18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
BATMAN'S FORGOTTEN CLASSICS, May 21, 2007
This review is from: Batman: The Sunday Classics 1943-1946 (Hardcover)
The 1940's weren't just the golden age for comic books they were also the golden age for newspapers. Still several years before television would become prevalent, newspapers would be the primary way American's got their daily news as millions of copies were sold each day. And of course, inside those millions of newspapers were comic strips of all kinds. Today, the episodic comic is almost dead. With dwindling circulations for most newspapers, people just don't have the time or patience to pickup their daily paper and read the adventures of their favorite characters.
One of the comic's most famous characters was adapted into strip format when Batman & Robin debuted in both daily and Sunday color strips in 1943. This was right smack in the middle of World War II when paper drives reduced the circulation of many newspapers and Batman's debut actually represents a pretty rare spot in the annals of comic strips because of this. The Sunday strips are even more rare as many papers who carried the daily strips opted to not carry the full-color Sundays.
This landmark hardcover edition from Sterling Publishing reprints all of the Batman & Robin Sunday strips from November 1943 to October 1946 and includes 26 different chapters, or story arcs if you modernists prefer. While Batman creator Bob Kane gets the sole credit on each and everyone of the Sunday strips, the fact is that Kane was only involved in a handful of the chapters. Jack Burnley, who just passed away in December of 2006 at the ripe old age of 95, provided the art on most of the strips while the writing chores were handled by longtime Batman writer Bill Finger and also Al Schwartz. While various parts of this era's Sunday strips have been reprinted previously, this is the first time the run has been reprinted in full.
The Sunday colors were given enormous space by today's standards, as each consisted of eleven panels. You had to be a popular character to command that kind of space on a comic page! Each chapter generally ran from four to six weeks and were untitled. Titles have been given to each chapter, usually based on a phrase used in the strip or based on the plot. Thankfully there is an index to each chapter, otherwise there's no way to really tell visually when one chapter ends and another begins.
Batman encounters some of his most famous villains within these pages including The Joker, The Penguin, Catwoman, and Two-Face, although most of the encounters are with garden variety criminals. In "Gotham's Cleverest Criminal" the Joker uses a trick football to escape prison--not to go after Batman, but rather a rival female criminal called the Sparrow who is stealing the Joker's limelight.
In addition to the strips themselves, the book features background notes, including full story credits on each of the chapters, often relating where the story fits in terms of continuity with the regular Batman and Detective Comics issues. This historical information alone is worth the price of the book. You also get detailed biographies on all of the writers, artists, letterers, and editors who were involved in the Batman & Robin strips. The color had been re-mastered and looks stunning...probably even better than it looked when originally published over 60 years ago. These strips are great fun and serve to maintain the legacy of a great character and a bygone era!
REVIEWED BY TIM JANSON
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Lightning will blast you down in your tracks.", November 16, 2009
This review is from: Batman: The Sunday Classics 1943-1946 (Hardcover)
First there was Superman, a character that the initial creators just could not sell, but finally had to give away for a song. Superman took the world by storm, the next big character in the comics was Batman, solo, Robin & Alfred came later. Even more than Superman, Batman became defined not just by the character, but also by his foes. In the short article that closes out this book "Tracy's Influence" it is pointed out that when Batman was created, it was Chester Gould's comic strip "Dick Tracy" that most influenced Bob Kane. Kane based Batman's illustrative style on Gould's, because a less illustrative and more cartoonish style would allow Kane to be able to introduce more bizarre and fantastic villains and supporting characters, and make the fantastic Batman more believable. There is even a comparison between the two strips villains and sometime (accidental) parallel plotlines.
The bulk of this book though is the reprinting of the entire run of the Sunday Batman comic strips. It's almost impossible to grade this book as you will have to judge it by just how much a fan of Batman, comic strips, or Americana that you are. The more the completist that you are, the more important that this book will be. The casual fan though will be disappointed though by the Batman comic strip itself. Artwise, nothing here will disappoint any fan of the early days. Kane himself did very little of the Sunday strips, he drew the first month or so, and being busy with the dailies, the strip was mostly drawn by DC regular Jack Burnley and inked by longtime, twenty-five years, Batman artist Charles Paris. As you read the strip you can actually see just how Burnley's style evolved and became more and more detailed, some examples of his pencils that are included here show just how detailed his art truly was.
No, no, it isn't the art that will disappoint, but, it really will be the stories themselves, written by Bill Finger and Al Schwartz, that will disappoint the true Batman fan. Almost none of them are really memorable. While the Penguin, Joker, Catwoman, and Two-Face appear in the stories, most of these stories deal with second or third rate thugs. A good example is Maxwell ("An Attic Full Of Art"), a second stringer who kills an acrobat and impersonates him to steal art from a farmer's barn; Hamlet ("Jesse James Rides Again!"), a second-rate actor who stages some train robberies. The Penguin is here with two adventures, and both minor, the first is a gem robbery, and the second is just comedy as the Penguin's aunt shows up, and even the sexy Catwoman is stuck in a forgettable time-waster.
