Batman #226

Batman #226  (On Sale: September 3, 1970) has in interesting cover by Neal Adams introducing The Ten-Eyed Man.

We begin with our cover story, "The Man With Ten Eyes" by Frank Robbins, Irv Novick and Dick Giordano.  A security guard tries to stop a gang of thieves from taking valuable furs from a heavily closed vault, but he is easily outnumbered by the thugs. The crooks prepare a large amount of explosives to destroy the vault, but as they light the fuse, Batman arrives. However, he is confronted by the security guard, who mistakes Batman for a criminal and starts fighting him. They struggle for too long and the explosives blow up near them, blinding the guard and knocking Batman unconscious.

The crooks take the furs and their leader carries the security guard, Reardon, to an ophthalmologist, who helps Reardon recover his sight using a risky surgical procedure.  The doctor connects Reardon's optic nerves to the tips of his fingers, giving him ten "eyes" to see with. The bizarre surgery works, but the Ten-Eyed Man goes after revenge on the man he blames for his condition: Batman.

Meanwhile, Batman's vision has also been slightly affected and he is forced to use black contacts in order to restore his sight. Batman installs a camera in his cowl that will project the images back to a monitor in the Wayne Foundation laboratory, where Alfred keeps an eye out, and guiding Batman through a microphone. As Batman is confronted by the Ten-Eyed Man, Alfred helps Batman avoid some of the incoming attacks. During the struggle, the black contacts slip out of Batman's eyes and he has to fight a man with a serious advantage over him. 

When Batman finally realizes that Reardon can see with his hands, he uses this knowledge to incapacitate his hands using his cape and Batman manages to knock the villain unconscious. Batman decides to contact the doctor responsible for giving Reardon his ability, but by the time they get to the place Batman left Reardon, the villain is already gone. Batman is concerned as he realizes that a serious threat to Gotham is on the loose.

The back-up reprint is tagged as a "Casebook Mystery",  "The Case of the Gigantic Gamble" is drawn by John Ely and reprinted from Gangbusters #37. After losing his business in a poker game, a man commits murder, but his alibi is thwarted by an unforeseen snow storm that put him at the scene of the crime much earlier than he had said.

Edited by Julie Schwartz.