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.
Moldoff said he would save newspaper comic strips and learn to copy their style. When he had to draw Hawkman, he turned to the style of Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon strip to make it work. He would be the first to draw Shiera Sanders as Hawkgirl, giving her a similar design to Hawkman. He would also draw the cover for the first issue of All-American Comics that featured Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern.
Some of the many DC characters that Moldoff co-created include the original Batwoman and Bat-Girl, Ace the Bathound, Bat-Mite, Mr. Freeze, Calendar Man, the second version of Clayface, Poison Ivy and the Spellbinder. However, despite this, he left DC in 1967 when they refused to offer healthcare and retirement benefits.
