The Best Batman Sequence of All Time

Having read hundreds of Batman stories, and having lettered a few dozen of them, I’d like to spotlight what I believe is the single greatest sequence in the character’s history. The whole 13-page story, from Batman #47, cover dated April 1948, is good all the way through, an excellent example of economy in storytelling, plot structure, and illustrations that work perfectly, despite their crudeness and, in some areas, their ineptitude.

But we’ll just look at the story’s four-page climax. Stories are built of sequences, and I have never seen a better sequence than this one in any Bat story.

Let’s start by placing that sequence in its context. We’re reminded that the child Bruce Wayne swore to fight crime after seeing his parents murdered by a mugger. Some twenty years later, after reinventing himself as Batman, he stumbles upon the man who killed his parents. He identifies him as Joe Chill, who’s running a trucking company, and using it to transport wanted criminals out of harm’s way for big money.

The story, written by later Superman editor Mort Weisinger, uses a three-act structure quite deftly. The first act introduces Chill, tells the story of his murdering Thomas and Martha Wayne, and ends with Batman requesting of Commissioner Gordon that he be permitted to take over the case, and making one more request, this one of his teenage sidekick:

I didn’t understand why when I was a kid, but Weisinger was a good enough writer to challenge the audience just a bit.

In Act Two, Batman makes two unsuccessful attempts to nail Chill on his criminal activities. First, he adopts a disguise and attempts to infiltrate Chill’s mob:

The dialogue is as crude as the drawings, by legendary penciller Jerry Robinson. It veers into the land of cliché to call this noir, but if this ain’t noir, I’d like to know what is.

(That line about Chill only hiring people he can trust is a nifty little piece of irony, as the story is going to end with those trusted henchmen murdering him.)

I won’t show the second attempt, although it’s well worth reading. You can find this story online and see for yourself:
https://viewcomics.me/batman-1940/issue-47/full

Weisinger understood that in the second act, you up the ante, over and over, until the stakes become unbearable. Chill sees through Batman’s attempt to expose his activities, and commits a brazen act of murder, in such a way that he can’t be prosecuted. Which brings us to the end of Act Two. Batman’s best attempts are futile against this feral little man. He must try something considerably more desperate.

Act Three begins with Batman determining that there is only one way to get his enemy: to stake absolutely everything on one single turn of the wheel. This single page, for all of its crudeness, is comic storytelling at its absolute best.

Dick Sprang, a far better illustrator, was working in comics at the time. One wonders how he might have handled the page. Unlike Robinson, Sprang totally understood one-, two- and three-point perspective, and loved Gothic architecture. He certainly could have handled the first panel far more monumentally, particularly had he been paired, as he often was, with Charles Paris as his inker. But I wonder if it would have been an improvement. What Robinson lacked in finesse, he made up for in his ability to depict raw emotion. Batman addresses his enemy, arms folded, in panel 3. He’s in control of himself, but clearly, something big is about to happen. He towers over the terrified Chill in panel 4. And when he yanks off his cowl in panel 6, it is genuinely shocking. Sometimes crudeness can work in a story’s favor.

Good writing is characterized by surprise. Maybe you’re more sophisticated than I was at eleven, when I first saw this thing in reprint form. But it surprised the living hell out of me: our hero revealing his most jealously guarded secret to his most hated enemy.

It gets better. Take a look:

You don’t need much more than this, although you’re going to get a whole lot more. Chill stripped to the bone, terrified. The Club Pelican in panel 2 is (obviously) there as reference to the Stork Club, the most celebrated night club in Manhattan. Poor Chill, with his cigar and his blonde. It’s all come to nothing. He’s a ruined man. There’s no way out for him. Weisinger manages to make him a figure of pity, and it adds that much more to the pathos of the final scene.

Batman’s solution worked brilliantly, except for one thing: he failed to anticipate Chill’s desperate solution to the dilemma, seen in panels 5 and 6. Yet here again we get that element of surprise, and delicious irony:

I love it. The terrified, white haired thug. The kill crazy mob. I even like the incompetently drawn hands. And, of course, the last-minute realization that they’ve just killed their golden goose. And a nifty little action sequence:

I said the script was by Mort Weisinger, but that spinning truck-hoist screams Bill Finger. I dunno. If you do, please let me know.

There’s something sweet about Bats’ question in panel 4: there’s no more vindictiveness, he’s got his revenge. Chill’s ruined, and on his way across the Styx. And that “Case Closed” final panel. It really doesn’t get much better than this.

Comics were 52 pages long at this point, and “The Origin of The Bat Man” was one of three stories. Pretty inauspicious. And this is a character whose origin has been told, retold, and revamped many times since. I had a hand in one such revamping, the 2003 Brian Azzarello-Eduardo Risso-Trish Mulvihill miniseries “Broken City,” a story as touching as this one is crude. And Alan Moore’s “The Killing Joke,” while not a retelling of the Bat’s origin, is still about as penetrating a look into his heart as anyone’s ever managed to come up with.

But Batman #47’s “The Origin of The Bat Man” has its own mystique: in spite of its crude drawings, cruder inking, dialogue straight out of the pulps, bad coloring, and bad printing on bad paper, it somehow all clicks. In this one man’s opinion, these four pages are the single greatest sequence in the history of the single greatest character in the history of comics.