While they may not have rivaled the ever-popular cover gorillas, giant hands clearly had an appeal of their own to DC Comics editors.
And not merely giant hands, but giant green hands, for the most part.
I grant you that the giant hand looming over a speeding convertible on the cover of Strange Adventures 110 (Nov. 1959) wasn’t green. But we had a giant green hand crawling ominously across the sand on the cover of Blackhawk 115 (Aug. 1957), a pair of giant green hands in the sky reaching for the heroes’ jet in Challengers of the Unknown 2 (June 1958) and a giant green hand commanded by aliens menacing the Dynamic Duo on the cover of Batman 130 (March 1960).
In The Hand from Nowhere, Batman deduces that’s it’s not aliens who are behind this scheme to steal platinum, but Lex Luthor.
The story — written by Bill Finger and drawn by Sheldon Moldoff — marks the only time Luthor shows up in a Batman story by himself until the 1990s.
Comics historian Michael E. Grost observed that many Bill Finger stories involve “…a series of linked mini-mysteries. Batman and Robin solve each one in turn, then move on to the next one.”
So it is here, as what appears at first to be an alien invasion turns out to be Luthor’s criminal scheme.
I imagine the story might have been Finger’s wink at the idea that he and Bob Kane’s creation could be just as formidable an opponent as Siegel and Shuster’s, despite the Masked Manhunter’s lack of super powers.
The Dynamic Duo corrals Superman’s archenemy by operating his own mechanical hand.
Elsewhere in this issue, Batman battles the hooded Master of Weapons, who specializes in the use of ancient weaponry like ballistae, catapults and caltrops. Ace the Bat-Hound’s superb sense of smell helps the crimefighters track the villain to his hideout in an abandoned prison.
Here, Finger pulls a fast one. The most likely suspect hasn’t been framed, but is in fact the Master of Weapons.
The villain’s obsession with ancient arms was of course shared by Hawkman, a superhero who’d vanished in 1951 but would return in 1961.
And in the issue’s third story, Batman’s Deadly Birthday, the Dynamic Duo ends up stuck in the wet plaster “icing” of a three-story cake created to celebrate the anniversary of Batman’s first case.
The same thing happened to the Adam West Batman, courtesy of the Riddler, in the February 1967 episodes Batman’s Anniversary/A Riddling Controversy. The Batman TV show was closer to the comic books of the era than fans sometimes like to admit.
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