Detective Comics #443 - Manhunter Meets Batman!

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. 

***

Everyone knows the greatest comic ever created is Detective Comics #443.

Admittedly, I say that without ever having read it.

But who needs to read it? It's got Batman. It's got Manhunter. The cover's by Jim Aparo. The insides are by Walt Simonson. It's a 100-page comic and its lead tale is blessed with the title Gotterdammerung!

There's no more chance of it not being the greatest comic of all time than there is of a Red Nails adaptation by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith not being the greatest comic of all time.

Admittedly, if the tale's author Archie Goodwin had titled it Batterdammerung, it would have been even better but I can only conclude the man lacked my remarkable taste and good judgement.

So, now that we know it's the greatest comic of all time, without even having read it, how does it stand up when one actually does read it?

In the wet streets of Gotham, a man has died.

That man is Dan Kingdom - private eye, master of the martial arts and friend of Batman - assassinated before he could tell the dark detective something about the prime minister of a land called Congola.

Fortunately, Bruce Wayne is, that very night, hosting a party for that very prime minister, giving his alter-ego the perfect chance to find out just why Kingdom was killed and what beans he was about to spill about whom.

Not so fortunately, the party's barely begun when the prime minister's assassinated too. It's starting to look like Batman's a straight-out jinx.

Unconcerned about that, our hero leaps into action and goes in pursuit of the killer but, before he can make him talk, is attacked by a mystery villain called The Enforcer who promptly decks him.

The Enforcer flees but Batman tracks him and the assassin to Nairobi where he encounters Paul Kirk - the Manhunter - who's planning a final and decisive attack on the secret HQ of the deadly Council who resurrected him from his death in World War Two and now plan to take over the world.

Not liking the sound of that kind of thing, Batman offers to help Kirk and his friends but is spurned by them because of his reluctance to kill. Batman takes it in good spirits and says that, in that case, he's headed off back to Gotham.

So, Kirk and his friends  Asano Nitobe, Christine St Clair and Kolu Mbeya set off to the Australian outback where the Council are currently keeping their headquarters.

On the plane there, we get a recap of how Kirk was resurrected by the Council, after dying in World War Two and now feels like a man out of time, giving us an impression of him as a dark Captain America.

But no sooner do they reach that secret HQ than it turns out Batman was fibbing and, by means not at all explained, has got to to the scene first and has already taken out two of the council's killers, convincing Kirk he might be of some use after all.

Thus it is that Batman fights the returning Enforcer while Kirk goes off in pursuit of Dr Myrkros, the coordinator behind the Council's schemes.

It's during this fight that we discover The Enforcer is none other than the supposed assassination victim Dan Kingdom and that the body found in Gotham was merely a clone of him, created by the Council!

Elsewhere, Kirk confronts Myrkros who's got himself a psionic helmet and uses it to blast the hero with deadly radiation. Thus, does Paul Kirk die a second time.

Or does he?

Realising it's all gone belly-up, Batman leads Kirk's friends away from the base and steals a plane in which they escape.

But, as that plane flees, a nuclear explosion erupts behind it, letting its passengers know that Kirk didn't die from the psionic attack but achieved one final resurrection before, at last, succeeding in destroying the base, Mykros and his Council all in one go. At last, the man who should have died decades ago can know peace.

It has to be said it's a very simple and straightforward tale that goes from plot point to plot point in the most linear and obstacle-free fashion possible but it wraps up the Manhunter saga efficiently enough and looks pretty as it goes about it.

Perhaps its main weakness is that, being designated a Batman tale, Bruce Wayne's alter-ego seems far more competent than Paul Kirk, managing to find the Council's base before Kirk and his friends do and defeating The Enforcer who seems to be too much for Kirk to handle. This is unfortunate, as the thrust of the tale is to wrap up the Manhunter saga and should, you'd have thought, therefore, centre around Kirk and his friends.

Come to think of it, strictly speaking, Batman could have been totally written out of the tale without any need for the central plot to be changed.

Oh well. Who cares? It's drawn with style and, as I've said, the cover's by Jim Aparo. The insides are by Walt Simonson. It's a 100-page comic and its lead tale's blessed with the title Gotterdammerung. If that doesn't keep a human being happy, what will?

Manhunter: Cobras of the Deep - Detective Comics #440.

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.

***

Thanks to the wonders of DC Comics' 100-page publications, we lovers of 1970s derring-do were treated to the exploits of the New Manhunter.

Which was all well and good - except most of us had never even heard of the old Manhunter.

Fortunately, Detective Comics #440 put that right, as it gave us the wartime Simon and Kirby classic Cobras of the Deep in which big-game hunter, turned battler of Nazism, Paul Kirk strikes yet another blow to Hitler's ambitions to create a Reich that will last a thousand years, by making sure it only lasts for twelve.

Determined to win the war, a German submarine captain concocts a plan to rid the Axis powers forever of the threat from their deadly nemesis Manhunter.

