Batman ’66 #6 – Review

By: Tom Pever & Jeff Parker (story), Ty Templeton & Ted Naifeh (art), Tony Aviña (colors)

The Story: The evil Bookwork demonstrates the danger of reading.

The Review: Fun fact about me: I’m an addict for PBS kids’ shows.  I’m particularly fond of Wordgirl, which combines three of my favorite things into one show: superheroes, vocabulary, and self-aware humor.  One of its most endearing features is the supervillains, each of whom comes with his or her own gimmick which dictates their crimes.  Chuck the Evil Sandwich-Making Guy, for example, spends the bulk of his time harassing delis and grocery stores.

This might explain why I seem so inordinately entertained by the villains on this series.  Of course, it helps when the writer finds a way to spin what could otherwise be a rather predictable obsession.  Bookworm, for example, sets his sights beyond the library tomes for weirder, less expected targets.  At the suggestion that he’s out to steal Bruce’s ceremonial check for a literacy charity, Bookworm sneers, “I don’t want your giant check…I want your giant checkbook!”

It’s a funny gag, but more importantly, Pever gives Bookworm’s crimes some real stakes through a bit of sixties-era logic.  To mitigate the damage of Bookworm’s theft, Commissioner Gordon orders, “Chief O’Hara, notify the banks to stop payment on all oversized charity checks.”

“Aww, Commissioner!  We might as well be yankin’ food from the mouths o’ poor widows an’ orphans!”*

Even so, this is a fairly small danger posed to Gotham.  The bigger threat is Bookworm’s intelligence, which spurs him to a much bigger goal: discovering Batman’s true identity.  In the Batman ’66 world, Bookworm’s strategy of gathering “[e]very known scrap of information” into “an ever-expanding Batcyclopedia” is practically the height of genius, and his thirst to have “a real conversation” with the vigilante he considers his intellectual equal is probably as close to a homo-erotic obsession as you can get on this series.

These kinds of things are important to make Batman ’66 more than just a parody, even though comedy is the lifeblood of the series.  Fortunately, it’s not all just alliterative humor (“That bibliophilic brigand, back to bedevil us!”) and tortured catchphrases (“Holy child’s play!”).  Instead of garden-variety gags and punchlines, Pever goes for a drier style of comedy, where the joke is in the implication rather than the content.  Bruce quoting James Joyce to assuage Dick’s anxiety over a near-slip (“‘Errors are the portals of discovery.’”) is amusing not just because of its utter pretentiousness, but also because of Dick’s enthusiastic reaction (“Gosh!  You’re right!”), suggesting the two share, among other things, a reading list.

The back-ups in this series have proven to be forgettable, lesser stories in the Batman ’66 canon, and this latest is no exception.  Olga, Queen of the Cossacks, never does manage to develop much dimension beyond her gently racist appearance and accent (and crush on Batman), and once our heroes manage to overcome her attack bears,** the rest of the feature proceeds and ends rather anticlimactically.

It seems like Jonathan Case is the only artist who can manage to play up the parody aspects of Batman ’66 without losing his edge of sophistication, because most of the other artists have been competent, but completely unremarkable.  Even though he draws the issue with a fair amount of charm, Templeton does almost nothing to enhance the script, and Naifeh, if anything, is even less impressive on the back-up art.

Conclusion: Fun as always, but the title can really use a lot more zip and boldness in the art and a greater effort really needs to be made where the back-up features are concerned.

Grade: B-

– Minhquan Nguyen

Some Musings: * Actually, my favorite of Bookworm’s schemes is the theft of the city police’s rule books, which risks sending the whole department into chaos: “Until we replace those manuals, Gotham City police will be unable to operate—by the book!”

“Holy loose cannon cops!”

** Of course Batman ’66 would have fish treats in his utility belt to ward off Olga’s bears.