Back in the late spring/early summer of 1987 I was at the picnic for the company my dad worked for and got hurt. Nothing serious. I was with some other kids, and we were swinging on some vines and mine snapped. I hit the ground, back first, kind of hard. This was the third time I had fallen and injured my back as a kid and while I didn’t have to go the hospital, I was still a bit upset. To make me feel better my dad took me to the Trexlertown Mall to get a comic or two, but this was during the time period where places rolled up the sidewalk at six in the evening if it was Saturday or Sunday, so the newsstand we went to was closed.

Because my dad could be kind of awesome, we woke up early the next day and went to the newsstand before church and I got two books. One was Batman #410 and the other was Batman Annual #11 and I would go on to read both of those until the covers nearly fell off.

Batman Annual #11 has two stories in it. The second story in the book is a fairly straight forward Penguin tale written by Max Allan Collins and art by Norm Breyfogle. This was actually the first time Breyfogle professionally drew Batman. Not that I had any sense of that at the time. I would get to know his Batman work a few years later when I started picking up Batman and Detective Comics in the wake of the release of the 1989 film. I do remember liking the art, but I was so new to comics that “I like this art” or “I don’t like this art”, along with “I liked that story” or “I didn’t like that story,” were the extent of my critiques of the comics I read at the time.

Which is another way of saying that I wasn’t the picky fanboy I would one day become.

“Love Bird” is one of the better stories Max Allan Collins wrote during his time working on Batman. It’s a love story, which begins with Batman trying to convince a parole board that they shouldn’t let the Penguin out of jail and ends with him arguing that they should most certainly grant him parole. Between those two scenes we see Oswald falling in love with a woman named Donna Partridge (no one could ever accuse Collins of being subtle in his Bat writing) and it ends up being a sweet little tale where the Penguin really wants to go straight for this woman but ends up violating his parole by associating with ex-cons.

My main frame of reference for Batman during this time period was the sixties television show, so to eleven-year-old me the story felt “right”.

It was the first story that really grabbed me. “Mortal Clay” was written by Alan Moore with art by George Freeman and this was the first time I ever encountered the third Clayface. I was vaguely aware of the fact that Batman had a villain named Clayface thanks to Batman: From the 30s to the 70s reprinting his first appearance and I took that book out of the Fairview Elementary School library dozens of times, so the name was familiar but everything else was brand new to me.

It’s hard to describe how that story made me feel. There are a lot of nuances to the tale, but the back of a trading card (or one-minute TikTok) version is that Clayface has taken refuge in a Gotham City department store and fallen in love with a mannequin. To Preston Payne (the third Clayface’s real name) this was true love and he becomes very possessive of the mannequin. Things go pear-shaped after Preston kills a guard that he sees taking a scarf off of the mannequin to steal for his wife. Batman shows up, there’s a fight, and in the end Clayface is in Arkham and, because comics, they allow him to keep the mannequin. This is not the happy ending you might think it is.

Seriously. Track down that story. It’s really good. It was one of the first stories that I ever read that messed with my head.

I was a sheltered kid. Largely by my own design.

John Byrne drew the cover to this annual and getting this book when I did, right before I started buying the Superman books because of Byrne, feels like a bit like fate.

Years later, as I started to read more comics from this era, I came to love the design for the house ads DC put together for their 1987 annuals. Some advertised two books, but Batman Annual #11 got one all to itself.

More to follow…