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Keller's Comics Corner: The Baseball Bat-Man

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Did you ever wonder what might have happened if the rocket containing the baby Superman - standard-bearer for "Truth, Justice and the American Way" - had landed in the Soviet Union rather than in the United States?

Might Jack the Ripper have been identified and caught if Batman had operated in Victorian times rather than fifty years later?

How effective would the Justice League have been in a world where Superman did not exist as a hero?

Stories with interesting premises such as these cannot possibly be told within the canonical publications of the DC Universe. But DC Comics is a company whose business is not to maintain a particular "universal canon," but to sell entertaining stories, and so they came up with a separate imprint called Elseworlds - familiar faces in unfamiliar times and places. These stories were usually printed as prestige-format (glossy card-stock covers, square-backed, paperback binding) publications, and the favorite subject of these has been Batman. In these special editions, Batman has been set in different time periods (such as the aforementioned Victorian era story), alternate-history worlds (such as where a theocratic British Empire includes America in its dominion), dropped into the fictional worlds of Tarzan, Dracula, Frankenstein and the Scarlet Pimpernel, among others. (Superman was a distant second as a subject for Elseworlds stories.) One such story had some of the action take place in a baseball stadium before and (ever so slightly) during a game of major-league baseball.

Background

Batman: Detective No. 27 might be the only Elseworlds book where the premise comes from a play on words - the title is based on the fact that Batman's debut was in Detective Comics # 27, for which the writer, Michael Uslan, came up with an alternate meaning and ran with it. (This is quite appropriate, given that book features the pun in this article's title, swapping a flying mammal for a club used to hit a baseball.) Uslan was an executive producer on the 1989 Batman film, and as such, this issue is notable for including, for the first time in any comic book (outside of direct adaptations of that film) some elements unique to that cinematic Batman.

Batman Detective No 27

As in the canonical DC Universe, a 12-year-old young Bruce Wayne sees his parents mugged and shot before his eyes. In this world, that occurred in 1929, ten years before the May, 1939 publication date of the aforementioned Detective Comics # 27. In a number of canonical re-tellings of Batman's origin, the Waynes' murder is not a random dark-alley robbery, but is instead a plot targeted at the Waynes themselves. This holds true (though the details are different) in this re-imagining.

The story opens on the night of Abraham Lincoln's assassination. The pioneer of private investigation, Allan Pinkerton, warns the President that he is concerned about an assassination attempt by the Knights of the Golden Circle, a (real-world) group of Confederate sympathizers, but the President insists on going to Ford's Theater anyway, and the rest is history. The following night, the leader of the Knights, Professor Josiah Carr (get it?) announces to his followers that although the cause of the Confederacy is lost, his group will yet bring the North to its knees with fear...in 74 years' time. He announces that his followers have stolen a research notebook from an obscure monk named Gregor Mendel, and based on it, the Knights have recruited scientists who would carry on their work of revenge across the generations. Carr then exposes Pinkerton, who had infiltrated the group disguised as Charles Darwin, and Pinkerton shoots Carr with a small, well-concealed gun, but the low-powered bullet was blocked from Carr's heart by the contents of his pocket...a copy of Joe Miller's Joke Book (to complete the allusion linked earlier). Eventually, Carr finds himself cornered by Pinkerton and his men. Not wanting the Northerner to learn enough of the Knights' plan to eventually thwart it, he commits suicide.

The story continues in New York City in 1884. (It should be noted that while "Gotham" is a well-established nickname for New York City, and the Gotham City of DC Comics is clearly based on New York City, it does not replace New York in the DC Universe (nor in this "Elseworld"), but rather, exists alongside it. In a number of "canonical" DC Comics, Gotham City is said to be located in New Jersey.) Allan Pinkerton has secretly dedicated his life to uncovering and preventing the Knights' 75-year doomsday plot from coming to fruition. He arrives by train in New York, where he, his son William and top agent Kate Warne are met by a local politician who made his mark investigating political corruption, Theodore Roosevelt. While the four of them travel across Manhattan to meet the ship carrying Gregor Mendel, Roosevelt gives the visiting detectives a running tour of Manhattan, proudly pointing out the Polo Grounds, home of New York's championship baseball team, the American Association's New York Metropolitans. (The National League's New York Gothams, later to become the Giants, also played there, but were less heralded at that particular point in history.) Pinkerton, anxious to get to his purpose in meeting with the future New York City Police Commissioner, cuts him off, stating that (foreshadowing alert!) knowledge of baseball cannot possibly be relevant in thwarting the Knights' plot. Pinkerton then explains to Roosevelt that he has started a Secret Society of Detectives for the express purpose of thwarting the Knights, made not of Pinkerton men but of out-of-the-box thinkers, who would ensure their own anonymity by referring to one another in correspondence only by numbers. Allan, Kate and William were "Detectives # 1, 2 and 3" respectively, and they invite Roosevelt to become Detective # 4. The purpose of the society is to monitor any botanists or physicians who seem to have suddenly come into money, as this might indicate involvement with the Knights.

