, but he hadn’t been used that often even in the Golden Age.

Of the classic Golden Age villains still extant, only Catwoman—who had appeared in three 1954 stories—seemed to get completely mothballed for the next twelve years, until, as Greenberger notes, she re-appears in LOIS LANE (as does the Penguin, for his second Silver Age appearance). No one has ever proved that DC had an anti-Catwoman policy, though it may be significant that the Princess of Plunder is the only costumed villain specifically mentioned in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT, where Doctor Wertham complains about the nasty influence of her whip on young minds.

But Schiff, as stated, continued to build up the Bat-gallery, even if none of these super-crooks were quite on the level with the best Golden Age malefactors.

The Mirror-Man appears right in the cutoff year, 1954, though he doesn’t show up again until 1963.

The Mad Hatter, who borrows the name of a 1948 villain but who is essentially a new character, appears first in 1956 and then again in 1964.

The Signalman appears both in 1957 and 1959 before making one more appearance in 1961 as “the Blue Bowman.”

The Terrible Trio, aka the Fox, the Shark, and the Vulture, make a 1958 debut and then pop up once more in 1963.

And two one-shot villains, False Face and Mister Zero (later Mister Freeze), made their respective debuts in 1958 and 1959, after which both were adapted to the 1966 show, even though only Freeze became ensconced as a Bat-rogue from then on.

And of course, for the remainder of Schiff’s four-year custodianship in the sixties, he also introduced such familiar characters as a new Clayface and the Cat-Man, explicitly introduced to compensate for the lack of a cat-crime crook. Schiff also introduced a lot of lesser foes—Mister Polka Dot, anyone? —but even those examples prove that he bought a lot of stories with fancy-dressed felons.

So the paradigm is this: Schiff, far from cutting down on costumed antagonists, started beefing up Batman’s rogues’ gallery long before the revised versions of Flash and Green Lantern even had regular foes. I’m not surprised that this minor aspect of comic-book history got lost in the shuffle, though I am a little surprised that Greenberger, born in 1958 and thus a guy raised in the Silver Age, allowed himself to make such an erroneous statement. I can only assume it was done in haste, trying to simplify an involved subject for modern comics-fans, who have no particular reason to care about the policies of DC Comics in the 1950s, much less the accomplishments, good and bad, of comics-editor Jack Schiff.

ADDENDUM: Just after completing this essay, I read ALTER EGO #26 (2003) for the first time, and I came across a snippet in which Julie Schwartz sort-of promoted one aspect of the Schiff falsehood. Schwartz says, "fortunately, the one thing I did was to bring back the villains that Jack Schiff had neglected."

That's not quite the same as the assertion that Schiff didn't use villains at all. But Schiff did revive two Golden Age villains, essentially remaking them into new characters (Mad Hatter and Clayface). How many old villains did Schwartz revive? I only remember three during the sixties-- the period when Schwartz was editing the Bat-books to his preferences-- namely Riddler, Scarecrow and Killer Moth. And not that many new Schwartz villains of the sixties grabbed the fans. Blockbuster maybe-- but Eraser? Cluemaster? Spellbinder? His editorship in the seventies seems more like him kicking back and letting the writers do what they wanted, We did get the revivals of Deadshot and Hugo Strange then, but I don't know how much to credit Schwartz with those. I guess Schwartz made more use of Joker, Penguin and Catwoman, but some of that was due to the TV show.

I welcome other fans' input, since I'm not sure if I'm forgetting some important Bat-foes.