An oceangoing pirate might well consider himself to be safe from the Dynamic Duo.
But he’d be wrong.
In Detective Comics 147 (May 1949), Batman and Robin tackled the Tiger Shark, “…the leader of a gang of criminals who, operating from their undersea headquarters aboard a sunken ship some 200 miles from shore, commits a series of spectacular crimes at sea and on the waterfront,” noted comics historian Michael L. Fleisher. “Ironically, the Dynamic Duo capture the criminals with the aid of a special ‘Sub-Batmarine’ designed especially for their use by Dr. Gaige, the famed oceanographer who is secretly Tiger Shark.”
After an underwater scuba battle with Tiger Shark’s gang, Batman and Robin are maneuvered into a particularly harrowing death trap when their bathysphere is cut loose and set adrift 1,500 feet beneath the ocean’s surface.
Only a handful of years before this adventure, submarines had played a crucial role in World War II, starving island and peninsula nations by crippling enemy supply lines.
Undersea craft became a logical extension of Batman’s super-equipment. The Sub-Batmarine was fitted with a periscope, grappling hooks and a Batarang gun.
“Batman’s first undersea vessel is actually the Batplane, which, following the installation of Frank Folland’s ‘aeraquamobile devices’ in Nov.-Dec. 1946, can retract its wings and travel beneath the surface as a jet-propelled submarine,” Fleisher noted, citing The Famous First Crimes! in World’s Finest 25.
Batman and Robin also took to sea in subs in The Voyage of the First Batmarine (Batman 86, Sept. 1954), The Lair of the Sea-Fox! (Batman 132, June 1960) and The Secret of the Sea Beast! (Batman 138, March 1961).
Much as he enjoyed deploying his own submarines in his war against crime, Batman wasn’t pleased when the tables were turned.
In the 1966 Batman movie, the Masked Manhunter became frosty with a vice admiral who informed him the Pentagon had sold a sub to the Penguin.
“Avast and belay, Batman! Your tone sounds grim,” the vice admiral says. “We haven’t done anything… foolish, have we?”
“Disposing of pre-atomic submarines to persons who don’t even leave full addresses?” Batman snaps. “Good day, Admiral.”
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