Underappreciated Dept. - The onus for this project was that Bob Haney is, on the whole, a terribly underrated writer of comics. Hes something of a cult figure among those of us who remember him fondly, but he seems to get little respect outside of a handful of comics connoisseurs. The Batmans creative rebirth in the 1970s, for example, is certainly recognized as a rennaissance for the character. That era didnt begin in the 70s though. It began in the late 60s, in Bob Haneys Brave & the Bold. When the awful camp craze surrounding the 60s Batman tv series had blossomed, DC had ordered the bat-books to ape the fad. Mercifully, the craze quickly faded, but the edict to clone it in print (which itself had wrecked an earlier attempted reform of the books) meant the fortunes of the comics sank with it. Haney went along with the silliness for a time--he could be pretty great when it came to silliness, actually--but he was also one of the key figures in rescuing the Batman from that awful period and launching what is frequently regarded as the high point of the characters comic history. His Brave & the Bold, which saved the day and pointed the way, continued as one of the main bat titles right through that era, yet his contribution is often minimized or entirely ignored. In Batman: The Complete History, Les Daniels writes, The initial impulse that led to Batmans renaissance came from an unexpected quarter, that being Haneys B&B. He spends a paragraph explaining how Haney, George Kashdan and Murray Boltinoff converted the title to a team-up-with-Batman book, then writes that B&B made its most lasting mark on Batman by providing a showcase for artist Neal Adams. Perhaps thats true. Adams is unquestionably a central figure in the Batmans creative rebirth and is, to this day, still widely regarded as the definitive Batman artist, but its hard not to see Daniels treatment as seriously shortchanging Haney. He does, to his credit, write of Haneys solidly crafted stories, but remarkably enough, after that single paragraph his complete history never mentions Haney again. Daniels switches to Adams and never looks back--makes it sound almost as if Adams was writing the book himself. Adams spent over a year illustrating Haneys stories in B&B, and while the other bat titles were an aimless mess in the aftermath of the tv debacle, Haney was regularly knocking them out of the park through this period. For comparison, look at Batman #214, Batmans Marriage Trap, a ridiculous tale of gangsters using a faux-grassroots activist group to trick hundreds of single women into protesting the Batmans bat-chelorhood as a cover for a crime-wave. Appearing nearly a year-and-a-half after the godawful tv series had ended, it could have been turned into a script for that series without changing a line. Meanwhile, over in B&B #84, Haney and Adams had just produced the first of what would become a series of classic tales featuring the unlikely team-up of the Batman with World War II hero Sgt. Rock--the bat and the sarge battling Nazis (and one anothers egos) over nerve agents in the lead-up to D-Day. Im going to post samples from both. The B&Bs of this period were light-years ahead of what was happening in the other bat-books, and this certainly wasnt solely attributable to Adams artwork. After Adams left the book, Haneys streak continued through several artists, culminating, ultimately, in what became his long pairing with Jim Aparo, the only serious competition with Adams for the title of definitive Batman artist of this period. For my money, he wins that title (Aparo drew the Batman for decades; Daniels makes only a single mention of him, noting him, almost in passing, as the artist on one of the bat-tales from the 1990s). Over the years, DCs treatment of Haneys work has arguably been even worse. In the 1990s, DC published Batman in the Sixties, intended as a best of compendium of its designated decade. While several exceedingly weak and irrelevant stories were included, not one of Haneys groundbreaking tales from the end of the decade made the cut. Even more egregious, DC also published a collection of Batman in the Seventies, and again, while several mediocre tales of no real value turned up, no Haney tales were included. The books editors write that, next to Adams, the artist most identified with the character during the seventies is Jim Aparo, Haneys longtime artist through the decade, yet they didnt opt to include a single Aparo-drawn story (outside of a single-page portrait of some of the Batmans rogues gallery, the work of one of the central Batman artists of the decade is entirely absent). In 1988, DC published The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told. a rather ambitious title and a much higher page-count to accomodate it, but a book that, like the others, contains no Haney stories at all.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:53:20 +0000
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