Dracula Lives (1973) #9

Dl9

Until the last story, which might be the least impressive entry in an issue of unimpressive entries… I think the most successful art, overall, in the issue is Ernie Chan’s one-pager. It opens the issue, with a Tony Isabella script, all about the various ways of killing vampires. It’s amusing and practical; statements it’s difficult to make about the rest of the issue.

The first story’s the most disappointing, just because it continues Doug Moench’s okay “Dracula vs. the NYPD” story from the previous issue. This time Frank Robbins is penciling with Frank Springer inking. It’s a cartoony style, with disappointing character work. Not sure if it’s Robbins or Springer, but the people look lousy. Neither good nor bad is Dracula, who’s more inhuman. The story involves Dracula tracking down the guy who looted his castle and having to figure out how to get his wares back.

Meanwhile, the cop whose wife Dracula killed last issue is out to get him. His fellow cops believe his story of a vampire forcing the guy to kill his own wife, which tracks. Imagine what police accountability was like in the seventies.

Interestingly, Dracula’s still a somewhat mythic figure, with the lady who buys his stuff at auction (seriously, hasn’t another Tomb story used this bit) wishing he were real. Well, she finds out.

For a panel, it seems like the Franks are at least enthusiastic about good girl art but then not really.

The disappointing art sets the tone for the rest of the issue, with the most personally disappointing coming up next. It’s another Moench story (there are four features, one movie review, and a letters page, yet another change of regular content), with art by twenty-one-year-old Paul Gulacy and inks by Mike Esposito. It’s about Dracula versus some other vampire; this other vampire’s terrorizing a European village, which pisses Dracula off because it means no easy feeding there.

I’d love to say baby Paul Gulacy has the chops.

He does not. He’s got better panels and worse panels, and you can see proto-Gulacy at work (even the almond eyes), but you can’t really see how good he’ll get from this one.

The story’s got a strange finish, kind of jokey. What’s more bizarre is the other two stories have the same kind of finish.

They have a different writer, though—Gerry Conway.

His first story has Alfredo Alcala art. Alcala’s a better inker than penciller and inker. His faces are flat in the wrong places, and his figures are strange. His backgrounds are fantastic. The story’s about a young couple; the evil girl convinces the boy to rob a jewelry store for her.

Meanwhile, Dracula’s around. Their paths cross. Unlike the Moench story, this one begins and ends with light humor. It’s a weird tone, especially with the art. The whole issue just feels off.

The last story—the only one where the art’s more successful than that Chan one-pager—is about a mysterious figure in a top hat hunting Dracula. Sonny Trinidad does the art. The art’s good. The story’s terrible. Conway takes a big swing with it and completely misses. So again, the issue feels off, especially with usually sturdy (on Lives anyway) Conway fumbling both his stories. Moench’s got more art problems, so it’s hard to say. But Conway’s stories go wrong because of the writing.

The movie review—by Gerry Boudreau—covers the Hammer Dracula film, The Scars of Dracula. Boudreau hates it, though with less personality than Moench or Isabella had in their previous reviews.

No Bram Stoker’s Dracula adaptation here.

Unfortunately—and unexpectedly—I’m back to wondering if Lives is worth it again.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1972)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

I’ve been aware of the “Barbara (Batgirl) Gordon becomes a congressperson” storyline in the seventies since Who’s Who in the DC Universe #2 in 1985—I even have an anecdote about buying the issue at age seven—but I’ve never read the arc before or even read about its details.

And now I’ve read it.

And it’s about Barbara Gordon becoming a congresswoman because Batgirl can only lock up the crooks, not keep them locked up forever. Yes, Barbara Gordon is a garbage Republican. I wonder if Chuck Dixon held that ace through Birds of Prey and never got to use it.

After an ex-boyfriend from her youth—who Barbara broke up with ten years ago but then beat up and apprehended two years ago as Batgirl—shows up at the library with an Edgar Allan Poe enthusiasm, she can’t help but hope for the best. Only it turns out he’s just after a famous manuscript she’s shown him and it crushes her confidence in the criminal justice system.

Worse, she’s been helping these crooks get parole as a librarian!

Or something. I glazed over in a combination of shock and disgust. Batgirl is a Karen.

At least as written by Frank Robbins. Though I doubt it’s going to change for decades.

