Wolf Week #5: God Loves Batman and All the Little Children

When we last left Batman he was about to die just as you always suspected he might: beaten to death at a construction site by a werewolf with a piece of rebar.

 But, the Stupid Bronze Age Batman, like many village idiots, is beloved of God. So, after Batman has blown every chance to escape or incapacitate the werewolf, God saves him.
   
At least Batman gives credit where credit is due.

 In the 1970s, God saved Batman a lot. Pieces of buildings would fall on attackers, paintings would mysteriously point to the right antidote, villains would suddenly be startled by their own jewelry and stumble off a cliff. Really, it was as if Batman had an Ironic Death Generator in his utility belt. If the Golden Age Batman's chief weapon was the Strange Hunch, the Bronze Age Batman's was Divine Intervention. "Stand clear, Robin! I'll hurl these Deus Ex Machina capsules from my utility belt!"
   
As for the story... that's it. God saves Batman.
   
Batman shrugs and says, "Wonder what Alfred's made for dinner?"
   
It's a lightning bolt, not a phaser cannon, you moron. Lightning bolts do not "disintegrate" people (let alone werewolves). Oh, and god forbid you should actually look for any forensic evidence to determine whether the werewolf survived, because that would be too much like detective work. "Guess I'll just wait to see whether he turns up in some later story or wolf-mutilated corpses start showing up somewhere in Gotham."

 So, let's recap. Batman doesn't look for any evidence as to what happened to the murderous monster, makes no connection between Anthony Lupus and the werewolf, doesn't investigate the missing timberwolves, gets nowhere near the actual bad guy, Prof. Milo. Ladies and gentlemen, the World's Greatest Detective.
   
Meanwhile, Anthony Lupus abandons his fame and fortune and moves to Alaska. Why I do not know since, there is no way he would go to prison for kidnapping Batman; Batman has no evidence of that, and Batman is certainly not going to look for any evidence. Anyway, now that Anthony is Alaska he kills as many wolves as he can (for... food? revenge? the Outdoor Channel?) while joining their pack monthly.
   
Oh, and collecting their blood, which was the key ingredient of the formula that made him a werewolf, not the antidote. I guess he intends to regain his fortune by cornering the market on timberwolf blood. Ladies and gentlemen, the World's Most Confused Decathlete.  

You know those stories where bloggers post pics and you suspect that by removing them from context it's made the whole thing seem much worse than it is? 
 

For example.

This is not one of those stories. I assure you that every panel I didn't post from the story would only make it -- and the Stupid Bronze Age Batman -- seem worse.

Wolf Week #3: Prof. Milo

So, the big bad behind "Moon of the Wolf" is Professor Milo; who is Professor Milo? He's one of the greatest villains you’ve probably never heard of.

Basically, he's an evil chemical/medical researcher, the kind who tests stuff on animals. If he were a Flash villain he’d be dirty chemistry versus the Flash’s clean physics. If he were a Superman villain, he’d be a Junior Luthor, whose chemical concoctions would transform the citizens of Metropolis (but mostly just Jimmy Olsen) into all sorts of weird things. If he were a Green Arrow villain—well, Green Arrow would just be dead. Which might actually be a mercy considering how painful his current title is.

The early form of Prof Milo first shows up in Batman #112, when he infects Batman with, well, a lotus-eater gas, for lack of a better term:

Settle down, Beavis.

Batman was going to literally die of apathy if someone didn't give him a sudden dramatic challenge or puzzle to keep him engaged. So Robin and Commission Gordon did the (comic book version of) the logical thing...

You'd be surprised how cozy sleeping in a cowl can be.

They committed him to the insane asylum and told him he wasn't Batman, just a crazy person who thought he was the real Batman.

Uh-oh; someone's been skipping his bat-benzodiazepine! Get out the hoses!

No, really, the story starts with Batman escaping from the nut house.

Nice to knows it's always been that easy to escape from Arkham.

Anyway, after an artist's makeover that made him no more attractive, but at least less reminiscent of Cornholio, Prof Milo turns up again in Detective 257 (1958). As Polite Dissent teaches us, Scarecrow’s first use of anything like his “fear toxin” is in Batman #189 (FEB 1967). But Prof Milo had already invented it in Detective 257 nine years earlier. And it was severely debilitating, I might add.There he used his own fear toxin...

to make Batman afraid of--wait for it--bats. At which point, Batman just becomes "Starman" and kicks Milo's ass.

Yeah, you heard me: Starman.

James Robinson tried to suck the whole thing into his Opal City storyline with "the mysterious Starman of 1951." Sad part is, most readers didn't realize that Robinson was actually repurposing a Batman-versus-Prof. Milo story from 1958. Here's panels from each story, side by side, in case you don't believe me.

Comics can be very confusing; sneaky stuff like this is going under right under your nose all the time. You'd be amazed.


Anyway, Prof. Milo didn't show up again until 1974's "Moon of the Wolf", which we are reading this week. But four years later he crops up again...
From Batman #326 (1980):




Note the scars; if you can't already guess where he got them, we'll get back to those later in the week. In this story, Prof Milo has (somehow) become the director of Arkham Asylum. He tries to drive Batman insane with, well, a gas that drives you insane. Milo wound up inhaling it himself, which is why in 1989 you can spot him in Grant Morrison's Arkham Asylum, protesting that he is sane again.


His next significant appearance is in Final Crisis Aftermath: Run, where he experiments on the Human Flame. If you don't know who the Human Flame is, just follow the link; it's worth it and I'll be here when you get back. Milo appear several times in the animated DC universes (once as animal experimenter in the "Cat Scratch Fever" episode of Batman The Animated Series; as an ill-fated STAR Labs researcher in Justice League Unlimited; and as his true villainous self in Batman: Brave and the Bold where he uses mice to commit crimes).

But Milo should be best known for the 1992 episode of the Batman The Animated Series based on this very comic book story: Moon of the Wolf. Actually, it's astonishing how faithfully the episode hews to the stupid little details of the story: particular lines spoken and even the staging of the fight scenes. But they improved the story vastly by making Anthony, the athlete cum werewolf, a much guiltier, morally questionable character. Anyway, if you wind up resorting to Prof Milo for medical assistance you are scraping the bottom of DC's ethical barrel as author Len Wein makes clear:



So, now that Prof. Milo has extorted a dangerous werewolf into his thrall, what does he want him to do?

Oh. Well, of course.

Wolf Week #2: Who he is and how he came to be

So, how did a werewolf wind up running around Gotham? Well, if you are asking that question you are already a more apt detective than the stupid Bronze Age Batman! Once upon a time there was an athlete named Anthony Lupus. Lupus? Gee, I wonder where THAT's headed.

MEMORY: In the Bronze Age, narration boxes often began with inelegant capstone words that made you think that the author pictured himself to be a screenwriter, or maybe a robot.

He was a very proficient athlete and became a rich and famous person, which is the goal of amateur athletics.

But then something awful happened to him. Not as awful as being in Can't Stop the Music or marrying a Kardashian, but still fairly unpleasant. He got really bad headaches. For no apparent reason. The same lack of apparent reason for which werewolves climb up skyscrapers, in fact.

Headaches so bad that they cause YOUR ENTIRE HEAD TO FALL OFF THE BACK OF YOUR SHOULDERS. Thank goodness for Tony's olympic-level reflexes or he'd be pulling a Pantha. Pity the Legion of Super-Heroes didn't exist yet; he could have applied. So Tony went to many doctors, in vain, to solve his headaches-so-bad-they-cause-your-head-to-fall-off problem.

Then, in a clever and efficient Neal Adams montage, he winds up scraping the bottom of the medical ethics barrel....

HOLY CHRIST ON A CRACKER, Professor MILO?!?!?

More on HIM tomorrow.