It’s not exactly a secret that one of the most fun Batman comics currently coming out is Batman ‘66, based on the sexy pop art TV series which originally aired from 1966 to 1968, starring Adam West as the Caped Crusader and Burt Ward as Robin, the Boy Wonder.
Writers Jeff Parker and Tom Peyer (among others) have built upon the original’s mix of surreal adventure and cheery playfulness while making the most out of the show’s cool rogues’ gallery. And it doesn’t hurt that they’ve been working with wonderful artists like Jonathan Case:
Batman ’66 #2
Yet even even before DC devoted a whole series to Adam West’s Batman, throughout the years many of its comics had already included nods to the classic TV show.
This is a trend that goes back to the late ’60s, when the show was still on the air. In a not-too-subtle piece of metafictional product placement, the headquarters of the original Teen Titans (led by Robin himself) were hidden behind a promotional billboard, which readers would usually see when the team left for a mission…
Teen Titans #9
What’s more, elements of the TV series spilled over into the printed page, and continued to do so years after the show was over. Police Chief O’Hara, for example, began life on the small screen but later made occasional appearances in the comics. One of the first instances took place way into the 1970s, in an issue by Steve Englehart, Walt Simonson, Al Milgrom, and Jerry Serpe. Notice how besides Chief O’Hara, this scene also features an appearance by the show’s emblematic red Bat-phone:
Detective Comics #470
Much more recently, Neil Gaiman’s and Andy Kubert’s ‘Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?’ brought together characters from Batman’s various incarnations to the wake of the Dark Knight. Among the various guests was a particularly confused Frank Gorshin-as-Riddler:
Batman #686
A big Silver Age enthusiast, the awesome Mike Allred paid a more extensive tribute to the lighthearted spirit of the show ten years ago, contrasting it to the more cynical modern era through the short story ‘Batman A-Go-Go!’ In this dark satire, the show’s version of the Caped Crusader has a profound existential crisis as everyone around him suddenly goes into grim-and-gritty mode:
Solo #7
More or less around the same time, the Adam West version of Batman also briefly appeared in a crossover with Planetary, the postmodern pulp superhero series created by Warren Ellis and John Cassaday. I really like the way Cassaday mimicked the TV series’ signature Dutch angles while colorist David Baron captured the brightly-colored sets:
Night on Earth
This last bit is an amusing reference to the Bat-Shark-Repellent spray, an infamous piece of camp commonly associated with Batman: The Movie, where Adam West uses it to repel a rubber shark (although there was actually a precedent in the comics).
The spray has become a symbol of what many fans consider to be a too jokey approach to Batman which, they feel, for a long time prevented the character from being taken seriously in popular culture. Dennis O’Neil, a writer and editor who worked especially hard to restore the Dark Knight’s more grounded and somber credentials, once included a neat nod to it in the form of this badass one-liner in one of his comics:
Legends of the Dark Knight #19
By contrast, Sholly Fisch totally embraced the goofy concept in Batman: The Brave and the Bold:
Batman: The Brave and the Bold (v2) #10
It makes sense, since Batman: The Brave and the Bold was all about celebrating the craziness and visual wonder of the Silver Age. In fact, that comic (and the cartoon which it spun off from) has way too many homages to the Adam West TV series for me to list them all here without going madder than Cesar Romero’s Joker…
Another memorable sequence from the 1966 Batman movie had the Caped Crusader hilariously running around with a bomb – and every time he tried to get rid of it, he couldn’t because there was someone in the way, including a marching band, a pair of nuns, a woman pushing a baby carriage, and a young couple making out… Chuck Dixon gave a nod to this scene in Nightwing: Year One, when Dick Grayson goes through a similar predicament:
Nightwing #102
Finally, I have to point out that one set of comics in particular nailed Batman fans’ difficult relationship with the Adam West TV series, namely the Mike W. Barr-Alan Davis run on Detective Comics in the mid-80s.
Barr (who also wrote the latest issue of Batman ‘66) has often reflected the contradiction between the simultaneous appeal of both the lighter and the grimmer side of the Dark Knight. So he gave readers a scene that could have come straight out of the TV series… yet when Robin pushes the parallel too far by quoting Burt Ward, Batman totally puts him in his place:
