The morning news.
from Batman #85 (Aug 1954), reprinted in Batman #182 (Jul/Aug 1966)
Looking at the dates of the two different printings of this story…and, in fact, of all the panels I’ve posted this week…I’m always a tiny bit surprised that it’s so short of a gap. Twelve years doesn’t seem that long, but, then again, conventional wisdom at the time was that comics’ readership experienced significant turnovers, with most readers only sticking around for a few years (or months). Twelve years was probably plenty of time for an old story to be “new” again to most of the audience.
So, how many of you folks out there have been reading the same comic book series (more or less, including “reboots” or “new #1s” — you know, where it’s essentially the same series, without a significant gap between “volumes”) for more than ten years? Twenty? Thirty?
I don’t have any continuous series I’ve been reading more than thirty years, but there are more than a handful I’ve read for over twenty. I’ve been reading Hulk comics, in their various incarnations, since 1983, for example.
Thinking about this sort of thing reminds me that there was only a five year gap between the last Golden Age Flash comic and the introduction of the Silver Age Flash. Always seemed like that should have been more of a break than what it was, given its relative significance. (As I recall, one of the reasons for introducing a new Flash was that, five years later, most of their readership would probably not have been around for the previous Flash character.)
Of course, all this has precious little to do with the actual content of the scan. I just found it amusing, is all. Whoever wrote those headlines was really emotionally invested in how Batman comported himself, wasn’t he?
Happy Fourth of July, where applicable.
