Slightly Misplaced Comic Book Characters Case File #486: Harvey Bullock

Wait a minute.  Hold up.  This column is for forgotten or secondary characters that don’t get a lot of page time or something.  What the heck am I doing writing up Harvey Bullock?  He’s the second-most recognizable cop character in Batman’s supporting cast, behind only Commissioner Gordon.  He’s been in a ton of comics, cartoons, and even one live action TV series.  Why am I doing this?

Well, because of something I saw in an old comic from the 80s that I read off the DC Universe app, something that got me to thinking I might not know as much about the character as I thought.  Besides, I covered pretty much all of the Guardians of the Galaxy here once, and that was after most of them appeared in a popular movie franchise.  I can cover a Batman supporting character if I so choose.

Harvey Bullock of the Gotham City Police Department first appeared in…OK, the Harvey we all recognize first appeared in Batman #361 in July of 1983, an issue written by Doug Moench and drawn by Don Newton.  However, a character named Lt. Bullock appeared in Detective Comics #441 in June of 1974 as written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Howard Chaykin.  The Goodwin/Chaykin Bullock basically never appeared again after that one appearance, but Moench was a self-proclaimed Goodwin fan, and many fans think it is likely Moench was at least partially inspired by the earlier story when he came up with the second Bullock, and some fans even think they may be the same character.  Me?  I don’t think it matters much.

So, skipping the older Bullock, the Moench Bullock initially appeared as a crooked cop who faked being clumsy to ruin a case for the police.  But then Commissioner Gordon had a heart attack, and a guilt-ridden Bullock turned over a new leaf.  Post-Crisis, that story got ret-conned a bit so that Bullock was always loyal and just a bit clumsy.  Moench found the guy fun and kept him around, even showing Bullock bonding with Robin over a shared love of old movies.

Later on, when Denny O’Neil because the Bat-editor, he pushed a lot of characters out of Batman’s world, and that included Bullock.  Writer Paul Kupperberg, however, took a liking to Bullock and added him as a supporting character to his Vigilante series, and then later, Bullock worked for Checkmate at the rank of Bishop, another comic written by Kupperberg.  And that fact there is why I wrote this up:  I have been reading 80s-era Suicide Squad comics, and when I got The Janus Directive crossover, I started to read the other issues and there was a guy I always thought of as a Gotham City cop working for one of DC’s many fictional spy agencies, and at a fairly high rank too.

Bullock would eventually find his way back to Gotham, where he may or may not be a dirty cop, and he’s been on and off the force, but he’s basically there, the overweight, slovenly guy who always has Gordon’s back and may or may not like Batman very much.  The last recent comics I read actually showed Bullock as the Commissioner, but for a while there, the guy was a spy.

Of course, he’s been other things.  In the Earth-1 continuity, Bullock first appeared as a handsome, naive cop who had hosted a TV show for a period before being fired and going to work in Gotham.  That Bullock was honest in a story setting where Gordon initially wasn’t, but he took up drinking after encountering his first Gotham City psycho.

And he has been featured in a number of DCAU-set cartoons, mostly the Batman ones, as voiced by actor Robert Costanzo.  That’s probably the Harvey Bullock most recognized by fans.

And though he hasn’t appeared in any live action movies, he was a prominent cast member for the campy TV series Gotham as played by actor Donal Logue.

So, that’s Harvey Bullock.  Yes, maybe not as shocked as, say, learning Groot started off as a villain, but I think he was worth a look all the same.