His plan is simple, invite our hero to a place and then blow him up by shooting the mountain of dynamite he's inadvertently standing on.

Unfortunately, the Nazi ne'er-do-well hasn't taken into account Kirk's ability to leap out of the way when things explode and, so, within mere panels, he's out to hunt-down his would-be assassins.

Donning a diving helmet they've left behind, he soon follows their trail to the bottom of the sea, where he's captured, before sabotaging their sub and bringing its crew to justice.

In truth, at nine pages, it's not a long tale. No longer, in fact, than an adventure from the new Manhunter. But it rolls along quickly and efficiently and still has a little time to take in the scenery. I especially like Kirk's one-panel meeting with a huge but passive octopus.

We get no real sense of who Paul Kirk is or what he's about, as he gets just three panels before changing into costume.

It's basically a typical piece of wartime comic book propaganda with incompetent Nazis who talk funny and a brave American dealing justice to them, thanks to his greater ingenuity and refusal to give up.

I was struck, however, by the tendency of the Nazi sailors to wear their uniforms while walking around on American soil and committing their clandestine acts. Frankly, from that, I'm not convinced they're the sharpest knives in Hitler's drawer.

Overall, it's a painless enough read but there's nothing at all in it that would have given anyone reason to think such a standard-issue adventurer had the potential to be revived as one of the most intriguing characters in comics.

STOP PRESS! 

Because Charlie47 demanded it, here's the panel which shows Manhunter's deathless encounter with an octopus.

The New Manhunter in Detective Comics #440. One man's battle with the council.

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon.

***

When I was young, there were a hundred good reasons to read Detective Comics #440.

And every one of those reasons was a page.

But some pages were more reasony than others - and the final seven were the most reasony of them all.

For they were the ones which contained the all-new, all-improved Manhunter.

I say, "all -improved," but, for all I knew, he wasn't anything of the sort, as, up until this issue, I'd never read any tales of the old Manhunter who was, of course, one of DC's stable of Golden Age adventurers.

I did, however, know that - as delivered by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson - Paul Kirk's latest incarnation was a splendid character, armed to the teeth, equipped with a magnificent costume and capable of dealing with any threat life could throw at a man, whether it be tigers, multiple copies of himself or lunatic conspirators.

So, clearly, I loved it in my salad days but what of now?

As we join the action, Manhunter and his newly recruited accomplice Interpol agent Christine St. Clair are strolling down a street, for reasons that are never made clear, when her old boss Damon Nostrand tries to run them over. 

That is, of course, no more than a minor inconvenience to our hero who simply stabs Nostrand's car and then sets it on fire, blowing its driver up in the process.

This leads Manhunter to stroll into flashback mode and tell of how the secret organisation known as The Council recruited and trained him to be their assassin and how Nostrand had been the first victim they'd sent him out to kill.

Lest we think too unkindly of The Council, they did, at least, tell our hero of their mission to create a better world and that the removal of men like Nostrand is the only way to achieve it.

But, being a man of conscience, Manhunter had, instead, warned his intended victim - only for it to turn out Nostrand was in on it all and the mission was merely a test of Manhunter's loyalty.

After a quick battle with his own clones, Manhunter fled the scene and set about arming himself for his new life as an adversary of The Council.

The whole thing is a masterclass in concentrated story-telling as we get through a startling amount of plot and information in just seven pages, without it ever feeling rushed or any element ever feeling perfunctory. In fact, it really does feel like a twenty-page story until you make the effort to count the pages.

Everything about the thing works. Manhunter is a kind of dark Captain America, a 1940s one-man army revived in the modern world and having to find a new course for himself in this brave new era. The Council are sinister, grotesque and pathetic, a bunch of old men on life support, trying to reinvent humanity, and the fact that Paul Kirk is a man at war with an army of his own clones is a stroke of genius. Why on Earth have they not made a movie of this?

What did quickly strike me, re-reading it for the first time since the 1970s, is how similar Kirk's backstory also is to that of Shang-Chi, with a well-intentioned man being trained to kill by those who claim to have pure intentions, before recognising the sinister nature of his masters and turning against them.

But Manhunter's a very different kettle of fish to Shang-Chi, having lived a full and adventurous life long before he encountered The Council and having a less philosophical and more matter-of-fact nature. 

At face value, in his modern form, he's another of those ruthless, death-dealing characters who were suddenly all the rage in the era but what sets him apart from the likes of the Punisher, Hangman and myriad others is he doesn't seem to be insane and has a clear handle on right and wrong, meaning you can enjoy the sight of him killing people, without feeling uncomfortable about it.

The one thing that does feel like a letdown is that Manhunter's armoury of weapons feels nothing like as awesome now as it did back then, consisting, as it does, of two throwing stars, an antique pistol, a knife and a pair of shoulder pads. Thus, it is odd to see him travelling all the way to Nairobi to acquire it from one of the world's leading experts in the field, when you would have thought he could have got better tooled-up just by going to Walmart.