HOME | DD

Description
So I've actually been reading the Tales of the Batman: Carmine Infantino anthology, collecting all of the old master's Batman work from the 1960s on up to the late 2000s and one of the things I loved about Infantino's style was how much he actually predicted Adam West coming into the role of the Batman on television, as there's more than a passable resemblance between the way he drew Batman in Detective Comics at that time and how it was going to impact how the show was presented. It's probably a coincidence or a testament that before Neal Adams, Jim Aparo, Dick Giordano, and others that Infantino's dynamic, realistic style was such a polar opposite to the flatter, cartoonier look of Shelly Moldoff and Dick Sprang's work that ran concurrent with his for awhile (that's not a dismissal of the two previous masters of the Batman, just that there was a need for something fresh...and besides, that goofball cartoony style is still fondly remembered and did help influence the look of The Brave and the Bold cartoon in a big way) that I do wonder what the comic audiences must have thought about these slightly bolder, slightly more adventurous Batman tales?

I had just finished reading the lone Joker adventure that Carmine illustrated during his original Bat-run, a neat reminder of the "clown" aspect of the Joker where his big plan involves the robbery of an eccentric millionaire's manor by posing as a film producer and making comedies, complete with references to Chaplin, Harpo Marx, Ben Turpin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. And I got to thinking what it would've been like if the Batman TV series had pilfered plots from the comics more often (Hi-Diddle Riddle, the series premiere, was one such example, and ironically marked the Riddler's first appearance in the Silver Age) that this might've been a hilarious two-parter for the show to take advantage of.

Description
So I've actually been reading the Tales of the Batman: Carmine Infantino anthology, collecting all of the old master's Batman work from the 1960s on up to the late 2000s and one of the things I loved about Infantino's style was how much he actually predicted Adam West coming into the role of the Batman on television, as there's more than a passable resemblance between the way he drew Batman in Detective Comics at that time and how it was going to impact how the show was presented. It's probably a coincidence or a testament that before Neal Adams, Jim Aparo, Dick Giordano, and others that Infantino's dynamic, realistic style was such a polar opposite to the flatter, cartoonier look of Shelly Moldoff and Dick Sprang's work that ran concurrent with his for awhile (that's not a dismissal of the two previous masters of the Batman, just that there was a need for something fresh...and besides, that goofball cartoony style is still fondly remembered and did help influence the look of The Brave and the Bold cartoon in a big way) that I do wonder what the comic audiences must have thought about these slightly bolder, slightly more adventurous Batman tales?

I had just finished reading the lone Joker adventure that Carmine illustrated during his original Bat-run, a neat reminder of the "clown" aspect of the Joker where his big plan involves the robbery of an eccentric millionaire's manor by posing as a film producer and making comedies, complete with references to Chaplin, Harpo Marx, Ben Turpin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd. And I got to thinking what it would've been like if the Batman TV series had pilfered plots from the comics more often (Hi-Diddle Riddle, the series premiere, was one such example, and ironically marked the Riddler's first appearance in the Silver Age) that this might've been a hilarious two-parter for the show to take advantage of.