There’s some hilariously dated election fraud, with the mob threatening voters to not vote for Barbara “Boots” Gordon. She’s called “Boots” initially because she’s going to give the crooks the boot, but then it’s the swamp. There’s a whole subplot about Batgirl accidentally endorsing Barbara and then Barbara apparently feeling weird about it.

The congresswoman is the last Robbins and Don Heck arc. The earlier stories in the year have Barbara going to Mexico to bust up a drug ring run by an American mobster dropped from a Dick Tracy script for being too boring. Again, Robbins is weirdly dated.

Heck’s got some good panels throughout. Not really sure his grasp of human musculature and movement is adequate, but he makes up for it well enough. His faces have personality even if they’re a little static. Oddly enough… he really can’t draw Batgirl’s boots. She’s always doing these kicks and he’s always messing up the boots.

Robbins tries the “can you spot the clue to solve the case” bit a couple more times, but with less and less enthusiasm. At one point it’s just at the end of a page, not even a cliffhanger. Though I guess Batgirl doesn’t lose as many fights in 1972. Well… wait. There are some bad losses in here.

But she wins against a killer jai alai team.

I had originally assumed these Bronze Age backups would be disposable except for the some of the art—Robbins has never been good (though he’s been better than some of the original Batgirl writers)—but there may actually be something in here for anyone writing about the characterization of women in male-written mainstream comic books of the seventies.

Though just because you can unpack it doesn’t mean it needs to be unpacked. Robbins is pretty shallow.

Thank goodness I’m through his Bronze Age Batgirl.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1971)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

After a cliffhanger resolve with Gil Kane pencils (Vince Colletta inks, which shockingly is an improvement over previous Kane inkers on the Batgirl backups), Don Heck takes over the pencils with Dick Giordano on inks. Can Dick Giordano inks save Don Heck pencils? It’s not terrible. Even after Giordano leaves and the Batgirl strips are Heck solo, it’s at least a nice nostalgic seventies middling. Low middling. But solidly middling; though Heck’s got some weird costume choices, like when he dresses Barbara up like she’s in Little Women for bedtime.

Frank Robbins writes all the stories for the year (backups in Detective Comics), which have a single moment of character development—Commissioner Gordon discovering Batgirl’s secret identity–while Batgirl has a variety of misadventures.

The opening cliffhanger resolve has some concept of Batgirl as female role model for the young women of Gotham but it’s the one mention. Otherwise, Robbins’s stories start as globe-trotting—off to Spain for the bullfights—then fashion world related (the killer wigs are better than the gangsters out to find out if a supermodel wants to show her legs or if there will be six more weeks of winter), then random Hollywoodish stuff. Oh, and then the one where Gordon finds out; he’s out for a cop-killer and it’s possibly Robbins’s worst writing, which is a statement to make because there’s some bad writing throughout.

Reading Frank Robbins’s thought balloons seems to definitely prove thought balloons are bad, actually.

There are some big bad themes throughout—like random people being able to kick Batgirl’s ass in a fight, which is really just the norm but it’d have been nice if Robbins and Heck got away from it. They dabble in bondage imagery for a couple stories but apparently it was a bit too far and instead settle on doing those lousy mystery stories where they give you the clues and you should be able to figure out the killer because he was holding the gun in the wrong hand.

There are contemporary movie references–The Godfather becomes The Stepfather (no Terry O’Quinn, sorry), what appears to be Liz Taylor, Richard Burton, and John Wayne analogues—where Robbins either tries too hard or not enough.

The best story, art-wise, is the Spain one, where Barbara finds herself in a Spanish manor fighting a Zorro-type. Throw in the romance novel dresses for her and it’s at least a Gothic thriller with some visual flare. Had they done these backups Marvel-style, at least for that one, and had someone write the story over the art… it probably would’ve been better.

The biggest problem with Robbins’s writing is his inability to get to that first cliffhanger. At least two of the stories resolve in between the first and second half, or could if Batgirl just managed not to always get her ass-kicked in the first scene of the second part. Unless she’s held captive in a James Bond villain trap at cliffhanger.

There’s undoubtedly a way to do these two-parter backups well and Robbins just doesn’t know it. Though it’s not all on him—whoever edited these stories (Julie Schwartz it seems like) didn’t do a good job either. Even if you ignore the seventies sexism, the lack of character development over a hundred pages for Barbara is a glaring defect.

