Summary: <br><br> A look at Len Wein’s Bat-murderer saga in the early 1970s. Then in the later 1970s, Wein became the writer of Batman and introduced a love interest in the form of Selina Kyle.<br> Affiliate link included.<br> Transcript below:<br> Graham: Can Batman survive the danger posed by such foes as Ra’s al Ghul and Signalman? We’ll tell you all about it next as we take a look at Tales of the Batman: Len Wein straight ahead.<br><br> <br> [Into Music]<br> Announcer: Welcome to the Classy Comics podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise Idaho, here is your host Adam Graham. <br> Graham: Len Wein was one of those really great comic book readers tied into a lot of things was a co-creator of Swamp Thing and also of Wolverine as well as helping to revamp the X-Men and was rightly inducted into the comic book Hall of Fame in 2008, passed away in 2017. Today we’re taking a look at Tales of the Batman: Len Wein, which collects his work on the Cape Crusader. These range from one off appearance in Detective Comics to his own run as writer of Batman and actually the very first graphic novel I ever read. So, let’s go ahead and take a look.<br> The book starts out with a story from Detective Comics 408 and it opens with Batman seemingly in a haunted house where nothing is quite as it appears. This is just a really, really good story and the art by Neal Adams is just fabulous. It does a great job setting the scene, the atmosphere, giving it all this sort of Twilight Zone feel to it. So, both writing and art are really good here and then there is an appearance in World’s Finest, the Batman/Superman team up book and me it’s another one with Neal Adams artwork and it’s a story in which Clark Kent is apparently trying to hire thugs to kill Superman and Batman is trying to figure out what’s going on. Now this one is a fairly good story. It does end with a pretty nice super villain battle with Dr Light. It’s not my favorite World’s Finest story but I enjoyed it pretty well.<br> Alright, so the next thing that he ends up writing is the Bat-Murderer saga, which was a series in Detective Comics #444 to #448 and it’s mostly has the art by Jim Aparo and the plot in this involves Batman picking up a gun and appearing to shoot Talia al Ghul and the police declare the him wanted for murder because he won’t turn himself in and he’s on the run from the police trying to clear his name. He breaks into jail to question Ra’s al Ghul about what happened to Talia and then he appears to shoot Ra’s and so it’s a story where he is on the run from the police and then The Creeper gets into the action to try and hunt down Batman. The story is interesting. It’s essential the first 4 or half issue stories with the other half of the comic book and Detective Comics taken up by the backup feature but in issue 448, we get a full-fledged resolution at a circus. The story’s not perfect and he does also fight a villain, Silversmith, in the middle of this. This is a really good serialized story for the era. It manages to build action, to build consequences, to increase the pressure as The Creeper rejoins the hunt and you get a reveal. It’s not completely surprising. It just does tend to make a lot of sense.<br> Next stop is another guest writing appearance in Detective Comics #466. In this one, Batman is dealing with the return of an obscure villain named Signalman. Signalman is one of those villains that just shows the strength of the Batman Rogues Gallery and how you can really go back through history to see some characters who are not considered all that successful and make them interesting. In this case Signalman really does give Batman a run for his money and actually comes close to killing Batman, which you wouldn’t really expect from a villain like signal man but he tried to kill him in the most Signalman way poss...
