Friday, October 31, 2008

Brave and the Bold #81

Brave and the Bold #81 (On Sale: October 31, 1968) has a great Batman and Flash cover by Neal Adams.

"But Bork Can Hurt You" is by Bob Haney, Neal Adams and Vince Colletta. This is Colletta's first super-hero inking job for DC and boy did it cause a stink. Adams was infuriated when he saw what Colletta had done to his pencils, going back and inking over Colletta in places in an attempt to salvage his work. Some also say that Adams got some of the later pages back from Colletta and had Dick Giordano ink them. It's been so long since I looked at this book that I really don't remember, but if ever two artists styles clashed it was Adams and Colletta. Neal made sure that Colletta never inked his work again.

Small-time hood Carl Bork suddenly discovers that he is invulnerable to any physical harm. Using his new ability, Bork takes over a local gang and stymies police who cannot stop the bulletproof crook. Even Batman is unable to beat Bork, who begins raising a criminal army to take over Gotham City.

Batman and the police try to hold off Bork, while the Flash searches the world for the source of Bork's power. He discovers that a statue of Bork is responsible, and it shares a mystical connection to its subject. Flash locates the statue, but, like Bork, it too proves to be invulnerable. Flash is finally able to damage the hand slightly with a laser, but the laser is not powerful enough to harm the statue further.

Batman notices that Bork's hand is no longer invulnerable. He believes that Flash is working on the problem and is inspired by the progress. Rather than risk a war in the streets of Gotham, he challenges Bork to a one-on-one fight. Bork's invulnerability proves more than a match for Batman. However, the Caped Crusader holds on to hope that Flash will come up with the answer to defeat Bork. His hope is rewarded when Flash is able to drag the statue into the sun where it is consumed. Once the statue is destroyed, Bork loses his power and is defeated by Batman.

Bork would return years later in a mutated form as a reformed criminal and an associate member of The Power Company, even getting his own book at one time. Reprinted in Best of the Brave and the Bold #2, Batman Illustrated by Neal Adams Vol. 1 HC and Showcase Presents the Brave and the Bold Batman Team-Ups Vol. 1 TPB.

Edited by Murray Boltinoff.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Neal Adams was a wimp, a crybaby and a mouthy jerk-off. I did a piece on the Adams-Colletta dust-up on April 11, 2008. This is old news, why are you blogging it for the 1,000th time? Next you'll be reviewing X-Men #12 where Alex Toth gives us his "cry-me-a-river story just as sympathetically as Adams.
Dan
http://ismarkevaniermentallyill.blogspot.com/

-Keller said...

Every time you speak Dan, you show your ignorance, but you just keep talking. If you even bothered to look at this site you would understand that I review the books that came out 40 years ago today, as this book did yesterday.

There is not a thing you can say that will make your Uncle Vinnie's inks any better than they actually were not. He spent years phoning it in when he had already shown that when he tried, he wasn't half bad. Unfortunately for all of us who love comics, Vinnie rarely tried.

There is a fairly interesting Thor cover that came out about the same time as this atrocity (#158), where Vinnie actually spent some time and did a very fine job, but these occasional forays into decent inking only proved to highlight how rarely he applied the talent he had.

You and I have gone over this before, which resulted in you stealing my artwork without permission and then calling me names. Do not comment on my site again until you grow up.