Detective Comics #629 Newsstand Edition

THE HUNGRY GRASS!

For several nights, Gotham City is plagued by bizarre disasters: policemen are killed by invisible axes, cars crash against thin air, and ordinary citizens launch into sudden homicidal rages. A mysterious terrorist known as "Hungry" claims to be responsible, and promises more deaths if his demands are not met. To the consternation of both Batman and the police, Hungry's demands are even more bizarre than the deaths - for instance, ordering citizens to clean the sidewalks with toothbrushes while accusing Batman of being a "lying, hypocritical, sanctimonious Fascist guardian of injustice".  Sensing that Hungry has a special hatred for him, Batman issues a personal challenge, which Hungry accepts. The two men confront each other at the abandoned Blackgate Penitentiary, where Hungry reveals himself to be an out-of-shape drunkard exacting revenge on Gotham City for wrongful imprisonment. Batman pursues Hungry, but is attacked by a variety of phantoms - prison guards, murderous convicts, and even the sensations of a drug withdrawal. Hungry escapes in the confusion, but Batman nevertheless secures several clues.  With the clues, and some help from the police, Batman discovers Hungry is Dean Fahy, a pizza boy convicted of murder fifteen years ago. Fahy, afflicted with depression and alcoholism from his time in Blackgate, had returned to his native Ireland seeking peace and discovered a cache of "hungry grass" - grass enchanted by the death of a powerful witch. When laid at the site of any violent event, the grass magically "replays" the event, sometimes summoning phantoms of the perpetrators and sometimes merely possessing passerby.  Armed with this knowledge, Batman finds Fahy hiding in the hotel room where his supposed murder had occurred; there, Fahy has rigged himself up as a human bomb, ready to scatter the rest of the hungry grass across Gotham as his final revenge. As Batman tries to reason with Fahy, he steps on a strand of the grass and sees the murder reproduced in every detail; the true killer was not Fahy, but the bellhop who had accused him. Batman now proclaims Fahy innocent, but Fahy refuses to abandon his revenge; in the ensuing struggle, Fahy himself falls on a patch of the grass and is killed by the bellhop's phantom.  With Hungry's reign of terror ended, the police re-open the Fahy murder case, while Batman and Alfred burn the rest of the hungry grass.