"BEWARE OF--POISON IVY!"

Yesterday Comixology put up a bunch of titles to celebrate Poison Ivy's 50th anniversary.  99 cents a pop.  Not bad in an age wherein you spend $2.99 to $4.99 for a regular-sized comic book.  And this issue of Batman was one of the sale items.  I bought it, of course.  Because this was my first comic book.  I didn't realize I was so young--not quite 9--when I read my first comic book.  But I do remember that I was a big fan of the Adam West Batman tv show, and that my mom brought this comic book home to me one day when I was sick.

Looking back through it was not quite as big a thrill as it would have been if I hadn't bought a collection of Batman stories which reprinted this issue, but I still like having it on my Kindle.  Also, it includes the double-page pin-up of The Dynamic Duo that was in the middle of the book.  The collection didn't have that.

I wish they had also put in the ad pages, though.  I remember being really thrilled and intrigued by some of the ads in that issue.  There was an ad for Justice League of America #45, for instance, which I really wanted.  The cover was reproduced in teeny tiny form . . . like this

 ,

or maybe even smaller than that.  And I could see Batman, of course, but I thought that the red person must be Robin, and I had no idea who the guy in green was.  (And I couldn't even see The Atom sitting on Green Arrow's arm.)  And when I found that issue on the comics rack . . . a whole new world opened up to me.  You know the Keats poem, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer"? 1 That's what this comic book was to me.  A new planet had swum into my ken, and I looked about with a wild surmise.  And I'm still looking, still wild surmising, still kenning.

1 Sorry to be a snot--if that's what this is to you--but if you don't know it, you should, so here it is:

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

BY John Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

   Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

   That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

   Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

   When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

   He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

   Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The only way Keats could be more of The Man would be if he'd written comic books.