In the late 1960s and early 1970s, artists Neal Adams and Jim Aparo helped bring Batman down from the “camp” ledge where the TV show had left him stranded.
In Detective Comics 395, for example, Adams and writer Denny O’Neil restored some of Batman’s early gothic horror in The Secret of the Waiting Graves.
“Batman took another step towards the Dark Knight, thanks to Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams, and Dick Giordano,” wrote Deejay Dayton. “While the stories by Frank Robbins had enmeshed Batman in a world of real street crime, this story moved the character to the verge of the supernatural, taking advantage of the gothic craze from the early ’70s, and adding a new darkness to the character.”
The issue included a second artistic treat — Gil Kane and Murphy Anderson providing us an action-packed story about the emancipation of Robin, written by Frank Robbins.
On his first day at Hudson University, the erstwhile Boy Wonder investigates a campus protest riot instigated by fake cops in league with fake demonstrators. It’s all part of a communist plot to shutter America’s universities.
“That’s a kind of shocking dismissal of the issues that were being protested on U.S. college campuses at the time, and later Robin stories would deal with those issues in a much more intelligent way,” Dayton remarked.
The ongoing Vietnam War is, of course, never mentioned.
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