It’s even worse when Jason Bard’s along. He’s a bad romantic interest, which isn’t a surprise, and it’s better Robbins isn’t interested in their relationship.

And it’s not even like Robbins is atrocious. For the time period, he’s bad but he’s not, like, spectacularly bad. He’s a lot less sexist in his characterization of Barbara than previous Batgirl writers. Sure, some of it is because he’s disinterested in her character development and she’s just a pawn to move around the board, but… it’s not like she ever screws anything up because she’s trying to look pretty.

She screws things up. But because the story requires her utter, should-be-fatal incompetence to get to the next page. Not because she’s a girl.

Presumably. The only other action heroes are Commissioner Gordon, who gets hoodwinked so his screw-up is disqualified, and Jason Bard, whose bum leg—which inevitably causes him to trip, fall, let the bad guy get away—disqualifies him too.

Maybe the Giordano-inked Zorro-esque story would have been worth a read in the floppy, but it’s hard to imagine looking forward to the Batgirl backups every month of 1972 in your Detective Comics. Though it was the seventies so who knows.

Batgirl: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1 (1969-70)

Batgirl Omnibus 1

Maybe I shouldn’t have complained so much about Gardner Fox.

After approximately a year off (or just appearing as a guest star in Batman or Detective and not getting an Omnibus reprint), Batgirl’s started getting backups in Detective. Gil Kane came back to do the pencils, but with Murphy Anderson on the inks and—outside the occasional eyes—the art rarely looks like Gil Kane. Anderson seems to have entirely erased and redone the faces, which leads to some strange face placements on heads. So outside the curiosity factor of seeing pencils and inks not going together, Batgirl’s going to need some good writing to get through.

Starting with Mike Friedrich, it’s pretty clear she’s not going to get any good writing. Friedrich takes Fox’s bad flexes—Barbara Gordon’s female vanity and her professional indiscretions as a librarian—and streamlines them into a tale of Barbara stalking a handsome customer. The first part of the story is just her deciding when he doesn’t come into the library at the regular time she needs to go to his home, where she finds another woman, so then we get Batgirl stalking the dude while being jealous of this other woman. It’s fairly obvious how the resolution is going to work but along the way there’s some constrained action—Batgirl fighting random thugs, who always manage to get the upper hand, which really reminds of the old Batman serials where the heroes would get beat up the entire fight scene and then succeed through a cliffhanger reveal. Unfortunately, Batgirl getting beat up because she doesn’t pay attention or just isn’t, you know, as good a fighter as a random college student maintains through the different writers.

One of the few things writers Friedrich, Denny O’Neill, and Frank Robbins are all going to agree on is Batgirl not actually being a competent crime fighter.

Robbins takes over after Friedrich’s first two-parter and has Barbara stumbling into some kind of plot because she wants a cheap apartment. It opens like it’s a Red-Headed League homage–oh, there’s another thing they all agree on: fetishizing Barbara being a red-head. Anyway, it’s not a RHL homage, instead having Barbara at a costume ball as Batgirl fighting with crooks dressed as other superheroes. Arguably the Anderson inks on the Kane pencils never work better than with the pseudo-superheroes. They’re at least effective. The resolve has what should be a gloriously silly resolution but it just doesn’t play; some of it is how Kane breaks out the action, so it’s not all on Robbins or Anderson. A lot of it is on Robbins and Anderson, obviously, but not all of it.

The next story introduces Jason Bard, an amateur detective who can’t be a professional because he’s got a bad knee, which may or may not have happened in Vietnam. He definitely was in Vietnam, but where he hurt the knee is immaterial or so I’m going to keep telling myself because I clearly skimmed that exposition dump. Though Bronze Age so there will be plot-changing details revealed in six words in a tiny thought balloon in the top right of an action-packed panel.

Barbara and a work pal are gossiping about customers—it’s just what librarians do, the pal tells Jason, silly ladies—and they set their sights on him. He’s in the library doing his amateur criminologist research and now he’s going to go out and investigate and prove his methods correct, starting with a mugging turned murder in Central Park. Gotham Park. Whatever. They both have Taverns on the Green. Jason makes quick work of setting a lunch date with Barbara and soon they’re investigating together, except she’s doing it behind his back as Batgirl while telling him how cool it must be to be an amateur criminologist on full disability. Jason Bard’s a weird character.

