Siskoid and the Chris Franklin’s coverage of The Brave and the Bold continues with issue #171 (February 1981) by Gerry Conway and José Luis Garcia Lopez (Praise Be His Name), starring Batman and Scalphunter! It’s “A Cannon for Batman”.
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I’m halfway through, but that isn’t stopping me from commenting lately. I got this one off the stands and loved it. In addition to the art, the characterization is also outstanding. This is yet another example of my favorite version of Batman, so often featured on Fire & Water (and voiced by Chris).
– Historical crushes are real. Exhibit A is my crush on early aviatrix Bessie Coleman. And with art like this, a crush is certainly understandable.
– I think Batman’s choice not to lecture Ke-Woh-No-Tay (sp?) on killing was because he was aware that he had gone back to a time of brutal war, and anything he said about his own code would be irrelevant. Of course, killing wounded prisoners is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.
– For many of the characters you listed (Powwow Smith, etc.), multi-culturalism is their superpower. They bring the knowledge of one culture (or the rights and privileges of one demographic group) into another. Even Batman exhibits this to some degree, as he moves between the street and the boardroom, with the powers and abilities of each. The apostle Paul also comes to mind, as he was an Israelite and a native-born Roman citizen, highly educated in the Jewish religion, but familiar with Greco-Roman culture as well. He used all of that to spread the gospel, getting in doors and out of prisons when others couldn’t, and making arguments and analogies in the language of his audience at the time.
– I like the idea of Nichols being the source of all of DC’s timey-wimeyness — especially if he did it accidentally. I envision a DC event wherein the time-traveling heroes and villains team up to keep the multiverse from cracking under the strain, while Nichols plods along, blithely destroying the space-time continuum.
That’s all for now. I’m loving this episode (just like I always do)!
When Siskoid said Prof Nichols hadn’t appeared since the 60s, I started yelling “SUPER FRIENDS! SUPER FRIENDS!” at my phone, scaring my dog. Luckily Chris was there and prevented me from getting an aneurysm.
Art wise, it literally does not get better than JLGL inking himself.
My firsthand knowledge of Scalphunter was limited to his guest appearance in the JLA issues you mentioned–though if I ever saw that issue of WWT with Abe Lincoln, I’d buy it.
Is who your thinking about a character called
Straight arrow by any chance?
Here’s my scalp hunter team up .
This would be a else world story what if when Jonah hex went into the future he didn’t go alone he had both scalp hunter and his at the time 8 year old son with him and they where war world as team . Hex , scalp hunter and kid balloon buster and they also get few female furries one there side as well . The big one with the boots sees kid balloon buster as a son she alaways wanted as such she’s always trying and falling to seduce scalp hunter and falling . then have the one with the whips with hex . An a young girl they rescue from the from some strange creatures also joins them what do think I call this tale “ old friends and strange adventures “.
Tragically there were very few First Nation Peoples being depicted as heroes. At best they were the partner/sidekick to the lead like Tonto was to The Lone Ranger. Most often they were either the child of a white person and an indigenous person or a white raised by a native tribe. Choosing this latter option gave the character that true loner status. A person who was neither white or First Nation and was therefore shunned by both races.
Scalphunter (cringe… the name is pith inappropriate and inaccurate) had the distinction of being her who was less welcome than the infamous Jonah Hex when he rode into a territory. He was a cool character who was featured in some pretty bad ass stories.
There was yet another white-man-who-went-native hero in the comics that you didn’t mention in your rundown: Dan Brand, the ‘White Indian,’ which was the title of the back-up feature in the Durango Kid series from the late 1940s. Set in the Revolutionary War-era America, the hero, Brand, flees to the wilderness after his fiancee is killed and is taken in by a native tribe who teach him their ways. He later travels around the colonies and then states righting wrongs and so forth with the help of his boy sidekick Tipi. It’s notable mainly because most of these stories were drawn by none other than Frank Frazetta (I have the reprint collection; the stories are nothing to write home about, but the art is, naturally, gorgeous).
Otherwise, I think it was probably quite important for Batman to maintain his secret identity in the past, so that it’s not later blown by some history grad student digging through obscure Civil War-era documents while conducting research for a thesis paper.
And I guess Martha Jennings is Batman’s Edith Keeler…
Martha Jennings must die.
