Two Batmen Too Many!

Well, here's a first. This is a story where Ralph more or less appears in a cameo.

Batman #177 carries a cover date of December 1965. Carmine Infantino did the cover with inks by Murphy Anderson and Ira Schnapp provided the logo. "Two Batmen Too Many!" was written by Bill Finger with pencils by Sheldon Moldoff, inks by Joe Giella, lettering by Gaspar Saladino and Julius Schwartz served as editor. The issue is not currently available on Comixology.

Ralph does but doesn't appear on the cover, which doesn't reflect a scene in the story. It teases three different Batmen: regular Batman, a giant one and a tiny Batman.

The splash page sees all three of the Batmen taking on crooks in three panels. Only the regular sized one is accompanied by Robin, though.

The story begins with Ed "Numbers" Garvey feeling targeted by Batman. He used to run a numbers game, but became obsessed with a jewel heist. He flees to a cave and finds two figures seated on thrones, one very tall, the other very short. His torch reflects light into a crystal and turns the figures into clones of Batman, who say they'll be his slaves.

Ed takes the Batmen to his gang back in Gotham City. When the fellow crooks try to fight them, the Batmen make short work of them. They're about to have the Batmen do a job, when the little one says it needs to be revitalized with star light reflected through a blue-white crystal. The little Batman goes to help them knock off a carnival, but the robbery is stopped by the real Batman and Robin, though the crooks get away.

Back at the hideout, the Big Batman needs revitalized with a ruby. When Big Batman claims to be revitalized, Garvey has them knocked out, revealing he suspected the Batmen were frauds and that the ruby he just used was a fake.

Removing the Batman costumes, they discover that the Batmen were actually Elongated Man and the Atom.

Garvey decides to unmask the Atom to discover his secret identity (chances of him recognizing Ray Palmer at the time is very low, though), but Batman and Robin enter and begin fighting the crooks. Garvey tries to get away via a trap door, but Batman manages to catch him.

Now comes an explanation of the whole plot. Batman did indeed arrange things to make Garvey go to that cave and find Ralph and Ray in costume.

The "revitalizing" with a gem act was to get radioactive powder onto the gems so Batman could find them with a Geiger counter.

When the crooks left to knock over that carnival, Batman and Robin found the diamond in a clock, realizing that each gem was hidden in different locales.

Garvey thinks he's still got the rest of the jewel collection hidden away, but the ruby act worked because he held the fake gem in the same hand as the real one (just in case) and the radioactive powder got onto the real one, which Batman finds in a telephone.

The rest of the gems are found in spots in the hideout related to numbers: in a typewriter, behind the door's number, in a hollow in a desk calendar and in a dummy algebra book.

To be fair, anyone besides a mathematics whiz owning an algebra book outside of a school is already pretty sketchy.

With all of the gems recovered, it's now time to take Garvey to prison.

The story tries to keep it down to earth with a wacky concept, and luckily, Batman was given connections to Ralph and Ray prior to the story. It's just wacky that the crooks went with the concept at first of clay figures being brought to life that look like Batman. Silver Age stories, am I right?

Sheldon Moldoff becomes the first person aside from Carmine Infantino to draw Ralph in the pencils for a story, and he doesn't do a bad job at all. Except that he doesn't really show Ralph stretching. Most of the time, he's not drawing Ralph, but an oversized Batman.

Interesting is that you can see Ralph's face clearly a little deformed as he had to stretch his chin to mimic Batman's face. This marks the first time we saw him take on face molding, something that other writers would make use of much further down the line, and even make its way to The Flash TV series.

So, not a bad story, but not quite a memorable one. And my tease last time wasn't wrong, Ralph did get a new costume: a Batman costume!

So, next time, we're heading back to Detective Comics as Ralph completely fails to catch a criminal.

Who is Ira Schnapp?

I've already discussed the important role that letterers have on comics. As I say, if your lettering is bad, no one will want to read the comic book. But the talents of letterers can extend beyond the comic page. So get ready to meet a DC legend who got to work on Ralph, namely in the last story we covered: Ira Schnapp.

Israel Schnapp was born in Sassow, Austria on October 10, 1894. The next year, his father moved to New York City to begin work as a grocer, eventually bringing his family over in 1900. He had four brothers and two sisters who were born after the move. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1913.

