Somebody’s First Comic Book: Batman #281

Wondering what Somebody’s First Comic Book is all about? The explanation is on this page!

TITLE: Murder Comes in Black Boxes

CREDITS:

Writer: David V. Reed
Art: Ernie Chua & Tex Blaisdell
Editor: Julius Schwartz
Cover Artist: Ernie Chua
Publisher: DC Comics

PRIOR KNOWLEDGE: It’s Batman. It doesn’t matter if I’ve ever read a comic before or not, everybody knows who Batman is, right?

IMPRESSIONS: Commissioner Gordon calls in Batman to investigate a strange murder – a limousine jumps a curb in the rain and runs over three people, all of whom turn out to be foreign intelligence agents. Batman knows who all of them are, but he doesn’t have any reason to believe any of them know each other. He finds a clue left with their bodies, recorded messages from the men proving they were trying to contact Batman before they died. He rushes off to find the fiancé of one of the dead men, worried that she may be the murderer’s next target. Naturally, she’s attacked and Batman starts beating people up, because that’s what he does.

Anyway, without giving a play-by-play of the entire comic book, Batman manages to track down the bad guys, but they get the drop on him and the comic book ends on a cliffhanger. Oddly enough, the cover of the book only seems to correspond to the last page of the story. It seems to me that’s a strange way to sell a comic book, by giving away the ending, but there’s not a lot else in this story that would lend itself to a really striking image. There’s none of Batman’s more famous bad guys – no Joker or Catwoman or anything like that – to make the cover pop. The story itself actually is kind of the same. There’s nothing in here about Batman himself, we never see him out of costume or interacting with anybody except Gordon, the fiancé, and the people he beats up. This seems to be kind of a straightforward mystery. It’s okay, but not the best mystery ever. I’m only mildly curious about how Batman gets out of the predicament he’s in on the last page. And mild interest isn’t enough for me to look for issue #282.

GRADE: B