Holy cow, that's a grisly cover. What the heck is Batman doing surrounded by all of these broken-necked dolls? What's going to happen when we open the issue?
I shouldn't have asked! Yikes! That's a pretty macabre splash page for 1976 -- a purple-clad puppet master strangling the heck out of the Caped Crusader. Seriously, what is this all about?
Well, the opening pages of the actual story don't provide too much of a clue quite yet. We see Batman stop a hijacked truck, aided and abetted not by Robin, his usual partner, but by a mutton-chopped New Scotland Yard inspector in a castoff Sherlock Holmes outfit. Of course, the inspector knows Judo and helps take down the perpetrator...
This is a character named Inspector Clive Kittridge -- making his first and last appearance -- who's in Gotham to... I don't know. It's never made entirely clear. I guess he's visiting to learn new crime-fighting techniques from a masked vigilante. Go figure. Anyway, who am I to judge? Commissioner Gordon seems totally into the whole thing, so it must be on the up and up.
(I have to pause here to mention how clumsily this character is introduced. Batman simply calls him "Inspector" on first mention. We don't learn his last name until someone mentions it in the next scene, where other people are talking about him, as you'll see above. His first name isn't even mentioned until half-way through the book, when Alfred the Butler drops the name "Clive" in a thought balloon. Weird, awkward storytelling.)
Anyway, soon after this opening scene Batman and Inspector Clive encounter a red-headed man in a trench-coat who literally just jumps in front of them and starts blubbering like an idiot. Batman -- believe it or not -- asks if he's a fan and wants his autograph. (This is definitely before the grim-and-gritty Batman of the Eighties). Instead, the guy just runs away. Batman surmises that whatever the guy really wanted, he couldn't get it out of his mouth.
Yeah, that's going to become a problem later on.
You see, a couple of pages later the purple-hooded guy from the splash page shows up, and he's strangling a ventriloquist's dummy. Batman punches this "madman" (kind of judgemental for a dummy-strangler) in the face -- revealing the red-headed stranger under the hood.
Mystery solved, right? Well, nope, the madman gets away after... throwing a stool. Yeah, not Batman's finest hour.
Don't worry, though, the plot thickens on the next page when Batman and the Inspector -- who have just nicknamed our dummy-strangler "The Wringer" -- get into the Batmobile and almost immediately nearly run down a cute little girl in a Shirley Temple-style dress and curls. They swerve just in time, saving her from being squished to death, only to have old Purple Robe jump out of the darkness, grab her, and toss her through the air to her doom.
Whoops.
Well, again, don't worry. It turns out she's another doll, only a more life-like one this time. There's a chase, and a fight, and the Wringer once again gets away.
The action take a break here, as the Inspector and Bruce Wayne visit the Gotham Bicentennial Expo, which Bruce mentions is full of animatronic recreations of the Founding Fathers and related Bicentennial figures...
...including Patrick Henry, whom the Wringer suddenly shows up to gruesomely strangle!
I won't bore you too much with the rest of the story. It turns out that the Wringer wasn't really a murderer. He was just a murderer in the making, and he was strangling increasingly lifelike dolls so someone would stop him before he actually fulfilled his desire of putting his hands around a real person's neck. That's why he showed up blubbering in the first place, hoping to reveal his penchant for strangulation, but he just couldn't get the words out at the time. Batman figures all of this out and also deduces the would-be killer's real name through some detective work that doesn't exactly put him in the intellectual realm of Sherlock Holmes. I mean, seriously, here's Batman's dialogue in the great reveal moment: "The dummy was made of Douglas fir, so I theorized his first name might well be Douglas!"
That's not exactly Great Detective thinking, folks.
I kid, but this isn't exactly a bad comic book. It's a nice, bloodless crime story that uses the Bicentennial as a timely part of the plot. It's hardly a classic, but it's a decent little read courtesy of artist Ernie Chan and writer David V. Reed, who also scripted the Bicentennial-themed Batman 273 a few months earlier.
All told, Batman 278 is a fun piece of comics history that has never been reprinted. I'm glad to have unearthed it, but somehow I doubt I'll ever bother to read it again.
Next up: who knows? I've got a few dozen more Bicentennial-themed comics piled up, waiting to be explored. Come back next time for another dip back into 1976!
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