Schnapp's talent for designing letters was quickly put to use as he revealed that he designed the lettering for the James A. Farley Post Office Building, constructed from 1908 to 1912. On his World War I draft cared, he said he was employed for the W.T. Slide Company, which created title screens for silent films. While no credits to his name are known through the 1920s, this was work that usually went uncredited. In the 1930s, he would be designing lobby cards and posters for films, including displays for King Kong's premiere at Radio City Music Hall.

After working for publishers and advertisers, Schnapp began working for a relative of his wife: Jack Liebowitz, who along with Harry Donenfield was publishing pulp magazines. They eventually acquired National Comics. While people believe Schnapp designed the logo for Action Comics, he claimed his first work for DC was the Superman logo, which he revised from the original by Joe Shuster. The logo was revised in the 1980s to round out many of the letters, but the logo's style used to this day is the same that Schnapp designed for DC.

Schnapp became instrumental for DC throughout the years, designing logos and advertisements and lettering when available for a wide range of their titles. His design work is credited as making DC titles an exciting seller for young readers.

One work of Schnapp's appeared on hundreds of comic books by many publishers over the years: he designed the Comics Code Authority seal.

In 1966, DC's logo design duties were transferred over to Gaspar Saladino, who fondly called Schnapp "Mr. DC." Schnapp remained employed by DC for two more years, mainly as a professional courtesy, before the company retired him. Neal Adams claimed that Schnapp had been sent home to die, and Saladino said that when Schnapp left DC, it was as if he'd never been there.

Schnapp died of a heart attack on July 24, 1969. DC did not officially note his passing. He was survived by his wife Beatrice and their children Theresa and Martin.

I only briefly talked about Schnapp's work here as in researching, I came across two lengthy pieces documenting his life and works. If you're interested in reading more, I highly recommend them. The first is a feature on Dial B For Blog, which focuses mainly on Schnapp's work. The other is a series of blogs by Todd Klein which go indepth about the details of Schnapp's life. Enjoy these two tributes to a true DC legend who was confirmed to have worked with the Elongated Man at some point during his career.

The Secret War of the Phantom General

 Detective Comics #343 was released with a cover date of September, 1965. It can be found on Comixology and DC Universe. In addition, since this story also features Batman, it has been reprinted in Batman Family (Vol. 1) #4 and Showcase Presents: Batman Vol 2, as well as Showcase Presents Elongated Man.

Over in the letters page, readers were too busy puzzling over how Batman could actually lift a gorilla on the cover of #339 to discuss Ralph's story in that issue. However, Joel Pollack of Silver Spring, Maryland tries to offer advice on how to identify inkers on Carmine Infantino's work throughout the book. "I can sum it up in one word—expression. When Sid Greene inks Carmine Infantino, everyone looks happy, even when they're sad. With Joe Giella, everyone looks befuddled. When Infantino pencils, characters have very human expressions on their faces."

This would be the second team up story for Batman and Ralph, following from "Museum of Mixed-Up Men!" back in #331. The concept was to do a book-length story occasionally pairing up the two heroes instead of two separate stories. Readers weren't crazy about it, though.

"The Secret War of the Phantom General" would see the return of John Broome to writing for Ralph and Joe Giella on ink with Carmine Infantino on pencils and Ira Schnapp lettering. Julius Schwartz was editor.

The cover should be striking, but something about it just feels unappealing to me. Ralph seemingly has Batman and Robin at his mercy, tied up in his arms, at the command of the ghostly face behind them. I'm going to venture that it would look much better against an actual background instead of black, empty space.

Another error is the text on the cover and header trying to suggest that the villain of the story might not actually be alive, but they show him standing right there in the splash panel.

We haven't even started the story, and I'm already disappointed.

So yes, the splash panel shows us the villain General Von Dort with a hypnotic monocle that has put Ralph and Robin out of action with Batman trying very hard not to look to avoid the same fate. It's interesting and very Batman-central and Joe Giella returning to ink Ralph again looks okay.

Ralph doesn't turn up until page 6, so I'll sum up the story until then.

Batman and Robin are going to meet Ralph and Sue at a hotel when they hear about a hold up at the Gotham City Terminal. There are dozens of crooks and when Batman and Robin arrive, they only manage to take out a few before most of them escape. Batman notes military-style efficiency and a reporter decides to run "Is New Mystery Crime King A Military Mastermind?"