After escorting Mendel off his ship, the four detectives and the monk-scientist are accosted by thugs, led by an elegantly-dressed but monstrous-looking man whose presence caused fear in all around him, subsequently revealed to be Mr. Hyde. Based on the clues gathered by Pinkerton over the past twenty years as well as the encounter with Hyde, Mendel, over a steak dinner at Delmonico's, suggests that the Knight's plot involves the amplification of toxins by generations of cross-breeding of two (real-world) poisonous, psychoactive plants: Datura (which is pollinated by bats, to continue the allusions to the mainstream DC Universe) and Devil's Backbone (strangely, the comic book uses, for the latter, the Latin name of an unrelated and harmless plant). Roosevelt leaves the restaurant to offer dinner to Warne and the younger Pinkerton, but they tell him that the chef, named Johnny, already offered to bring them a steak. Roosevelt, knowing that that's not the name of Delmonico's chef, rushes back into the restaurant to find that the restaurant's owner and kitchen staff had been killed, as had Alan Pinkerton and Gregor Mendel, by Datura poisoning applied to their steaks (in a probably unintentional - but who knows, given the writer's cinematic background - reversal of the premise of Airplane!, Roosevelt is spared this fate because he ordered the (shell)fish and not the steak). The Knights of the Golden Circle made it known that they committed these murders by writing on napkins the catchphrase of Josiah Carr (spoken by him earlier in the book): "Did you ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?" (Later in the book,this is said to be derived from one of the punchlines in Miller's Joke Book, but I couldn't find anything in the real-world text - linked above - remotely like it.)

(In the real world, Gregor Mendel, Allan Pinkerton and Charles Delmonico did all die in 1884, but not on the same day. In the comic book, the three surviving detectives hide the connectedness of Delmonico's, Mendel's and the elder Pinkerton's deaths by putting Mendel's and Pinkerton's corpses on their planned boat and train a la Weekend at Bernie's, their deaths to be discovered at their destinations. A Delmonico's chef named Charles is found dead at this time also in the book, if he is meant to be Delmonico's famous chef Charles Ranhofer,then this is not close to historically accurate - the real one died in 1899.)

In 1929, Thomas, Martha and Bruce Wayne leave a movie theater, whereupon they are mugged by two men, later identified as Joe Chill (in the canonical DC Universe, the sole mugger and killer of the Waynes) and Jack Napier, the killer of the Waynes from writer Uslan's 1989 Batman movie. As in the film version, Napier asks the "dance with the devil in the pale moonlight" question. After a suitable period of mourning for his parents and resolution to avenge their deaths by fighting criminals everywhere, the Wayne family butler, Alfred Pennyworth, sees young Bruce off on a tour of Europe and Asia for an educational regimen which would be suitable for a boy determined to grow up to become a crime fighter.

Bruce returns to Gotham City on New Year's Day of 1939, and is greeted by Alfred, who had earned a medical degree from Gotham City Medical School - the alma mater of Doctor Thomas Wayne, and a major beneficiary of his will. Bruce declares to Alfred that he will not join the police department or FBI, as he wishes to be independent of any organizational strictures, but would also not become a costumed vigilante, like the Crimson Avenger, whose exploits loom large in the media (at that point in mainstream DC Universe canon, the Crimson Avenger was considered the first costumed hero, and his adventures ran alongside Batman's in Detective Comics for years, his debut preceding Batman's by seven issues). He plans to outfit a cave beneath the Wayne mansion as a forensic laboratory, but when he goes to the bank, he finds his family's accounts unexpectedly short of funds. That night, in May of 1939 (the cover date of the real Detective Comics # 27), Bruce sits in an armchair in the parlor of Wayne Manor, in a scene familiar to comic-book fans, contemplating what kind of persona to use in order to strike fear in the hearts of criminals. In a "Person from Porlock" moment, the doorbell rings, and Bruce Wayne is not inspired by a bat flying through a window...that night. Instead, this happens:

