Trashed treasure: ‘Batman From The ’30s To The ’70s’

Some books are worth their weight in gold, even as they fall apart.

This treasured copy of “Batman: From The ‘30s to ‘70s” was given to me by my parents sometime around 1977 or so, and while it shows the wear and tear of 40+ years of avid re-reading, I’ll never part with it. The book needs regluing, there’s a few pages missing, the dust cover has been gone for decades, and for some reason I cut an interior page out and glued it on the front cover, but if there’s a single book I can blame for my lifelong comics addiction, it’s this one. 

This copy has been around the world with me, from California to Mississippi to Oregon to New Zealand. About 15 years ago or so I “loaned” it to my then-teenage nephew, and it eventually ended up on the shelf out at our family’s beach house here in New Zealand. There it sits, dusty but alive. 

Published as a “best of” collection celebrating Batman’s first 30 years or so, it’s a marvellous summing up of why Batman still works after all this time. You had the raw, primitive early Bob Kane stories – the debuts of The Joker and Doctor Death were dark, bloody stories with a high body count. Then Robin came along, and the tone started to get lighter – culminating in the great crazed sci-fi Bat of the 1950s, with Batwoman, Batgirl, Bat-Mite and Ace The Bathound all joining the crew. Batman traveled back in time and went to alien planets and yet this was the same Batman who once brooded in the shadows of Gotham, too. Over the pages of this thick tome, you could watch Batman progress from pulp hero to sci-fi star to the classic realistic Neal Adams-styled Batman who leapt off the page in the early 1970s. You could see how Batman could fit in almost anywhere and anytime.

There were several spreads of covers of various decades in Bat-history, going from the Gothic 1940s to the kitschy 60s to the lean, brooding Bat of the early 1970s. Pre-internet, pre-discovering fandom, this was the only window into the mysteries of comics history for me. It’s really hard to describe in our wired world what it felt like to discover hints of the past without being able to Google them up. At just age 8 or so, I began to understand the concept of history. All thanks to Batman.

 I long since bought another copy of the same book that’s less battered, just to be able to read it easily. I’ll still keep my original copy of “Batman From The ’30s to the ’70s” around somewhere until it disintegrates into crumbs, I imagine. It was the key to unlock a four-coloured world of heroes and villains I’ve never entirely left.