The first time Batman met Ragman (On 1978's Batman Family #20)

In my recent post about Batman and Ragman teaming-up in 1998's Batman #551 and #552, I briefly discussed the history of Ragman, particularly his post-Crisis iteration, as the character had far more appearances after DC's first big continuity reboot than in the relatively few years he was around before it. 

In a bit of synchronicity, the very next day I saw this post on Dave's Comic Heroes Blog, featuring the cover of Batman Family #20, the last issue in the series. As you can see, that cover featured Batman confronting Ragman. While I don't think DC ever released a collection of the 1975-1978 Batman Family series, that Batman/Ragman story happened to be drawn by Michael Golden, and thus it ended up in 2019 collection Legends of the Dark Knight: Michael Golden, an electronic copy of which I was able to borrow through my library.

And therefore, I got to read that Batman/Ragman comic just about as soon as I learned of its existence and can now write about it for your reading pleasure. 

After a few minutes of online research, it seems that this is the very first appearance of Ragman outside of his own short-lived series ("Short-lived" as in it only lasted five issues). It is also the first time he meets Batman, with whom he shares a city, although the pair would go on to cross paths repeatedly in the future, including in an issue of Brave and The Bold, in the 1991 Ragman miniseries, an issue of Legends of the Dark Knight and that 1998 Batman two-parter.

This story is by writer David V. Reed and, as mentioned above, artist Michael Golden. I have never heard of Reed and I know Golden's name primarily as a cover artist (There's a whole gallery of his covers for various Batman related covers in the back of the collection; that evocative image of a white-skinned Batman you see on the cover of Legends of the Dark Knight: Michael Golden is from one of those). It's entitled, perhaps unimaginatively, "Enter the Ragman."

It opens with Batman, "the matchless fighting machine", beating up a bunch of thugs armed only with sledgehammers and knives. Said thugs have apparently chased all the residents out of an apartment building in a poor neighborhood, part of a criminal enterprise that involves doing that, later razing the empty buildings and then developing the land for a huge profit.

Investigating the scheme is Bette Berg, a freelance photographer and journalist...and girlfriend of Rory Regan, the proprietor of the Rags 'n' Tatters junk shop and, secretly, Ragman. The pair are followed back to the shop by two parties.

The first is Batman, who eavesdrops outside the window for a bit to see what the pair were doing at the scene of the crime. Here he (and we) learn that Bette is a crusading journalist (and Rory, apparently, helps). The other is a member of the crooked real estate racket, and, because of him, the scheme's boss sends a few hoods to Rags 'n' Tatters to slap Bette, wreck the joint and threaten her not to continue her investigation.

It is now time for Ragman to enter "Enter The Ragman."

Before Rory suits up in his very cozy looking costume—which really looks like something warm to wear around the house on a winter's day, doesn't it?—Reed and Golden recount his origin, which takes just 13 panels here. Here are a few of those panels:

Remember, this is his original, pre-Crisis origin, the one conceived by creator Robert Kanigher, not the post-Crisis one Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming came up with, involving Jewish mysticism, a suit of souls and a lineage of magical defenders of the downtrodden.

To recap that original origin briefly, rather than make you try to read the panels above, Rory, his father and three of his father's friends were caught in fallen power lines, and some freak twist of fate caused these to electrocute all of the older men, while transferring their special abilities to Rory, the only one to survive the incident. And, as chance/Kanigher would have it, those friends all had pretty useful abilities, being a former circus strongman, a heavyweight boxer and an acrobat.

I guess the idea was that the Ragman hero was something of a patchwork of the skills of various men, in the same way that his quilt-like costume was made up of various bits of fabric...? Personally, I like the later, post-Crisis origin better. The Jewish identity and mission to protect his people makes Regan a more distinct character than the mostly religious-free superheroes of the comic books, and the magical abilities of the "suit of souls" costume seem more, um, realistic to me than the freak electrical accident.

Of course, that may just be nostalgia speaking, as the Giffen and Fleming-written Ragman was my first exposure to the character. 

Anyway, Rory spends a panel doing research into the real estate scheme at the library—that's where he was when Bette was attacked in his shop—and he finds out who is ultimately responsible for it: Bruce Wayne!

And so Ragman scales the side of a downtown Gotham skyscraper to reach the penthouse apartment of Wayne—I guess that this is the point in the seventies where Batman had moved out of the manor and into his penthouse?—only to be confronted by a superhero who claims to be a "close friend" of Wayne's, the Batman. 

The pair argue for a bit, with Batman saying that the Wayne Foundation has an outside agency handling their properties, and, when they come to blows, Batman basically takes a pair of very powerful punches from Ragman before the Tattered Tatterdemalion leaves, having learned that Wayne's not actually there anyway. 

Instead, Ragman attacks the boss of the scheme and his strongmen, a fight Batman eventually joins.

There's a pretty cool sequence where the two caped heroes corner the fleeing boss, in which Reed let's Golden's evocative imagery do all the talking:

Golden doesn't get too many panels in which to draw Ragman in this relatively short outing, and thus it's hard to fairly judge his Ragman versus those of other artists, like co-creator Joe Kubert or Pat Broderick or Kelley Jones, but he certainly does a fantastic job highlighting the creepiness of the cape and hood in this sequence.

On the one-page epilogue, a very seventies-looking Bruce Wayne himself shows up at Rags 'n' Tatters to show Bette and Rory that he's really a nice guy, congratulating them on their front-page expose in the Gotham Blade, offering to pay for the damages to the shop caused by the bad guys and underwriting a grant so they can continue their work, by which I assume he means the freelance reporting.

The two Gotham City heroes would next cross paths in 1983's Brave and the Bold #196 (written by Kanigher and drawn by Jim Aparo), after which they wouldn't meet again until Crisis on Infinite Earths scrambled DC's history and continuity, leading to a very different version of Ragman. 

Between the original Ragman series, the two '90s miniseries, and these various team-ups with Batman, there's probably enough Ragman comics to fill a DC Finest collection, although I wonder if such a relatively niche character would be deemed popular enough to sell such a book, and if the Batman connection would be enough for DC to greenlight one...