Batman: The Inevitable Best of the 1970s Post

Welcome to the first (and only) Batman: The Best of the '70s Awards. Who will win the most Alfies?

Named in honor of Gotham Manor's faithful and unflappable caretaker, of course.

Or perhaps it should be the Gordies?

Neither, you say? Shut up and dive right in, you say? I hear and obey the voice of Landru.

Let's start with everyone's favorite:

THE WORST

Got to go with Justice League of America here. 

The series in general, but specifically, the worst issue of any comic published in the 1970s to feature the Caped Crusader is JLA #89. That's the one with the Mike Friedrich stand-in "Harlequin Ellis" that walks around under agonized prose all issue long before the writer addresses the reader directly in the last panel about the "crash-pounding of his artistic soul" before laying it all at Harlan Ellison's feet.

Moving on.

BEST CONCUSSION

Oooh! So many to choose from. I'll go with these two from the pages of Detective Comics in 1975:

There were actually far more brutal ones, and it's a silly category to begin with. But when I close my eyes and mentally picture the Batman getting cracked on the back of the head, it's one of the two above that I seem to recall.

BEST SUPPORTING PLAYER

This to me was a no-brainer:

Reading all of Batgirl's adventures in this decade convinces me more than ever that Alan Moore's (really Denny O'Neil's, the same way killing Jason Todd was not Jim Starlin's idea, though he wrote it, but Denny's) idea to cripple her in the pages of The Killing Joke was one of the ugliest, dumbest decisions of all comics in the 1980s.

And it's a logical enough segue into...

BEST BACK-UP

Tougher than you might think.

The Robbins/Heck Batgirl stories are all pretty great.

Not to mention all of those fantastic early-70s Robin ones where he's mixing it up with hippies, cultists, and Jesus freaks.

And later in the decade there's some very interesting Wonder Woman and Steve Ditko stuff, to boot. And some of the reprints of old Batman or sci-fi tales come to mind, as well. But in the final analysis, I'll go with Archie Goodwin's and Walt Simonson's Manhunter series from Detective Comics in 1974.

BEST CREATIVE TEAM  

The obvious answer would be the most famous Bat-pairing of the 70s, Neal Adams and Denny O'Neil. And while I certainly wouldn't fault anyone for saying so, I'm going to with:

Jim Aparo

and Bob Haney.

They were far more consistent than O'Neil and Adams. (Well, O'Neil, anyway - Adams was and remains always consistent.)

Even the way he looks. (1978, left, and these days, right.) How is that possible?

Haney and Aparo were responsible for a greater amount of stories that I personally enjoyed than O'Neil and Adams at any rate. But that's a more awkward name for the category. Also, an honorable mention for Archie Goodwin, whose all-too-brief tenure as a writer and editor led to some of the Batman's best stories.

Gotham's International Airport (number 25) is named after him.

He was immortalized in The Batman Adventures as "Mr. Nice."

BEST OF THE BATMAN'S SITTING IN BRANCHES AND STAKING OUT A HAUNTED HOUSE PANELS

Oh, here I can't even hazard a guess. They're all winners. It was just a delight to discover it happening so often, over and over again, and wondering about it.

BEST VILLAIN

Well, it's definitely not any of these guys:

or

The Calculator

I get a kick out of the Spook and the Gentleman Ghost, but I can't in good conscience say their respective appearances are "Best Of..." level. So I'll play it safe and choose:

He's used fairly sparingly (despite even getting his own title halfway through the decade) but he steals the show each time he appears. As per usual. So, the Joker it is.

BEST OUT-OF-CONTEXT PANELS

Both from Batman 221.

From Batman 250.

And this gem from Batman 285.

MOST GRATUITOUS BOOBS

Another no-brainer.

Let's break down the individual titles for more Alfies-and-Gordies fun... numbered just to make it more presentable, not in order of importance or personal esteem.

1.

BEST WRITER: Tough not to go with Denny O'Neil here.
BEST ARTIST: Ditto for Neal Adams, but I'm going to go my own way, here, and choose Irv Novick, who while certainly following Neal's lead, kicked an unreasonable amount of ass and is perhaps somewhat unsung among Batman artists of the '70s.

NOTABLE STORIES

2.

BEST WRITER: Elliot S. Maggin? Steve Englehart? Archie Goodwin? I'll go with Archie Goodwin.
BEST ARTIST: The amount of artists who worked on this title is staggering. As with Batman, it's tough not to go with Neal Adams. But I'll go with a tie between him and Marshall Rodgers.

NOTABLE STORIES

3.

BEST WRITER: Bob Haney. Not very difficult - he wrote the vast majority of them.
BEST ARTIST: Slightly more difficult. Dick Dillin illustrated a whole lot more of them than either Curt Swan or Kurt Schaffenberger, but I'll take those two guys over Dillin any day - with all respect to Dillin, of course. Just a big fan of Swan and Schaffenberger's style.

NOTABLE STORIES

(You'll notice there's quite a few of these... of all the Bat-titles of the '70s, this was for me the most surprising. It marched to the beat of its own seriously-warped drummer, and each year seemed to bring something more memorable than the last.)

4.

BEST WRITER: Bob Haney. As with World's Finest, pretty easy to pick this one, as he wrote most of them.
BEST ARTIST: Jim Aparo. (Ditto.)

NOTABLE STORIES

5.

BEST WRITER: Steve Englehart
BEST ARTIST: Dick Dillin

Okay, so I beat up on this title a bit during my overview. Not too unfairly I hope, but apologies to anyone whose favorite era of JLA is the '70s. Me, I'll stick with Gardner Fox's and Grant Morrison's respective runs. (And the anomaly of the DeMatteis/Maguire/Giffen JLI from the 80s.)

NOTABLE STORIES

6.

BEST WRITER: Martin Pasko (with appropriate kudos to Alfred Bester)
BEST ARTIST: José Luis García-López

NOTABLE STORIES

and finally 7.

Probably my favorite of all the titles, as short-lived as it was. So much bang for your metaphorical buck, here, and a great cross-section of eras, styles, and characters. (Hell, even Alfred had an ongoing back-up.)

 

BEST WRITER: Bob Rozakis,
BEST ARTIST: Bob Brown. (Brown was all over the Bat-map and this is more of a catch-all award. His best work was arguably in the pages of Batman.)

NOTABLE STORIES

That does it for this one-off edition of the Alfie/Gordies. As threatened last time, I'll be back to inflict one more slice of Bronze Age Batman on you before darkening the Bat-signal from the roof of Dog Star Omnibus HQ forever. I'll leave you this - here's hoping wiser heads prevail at some point and give us the Bat-Mite / Mr. Myxlplyx buddy comedy we so desperately need.