October 1966. You can't keep a dead butler down. About two years after killing off Alfred the butler in 1964, editor Julius Schwartz was faced with a problem: William Dozier, the producer of the forthcoming Batman TV show, wanted to include Alfred in the show, and wanted him reintroduced into the comics as well! Schwartz and writer Gardner Fox struggled with this challenge and finally came up with the utterly preposterous story presented in the issue above.
Even for a Silver Age Gardner Fox comic book, this story is exceptionally convoluted, so it's best considered chronologically. We begin with a flashback sequence involving iconoclastic "all-around scientific genius" Brandon "Plot Device" Crawford:
This is already straining credulity a little because the story in DETECTIVE COMICS #328 in which Alfred died (helpfully recapped elsewhere in this issue) showed that he had been crushed to death by a giant boulder. That did not seem survivable at all, and even if it were, this would imply that neither Batman and Robin nor whatever doctor who filled out Alfred's death certificate nor the mortician noticed that he wasn't actually dead! Anyway …
So, Alfred wasn't actually dead, he wasn't embalmed, and he was buried in a refrigerated coffin (that's what the purple cylinders in the last panel previous page were for). A stretch, but we'll allow it. However, upon discovering this, Crawford, instead of calling an ambulance like a normal person, seizes on the opportunity to do some Frankenstein shit with Alfred's maimed, broken, mostly dead body, as one does (if one is a reclusive "radical individualist" who dropped out of college to pursue unorthodox, dubiously ethical scientific experiments, I guess).
One of the initial objects of Schwartz's tenure had been to rid the Batman books of the fantastical aliens, monsters, and bizarre transformations of the 1957–1963 period in favor of something a little more grounded. All that goes out the window here, despite the rather defensive editorial footnote, which says:
EDITOR'S NOTE: Physics professor Robert Ettinger, author of "The Prospect of Immortality," has said that death can only be defined in relative terms. He points to the hundreds of persons revived after drowning, asphyxiation, electrocution, and heart attack. "Biological death depends not only on the state of the body," Ettinger says, "but also on the state of medical art!"
Okay, then. On to the Frankenstein shit:
So, Crawford's experimental cell regeneration machine has restored Alfred's broken body, but in the process transformed him into an unrecognizable, rather hideous-looking being who is also evil. Check! The regeneration effect we see Crawford panicking about then transforms him so that he looks like Alfred, while leaving him in "a catatonic trance." The Outsider, rather ungratefully, puts Crawford's unconscious body back in Alfred's coffin to cover his tracks, and uses Crawford's various machines and his own "increased mental power" in his new quest to destroy Batman and Robin.
This was not the first appearance of the Outsider, who had actually been hounding the Dynamic Duo on and off since DETECTIVE COMICS #334 two years earlier, although he had never appeared on-panel, and his identity had been a mystery. Where Schwartz originally intended to take that plotline is not clear (Schwartz's own account doesn't say, and Gardner Fox said later that he didn't think Schwartz had a solution in mind at the outset), but it doesn't seem likely that revealing the Outsider as Alfred was the plan, particularly since subsequent Outsider stories had shown that the villain had superhuman powers, including the ability to bring inanimate objects to life! In this story, the Outsider really does transform Robin into a wooden coffin, as the cover indicates — it's not a hypnotic illusion or some other such dodge. Fortunately, the effect is reversed after the villain is defeated:
Batman's determination to keep these events secret from Alfred is bizarre, since Alfred's death is a matter of public record: As seen in DETECTIVE COMICS #328, Bruce Wayne started a charitable foundation in Alfred's name, with its own building in Gotham City! Batman suggests that they can rename the charity the Wayne Foundation (as of course they subsequently did), but how he expects to resolve the various problems created by Alfred having been legally dead for months without his finding out is unclear. They do take the time to retrieve Crawford (who has miraculously not suffocated or starved to death in Alfred's coffin) and use his machine to return him to normal, after which Batman suggests that Bruce Wayne will give Crawford a job at the renamed foundation.