But his first appearance is nowhere near as cringe as his second, when someone at DC told Robbins to up the Vietnam references so nearly every panel in the second half of Bard’s intro mentions Vietnam or war, including something about Bard’s amateur criminology being “his new war.” It’s a lot. And a fairly blah resolution anyway.

Still better than the next one, which has Batgirl trying to take down a lonely hearts killer. Here’s where we find out Robbins thinks Barbara is homely (whereas Friedrich made sure to establish she was ogle-worthy).

I can’t imagine how these would read as backups, what with the very iffy art and the bland action. This two-parter is just more Batgirl fighting random thugs in alleys. It’s bland stuff. And then Jason’s hanging around because Barbara’s doing the Sea of Love thing, obviously, not Batgirl so Jason’s got to stalk his love interest because romance. Maybe if Robbins had committed and done Jason as a creepy vet stalker but he’s just there to remind Barbara she’s his lady whether there’s a ring on it or not.

I don’t even remember if he unintentionally fumbles through a fight scene to deus ex something. In his first story he falls down some stairs and it saves the day.

Vince Colleta takes over the inks for the O’Neill-written two-parter, which promises to be the first time Robin ever teams up with Batgirl. Clearly O’Neill hadn’t read the second or third story in the Batgirl Bronze Age Omnibus where Batgirl and Robin very definitely team-up… maybe they mean without Batman at all. Or maybe they mean with some flirting. There’s this really weird bit where Batgirl flirts with Robin in the last panel and there’s no time for a reaction from him. And as a late nineties Oracle/Nightwing shipper, it’s fine? But maybe it’s just the art. The Batgirl and Robin adventuring scenes are about as good as you’re going to get, even if it’s just a page.

O’Neill’s writing is… not great. His mystery—an homage to Edgar Allan Poe and some other mystery writers—would probably not make Poe blush. At some point you’re wondering if O’Neill realizes there can’t be any question of the villain’s identity because there are only five characters in the story, two of them are superheroes and two of them are dead. Or something along those lines. I was too busy appreciating decent movement for once in the comic. Oh, but funny thing about the Batgirl and Robin team-up—no Robin in the first part. Total bait and switch. You get a two panel Dick Grayson cameo without Batgirl knowing Dick Grayson is Robin. Then O’Neill switches over to Robin’s perspective for most of the second part.

Robin, it turns out, is just as bad a criminal investigator as Batgirl, so at least there’s consistent incompetence to Gotham’s best funded paramilitary enthusiast organization.

Wait, are the Bat-family just larpers at their core?

Then Robbins does a story about an Andy Warhol analogue getting murdered. Well, combination Andy Warhol (Billy Warlock—wait, isn’t that the guy from “Baywatch”) and underground pornographer. Maybe. I’m not sure what Robbins means when he talks about “x-epics” and it’s not worth trying to figure out. Frank Giacoia’s inks aren’t great. They don’t clash as much as Anderson’s—and initially the art seems like it’s going to be all right, the inks giving Kane a cartoon-y quality—but no. Jason Bard’s also back for this one and there’s—maybe—the first appearance of Commissioner Gordon in the backups. He was too busy in the features to bother making an appearance apparently.

The cliffhanger (since I’m cutting off at a year mark) has Colleta inks again—who knew you could be so happy to see “inks by Vince Colleta”—and involves Batgirl using her knowledge from library to hunt down random citizens again. But this time she’s after protestors and they know their rights so we get a scene where someone’s like, “Get your vigilante ass off my porch,” and we’re supposed to be siding with Batgirl harassing the person. Who she only knew to target from the library. Will Batgirl be able to save the day against the hippies who say they aren’t violent but really are? Hashtag peace is for pansies apparently.

Batgirl 1969 and Batgirl 1970 aren’t a complete waste of time—I’m also curious how Kane’s original pencils look—but given the best thing about a hundred or so pages of comics is a dozen panels with Batgirl and Robin doing acrobat stuff thanks to Vince Colleta inks? I mean, it’s pretty close to a complete waste of time then, isn’t it.