Batman: Shadow of the Bat #52
By Nick Eskey
Looking back, I guess my comic reading started later in life than most can claim. It wasn’t that I didn’t like comics, but rather never was introduced to them. And my book reading was at a school requirement level at best.
What I loved were toys. That was my thing. I had a whole Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles chest full of action figures and accessories. When the chest began to overflow, my toys spilled out onto my floor and then the carpet. Safe it to say my mom and I were very familiar with Toys R Us.
During one of my frequent visits, I was 11 years old and spending time that weekend with my dad. I was walking down one of the figure aisles when I saw wrapped in hard plastic, hanging from a hook, three comic books. It was a DC collection, with a giant sticker that claimed it was offering a great value. I was curious, and also fascinated with the packaging’s cover art. I grabbed one off the hook and my dad bought it for me.
After taking it home, and spending a good deal of time on the hard shell with a pair of scissors, I laid out the books leafed through them.
Two of them I don’t remember, but the third is still vivid in my mind. It was Batman: Shadow of the Bat #52. My only exposure to the Dark Knight at the time was the Tim Burton movies with Michael Keaton. But this was something different.
The first thing that caught me was the look. The art style was darker than any of the Sunday Funnies, both in color and content. The villain wasn’t any of the one’s I knew about, like the Joker or the Penguin. This was a guy named Narcosis. He wanted to put the whole city into a deep sleep using poisoned milk. For an eleven-year-old kid who loved his morning cereal, this messed with my head. I began to question hard whether I wanted my Frosted Flakes.
Narcosis with his nightmare dream gas
Batman and Robin had to intercept the milk before it was delivered to any innocent people, so the story took place in the early hours of the morning. Even I with my limited comic exposure knew then that Batman only operated at the dead of night. At the end, while Narcosis lay in a deep sleep from his own tainted milk, police argued with themselves that since it was daylight, it couldn’t have been the Batman.
Toys R Us didn’t carry comics for too much longer. But by then, I was finding my love for books like Goosebumps. Soon I came in contact with more comics from stores like Borders. My love of the Batman character also grew.
I’ve since ventured to other titles and genres in the years that came. But that one comic will stick with me for a long time I think.
Type Chaotic 