Television: Holy Flypaper!

The good old American comic strips have long served a dual audience: kids read them for yuks, while grownups pretend to absorb all sorts of profound meanings from the billowing balloons. Television, on the other hand, has stuck to a single standard: simple-minded cartoons for kids, simple-minded programs of every other variety for grownups. Now all that is changed. Television has brought the comics to adults. It comes in the form of Batman, a new twice-a-week hyperthyroid series on ABC. Produced with an enormous amount of pulp and circumstance, it has become an overnight smash.

Batman would have attracted nobody but...