Originally Posted by
Jim Kelly
Camp is a state of mind. If you come at something as camp, then it's camp to you. When I was a little kid reading comics in the 1960s, the stuff that people called camp was usually not that for me. There were some instances when even I would pick up on something being so foolish that it only could be seen as camp, but those comics were rare.
The 1966 BATMAN series was called camp by the adults, right from the beginning. But very few of the comics from that time seemed camp to me and I don't think they were being deliberately camp.
On the other hand, if you read the letter columns, sometimes a college student will write in about a story and say it was so camp. I think, at that time, college kids were all about calling everything camp (just like today people call everything "random") and they bought comics to be ironic about them. So to them any comic book was camp and they read it like that.
It didn't matter if it was Marvel, DC, Dell, Archie, Harvey or Gold Key--comics were camp. And if you read those comics, a lot of writers like Stan Lee and John Broome built humour into their comics. They were writing on a few different levels, knowing that older readers would get a kick out of seeing something like the Flash turned into a puppet, but at the same time a younger kid could read the same story and take it seriously.
I'm always frustrated with readers who don't see that what is ridiculous and funny in those comics is meant to be so (it's not because the writers were stupid and didn't know what they were doing). And it's strange that Marvel readers took their comics so seriously. If anything, I think Stan was being more over the top bonkers than most DC writers (with maybe the exception of Arnold Drake)--and if you're taking his stories so seriously, then you're missing all the fun.
Getting back to Batman, while there are a lot of comics that you could read on those multiple levels, there are only a few that I think are deliberately and almost exclusively "camp": "The Joker's Original Robberies," BATMAN 186; "The Eraser Who Tried to Rub Out Batman," BATMAN 188; "The Blockbuster Goes Bat-Mad," BATMAN 194; "The House the Joker Built," DETECTIVE COMICS 365; "Alias the Bat-Hulk," THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD 68; and "Batman Meets Jerry," THE ADVENTURES OF JERRY LEWIS 97.
I absolutely hate "The Joker's Original Robberies"--it's an example of John Broome trying to write like the TV show and doing terribly at it. I didn't know how to feel about "The House the Joker Built" when I read it as a little kid, because I felt like it was mocking me and my love for Batman stuff--but now I think it's one of the greatest Joker stories of all time and it has a bit of influence on the Joker we will see later--this is an example of John Broome savagely critiquing Batmania and sending it up.
I really hated "Alias the Bat-Hulk"--I felt attacked--I don't know what I did with my copy that I got at the drugstore--maybe I threw it in the garbage, but I know I quickly got rid of it because I couldn't stand that comic. Now I don't mind it--it's ridiculous but not that bad. And those other stories I listed are a lot of good fun, too.
edit: Since the OP asked for the year, the years of those stories were 1966 - 1967.