Batman's First Recurring Antagonists
- Brin Walsh
- Apr 27
- 2 min read
And icon status versus staying power.
When we think of the earliest Batman foes, most people on the street would say Joker, or Catwoman. And they'd be right, if we were only talking about Batman (1940), but there was more before that.
Doctor Death, one of the first foes Batman ever faces, is literally a doctor obsessed with death who creates poisons in special delivery mechanisms with the intent to kill people. He's the first recurring foe, simply because he appears in one issue, apparently dies, but then returns in the next issue having faked his death and escaped, before finally apparently dying at the end of his second issue! He'd later be revived in the early 80s by Gerry Conway, but before then, he's already taken his place in history, beating out far more iconic people.
Next, the first true "arc" in Batman comics shows a several-issue story in which Bruce's fiancee, Julie Madison (yes, he had a fiancee back then that no one knows about now! She's fun, and has a very Hedy Lamarr type look) is hypnotized by a villain known as the Mad Monk, a European red-robed vampire who has been hypnotizing people from across the ocean and bringing them to his home to feed his werewolves. Across several issues, Batman rescues his fiancee multiple times, while juggling battles with wolves, large apes, a femme fatale vampire named Dala, and ensuring his fiancee does not uncover his secret identity.
However, in Detective Comics #36, we finally get a foe with staying power. This is the debut showing of Hugo Strange, a criminal mastermind with a plot involving fog. Strange, unlike the two others so far, will be recurring for years to come. He's the first villain to appear in both Detective Comics and in Batman, occupying one of the story slots in the three-story issue Batman (1940) #1. Like Doctor Death, he spends a few decades away from the comics before being revived in the 1970s, but once revived, the character joins the stable of reoccurring Batman foes. Recently, he even anchored a post-Rebirth story arc in which he reanimated the corpses of his former patients!
To make our way to the villains with truly the most prominence, importance and heft within the Batman mythos, we still have a few issues to go before we begin. However, one thing the Joker can never take away from these three rogues, no matter how "iconic" his smile, is that they were there first.
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