World's Finest Breakup

Superman and Batman forty years ago today

Superman and Batman had been BFFs for decades in the DC Universe.

I think they were first together on the cover of New York World’s Fair Comics #2 (1940).

This sssue went on sale on May 11, 1940, five months before the New York World’s Fair closed in October. 15 cents was 50% more than the standard 10-cent price for American comics, but the page count was also increased by 50% from the then-usual 64 to 96. The Sandman mentioned on the cover is the original superhero, not the modern Neil Gaiman character. Slam Bradley was a detective strip by the creators of Superman. Art by Jack Burnley

Superman and Batman had separate stories inside, though. That pattern of shared covers and separate interior stories would continue for years in that comic’s successor title, World’s Best Comics …

Red, White, and Blue were a trio of heroes nobody cares about anymore. A trio of White men in the military are anathema to modern DC. Zatara the magician - a Mandrake wannabe - has long since been eclipsed by his daughter Zatanna. Art by Fred Ray.

which was retitled World’s Finest Comics after its first issue.

Art by Fred Ray.

Superman and Batman would not team up in a story until 1945 in the radio serial The Adventures of Superman.

That radio serial was very loosely adapted by Roy Thomas, Rich Buckler, and Frank McLaughlin (later the inker for The Man of Steel; see below) in World’s Finest Comics #271 (September 1981).

Superman and Batman’s first team-up in a comic book was in Superman #76 (May-June 1952) billing them as “The Mightiest Team on Earth!”

Art by Curt Swan, Stan Kaye, and John Fischetti. By this point ten cents only paid for 52 pages, not 64 like in the forties.

When 15-cent World’s Finest Comics was reduced to the size of a regular 10-cent comic book and could no longer fit separate Superman and Batman stories anymore, almost every issue starting with #71 (July-August 1954) would feature a Superman-Batman team-up.

Art by Win Mortimer.

For me, the peak of those team-ups was in the sixties when DC had its best writers and artists working on them. The popular Batman-slapping-Robin meme …

… was from one of the best issues, #153 (November 1965), by Edmond Hamilton, Curt Swan, and George Klein:

But by the eighties, World’s Finest became a D-list title without star power. After it became anything but the world’s finest comic, cancellation in 1986 was inevitable. Its final story (#323, January 1986) was a downer with Batman and Superman going their separate ways for ‘real’ (as opposed to being enemies in an “imaginary novel” like #153 above).

Art by Denys Cowan and Dick Giordano.

Batman: You [Superman] wouldn't have to be thanking me now... if you'd handled the situation a little differently than you always do ... flying right into the thick of things. You're faster than a speeding bullet ... slow down ... and use that super-brain once in a while. The night ... the shadows ... those are my domain. The backstreets and back alleys ... they're my territory. Leave them to an expert. The world almost lost Superman ... because of his foolish impetuosity. I'll save your neck any time ... but I won't write your epitaph. Think about it.

You can see there how Batman had become the smarter, cooler character. He don’t need no doofus like Superman no more.

I got the feeling that by that point, DC Comics was embarrassed by their then-flagship character.¹ Which is why they let Marvel Comics superstar writer/artist John Byrne reboot Superman in his 1986 miniseries The Man of Steel. Byrne’s Superman, whom I call Byrne-El, lacked, to use Byrne’s term, the “barnacles” of the past. Like the stories above. It and all other Superman stories published before The Man of Steel ‘never happened’ because now only Byrne-El was ‘real’. So every Super-story I had read for over a decade by that point ‘didn’t matter’ anymore. Yeah, I’m still a little miffed.

Among the thousands of stories that ‘didn’t matter’ were the hundreds of Superman-Batman team-up stories. What would ‘matter’ was Byrne’s take on the relationship between the two heroes in the third issue of The Man of Steel from forty years ago today.

Note the body language. Byrne-El and Batman are facing away from each other despite the blurb at the top: “Face to face with the Dark Knight”.

They did meet face to face inside, eight months after Byrne-El’s public debut at the end of The Man of Steel #1.

I have no idea why Byrne-El was in Gotham City, Batman’s turf. Or why he was so eager to take Batman to the police now. If Byrne-El thought Batman was a criminal - unlike any previous version of Superman - why wait eight months to catch him?

Batman wouldn’t let Byrne-El get near him. He had a “force-field” that would detonate a hidden bomb and kill an innocent person in Gotham City if Superman penetrated it.

Byrne-El: You’d place an innocent life in jeopardy, just to stop me? What kind of inhuman monster are you ?!?!

Batman: It’s a touch Machiavellian, I admit, but my end justifies my means.

Holy edgelord, Batman!

The two briefly overcome their antipathy for each other to team up against … Magpie, a homicidal kleptomaniac whom Byrne had made up for this story. Here we see Magpie ‘happy birthday’-ing a henchman who failed her.

How many kleptomaniacs in real life are also murderers? Who come up with clever, complicated ways to kill like “a little steel rook that fired razor-edged blades”?