Batman Detective No 27 Stupid Bird

The visitor is none other than Lee Travis, a newspaper publisher who the crimefighting-obsessed Bruce Wayne had disdained as hopelessly liberal. Travis reveals that he knows of Bruce's personal mission and his prior ten years training for it. He tells Bruce of the Knights of the Golden Circle and their doomsday plot, Allan Pinkerton's Secret Society of Detectives, and asks Bruce to join the group. Bringing him to a room full of people recognizable (though not named outright) as some of the most famous detectives in then-contemporary literature and film, Travis tells him that the society had actually arranged for his education in the manner that would make him a capable detective. Bruce realizes that the only one who might have known him well enough to recommend such a course of action was Alfred. Travis admits the truth of this (gleefully using the classic detective-fiction line "The butler did it"), and tells Bruce that Alfred, who had been a Scotland Yard detective since the Great War, is the Society's Detective # 25. Alfred explains that he made himself the Wayne family butler to spy on Thomas Wayne, a doctor whose wealth had risen in a way that seemed like the Knights might have recruited him. As Bruce accuses Alfred of siphoning the Wayne fortune to support the Society of Detectives and argues with him about the Society's manipulation of his life, Travis slips away. Bruce is about to storm out of the meeting, when the door is blocked by the Crimson Avenger, who Bruce correctly deduces is actually Lee Travis, a.k.a, Detective # 26 (and of a mind with Bruce on the subject of crime after all). The detectives convince Bruce of imminence and horror of the culmination of the Knights' doomsday plot, and clues that the Knights are operating in Gotham, and he finally relents to become the titular Detective # 27.

Over the next month or so (it's never specified what day in May the preceding two paragraphs take place), Bruce and Alfred work feverishly, as traditional, non-costumed detectives, to figure out the Knights' plans in Gotham City. They decide that Gotham Med's Professor Hugo Strange was particularly suspicious, and attempt to question him following a medical convention, but, realizing that he is being followed, Strange gets goons employed by the Knights to attempt some violent dissuasion, but Detective # 27 was well-trained in martial arts during his decade abroad and escapes them. He confronts Strange at his laboratory at Gotham Med, and when he pursues the fleeing professor he asks another professor in the hallway to stop Strange. Unfortunately for the hero, that other professor is Jonathan Crane, who is actually a fellow member of the Knights. Crane and Strange (who is holding a book about jokes by Sigmund Freud) knock Bruce Wayne out with poisonous Datura-based gas, but rather than simply incapacitating him and escaping, they get to monologuing instead, saying that he "deserves an explanation, given the circumstances." They reveal that they will be carrying out Josiah Carr's doomsday plot against the North on "the most ironic day of all." Finally, they leave Bruce in a padded cell (promising to be back in a few hours to kill him, after they determine his value as a bargaining chip with the (apparently not so) Secret Society of Detectives) with the question, "Did you ever dance with the devil by the pale moonlight?" Bruce, upon hearing this, realizes that the Knights were connected to the deaths of his parents. He shakes off the psychoactive effects of the gas and escapes back to Wayne Manor, where he tells Alfred of what he learned from Strange and Crane. He also attempts to find the Freud book that Crane was holding in case it holds clues to the Knights' plot, but although his father has a set of Freud's books, that particular one is missing from the bookshelf. Bruce finds out that Freud himself is actually in New York at the time and has Alfred schedule a meeting between them. (In the real world, though Freud was alive in July of 1939, he was not in New York; his only visit to the United States of America was in 1909.)

Play Ball!

