BATMAN ’66 WEEK: Crossing the Bat-pond to see how they did it in Londinium…
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Welcome to BATMAN ’66 WEEK, celebrating the 60th anniversary of the beloved TV show starring Adam West! All week, we’ll be presenting daily tributes and features, leading up to Jan. 12 — the premiere date itself — when we’ll roll out a brand-new TOP 13 BATMAN ’66 EPISODE COUNTDOWN, voted upon by a panel of the most knowledgeable Bat-experts around. Click here for the COMPLETE INDEX. — Dan
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By JIM BEARD
When Batman ZLONKed, ZOKed, and ZOWIEd into living rooms across the nation back in ’66, it set off a then-unparalleled chain reaction of merchandising that remains legendary to this day—though curiously very little of it had much to do with the actual show.
Oh, there were some bubblegum cards with Batman feature film images, and yeah, a few Barris Batmobiles to be had, but beyond that, when the Dynamic Duo ended up on merch in 1966-68 they sported comic book faces (and too many times off-model at that).
No, it took Merry Olde England, of all places, to make Batman the television series (In Colour!) really swing like a pendulum through a series of unique, original prose publications, something the Caped Crusader never enjoyed in his home country.
There were two paperback books in the U.S. that teased what could have been: the novelization of the ’66 feature film, Batman vs. the Fearsome Foursome, by Winston Lyon, and, a few months earlier, an original prose novel by Lyon called Batman vs. 3 Villains of Doom, which aligns itself far more with the comic book characters than the television versions of same.
Sadly, that was it in America. The covers of both books spotlighted West in costume, but they just didn’t offer anything new to expand upon the show’s unique continuity—if you can even call it that.
In England, though, they went Bat-crazy with the Bat-prose.
A company called World Distributors Limited out of Manchester put out a series of digest-size paperbacks of pop-culture subjects, most of them from America, known as World Adventure Library. British kids could pick up each issue of the series for only “one and a penny,” which was barely equivalent to a U.S. dime, a pretty cheap sum.
Characters like the Phantom, Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, Tarzan, and the Man From U.N.C.L.E. filled out the line, but with mostly a mix of American comic book reprints and a bit of original strips. It took the world’s finest combo of Batman and Superman to bring a two-fisted prose punch to the little books with original stories not found in the U.S.
The Batman! series of World Adventure Library books (yes, with an exclamation mark!) was pure West, unlike what you’d find in the actual West in 1966 and 1967. For whatever reason, through whatever magical publishing sleight-of-hand, World Distributors was able to commission original works (online sources state Joseph Enefer as the writer) for the 11 issues they produced.
The tales were straight out of the boob-tube Gotham City, featuring the show’s sound effects (Biff! Bam! Etc.!), the Barris Batmobile, its unique versions of Aunt Harriet and Alfred, and most specific of all, the series-original character of Chief O’Hara, in addition to Batman’s overall set-up and dialogue conventions—yet through the lens of the somewhat stilted and stuffy British atmosphere.
(And let’s not forget the very British “editing” in the interior illustrations to make sure the driver was on the right, not the left, in the Batmobile.)
While all the show’s major Bat-Villains appear throughout the 11 issues, Issue #1 actually offers up a British original baddie, the Ringer, and the third installment features a criminal called “Dr. No-Face,” presumably the English take on actor Malachi Throne’s False Face (or maybe the one-off American comics lawbreaker, Dr. No-Face). Beyond that, the books also presented stories with TV show original villains like Bookworm and the Archer.
The covers, unfortunately, sported art that reflected the comic book Batman, though the Barris Batmobile can be spotted on Issue #7. Presumably, there was a certain shyness, legal or otherwise, concerning the use of West’s and Ward’s likenesses, as well as the particular costume details of the show.
(Forgive us here in the Colonies, but we have to suppress a chuckle over the very, very British titles of The Joker Goes Nap! and A Rocker For the Riddler on Issues #5 and #6, respectively.)
The stories themselves are short and breezy, with plenty of TV series action and adventure. You can picture the actors when the characters speak, and you can hear the music and the roar of the Barris Batmobile as the tales unfold.
It’s a real treat for fans of Batman ’66 to peruse the World Adventure Library series—if you can get your hands on them, that is. They’re not easy to find, nor easy to afford, but well worth the hunt and the score.
As a side project to these books, World Distributors also published four volumes of the Batman Story Book Annual, a large-size hardcover series offering even more Dynamic Duo prose tales from 1966 to 1970, albeit more inspired by, again, the comic books than the television show. Still, there are nods to West and Ward therein, and fans and collectors of anything Batman ’66 should definitely pick them up should they ever appear on their radar. (Our pal Bill Morrison did a great piece on them here.)
One wonders what American kids would have thought about the World Adventure Library and Story Book Annual publications. Through them, they could have fed their Bat-fix to an even higher degree with original stories to help them through the days between TV episodes. The mind Bat-boggles at the thought of the British stealing some ’66 Bat-thunder from America…
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MORE
— The Complete BATMAN ’66 WEEK INDEX of Features. Click here.
— THE CHEETAH CAPER: The Perfect Intersection of BATMAN ’66 and the Comics. Click here.
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JIM BEARD has pounded out adventure fiction since he sold a story to DC Comics in 2002. He’s gone on to write official Star Wars and Ghostbusters comics stories and contributed articles and essays to several volumes of comic book history. His prose work includes his own creations, but also licensed properties such as Planet of the Apes, X-Files, Spider-Man, Kolchak the Night Stalker and Captain Action. In addition, Jim provided regular content for Marvel.com, the official Marvel Comics website, for 17 years.
Check out his latest releases: a Green Hornet novella How Sweet the Sting, his first epic fantasy novel The Nine Nations Book One: The Sliding World, Running Home to Shadows about Dark Shadows, and the most recent Batman ’66 books of essays he’s edited: Zlonk! Zok! Zowie! The Subterranean Blue Grotto Essays on Batman ’66 – Season One, Biff! Bam! Ee-Yow! The Subterranean Blue Grotto Essays on Batman ’66 – Season Two and Oooff! Boff! Splatt! The Subterranean Blue Grotto Guide to Batman ’66 – Season Three.
January 10, 2026
Technical nitpick from the UK – these weren’t “one and a penny”, but one shilling (one twentieth of a pound at the time). Given that the pound was worth roughly $2.80 throughout 1966, these would have cost the equivalent of 14-15 cents, not a dime.