Batman and Robin go on to meet Ralph and Sue, the latter of which goes to the Gotham City Music Hall to go offscreen until the final panel of the story. (Sigh.)

Batman tells Ralph about the scene they just arrived from and when he mentions "military mastermind," Ralph freaks out and goes pale. He tries to connect dots as the story cuts away to a flashback introduced by a portrait of John Broome.

The flashback shows some Gotham City criminals being met by General Van Dort, a German general who was believed to be dead "with Hitler in that fatal Berlin bunker!" Van Dort says he's alive and has simply moved from traditional warfare to crime. He wants to take over the crime world in Gotham and claims he can't fail. When one crook asks him how he knows they won't turn him over to the police, he laughs and stares them with his monocle and says they wouldn't dare.

Seriously, I hate that we got this method of introducing the villain. The cover and title teases that the General might be dead and it's his ghost. Here, page 8, Van Dort clearly says that this isn't the case. While our protagonists might not know, we as an audience do, so that bit of suspense is gone. It's also really clumsy to have Ralph freak out and then there's no explanation for what happened for two pages.

Ralph explains that he was in South America and heard rumors about Van Dort. He heard that Van Dort left his base in the Andes for Gotham, which makes his freak out so surprising. Now that Batman and Robin have an idea of who they're dealing with, they all set out to investigate together.

The last panel shows Ralph putting his costume on. I'm going to assume he's finishing putting on after stepping out of the bathroom and he didn't strip down in front of Batman and Robin.

While out, Batman and Robin spot parachuting crooks descending on an auction and go break them up. However, these crooks were just a diversion while Van Dort steals an undisclosed item and heads back to the Andes.

As the heroes meet up again, absent until now Ralph reveals that he has discovered that Van Dort was working on a Death Ray, and was only lacking "a vital radioactive isotope called M-244." They realize that Van Dort has stolen the isotope and headed back to the Andes, so they head to Batplane to pursue.

Arriving, Ralph stretches his neck from the Batplane so he can strike a sniper. Good going, Ralph, it's about time that you got an action moment.

As the three heroes meet and take on Van Dort's men, they are identified as Batman and Robin. Ralph adds "And don't forget the Elongated Man!" Okay, that's a good moment.

Ralph spots Von Dort through a window and stretches in to demand his surrender. Von Dort uses his monocle and compels Ralph to turn on Batman and Robin. Ralph seems to be completely aware of what he's doing, but he can't stop his actions.

Batman and Robin manage to stop Ralph by twisting his arms around himself and squeeze him, making Von Dort's spell on him break.

So... What the heck just happened? Did Batman and Robin break a weird trance by forcing Ralph into a self-induced Heimlich maneuver?

Von Dort himself arrives on the scene and freezes Robin with the radiation from his monocle, and Batman—observing Von Dort's weapon—lowers his head and charges, knocking Von Dort out with a punch.

Why would a military mastermind like Von Dort just arrive on scene with no protection? Like, do it from the window and then go to escape or something. It's like he wasn't even trying.

Before I go to the final panels, this surprisingly wasn't the end of Von Dort. Five years later, Batman would face his son Willi Van Dort (they got the name wrong) along with Wonder Woman in The Brave and the Bold #87.

Batman and Robin get the authorities to pick up Von Dort and his crew and discuss how his monocle worked and how they narrowly stopped his death ray.

Later, Batman and Robin join Ralph and Sue in their hotel room for tea, Batman thinking that nothing ruffles Sue. (Lies.) "Just looking at her makes you realize that everything's all right in the world—and probably always will be!"

Well, that makes Identity Crisis hurt even more.

You know, I think it'd be fun if Sue has figured out that Bruce Wayne is Batman from observing Batman's mannerisms here while he's at ease and putting together what she probably knows about Bruce Wayne.

Well, I'm rather disappointed with this story. The lead in text, cover and title all tease that Von Dort might be dead, but it's quickly shown to not be the case and Batman and Robin take him down with just a bit of help from Ralph, who's definitely just a guest star here. The story idea of an former Nazi general finishing a death ray is not bad, but it's not carried to its full potential here. The wrap up is contrived and just too easy. It's too bad John Broome doesn't seem to care about Ralph very much after he introduced him back in The Flash. The best moment is the bit where Ralph announces himself to Von Dort's men.

Infantino's art is fine with some well-done moments, but nothing really spectacular.

Next time, Ralph goes to Paris.