This was the way I first got to read the classic Steve Englehart/Marshall Rogers Batman stories from Detective Comics and it was the best way I could’ve, as these Rogers’ artwrok never looked as good as it did in black and white here.
Honestly. I also have these same stories as collected in the Legends of the Dark Knight: Marshall Rogers, in full colour on great paper and it just doesn’t look as good as it did in black and white on that crumbling newsprint paper Classics Lektuur used. The atmosphere of these stories was just so much better suited to black and white.
Marshall Rogers was already the penciler of the backup feature in Detective Comics in #466-467, with his first full issue in 468. Then in issue 471 he was joined by Steve Englehart as writer, who had started the previous issue but that had been drawn by Walter Simonson. From 471 to 476 they would create some of the best Batman stories ever published. Starting off with Hugo Strange, a villain last seen in the 1940ties discovering Batman’s secret identity, then trying to auctioning it off to, among others, the Penguin and the Joker. Before he can do so however he’s kidnapped and murdered by local crime lord Boss Thorne, who doesn’t get him to divulge the secret.
While this is all playing out, Batman first has to deal with the Penguin’s plan to rob a bird statue from a Gotham museum, in a rare teamup with Robin, still in college at this point. Then Englehart brings back another ancient villain, Deadshot, who started out as a fake Batman wannabe, now equipped with cool new wrist guns and costume. Then Rogers and Englehart round off their tenure with the legendary Laughing Fish story, in which the Joker poisons the fish around Gotham so they look like his own face and then threatens the copyright commission because they wouldn’t copyright the fish for him…
All these were reprinted in Dutch in Batman Classics 118-122 in 1980 and almost a decade later I would find these in a local secondhand bookstore for 75 cents a pop. That was a bit steep at the time for me, but over the next few weeks I would buy as many of these as I could, as well as some of the other issues they had. These would be not just my first introduction to the Englehart/Rogers Batman stories, but because these issues were 52 pages long, it also had various backups, including Warlord and Manbat. The latter series also featuring Rogers art.
At the time I wasn’t really a DC reader, but these were so good that they converted me from being a proper Marvel Zombie. The Batman Classics series had run from 1970 and would be cancelled in 1981, when the publisher, Classics Lektuur, got out of doing comics entirely. They actually started off as a publisher of the old Classic Illustrated edutainment comics in the mid-fifties, then branched out into less reputable fare. Not picky when it came to what they reprinted, they not only published DC superhero series, but also a lot of Marvel ones as well as Dell/Goldkey series, most with “Classics” in the title. Batman was actually a late addition to their portfolio as he had been licensed by another publisher during the sixties…
For years you could find all these comics very cheap in second hand stores or at comic cons, but over the decades they have become somewhat collectable to a few generations of superhero fans who grew up without access to the originals. I too have been slowly starting collecting them again, for nostalgia sake.
A word about the cover art: most of the Batman Classics issues at this time used new covers rather than reprints from the original American issues, with them being used not just on these Dutch reprints, but on similar series all across Europe. The artists responsible are largely unknown.
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