Fangan

Fangan

An English sorcerer of the twelfth century A.D. who once set a trap for a knight he hated: inside a cave was hidden a flagon of mystic potion, whose fumes were designed to hypnotize anyone entering into becoming obsessed with the desire to fulfill three commands, to fight a dragon, to dress as a jester and obey the commands of the townspeople for an hour, and to do battle with the most powerful man on Earth—which one way or another, Fangan reasoned, were likely to end in his victim’s death. Fangan died and the knight never blundered into his trap, but 800 years later, while attending a police convention in England, Batman enters the cave alone and becomes obsessed with the desire to fulfill Fangan’s three commands. To enable Batman to carry out the sorcerer’s directives without coming to any harm, Superman exposes him to a ray-machine in his Fortress of Solitude designed to give a man super-powers for twenty-four hours, then brings him a dragon-like beast to fight from outer space, watches over him during the “jester” period to ensure that criminals will not profit from Batman’s compulsion to carry out people’s commands, and then lets Batman defeat him, the strongest man on Earth, so that, Fangan’s commands finally fulfilled, Batman can recover unharmed from the sorcerer’s curse (WF No. 109, May 1960: “The Bewitched Batman!”).