THE BRAINSTORMS

The biggest bastion of the Silver Age! I’m sure you know the phrase (or at least the song) “New friends silver, old friends gold.” If you’re not, I’m unsure where you’ve been in the past 130 years. The phrase comes from an old Girl Scouts’ song, derived from an 1890s poem, and alongside a nice lesson about keeping friends and making more, it’s surprisingly relevant for me today. In Comics, often periods of time (defined by aspects of the comics themselves rather than even s

A very different Bat from the woman we know today. Are you sitting down? Are you comfortable, and ready for a wild ride? Good! You’re already ahead of where Kathy Kane was in Detective Comics #233 in the summer of 1956, when she made her debut as Batwoman. You don’t really need to be seated for anything shocking, but Kathy certainly could’ve used a bit more mental preparation before embarking on her journey! She burst on the scene competent enough, in her very first case bea

Or, at least our first glimpses of them… Have you ever wondered what Batman majored in in college? Or what he did between deciding on a quest for justice and actually going out and learning stuff, since he decided so young? Well, the Golden/Silver transitional age answers those questions, or at least gives us an “answer”. The canon nature of this outside the stories in which this was published is very suspect, as is the case with basically any teen-years-of-heroes story from

Our earliest encounters with Ace the Bat-Hound! Our modern image of the Batman family is full of pets, but that’s largely due to a modern influx of pets and one particular character (fans know who I mean) who loves them. The first, and for the majority of Bat-history only, Bat pet, was Ace! Ace the Bat-Hound was a German Shepherd found by the Dynamic Duo in Batman #92 in 1955, while they were out on patrol. He was drowning in a river, and they rescued him, brought him back

The puzzling puzzler’s earliest crimes! In Detective Comics #140 (October 1948), we finally got the debut of the man who would eventually become one of Batman’s most iconic foes of all time. Edward Nygma, aka Riddler! Eddie is a man who made his money by cheating at, then actually solving, puzzles. When he was younger, he managed to find an answer key to a seemingly near-impossible puzzle, and solved it to much acclaim. From there, he built his career on more of the same thi