If you're wondering, "Wait, does this mean Alfred now had super-powers?" the answer is yes! Since he didn't retain any conscious memory of his death and resurrection, he was normally unaware of this, but Alfred's evil Outsider personality resurfaced several times, and he sometimes spontaneously reverted to the Outsider's form, in which he once again had supernatural abilities:
Notice the background, with the buildings burning like candles? The Outsider did that with his mental powers, along with a bunch of less grandiose but equally impossible feats. Fortunately, they reverted to normal after he split into separate good (Alfred) and evil (Outsider) selves and defeated himself. The Outsider resurfaced once more in 1985, battling the Outsiders and nearly killing Superman by transforming the Batcave's giant penny into Green Kryptonite.
I guess this whole saga did resolve the problem of resurrecting Alfred for the TV show, but in what I think can fairly be called the most ludicrous way possible. (And you thought the PENNYWORTH show spun out of GOTHAM was silly …)
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April to October 1977. Although the first issue of the Marvel STAR WARS comic has a cover date of July 1977, it appeared on newsstands in early April, about a month before the film debuted, and Lucasfilm first approached Marvel about a comics adaptation before the movie had even started shooting. Lucas was plainly a comics reader — as writer/editor Roy Thomas explains in a text page in the first issue, Lucas had even read Marvel's short-lived UNKNOWN WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION magazine — and for all Lucas's talk of Joseph Campbell mythological archetypes, the movies contain some probably non-coincidental similarities to the work of Jack Kirby, both from Marvel and DC. Lucas requested Thomas, whom he'd previously met, to write the comic, and also apparently asked for artist Carmine Infantino, who would later pencil the ongoing series, albeit not until after the adaptation of the movie was complete. The first 10 issues of the series were drawn by Howard Chaykin, who'd previously done some similar space-opera adventures, including his original "Ironwolf" strip in DC's WEIRD WORLDS in 1974–1975.
Thomas says in the text page that spreading the adaptation over six issues was his idea. That was generous for a movie adaptation (a few years later, Marvel adapted a variety of feature films, including BLADE RUNNER, in just two issues apiece), and was a fairly risky commercial move, but it paid off handsomely — I'm reasonably sure that this adaptation was by a healthy margin the most successful book Marvel published in the 1970s, going through multiple printings and being repackaged in an assortment of different ways. Unfortunately, this was before Marvel implemented its "incentive" (royalty) program for writers and artists, so it wasn't the windfall for Thomas and Chaykin that it would've been a few years later.
The adaptation isn't Chaykin's best work, although the addition of Steve Leialoha as inker on issues #2 through #6 tightens up the likenesses and gives the line art a greater feeling of solidity. Since the comic was done before the movie was completed, there are some discrepancies, and the adaptation includes several scenes that were dropped from the film, including Luke running to tell his friends about witnessing the battle between Leia and Vader's ships (which Luke has seen through his macrobinoculars) and encountering Biggs. The second issue also includes Han's confrontation with Jabba the Hutt (initially spelled "Hut"), later added in the SW Special Edition. Since Thomas and Chaykin had no idea what Jabba was supposed to look like except that he was an alien, this is what they came up with:
This version of Jabba reappeared twice in later issues of the series (#28 and #37, both penciled by Infantino). When Jabba's appearance was finally canonized in RETURN OF THE JEDI, Marvel made no attempt to explain the difference, which was really just as well. (If you dig around the Wookieepedia wiki, you'll find a rationalization for it that is absolutely NOT reflected in the original comics.)
Thomas and Chaykin also did the earliest post-movie stories, both in the STAR WARS title and serialized in Marvel's PIZZAZZ magazine, although these were not particularly distinguished and are really of interest only as curiosities. Thomas departed before either storyline was completed, with the comic book story wrapped up by Chaykin and Donald Glut and the PIZZAZZ serial continued by Tony DeZuñiga and Archie Goodwin. Goodwin would subsequently become the principal writer of the SW comic book until after THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and of the newspaper strip until 1984.
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