This is the last part of this tale. If you want to read it from the beginning, go to this page and you'll have no trouble finding your way from chapter to chapter.
So we're finally back where we started. It's Thursday, March 26, 1964 and I'm 12 years and 26 days old as I walk up to Pico Drug, the store with the most glorious comic book rack in my area. I'm there to purchase the new comic books that were placed on sale earlier that day. One of them should be the new issue of Detective Comics, which always features one story of Batman and Robin, followed by one story of John Jones, Manhunter from Mars.
The rack shows the top fourth-or-so of each comic's cover — the title of the magazine known as the logo. It always looks the same on Detective Comics and on the issue I bought a month ago, it looked like this…
I have a moment of genuine surprise when I find the new Detective Comics as the logo — largely unchanged since the comic began twenty-seven years and 326 issues ago — now looks like this…
That logo screams "Something is different" in a way I will never see another logo proclaim. Designed (as I will later learn) by DC logomaster Ira Schnapp, it just electrifies. When you're twelve, you electrify easily. I study it for a long moment before I pull the comic out of the rack so I can gaze upon the entire cover.
It's Batman…but not like any Batman I have ever seen. Batman and Robin are not drawn by the guy(s) who did previous issues. They're drawn by the guy(s) who draw The Flash. The change is especially arresting if you do what I do when I get home with it. I lay the issue next to the previous issue. Stare and compare, stare and compare…
In addition to the different art style, the cover proclaims that the comic now features — "starting in this issue" — the adventures of The Elongated Man. John Jones, Manhunter From Mars is gone. (His strip, slightly retooled, would soon resurface in House of Mystery, now edited by Jack Schiff.)
Inside, there is a good, solid Batman story with no space aliens or interplanetary zoos. It isn't the Batman I'd been reading for a few years now but in many ways, it's more Batman than the last few years of Batman stories have been. I like it very much but it will take some getting-used-to.
The bat-insignia on Batman's chest now has a yellow circle behind it. I had noticed that in the most recent issue of World's Finest Comics, which went on sale two weeks earlier. I didn't know what it meant then but now I do. All part of the change.
And now, stepping back to present-day, I would add this: I didn't know what the change in Batman meant in 1964 but now I do. The most immediate impact was that sales went up…not a huge amount but enough to stop all talk about the Batman comics being in trouble. And then less than two years later, the Batman TV show with Adam West went on ABC Television and that's when sales did go up a huge amount.
Looking back on the change on 3/26/64, I have two thoughts that prompted me to write this long, serialized essay. One is that I wanted to convey to you how monumental and exciting the change was that day…and how important it was to the continuing existence of that great character.
And the other thought is this: It can never happen again. Tomorrow, if DC Comics and whoever's running it this week decides that henceforth, Batman and Robin should be talking kangaroos, it will not have the same impact. Why? Because there's no one art style or one approach to Batman that prevails. Every writer and artist who gets within ten blocks of DC Comics has their own "take" on Batman — what he looks like and who he is behind that mask. I recall twenty years ago sitting in a hotel lobby at a convention with five or six guys who were then writing various Batman comics for DC and they were all talking about their approach to the character…
…and it seemed very clear to me that none of them were talking about the same guy.
I don't read a lot of Batman comics these days but when I do, I don't see that any two writers writing about the same guy or very few artists drawing the same guy. I'm not saying that some of those comics aren't interesting or exciting; just that to me, it's like there are eighteen different men named Bruce Wayne — some of them quite sane and some of them far from it — running around in about fifteen different costumes that all incorporate some of the same elements in different ways.
There absolutely is room for different interpretations. In times past, some companies and editors were too insistent that everyone draw the same way; when it all had to be homogenized down and someone would retouch work if it was too unlike what others were doing. Creativity was suppressed in service of conformity. I'm not saying to do that.
I'm just saying that DC could never do a story that changed the "norm" of Batman because these days, there is no "norm" of Batman.