One of the DC characters I've been thinking about lately is Jack Kirby's Etrigan, The Demon, having recently encountered him in November's The Spectre omnibus, and during a partial re-read of the Moench/Jones/Beatty Batman run and again in Lobo/Demon: Helloween. So, I was of course quite interested to see him show up in a Man-Bat story from the pages of 1978's Batman Family #16, collected in that 2019 Legends of the Dark Knight: Michael Golden in which I found that "Enter the Ragman" story I blogged about the other day
Unfortunately, Etrigan didn't make the cover, so I'm just using the character intros from the first page of Bob Rozakis and Michael Golden's "There's a Demon Born Every Minute" at the top of this post.
Now Man-Bat was created in 1970 by writer Frank Robbins, artist Neal Adams and editor Julius Schwartz (the last of whom Wikipedia credits with "concept"). He was originally an antagonist to Batman. After several appearances in Detective Comics, however, he became something of a hero himself and seems to fit into the broader category of monster heroes, a superhero sub-genre that seems to have been rather prevalent in DC and Marvel comics in the 1970s.
This portrayal now seems strange, given that Man-Bat has primarily been portrayed as a usually bestial, monstrous foe of Batman's over at least the last 35 years or so. (I wonder how much of that might be attributable to the 1992 Batman: The Animated Series episode "On Leather Wings", which was itself based on those early Robbins/Adams Detective Comics appearances?)
But in late 1975, the character starred his own series—even if it only lasted two issues—and was then given a regular feature in the Batman Family anthology series. In these stories, he seems to have retained enough of his humanity to function as a good citizen, combatting bad guys rather than just going on rampages.
In this particular 19-page story, Man-Bat's human alter-ego, scientist Kirk Langstrom, is pacing the floors of a Gotham City hospital, nervously waiting as his wife Francine is about to give birth to their first child (Is all of that nervousness just the usual jitters of a first-time father, or is he worried his chemically induced transformations into a human/bat hybrid might have some effect on his child, I wonder...?).
When he hears screaming and sees medical personnel fleeing from a delivery room, he thinks to himself "This is a case for-- --Man-Bat!", pulls off his shirt, and transforms into Man-Bat, flying in the direction the doctors and nurses have just fled from. (Unlike, say, The Hulk, Langstrom's transformations don't seem to have any ill effect on his pants, so he's always sensibly dressed in a pair of hunter green slacks while naked from the waist up.)
Inside the delivery room, he finds a new mother and a monstrous three-eyed green baby. The baby is able to magically throw tanks of gas through the air at Man-Bat. He punches the baby (yes, our hero punches out a baby), and it soon returns to its normal form, that of a human baby (and it doesn't seem to have taken any real damage from Man-Bat's punch).
Nattily dressed professional demonologist Jason Blood, with some seriously unkempt eyebrows, is on the case.
He arrives and presents his very seventies-looking business card to an incredulous police officer.
This Etrigan, by the way, doesn't yet speak strictly in rhyme (While Kirby had his Demon speak in rhyme a bit, Len Wein had him rhyming in a 1984 DC Comics Presents appearance, and that same year Alan Moore featured the character in a Swamp Thing arc in which he spoke in rhyming iambic pentameter; afterwards, whether he rhymed or not seemed to depend on the writer and the circumstances of the character, but it sure seems to be he rhymed more than he didn't ever after that Swamp Thing appearance).
Etrigan also, in this particular story anyway, is unequivocally a good guy, and doesn't seem to harbor any hidden agendas or propensity for evil.
The two monster heroes quickly get on the same page, with Etrigan explaining that his old enemy Morgaine Le Fey seems to be waiting for a particular baby destined for great power to be born, and she is therefore infusing each one with a spell that temporarily turns it into a demon, but so far she hasn't found the right newborn yet (We already knew Le Fey would be the story's villain though; we saw her escaping the dimensional walls of her prison and stealing the Philosopher's Stone from Blood's office in the opening pages of the story. As to how she made her escape, it apparently had something to do with the JLoA's interdimensional transporter to Earth-2 weakening the walls between dimensions or something. We therefore get two panels of Batman and Batgirl bidding farewell to the pre-Crisis Huntress as she leaves Earth-1 for home).
Given that he's got a child about to be born any minute, Man-Bat obviously wants to put a stop to this turning-newborns-into-demons thing as soon as possible, and so he and Etrigan leave the hospital to search for Le Fey, Etrigan riding on Man-Bat's back as if he were a horsey:
Luckily for Man-Bat, on of these giant hands grabs him by the wings, and so all he has to do to free himself is to revert back into wing-less Kirk Langstrom, snatch the Philosopher's Stone from Le Fey and point it in her direction, which turns her to stone.
Rushing back to the hospital, he arrives in time to greet his new baby, which he reacts to in shock, before the last-page splash reveals why exactly he is so surprised: The baby he's been referring to as "Kirk Jr." throughout the story is actually a girl, Rebecca Elizabeth Langstrom.
In the lower righthand corner of the page there's a little box reading, "Is Rebecca Langstrom actually the latent demon foreseen by Etrigan and Morgaine Le Fey? Only time and future issues...will tell!"
As far as I can tell, no future issues of Batman Family—or any other comics—would address the possibility of Rebecca Langstrom being a demon of some kind. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that she might have turned into a human/bat hybrid at some point, though.
No comments:
Post a Comment