I was watching the Men’s Two-Man Bobsled event from the 2010 Winter Olympics tonight and thought the USA’s black bobsled would be very cool as a “Bat-Bobsled” with its black paint and fins. I then remembered the original Bat-Bobsled as it appeared in the Golden Age of comic books.
Batman #26 (December 1944-January 1945)
Yep, in the winter of 1945, Batman, Robin and Alfred took to the snow in this sled with a bat-head front (by the great Jerry Robinson). I don’t remember ever hearing it called the “Bat-Bobsled” or the “Bat-Sled”, but why not? I bet without Alfred weighing down the back Batman and Robin would have had a shot at a medal! With Robin as the pilot and Batman on the brake how could they go wrong? Unfortunately, both the 1940 and 1944 Winter Olympics (they would have been the fifth and sixth Winter Games) were cancelled due to World War II. The 1936 games had been held in Germany (the last time that the summer and winter games were held in the same country during the same year) and the Winter Olympics would not return until 1948 in St. Moritz. Tough luck for the Caped Crusaders’ Olympic ambitions!
Great image Bill.
Hi:
Sorry for a comment that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this thread…but I have a question about a comic I once read as a kid and hope that your readership can help me identify its source.
I was born in ’55 and read this story in, I believe, a Marvel comic (pre-Fantastic Four) that would have been published in the late ’50s or early ’60s. It was almost certainly a “10 center”. And I think it was in a title like “Amazing Stories” or “Incredible Stories” or something like that.
It was a Science Fiction tale about a planet that the top scientists of that planet discovered was about to blow up (no, not “Krypton”!). The civilization was advanced enough to have created spacecraft, which would enable them to escape the impending explosion and resettle on another planet…but the problem was that there was only one spaceship and they didn’t have enough time to build any more before the planet exploded.
However, one scientist did have a size-reducing machine that he had invented and it worked just fine. So the idea was to reduce every single person on the planet to the size of ants and then everyone would be able to fit in the one spacecraft and they could escape before the planet blew up.
Just one hitch: although the size-reducing machine worked just fine they didn’t yet perfect the return-back-to-normal-size machine! And the elders of the planet knew that if the people of the planet knew that they could never return to their original normal sizes, no one would go through with the procedure, no one would be reduced in size, and no one would be able to escape…and the entire population would be lost.
So what did they decide to do?
Why, they lied to the people! They told them that there WAS a machine capable of returning them to their original size. So the population believed the scientists, had themselves reduced in size, everyone on the planet fit on to the spaceship and were saved.
And the moral of the story was revealed in the final panels of the comic: the top scientists discussed amongst themselves, while en route in space to their new planet, why they justified lying to the populace: everything is relative and once we get to the new planet it’s going to be entirely new anyway and we may end up, even with our new tiny size, being giants on the new planet. Or, for all we know, smaller than the norm of the new planet. But our ideas of size are irrelevant because we’re going to an entirely new planet which shatters all relative standards we were used to from living on our old home planet…so in the final analysis it doesn’t really matter whether we can return to our “normal” size because that was only relative to the old planet.
Now, I’m paraphrasing a lot of this because I’m going on memory and I haven’t seen the comic book in question in almost 50 years, but there you have it.
Can anyone remember such a story? And, if so, what was the comic, the title of the story, and the issue #?
I’ve been obsessed with this story ever since I read it and like all good fables and myths has actually had an effect on my thinking and worldview, if you can believe that! I’d truly love to rediscover the actual comic and story.
I thank you in advance for your attention to my query…
Good thing they had “skinny” Alfred on the back, Bill!
Fr. Dan
This cover seems more like a World’s Finest cover than for a Batman issue. Tony, the story you describe sounds very much like Fantastic Four #7. Dying planet has only two small rockets and five billion people, so Kurrgo, the ruler, captures the FF and puts them to work on the problem. Reed hits on the reducing gas idea, so that everybody can fit on the ship. Kurrgo himself is doomed because he’s weighed down by the enlarging gas and doesn’t reach the rocket before blastoff. Reed later admits that there was no enlarging gas, but it didn’t matter, because all five billion would be the same small size.
Pat:
Thanks! I will try and check it out.
Funny how I remembered it as from another Marvel title. And I certainly read (and collected) FF back then, so it makes sense.