"We eliminated the Batman once and for all!" The enthusiasm on the part of a minion of Japanese super-spy Dr. Daka (J. Carrol Naish) at the prospect of having 86-ed Gotham City's Caped Crusader is premature, it bears mentioning, and short-lived as Columbia Pictures' 15-part Batman (1943) serial reaches its approximate midpoint with Chapter 7, "Sign of the Sphinx." Having seemingly been crushed by falling debris in a collapsing radium mine, Batman (Lewis Wilson) rises from the rubble with the assistance of his teen apprentice Robin (Douglas Croft). Finding one of Daka's henchmen (Ted Oliver, in a change of pace role from the many cops he played in such films as The Grapes of Wrath and Tarzan's New York Adventure) dazed but unhurt by the cave-in, the Dynamic Duo spirits the underling to the Batcave for questioning, with the hope of learning the location of Dr. Daka's Little Tokyo lair. Prior to the release of this Columbia serial, the Batman comics and daily comic strips had no Batcave, which was an invention not of character creator Bob Kane but of studio screenwriters Victor McLeod, Leslie Swabacker, and Harry Fraser. Obliged to keep the production inexpensive, the writers forfeited the Batmobile (substituting a standard Cadillac convertible) but dreamed up Batman's subterranean crime lab and folded in an entirely new character, Batman's British valet Alfred Pennyworth, whom the comics adopted and drew to resemble actor William Austin. The Batcave would make its debut in the newspaper "dailies" in October 1943 before being incorporated into issues of the DC Comics stories the following year.

By Richard Harland Smith