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DETECTIVE COMICS #365 — Batman and Robin are storming a building that's grinning at them.
Cover-dated July 1967, and the gag is right there in the architecture: the stone house is the Joker's face. White brick teeth, a red mouth, gunmen firing from between the lips and out of the eye socket, tracer fire crossing the frame. Carmine Infantino laid it out and Murphy Anderson inked it completely straight — nobody on the cover seems to notice they're fighting inside a punchline.
Infantino was DC's most important design mind in this period, the man behind the "New Look" that pulled Batman back from the science-fiction wilderness of the late fifties, and this cover is him working at the height of it. Nothing is decorative. The whole image is one idea, delivered instantly, from across a spinner rack.
The timing helps explain the confidence. July 1967 sits at the peak of Batmania — the television series had made the character a national phenomenon, and DC was selling Batman on graphic boldness rather than plot summary. John Broome and Gardner Fox supply the stories, Sheldon Moldoff and Sid Greene handle the interior art, and an Elongated Man backup rounds out the issue.
The back cover is worth a look on its own. Revell is advertising its Apollo spacecraft model kit — "1967 is the year for Apollo, the spacecraft that will place the first man on the moon" — with a photograph of the lunar module diorama and a foot-high space-walking Gemini astronaut for two dollars. Two years and one week before Neil Armstrong actually did it, the confidence in that ad copy is total.
This copy grades CGC 9.0, Very Fine/Near Mint, with cream to off-white pages. Late-sixties Detective Comics in 9.0 is uncommon — these were bought during a mass-market boom by an audience with no interest in preserving them.
CGC 9.0 · Cream to Off-White pages · Classic Infantino Joker cover · Broome, Fox, Moldoff & Greene · DC, 1967
Ships in a Gemini graded-comic mailer with honeycomb kraft void fill, fully insured, within one business day of cleared payment.
The Memory Shop of Concord — curated Golden, Silver and Bronze Age keys at memoryshopconcord.com
