Detective Comics #440 - Ghost Mountain Midnight.

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If ever there was a comic I bought for the cover, it was this one.

Admittedly, I also bought it because it starred Batman, was an issue of Detective Comics and contained a massive 100 pages of, no doubt, slam-bam action just asking to be read.

But most of all, I bought it because its cover featured a purple bear threatening our hero - as portrayed by Jolting Jim Aparo.

Well, that's all very well and great but what of the book's actual contents?

Bruce Wayne's on a date in a restaurant when a bunch of rednecks burst in and kidnap one of the waitresses.

Needless to say, it's mere moments before Bruce has made his excuses and, in his guise as Gotham's mysterious protector, gone off to deal with the abductors,

Despite being a man who can, apparently, beat up Superman any time he wants to, our hero's quickly vanquished by a single hillbilly with a rifle butt and then has to go trudging off to the wrongdoers' hometown, in order to make a second attempt at rescuing the girl who we now know is called Sarah Beth.

She is, it seems, the sister of her abductors and, for some reason, they believe it vital that they pop her clogs for her as soon as possible.

Upon arriving in town, our hero finds an uncooperative Sheriff who, like any responsible officer of the law, is more interested in finding an illegal still than in preventing the murder of waitresses and, so, Bats has to enter the local mountains where the kidnappers dwell, in order to fulfill his mission.

There, by eavesdropping, he discovers that, in order to keep a Native American curse at bay, the family believes it must, from time to time, sacrifice one of its own.

And this time is Sarah Beth's turn!

Clearly, Batman can't stand for that kind of nonsense and flings himself into the fray.

He's clearly been having fighting lessons since their last encounter because, despite being heavily outnumbered, he soon despatches the deluded simpletons and goes to rescue Sarah Beth from her chains.

That's when an inconvenient bear shows up.

But it's no ordinary bear.

It's a homicidal bear.

With not a picnic basket in sight and having been injured by fire, it's taken to eating people - and Batman's on the menu!

Not for long, he isn't. No mere twelve-foot tall agglomeration of teeth and claws is a match for the man the Germans know as Die Fledermausenmenschen and he soon sends it flying off a cliff to its doom.

But what a lucky break that is because, at the foot of that cliff, he finds the illegal still the sheriff told him about, concludes it was that which had burnt the bear, and then returns to town to give the lawman a good smack in the mouth, having deduced, on no great evidence, that he put the still there in the first place.

Mission accomplished.

I do like this tale. With its Deliverance meets Scooby-Doo plot, it's the sort of thing I love to see from a Batman story.

I do enjoy it when Batman's handled as a detective rather than a super-hero and this yarn, with its minor sense of mystery and its very simple plot, thus, appeals to me greatly.

I suspect it's not viewed as one of the all-time classic Batman adventures but it's solidly written by Archie Goodwin and cleanly drawn by Sal Amendola; with Dick Giordano's inks helping to lend it that look we associate with 1970s Batman.

So, yes, I can announce that, for me, with that cover, this story, that bear, and dozens of pages of back-up strips, this was definitely a book worth spending that 50 pence on.