Detectives # 25 and 27 realize that the phrase used by Crane could only be referring to the 4th of July, and then deduce, from the fact that the venue for distributing the fear-inducing toxin must be somewhat contained but still affect a large number of people, that the logical venue for the Knights' attack would be the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, scheduled to be held on July 4th at Gotham's "Yankee Doodle Stadium". Not only would the crowd be large, but would include many important city officials as well, who might very well bring the city down if crazed with Datura-induced fear. (In the real world, the 1939 All-Star Game was in the obviously-analogous Yankee Stadium in New York, but that was held on July 11, not July 4. However, a possibly more famous event, Lou Gehrig's "Luckiest Man on the face of the Earth" speech, was at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939. One wonders why Uslan, clearly intent on weaving real-world personalities and events into the story, didn't simply use that well-attended game.) Babe Ruth was in attendance, as there was a ceremony honoring the players of the first All-Star Game (this was invented for the comic book, both as a contrivance to have Ruth present - I don't know if he attended the 1939 All-Star Game, but he was present in Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939 for the aforementioned Lou Gehrig tribute - and as an excuse to have this world's version of Catwoman appear, to attempt to steal the diamond rings the honorees would receive. She appeared earlier as well and her history is revealed to have been peripherally connected to the main plot). Bruce, Alfred and the Secret Society are there in force to attempt to thwart the Knights' attempt to gas the crowd into insane fear, still not knowing how the gas was to be deployed. As a ball boy hands the home plate umpire a ball, Bruce, with his keen detective's eye, notes that the stitching on the baseball looks wrong. He deduces that the balls for the game were tampered with by the Knights, filled with capsules of Datura gas and then re-sewn so that when one is hit hard enough, it would break open, releasing the fear-inducing gas on the crowd. Detective # 27 and his allies needed to prevent the doctored baseballs from being hit.

The lineup in this world is clearly not the one from the real-world 1939 All-Star Game, so all we know of the players is:

Home Team (American League, one presumes, but impossible to be certain)
Catcher # 34 (no name indicated) Per Baseball Reference, none of the real-world 1939 All Stars wore that number. The only catcher to wear the number at all in 1939 was Bill Atwood, who was certainly not of All-Star caliber, having played only four major league games that season, none of them even close to July. (He was probably with the Jersey City Giants at the time, though I can't find day-by-day minor league box scores on line to verify it with certainty). The real starting catcher for the 1939 American League All-Star team was Bill Dickey, who wore # 8.

One pitch is thrown and it's a strike. That's the extent of the game play that we are shown. The game is then interrupted by Detective # 27 rushing the field to get the toxic baseballs.

In response, the field is soon flooded with the Knights' thugs and with policemen and Detective # 27, who hadn't thought to arm himself, finds himself on the verge of being overwhelmed while the tampered baseballs present a danger to the crowd and the city. Fortunately, in any world, fate finds a way to give Bruce Wayne a direction:

Batman Detective No 27 Bat Flies Through Window

(The text, between the two images depicted above, is almost word-for-word taken from the penultimate two panels of the canonical DC Universe depiction of Batman's origin.)

Thus armed, and with help from the Babe himself (as well as Alfred, the Secret Society and assorted other allies), the Knights' forces are defeated and the dangerous baseballs are gathered and disposed of. And Babe Ruth gives Bruce Wayne the name which, it seems, he cannot shake no matter what winding path his life follows:

Batman Detective No 27 Babe Ruth Names Batman

As for the All-Star Game, we readers are left with no idea whether it was resumed the immediately, postponed till another day, or cancelled, never mind the game result.

