While humans tend to be conservative, sticking with what they like, children are utterly conservative: they want things as they were last week, which is the way the world has always been. The first time I saw Neal Adams’s art was in The Brave and the Bold (I think it was a story called “. . . But Bork Can Hurt You”). I read it, but was unsure of whether or not I liked it: panels at odd angles, nighttime colors in strange shades of blue, and a Batman who wasn’t quite the Batman I knew. He was thinner and odder and wrong.

Still, when I saw Adams’s cover for “The Demon of Gothos Mansion” (Batman 227), I knew that this was something special, and something right, and that the world had changed forever. Gothic literature tends to feature heroines, often in their nightdresses, running away from big old houses which always have, for reasons never adequately explained, one solitary light on in a top-floor room. Often the ladies run while holding candelabras. Here we have instead a dodgy-looking evil squire running after our heroine, between what look suspiciously like two wolves. The spectral, Robin-less, Batman is not swinging from anything. Instead he is a gray presence, hovering over the image: this tale is indeed a gothic, it tells us, and Batman is a gothic hero, or at least a gothic creature. I may only have been ten, but I could tell gothic at a glance. (Although I wouldn’t have known that the cover that Adams was intentionally echoing, Detective Comics 31, was also part of the gothic tradition—an evil villain called the Monk reminds the reader of Matthew “Monk” Lewis’s novel The Monk, and, as I learned a couple of years later, when the story was reprinted in a 100 Page Super Spectacular, the Monk from this story was a vampiric master of werewolves. Or possibly vice versa, it’s been a long time since I read it. I do remember that Batman opened the Monk’s coffin at the end, and, using his gun—the only time I remember Batman using a gun—shot the becoffined Monk with a silver bullet, thus permanently confusing me as to the Monk’s werewolfish or vampiric nature.)

By the time I was twelve Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson’s Swamp Thing was my favorite comic; it was, I think, the comic that made me want to write comics when I grew up. Swamp Thing 7, “Night of the Bat,” was the comic that sealed Batman in my mind as a gothic figure. The cover only implies what’s inside, as Batman, his cloak enormous behind him, swings towards the muck-encrusted swamp monster, inexplicably hanging from the side of a skyscraper. The feeling that this was something happening at night, artificially lit, in the city, was there, almost tangible. But the things that made me remember this cover fondly are really inside—Bernie drew Batman with no pretense of realism. It was as far as one could get from Adam West: behind Batman an unwearably long cloak blew out: was it fifteen feet long? Twenty feet long? Fifty? And the ears, stabbing upward like devil horns, were even longer than Bob Kane’s Batman ears on the cover of Detective 31. Wrightson’s Batman was not a man—obviously: a man would have tripped over that cloak when he walked, the ears would have poked holes in ceilings—he was part of the night. An abstract concept. Gothic.