What The #$%^--Three's Company, Starring Batman!

Sometimes you stumble across a story that...well, maybe it explains why your parents are the way they are. And why they warned you about drugs. And "women's lib." And...oh, Bob Haney, what have you done to us?

In the Coils of Copperhead, as presented in Brave and the Bold #116, starts with an intriguing theorem: Copperhead, the dufus who always got knocked out first on the Justice League cartoon, is actually too smart for Batman to capture.

Chastised by Commissioner Ungrateful, Batman must formulate a plan to catch the master criminal. Meanwhile, is the skies of Gotham, Wonder Woman shows up, skywriting!!

please forgive some of the skewed scans...artist Bob Brown was letting his freak flag fly in the page layouts.

Nice of her to save the greenhouse emissions by not using her plane. Oops, did I say plane? Just a few seconds later, Batgirl responds:

Q: How many super-heroines does it take to change a light bulb? A: That's not funny!!

Wow, a super-powered love triangle. What is the inevitable result? Of course, you're right: SUPER CAT-FIGHT!!

Well, that set back women's rights a few decades, eh? But wait! The lovely crimefighters proceed to shower Batman with gifts, distracting him from his search for Copperhead:

Good question, Dark Knight...both as Bruce Wayne and Batman, he has to beat the girls off with a stick!! Playboy or crime-fighter: he's a chick magnet.

But wait!! All is not as it seems. Stunningly, the ladies are not actually in love with Batman!! It's all part of a Machiavellian ruse to trick Copperhead into feeling secure enough to rob a museum that Batman has rigged with an alarm!!

Now, far be it from me to quibble with the Dark Knight's awesome J.R. Ewing-type planning ability. But, I have to say, having two female superheroes pretend to be in love with you & you pretending to be so distracted by all the attention that you can't fight crime anymore is not one of your top thousand plans, is it? Really, is that the best you could come up with, Bruce? "Smarter" 1960's-style plans Batman could have tried:

• Pretending to be dead, so Copperhead would strike


• Pretending to turn evil, so Copperhead would strike


• Since this is Brave and the Bold, staging a fight with another DC superhero, so Copperhead would strike

Instead, the Caped Crusader chooses the "fake love triangle plan." Granted, Copperhead is a major-leaguer, so you have to think outside the box...oh, wait, no he's not! This is something out of Three's Company, isn't it? Batman's OMAC plan made more sense...

Sadly, Copperhead's "serpent's seventh sense" warns him something's up, so he breaks off his robbery, and Batman must hurry back so that Jack and Chrissy and Janet...uhhh, sorry, Batman and Wonder Woman and Batgirl...can resume their fiendishly clever plot, But wait....no, don't actually kiss her, Bruce!!

Oh, no! Now you've done it! Bruce, you used your lips. Obviously, you still had some residual Poison Ivy venom on them. Or maybe you really are irresistible to the ladies. Because now, in a panel that single-handedly lead to the defeat of the ERA:

The lips that destroyed a thousand super-heroine careers have struck again!! I can think of worse things than having Linda Carter and Yvonne Craig hanging all over me. But now, in a series of events that even I, as a male, find humiliating, Batman has to battle the "kooky romanticism" of his clingy love-slaves in order to find and stop Copperhead. They're hanging on him and giving him presents and...

OK, I have to stop. It's just too damn embarrassing. There's another 10 pages of the ladies' love thwarting Batman efforts to catch the bad guy. And because of their lovestruck state, Copperhead defeats Wonder Woman (read that again...not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story...Copperhead defeats Wonder Woman) and Batgirl, and then he poisons Batman. But Bruce finally mans up, knocks out Copperhead, Batgirl gives him an antidote, and everything is back to normal:

Phew...back to safely non-heterosexual adventures with Robin and Superman!!