And now...the rest of the story

As the victorious Bruce and Alfred leave the stadium, they are confronted by Joe Chill and Jack Napier. Chill is silent, but Napier is chatty, in keeping with his role as the Joker in the 1989 film (in this world, both he and Josiah Carr are partial Joker analogs) - telling him that he's waited ten years for the Knights to give him permission to kill Bruce, as "every joke needs a punch line," and asking the Knights' traditional question. Bruce finally recognizes that he was facing the murderers of his parents, and goes into a frenzy, pummeling Chill unconscious and intimidating Napier into spilling his guts. He tells the detectives that Crane had given specific orders to the two of them - Chill was to shoot only Martha Wayne, he was to shoot only Thomas Wayne, and Bruce was to be left alive, though Napier could offer no reason for that. He reveals that the Knights' Plan B was to release the fear-inducing gas at the World's Fair in New York the next day. After his morning meeting with Freud (in which the psychoanalyst tells Bruce that chemically-induced fear can be overcome by strong will - not sure just how true that is given what we now know of brain chemistry, but perhaps that was genuinely the state of knowledge in 1939), Bruce goes to the Fair, where President Roosevelt, Mayor LaGuardia and Superman (for whose costume Bruce expresses disdain) are all present. (In the real world, both Roosevelt and La Guardia were present at the fair's opening, but that was on April 30, not July 5. It's possible that La Guardia was there on July 5, but Roosevelt was in Washington all day that day. As for Superman, he (well, an actor dressed as him) did appear on "Superman Day at the World's Fair", but in the real world, that was on July 3, 1940.) He finds Strange and Crane in a vault where the annual generations of increasingly-strong Datura toxin were stored. He chases them (overcoming their fear-gas attack per Freud's suggestion) into a room that contains vats of chemicals. During the chase, Strange falls over a railing into one such vat (a homage to the climactic scene of the very first Batman story, from the issue after which this book is named, which was also echoed in the 1989 Batman film. Presumably, in this story, Strange died as did the villain of the original story, though in the movie, Napier survived his fall, emerging as the Joker). Bruce then confronts Crane, who tells him that he gave the 75th-generation toxin to his boss. Crane is about to reveal the identity of the Knight's current leader when he is shot from behind by said leader, who finally reveals himself to Bruce. Given Uslan's Hollywood background, how can we be surprised that he employed this classic twist revelation?

Yes, the man in charge of carrying out Josiah Carr's 75-year doomsday plot was none other than Thomas Wayne, not dead after all. He explains to a shocked Bruce that he was recruited to the Knights' cause as a young doctor and used the medical school as a cover for the Knights' fear toxin development and to launder money for them. But by 1929, his wife was close to discovering her husband's secret life, and he knew she stand opposed to it. He had carefully orchestrated the mugging - Chill was given a gun with real bullets and told to shoot only Martha, while Napier was given blanks with which to shoot Thomas himself so he could carry out the Knights' work with sufficient secrecy. Bruce had to be left alive to be a credible witness that his father was dead. The police at the scene of the crime and the coroner who signed the death certificate were on the Knights' payroll, and shortly afterward killed to complete the cover-up. It was he who withdrew the funds that Bruce expected to see from the Wayne estate, using that to aid the Knights.

After getting over the initial shock and disbelief, Thomas runs off with the box of fear toxin, with the intention to dump it on President Roosevelt, once Superman leaves. Bruce manages to prevent that from happening, and in the ensuing struggle, and chase, Thomas Wayne finds himself dangling off the edge of the World's Fair building, both hands on the box (held on the other side with one hand by Bruce). Bruce offers to save him if he will hand over the box, but the elder Wayne, having been fully invested in the Knights for so long, rejects the offer and, like Carr 74 years earlier, commits suicide instead. Ultimately, Bruce decides to let himself believe that his father's actions were driven by Datura-induced paranoia, and to think of his father as the man he knew prior to 1929, and of his having actually died on that occasion. Though he considers quitting being the Secret Society's Detective # 27 now that the group has accomplished its founding mission, Lee Travis and President Roosevelt convince him that with the world on the verge of war, the Society, and every man in it, are more necessary than ever. Thus convinced, Bruce and Alfred walk off into the night, their path forward clear.

Post Script

Most Elseworlds are one-off stories, this one included. However, one year later, the "bat" pun was repeated in the Elseworlds story Superman: True Brit. Written by Monty Python's John Cleese and mega-Python fan Kim Howard Johnson, it uses the premise of baby Superman's rocket landing in England, and most of the plot is based around the (somewhat dubious) humor of his middle-class parents, focused on keeping up appearances, trying to cover up embarrassing exhibitions of his powers. One such occurrence happened when "Colin Clark" lost his grip on a cricket bat, and his super-strong swing caused a bystander, "Bartholomew Stoat-Bagge," to be impaled by the errant implement. Years later, when Colin inevitably goes public as Superman, Stoat-Bagge confronts him not as a friend or even an ally, as he is to Superman in most takes on DC Universe history, but as an enemy:

Batman from Superman: True Brit

As with most forms of humor (other than the running gag), the pun does not improve with the repeat usage.

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