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Today, we look at the 1991 re-introduction of Ace the Bathound into the Batman books after Crisis on Infinite Earths.
This is “Look Back,” where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
The best thing about Ace the Bat-Hound (created by Bill Finger, Sheldon Moldoff and Charles Paris) is that originally he wasn’t even Batman and Robin’s DOG!
When he debuted in 1955’s Batman #92, he was just a dog that they found with a distinctive mark on his forehead and Bruce Wayne advertised in the local newspaper that he found the dog. The dog then jumped into the Batmobile and since Batman and Robin couldn’t very well be seen hanging around with a dog that Bruce Wayne found, Robin made him a mask and so Ace the Bathound made his debut!
His owner found him later in the issue and thus, for his first couple of appearances they would just BORROW the dog when they needed him! Hilarious. Ace was excised during the Silver Age (I don’t believe his absence was ever explained, but it easy enough to presume that his owner just came home and took him back).
Then Crisis on Infinite Earths occurred and DC’s continuity was rebooted, but slowly but surely, writers would bring back stuff from before Crisis and that’s happened with Ace. We first met him in Batman #462 (by Alan Grant, Norm Breyfogle and Steve Mitchell), when he is helping an old man in the desert…
In the next issue, the dog stops Batman’s car and brings him to his master…
The blind master, Black Wolf, helps Batman take down Black Wolf’s evil grandson and save a bunch of people that his grandson had kidnapped for a ritual sacrifice. But someone else needed to be sacrificed instead and so Black Wolf killed his grandson and prepared to finally die himself. He released his dog from his bond to him…
And at the end of the issue, Batman now had a new pet dog!
So that’s how Ace returned to DC Continuity. He was later murdered by Joker during the lead-up to Infinite Crisis (not really, but you’d believe that, right?), but I’ll let you in on a little secret, the issue had another notable meaning, well, to me, at least.
You see, while I had been collecting comics during the 1980s, it was really more of a passive engagement. I had actively pursued reading G.I. Joe during the 1980s, but that was achieved by the fact that my older brother collected them. In addition, my mother was a librarian at the local library (she remained a librarian practically up to her death), so I would borrow collections of old comic books there all the time (whatever collections they had back then, which weren’t a ton of course). And my parents would get me comic books on occasion. And my friend who lived next door actively collected DC Comics so he would let me read his.
So the amazing thing to me is that I didn’t actually buy comics on my OWN until 1991. My older brother was no longer reading comics so if I wanted to pursue it, it would have to be on my own. And I think there likely was a period around 1989-1990 when I wasn’t really reading comics period. Which really sort of amazes me in retrospect, given, you know, what I do now.
Anyhow, one day in 1991 there was some news report about Tim Drake becoming the new Robin…
or Superman getting engaged…
or something like that and I figured that I should get back into comics, so in May of 1991, my dad took me to the dentist for a check-up/cleaning/whatever and afterwards I asked if I could stop by the local stationary store and buy a comic book. He said fine (he, of course, did not realize what this would be starting) and I picked up a copy of Batman #464…
Luckily, as I noted, I had been reading comics for years at this point, so I was not thrown, because otherwise, beginning with part 3 of a three-parter involving Batman teaming up with an 130-year-old Native American Shaman to stop the man’s grandson from killing people as part of a ritual that involved retrieving ancient Native American relics probably wouldn’t be the place to start reading Batman comic books.
Years ago, I purchased a page of original art from the late, great Norm Breyfogle from the issue. This page…
The notable thing about this particular issue, though, was that it had an insert promoting DC’s new !mpact line of comic books, using the old Archie superheroes. I remembered thinking, “Oh, I could start collecting these from the first issue.”
And so it began…
If you folks have any suggestions for August (or any other later months) 2011, 1996, 1971 and 1946 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
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