Needless to say, having the DC Universe’s most powerful hero and greatest detective go up against a Z-list character was underwhelming. How was “bird-girl” supposed to have a chance against a guy who could burst through a wall?

Although I have many problems with Byrne’s story, I do like Byrne’s art.

Magpie should have been caught right there. She couldn’t outrun Superman or even Batman. She could unleash … acidic gas?

How could she be sure that the gas wouldn’t touch her exposed skin?

Superman inhaled the gas before it could harm Batman or any other regular human.

How was not being able to touch the Batman relevant to catching Magpie or neutralizing the threat of the gas? Why didn’t Superman hold his breath, keep the gas in his lungs, run after Magpie, silently apprehend her, and then get rid of the gas? But no. He flew into space to get rid of the gas first, giving Magpie a chance to escape.

I think that’s an early computer graphics effect on the right. I can’t imagine uncredited inker Frank McLaughlin laboriously making perfect squares.

In theory Batman could have gone after Magpie while Superman flew into space. Again, no. Instead he was using the “crime-lab” in the trunk of his car …

… which was not the Batmobile in this NuReality.

As much as I like the Batmobile, I also like the idea of Batman having a regular-looking car, one that would attract no attention. That car was part of a trend to make superheroes more ‘realistic’.

Was this realistic? Could a “spectrometer” in the trunk of that car in 1986 determine that “a tiny piece of thread” from a shard of glass on Magpie’s gas vial was “at least five thousand years old”? Brave AI says,

Accelerator mass spectrometers (AMS) used for carbon dating are typically large, stationary instruments that cost millions of dollars to establish and maintain. While standard AMS facilities are massive, recent [i.e., post-1986] technological advances have introduced compact or tabletop versions that are significantly smaller.

Here’s what the accelerator mass spectrometer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory looks like:

Public domain photo. Photographer unknown.

I’m not that bothered by Batman being able to do something that was probably impossible in 1986. I’m more bothered by what happened next.

Batman and Byrne-El go to a Gotham City museum “where [Magpie would] come into contact with five-thousand-year-old cloth” … as employee Margaret Pye. Eyeroll.

Byrne-El pulled off Margaret’s wig, and she had a breakdown.

And how did he react?

I … can’t help but feel sorry for her.

What about the Dark Knight?

She’s not a real criminal. Not like the kind of gutter-slime I’ve dedicated myself to destroying. She’s just a frail, human psyche. An unbalanced id that got pushed too far. You saw the psychological profile in her record. [Where did Byrne-El see that?] A little girl who loved prety things. A trifle too much, perhaps, who was taunted and called “magpie” because of it. Who educated herself, became curator of one of the nation’s leading museums … and found herself having to watch over pretty things she could never possess. Yes … I feel sorry for her, Superman. But I feel more sorry for her victims.

He should. She killed a lot of people in brutal ways for “pretty things”.

If Gotham is lucky, they’ll put her in a nice, safe padded cell out at Arkham Asylum. And if we’re unlucky, she’ll find herself a hotshot legal eagle, and be back on the streets before you’re halfway home to Metropolis.

I’d say Byrne-El was unlucky. Magpie was the very first villain - not even a supervillain, just a lady in a silly costume - that he faced in The Man of Steel, which was supposed to lay THE foundation for THE Superman, the only one DC was supposed to care about from now on. Not that loser whom I still love - the one DC ditched out of embarrassment.

But even their new winner Byrne-El still wasn’t kewl enough to hang out with edgelord Batman, who revealed at the end that the hidden bomb that would go off if Superman got near him was on him.

Batman would rather die than have Byrne-El violate his personal space. I don’t like people getting close to me, yet even I think that’s extreme.

Not that I would want Byrne-El near me. Not that distance would matter to a self-appointed Big Brother with telescopic vision who would be “keeping an eye” on Batman, lest the Dark Knight get out of line.

The “different reality” that Batman referred to the final panel above was, of course, the DC Universe that no longer existed - that had been ‘overwritten’ by the NuWorld of Byrne-El. Good riddance to “barnacles”!

Apparently Magpie was what we needed in ’86 rather than that lame, stale old stuff. Seriously, apart from an immediate follow-up story in Batman #401 (November 1986) about her killing again following her release (surprise!), nobody would use her again for years until DC ran out of ideas and had to recycle her.

I’m out of words.

I assume this issue didn’t sell very well. Artist John Byrne might have thought having his rendition of her alone on the cover would attract readers, but even those readers who liked his art might be disappointed to learn that he didn’t draw the story inside. I can’t remember if I have this. I might have bought it just for the cover and/or out of curiosity to see what happened to Magpie after The Man of Steel..

1. Superman was DC’s number one character until the Batman TV show in 1966 briefly put its hero in the lead. Then Superman regained his former position. However, by the eighties, Superman was in decline and Batman was on the rise, finally eclipsing Superman after the Tim Burton movie in 1989. Batman has been on top ever since, apart from the blip of the supposed ‘death’ of Superman in 1992 which made me abandon American comics.