Still, there is some good stuff here, the first is a clever story of justice called "Death Row's Innocent Resident" in which Batman has to decide the guilt or innocence of a man about to be executed. "There's Was A Crooked Man" which turns out to be more of a puzzle piece than most of these stories. "The Gopher: King Of The Underworld" is clearly the story out of all twenty-five stories here that most resembles a Dick Tracy story with a Tracyesque villian, this could have be better if longer. The same is true of "Gotham's Cleverest Criminal" in which Batman is pitted against The Joker who is also pitted against The Sparrow, but quite clearly the best story is the last story "The Curse Of The Four Fates!" where four criminals rob a medium and end up killing him and as he dies he puts a curse on them. Like Boris Karloff's movie "The Walking Dead" where a group of criminals end up killing themselves while committing crimes. Batman and Robin really don't do much here, but the story is creepy, and has more than a touch of the supernatural to it. The title of this review is from this story.
While the minor stuff is just so much well-drawn filler and fluff, even the good stuff suffers from being too short. Gould would have stretched out the stories, and developed the villains much more. The stories mentioned above would have benefited in appearing in a comic book where the stories would have been more developed. One can only dream of how a story like "The Curse Of The Four Fates!" or "Death Row's Innocent Resident" would be handled today. One can dream.
And yet for the true fan there is some important stuff to be gathered from even the most minor of these strips. In the dopey "A English Sassiety Skoit" we learn what Alfred's original last name was (Beagle) before it was changed in 1969 to Pennyworth. "There Was A Crooked Man" (1945) would later become the comic story "The Case Of The Mother Goose Mystery!" (1959), "Oswald Who?" was an incredibly camp, and unfunny story that was more in the mode of the sixties camp period of Batman, but this is the story that first tells us what The Penguin's full name is (Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot), and his origin is different than the later comic book stories. However the most important story in this collection for Batman collectors is the Two-Face story ("Half Man-Half Monster"). A) Here Harvey Beck is Harvey Apollo. B) Harvey Apollo is a second-rate actor and NOT a District Attorney. C) The villain that disfigures Two-Face is combined from two earlier villains "Boss" Maroni and "Lucky" Sheldon into "Lucky" Marony. D) Two-Face dies. Yes, in this strip he really dies. E) We learn that that Harvey Beck/Apollo the actor later became a plot line for the comic story "The New Crimes Of Two-Face" (1951-52) in which an actor is disfigured and believes he's Two-Face.
This big book also has several other important features. "A History Of The 1940s Batman And Robin Sundays" by Joe Desris gives us detailed information about the stories. We learn the complete credits on who wrote, penciled, inked, colored, and lettered each story; how the stories got named (some have multiple titles), which stories had to be reconstructed from several sources; the history of the stories, which later became comic stories and which ripped-off earlier comic stories, and we even learn where some of these stories fit into the Batman chronology.
"Biographies" fairly detailed biographies of all of the people, with pictures, who had anything to do with the Sunday comic strips. "Bubble Gum Similarities" is a short article showing how the bubble gum cards by Bob Powell and Norm Saunders had at times lifted images from the strips. "Previous Printings" gives us a detailed listing of where all of the reprintings of the dailies and Sundays had appeared, in both English and foreign editions, and which ones and in what condition. "The McClure Syndicate's Promotional Book" is reprinting of the promotional booklet that DC produced to get the McClure Syndicate to carry the strip, this gives a short pictorial biography of the Batman character up to the forties. This booklet has eighteen sample daily strips (penciled and inked by Bob Kane), sample ads for the newspaper to use, and a new short article telling us the origin of all of the artwork used in the booklet.
Then there is a page of Jack Burnley's detailed pencils. There is also an excellent four page article "Batman--Backward Looking And Forward Leaning" by Alvin "Al" Schartz which gives a short history of the costumed heroes in comics, Batman's origin, how he differs from other costumed heroes, and how important some of the early influences where. The Three Musketeers (especially Athos) and my favorite pulp hero "The Phantom Detective" are given some especially detailed attention.
"Batman: The Sunday Classics: 1943-1946" has a wrap-around cover by one of Batman's better known early artist Dick Sprang, but it should be known that this is a reprint of the 1992 edition that was co-published by Kitchen Sink Press and DC Comics. This edition, and I have never seen the original, has some detailed endpapers whose artwork is uncredited by anybody, and most of the articles are also uncredited. There are numerous comic book covers reprinted, all credited, and much spot ad art. The book ends with brief looks, articles about, and examples of the 1953 (lasted only two weeks and was written by "The Shadow" scribe Walter B. Gibson), 1966-1972, 1978-1982 (which was "The World's Greatest Superheroes" and would phase out everybody but Superman after a few years), and 1989-1990 (with Marshal Rogers) Batman comics. It's neat to see how the art for the strip will change over the years.
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