Great show, Siskoid and Chris. Any JLGL issue is worth covering. If just for that expression on Batman’s face! Genius. Also, I always thought Scalphunter’s name Ke-Woh-No-Tay was pronounced Key-ONE-oh-tay. Not Key-woh-NAY-tay. But what do I know?
I say No, Chris said Ne (typo?), let’s call the whole thing off.
Yeah, “Ne” made it into my notes somewhere and I pronounced it wrong a few times. My apologies.
I will strive to pronounce “Dr. Jekyll” correctly on House of Franklin-Stein…even though no one else ever does! (PLUG!)
It’s not pronounced DJE-kul?!
It’s Jee-kil in Scotland.
Here is an additional email to help beat Shag
I’m a person of mixed heritage: I’m a white man born in the US with a Libyan stepfather and siblings. There are millions of mixed heritage people around the world and we are equally deserving of media representation, and I am getting tired of this attitude that mixed heritage characters are just white men appropriating a culture that isn’t their own (see the debacle around the Snakeeyes movie for example). Mixed heritage people often find ourselves struggling to craft our sense of identity, as we never fully belong to either our adopted culture of that of our genetic origins. In my opinion, this makes a deeply human story to explore. As you mentioned, Native Americans adopting and raising white children is historically accurate. Perhaps writers and audiences at the time only felt comfortable exploring a foreign culture through the eyes of characters who were also outsiders to those cultures. I understand that this is less relevant in a more globalized world, but dismissing it as racisism is uncalled for in my opinion.
You bring up very good points, and I wish the writers of the era had had any of this on their minds, but I don’t think that was the case (or would be surprised if it were). There is a representational scale – from background to token to lead to also being mirrored behind the scenes – and all are important in their own eras. Our 2024 eyes can sometimes judge the past too harshly.
And to be clear, I don’t think Scalphunter THE CHARACTER is committing cultural appropriation. The production team, however, is another matter. But “This isn’t your story to tell” only makes sense in the context of “We are ready to find and promote a person whose story it IS to tell.”
This story is the exact same plot as the movie Somewhere In Time starring Christopher Reeve who played Superman who’s mother is also named Martha.
Give or take the cannon.
Gah, I can’t believe I forgot to bring that up. It was on my mind when we were first talking about discussing this issue. My family and I had a trip planned to Mackinac Island this summer, but we had to cancel it at the very last minute/day of. We even rewatched the film the week before. Maybe I was trying to distance myself for the film because of that.
It’s a wonder Batman never travelled into Smallville’s past and married young Martha Kent.
Actually, there’s probably an Elseworlds…
Anyway, great show, I remember enjoying this issue hugely. I do think a JLG-L cover wouldn’t been better than Aparo’s here. I was following Weird Western Tales and Jonah Hex monthly… I’ve never been a big fan of Westerns, but they were such good comics.
I was also thinking of Somewhere In Time. Just checked and the movie’s professor was named Gerard Finney. Maybe he and Prof Nichols went to the same undergraduate college. Worth a shot.
I always thought this issue was probably “inspired” by Somewhere in Time. According to Mike’s Amazing World, B&B 171 came out on November 25, 1980 and Somewhere in Time was released on October 3, 1980. I guess that didn’t leave enough time for Conway to be inspired by the movie. Conway could have been inspired by Richard Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return, which was the basis for Somewhere in Time.
At the time, my only exposure to Professor Nichols was in Super Friends. I had no idea that Batman had many “did they or didn’t they” go back in time plots and that Batman was hypnotized into believing he had travelled to the past. Richard Collier, the protagonist of Bid Time Return/Somewhere in Time hypnotizes himself into going into the past after he falls in love with a photo of an actress. While in the movie, he clearly does return to the past, in the novel (spoiler alert!) he has a brain tumor and may have hallucinated the entire experience. Wouldn’t it be something if Richard Matheson had been inspired by some 40s/50s Batman issues?
As for older/historical crushes…well before Somewhere in Time, I thought girls had cooties…after Somewhere in Time and my first glimpse of Jane Seymour, I realized I was heterosexual and liked girls.
Great episode as usual! Professor Nichols stories always drove me crazy but then I wanted more.
Had a lot of fun with this one and to coverage of Brave and the Bold really has me hope we see a Batman like this in James Gunn’s DCU to help separate him from the Matt Reaves vengeance.
I love this campy, James Bond, Tony Stark, flirt that Batman is here. This is the kind of Batman George Clooney could have been.