No, Batman, I Expect You To Die!!

Some things are pretty obvious to the trained observer. And one of those is: Len Wein watched Goldfinger just before writing Detective Comics #446 (1975).

Indication #1? Our villain:

Really? Sterling Silversmith? Sounds nothing at all like Auric Goldfinger, does it?

Silversmith is at least a tiny bit cooler than Goldfinger, because he figured out how to use silver to make his suit bulletproof!

Silversmith's motivation?
Which sounds absolutely nothing like Goldfinger's motivation (from the movie):

This is gold, Mr. Bond. All my life, I've been in love with its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I welcome any enterprise that will increase my stock, which is considerable.

Yup. Completely different.

Silversmith does have one curious motivation, though...

The gold standard? When this comic appeared, the U.S. (and therefore the rest of the world) had been off the gold standard for four years!! Furthermore, the argument wasn't over replacing gold with some other commodity--it was whether the dollar should be tied to any commodity at all!! So there was never any possibility of a "silver standard." Of course, maybe things were different in the DC Universe...

In fairness, there was one way that Wein was somewhat prescient, as in a few years the billionaire Hunt brothers would make a game attempt to corner the world silver market, and ended up controlling over 50% of the world's silver supply (until the market collapsed and they lost their fortune...oops).

Meanwhile, Silversmith smuggled his silver in a very un-Goldfinger-like manner:

Goldfinger, of course, smelted his gold into faux parts for his antique Rolls Royce to smuggle it out of England...

Anyway, Batman gets captured, and Silversmith decides not to use a deathtrap (there goes the Goldfinger comparison!)...he's just going to blow Batman's brains out!! But the Caped Crusader has a particularly badass way to escape:


(Yeah, I think the word balloon was misplaced...)


Still, mired down with Oddjob Silversmith's thugs, Batman has to find a way to keep the villain from escaping. No Q gadgets, but he does come up with a nicely ironic way to bring him down:


Yup, he hurled a silver bar at him!!

OF course, if James Bond had done that, he would make some witty and ironic remark. Not batman, though, right?

So, Batman would have made the traditional Bond ironic death remark if the cops hadn't showed up? (editor's note--at this time Batman was wanted by the police, as he had been framed for murdering Ra's Al Ghul)

Hmmm...I'd better go back and read more of Wein's Batman, and see if I can figure out which issue he wrote right after watching Thunderball...