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The Black Bat Omnibus #1
The Black Bat Omnibus Volume 1
D.A. Tony Quinn, blinded by a criminal's acid, begins a new career in his quest to fight crime as the Black Bat! This collection contains the first thee adventures of the Black "Brand of the Black Bat," "Murder Calls the Black Bat," and "The Black Bat Strikes Again," uncut and restored. The first volume of the complete reprinting of the series.
- GenresPulp
420 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 30, 2018
Reading the adventures of “The Black Bat” is a part of my continuing pulp odyssey, particularly the “lesser pulps” end of it. I didn't expect this to be “The Shadow” or “The Spider”, but more along the lines of “Captain Satan” and “Secret Agent X”. “The Black Bat” first appeared in mid 1939, around the time that Bob Kane and Bill Finger created Batman, which I'm sure is a large part of why this series still gets attention.
The origin, which is included in “Brand of the Black Bat, has heroic District Attorney, Tony Quinn, being blinded by acid in a courtroom and later having his sight restored secretly. He's scarred and continues to pretend to be blind, but he is secret also the masked hero The Black Bat. He has a whole crew: his valet Silk, strong-man Butch, and girlfriend Carol Baldwin.
Since the operation that restored Quinn's sight also gave him the ability to see in the dark, he's always going out at night in costume, meanwhile his friends have to do things like go undercover or get tortured. Silk, a former confidence crook, is also a master of disguise. Carol's job involves following people and getting periodically kidnapped. Butch is the fairly typical strong dumb guy.
Police Commissioner Warner and Sgt McGrath are always popping up with problems about criminal cases that the Black Bat has become involved in. McGrath is determined to arrest The Black Bat, and is never entirely convinced that Tony Quinn is blind. The result of this is that McGrath is always showing up when The Black Bat is in action, so our hero always has to rush home and jump into a robe or something and pretend to have been lounging and blind. It is a nice idea for a source of tension, but it becomes a very repetitive device over the three stories in the book.
The Omnibus here includes the first 3 stories: “Brand of the Black Bat”, “Murder Calls The Black Bat”, & “The Black Bat Strikes Again”.
The second story seems as if it may have been done by a different author (they're all under house name G. Wayman Jones), because in that one the valet, Silk, suddenly talks more like a street thug and less like the smooth cultivated type he is.
Somehow Silk manages to get caught and tortured on nearly every adventure. In one case he's cut up surgically and tortured with a painful antiseptic. Another time he's punished with bone-breaking tools employed by insurance scammers. Silk is tough, so I guess that withstanding all of this is his gimmick. I imagine that if these had been written 20 years later it would have been the love-interest getting these treatment, probably for maximum kink (Spillane).
The Batman comparisons are fairly easily achieved. You get the Harvey Dent bit with the DA and acid. Quinn is wealthy and seems harmless enough by day. He's got a butler, he has a hidden lab, costume... and for some reason he leaves bat stickers everywhere he goes. Batman didn't do that, he just wore the sticker on his chest and had the ears on his cowl. Quinn's costume is more like that of The Shadow, but he has a ribbed cape that looks kinda like bat wings.
Back to the stickers: a lot of those 30s pulp masked guys would leave a calling card, to build the brand, I guess. The Green Hornet did that, and The Spider stamped a red spider on the foreheads of his victims. The Black Bat is more of a goody-goody type, like Secret Agent X, he doesn't go around trying to kill anybody on purpose so much. A couple of times he has one of the major crooks in his grasp and simply lets him go so that the real mastermind can be exposed.
This is strict adventure serial format: a hero takes on a crime ring, meets several possible suspects, some are made to look more suspicious than others, then we assemble them all in an office or mansion on a rainy night for the big reveal. Much like in some of The Shadow's adventures, the mystery aspect is a major focus. The Black Bat is not simply given a known or obvious villain to shoot at for the duration, partly because he's as harried by the law as he is the criminals. In fact, only the law seems to suspect the identity of the masked hero, and they never do all that much about it.
In this 400 page volume we get armored car theft, murders in a cemetery, disguised messages, instant disguise makeup, lots of torture, a gang of killers on a yacht, hero imprisoned in coffin, instant sidekicks, tunnels for jewel thieves, cop-taunting, little old ladies tossed in the sea, lots of stock gangsters, safe-cracking, cave lairs, poison gas, hidden laboratories and more.
This is not the bullet-riddled perfection of “The Spider” or the delightful mystic parade of tropes that is “The Shadow”, but it does deliver a very workable form of what it is doing. The night-vision never become a cure-all, the mysteries are mysterious enough, and the hero never really has it too easy. These are formatted to hell and back, and all take on a specific industry, so it feels kinda like a decent detective show, as opposed to like a solid movie.
Oh! One more thing: Quinn is always hanging out by wide open windows pretending to be blind. Just close the damn drapes and relax!
The origin, which is included in “Brand of the Black Bat, has heroic District Attorney, Tony Quinn, being blinded by acid in a courtroom and later having his sight restored secretly. He's scarred and continues to pretend to be blind, but he is secret also the masked hero The Black Bat. He has a whole crew: his valet Silk, strong-man Butch, and girlfriend Carol Baldwin.
Since the operation that restored Quinn's sight also gave him the ability to see in the dark, he's always going out at night in costume, meanwhile his friends have to do things like go undercover or get tortured. Silk, a former confidence crook, is also a master of disguise. Carol's job involves following people and getting periodically kidnapped. Butch is the fairly typical strong dumb guy.
Police Commissioner Warner and Sgt McGrath are always popping up with problems about criminal cases that the Black Bat has become involved in. McGrath is determined to arrest The Black Bat, and is never entirely convinced that Tony Quinn is blind. The result of this is that McGrath is always showing up when The Black Bat is in action, so our hero always has to rush home and jump into a robe or something and pretend to have been lounging and blind. It is a nice idea for a source of tension, but it becomes a very repetitive device over the three stories in the book.
The Omnibus here includes the first 3 stories: “Brand of the Black Bat”, “Murder Calls The Black Bat”, & “The Black Bat Strikes Again”.
The second story seems as if it may have been done by a different author (they're all under house name G. Wayman Jones), because in that one the valet, Silk, suddenly talks more like a street thug and less like the smooth cultivated type he is.
Somehow Silk manages to get caught and tortured on nearly every adventure. In one case he's cut up surgically and tortured with a painful antiseptic. Another time he's punished with bone-breaking tools employed by insurance scammers. Silk is tough, so I guess that withstanding all of this is his gimmick. I imagine that if these had been written 20 years later it would have been the love-interest getting these treatment, probably for maximum kink (Spillane).
The Batman comparisons are fairly easily achieved. You get the Harvey Dent bit with the DA and acid. Quinn is wealthy and seems harmless enough by day. He's got a butler, he has a hidden lab, costume... and for some reason he leaves bat stickers everywhere he goes. Batman didn't do that, he just wore the sticker on his chest and had the ears on his cowl. Quinn's costume is more like that of The Shadow, but he has a ribbed cape that looks kinda like bat wings.
Back to the stickers: a lot of those 30s pulp masked guys would leave a calling card, to build the brand, I guess. The Green Hornet did that, and The Spider stamped a red spider on the foreheads of his victims. The Black Bat is more of a goody-goody type, like Secret Agent X, he doesn't go around trying to kill anybody on purpose so much. A couple of times he has one of the major crooks in his grasp and simply lets him go so that the real mastermind can be exposed.
This is strict adventure serial format: a hero takes on a crime ring, meets several possible suspects, some are made to look more suspicious than others, then we assemble them all in an office or mansion on a rainy night for the big reveal. Much like in some of The Shadow's adventures, the mystery aspect is a major focus. The Black Bat is not simply given a known or obvious villain to shoot at for the duration, partly because he's as harried by the law as he is the criminals. In fact, only the law seems to suspect the identity of the masked hero, and they never do all that much about it.
In this 400 page volume we get armored car theft, murders in a cemetery, disguised messages, instant disguise makeup, lots of torture, a gang of killers on a yacht, hero imprisoned in coffin, instant sidekicks, tunnels for jewel thieves, cop-taunting, little old ladies tossed in the sea, lots of stock gangsters, safe-cracking, cave lairs, poison gas, hidden laboratories and more.
This is not the bullet-riddled perfection of “The Spider” or the delightful mystic parade of tropes that is “The Shadow”, but it does deliver a very workable form of what it is doing. The night-vision never become a cure-all, the mysteries are mysterious enough, and the hero never really has it too easy. These are formatted to hell and back, and all take on a specific industry, so it feels kinda like a decent detective show, as opposed to like a solid movie.
Oh! One more thing: Quinn is always hanging out by wide open windows pretending to be blind. Just close the damn drapes and relax!
November 29, 2022
I’m not going to write a lengthy, that has already been done and very well. I really enjoyed the three novellas in this book. It isn’t Johnston McCulley but they are good. At the age of 72 I find myself reading all kinds of authors that I have known of but never read. This year has been kind of my pulp fiction year. I have read a dozen of McCulley’s books and several of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Manny more to come.
November 15, 2014
While I consider the Black Bat to be one of the lesser pulp heroes, his adventures are worth reading to see the influence he had on other pulp and comic book heroes.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews