When Man-Bat met The Demon (On 1978's Batman Family #16)

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).

What's going on here...? 

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. 

Soon, there's more screaming from a second delivery room, and Blood chants "Yarva Demonicus Etrigan!" or "I summon the demon Etrigan!", and soon he's transformed to the yellow-skinned, big-eared, horned demon who, as Golden draws him here, also has some prominent eyebrows, apparently the one feature he shares with Blood (see below).

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. 

He too battles a demon baby, this one another great monster design by Golden, using "demon-fire" (not sure why, but Rozakis keeps using that term rather than "hellfire") to restore the baby to its human form.

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:

The creators are fast running out of pages, but there's room for a brief, five-page confrontation with the villain, during which Golden lays out a quite cool page in which we see Le Fey framed in the middle of the page, two tiers of panels on either side of her. One features Etrigan, the other Man-Bat, and in these, she menaces them with giant versions of her own hands that appear through the ceiling and floor.

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.  

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...