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Chip Kidd

Bat-Manga! (Limited Hardcover Edition): The Secret History of Batman in Japan (Pantheon Graphic Library) Hardcover – October 28, 2008

by Chip Kidd (Author), Jiro Kuwata (Illustrator)

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The two hottest genres in comics gleefully collide head-on, as the most beloved American superhero gets the coolest Japanese manga makeover ever.

In 1966, during the height of the first Batman craze, a weekly Japanese manga anthology for boys, Shonen King, licensed the rights to commission its own Batman and Robin stories. A year later, the stories stopped. They were never collected in Japan, and never translated into English. Now, in this gorgeously produced book, hundreds of pages of Batman-manga comics more than four decades old are translated for the first time, appearing alongside stunning photographs of the world’s most comprehensive collection of vintage Japanese Batman toys.

This is The Dynamic Duo as you’ve never seen them: with a distinctly Japanese, atomic-age twist as they battle aliens, mutated dinosaurs, and villains who won’t stay dead. And as a bonus: Jiro Kuwata, the manga master who originally wrote and drew this material, has given an exclusive interview for our book.

The deluxe, expanded, and limited hardcover edition has a distinctly different cover, full-color printed endpapers, and an amazing extra adventure written by Jiro Kuwata (not included in the paperback), about a band of rogue alien robot art thieves at large in Gotham City. Guess who gets called in to save the day....

More than just a dazzling novelty, Bat-Manga! is an invaluable, long-lost chapter in the history of one of the most beloved and timeless figures in comics.

Print length

384 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Pantheon
Publication date

October 28, 2008
Dimensions

8.84 x 1.31 x 11.04 inches
ISBN-10

0375425454
ISBN-13

978-0375425455
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Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

The campy, Pop-art-infused Batman television series that d�buted in 1966 was not just a hit in the U.S.; it also set off an international wave of Batmania. A Tokyo publisher licensed the comic-book rights and new weekly Batman adventures appeared for more than a year, drawn by Jiro Kuwata, a manga prodigy who co-created the popular cyborg superhero 8-Man. His work, never reprinted and previously untranslated, was so little known here that, until its rediscovery by Kidd and Ferris, even DC Comics, �Batman� �s publisher, was unaware of its existence. Kuwata, an action virtuoso, employed hypnotic geometrical motifs within his panels, incorporating realistic Batman and Robin figures into an exaggeratedly cartoonish style. His Batman fights villains like the shape-shifting Clayface and Go-Go the Magician, as well as typically Japanese oversized robots, insects, and dinosaurs.
Copyright ©2008 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker

About the Author

Chip Kidd is a graphic designer and writer in New York City. His two previous books about comics for Pantheon were Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz and Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross. Both won the Eisner Award and were national bestsellers.

Geoff Spear is a photographer, living and working in lower Manhattan. For over two decades he has shot hundreds of images for a wide range of book covers, by such authors as Haruki Murakami, John Burdett, Augusten Burroughs, Oliver Sacks and Daniel Gilbert, among many others.

Saul Ferris is a founding partner in the law office of Ferris, Thompson and Zweig, in Gurnee, Illinois. During the last twenty years, he has amassed the most comprehensive collection of vintage Japanese Batman toys and memorabilia in the world.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Pantheon; 1st Edition (October 28, 2008)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 384 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375425454
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375425455
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.07 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.84 x 1.31 x 11.04 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,077,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #543 in Comic & Graphic Novel Literary Criticism
- #666 in Comics & Graphic Novel History & Prices
- #7,335 in Media Tie-In Manga (Books)

Customer Reviews:
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Chip Kidd

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Charles (Chip) Kidd (born September 12, 1964) is an American graphic designer, best known for his innovative book covers. Based in New York city, Kidd has become one of the most famous book cover designers to date.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Luigi Novi [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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Top reviews from the United States

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David SwanTop Contributor: Batman

An Unearthed Treasure

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 15, 2008

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This is a truly unexpected find. In the introduction Chip Kidd describes how shocked he was to discover that there had been Batman comics produced in Japan back in 1966 describing this find as a `new Holy Bat-Grail'. He presented the information to Paul Levits, the President of DC Comics, saying it was like presenting the skull of John the Baptist to the Pope. Right from the start it's obvious that Chip Kidd is more than a guy putting out some Batman material, he's a major Batman fan producing a book for fans.

I have enjoyed DC Comics for as long as I can remember but oddly enough Batman has never been one of my big favorites. In the last few years, however, I've learned to appreciate the Dark Knight particularly since of all the DC characters he tends to have the highest quality comics and movies. Jiro Kuwata's Batman has more in common with the U.S. comic from the 1940's rather than one from the Mid 1960's but they are easily distinguishable from American Batman comics regardless of the era. The stories are extremely shallow and the artwork is drawn in a very cartoony Japanese style reminiscent of the era. This is not a complaint but readers should be prepared. No one is going to mistake these books for Batman Year One or Frank Miller's Dark Knight in terms of story depth. Imagine it more as if Batman was living in the world of Speed Racer.

Chip Kidd states right up front that these stories are incomplete. The story with `Go Go the Magician' ends with Batman trapped behind a wall of ice suffocating. Still `Go Go' fares better than Dr. Faceless who gets neither a beginning nor an ending. What kind of irks me about this is that Mr. Kidd collected an equal amount of additional material to what's presented after he began preparing this collection for publishing. According to Mr. Kidd this additional material will be published if Bat-Manga sells well enough. But this sounds like a real problem because in order to complete the stories the next book would need to have the beginning of the Dr. Faceless story and the conclusion and the reader would have to go back to this book for the middle portion. Yikes.

So let me get down to brass tacks and tell you exactly what's in this book. There are five stories spanning multiple issues. The first one features Clayface (the only actual Batman villain to put in an appearance. This story is missing its ending. Next up is Lord Death Man, a character with no apparent counterpart in DC Comics. This story is complete. Following Lord Death Man is `Go Go the Magician', a near clone of the Weather Wizard including WW's "weather wand", physical appearance and origin. As mentioned earlier Go Go is absent an ending. Dr. Faceless is vaguely similar to Two-Face if both sides of Harvey Dent's face had been destroyed. Poor Faceless gets neither a beginning nor an ending. Perhaps as a homage to Gorilla Grodd, Karmak is an ape who temporarily gets the intelligence of a brilliant scientist. This one is missing its beginning but it's pretty easy to get the gist of what's going on. The final story, about a politician who transforms into a hyper powerful mutant, is entirely complete. So 40% of the stories are complete and one story has enough that most readers won't miss the beginning. Not so bad. Also, there are no breaks in the stories so except for beginnings and endings the continuity is complete.

I suspect the reason the publishers pushed this collection to market before collecting all the material is because they were so anxious for people to see it. This is one of those products that feels like a labor of love more than an opportunity to turn a quick dollar. It's nicely sized for the material with all sorts of images of quirky Japanese toys and art of Batman spread throughout the book. They even produced the book in its original Japanese right to left layout. It's a really neat book that someone could stick on their coffee table without feeling silly. I just wish they could have waited to collect more material.

11 people found this helpful

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Ryan Noonan

A glorious collection

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 3, 2008

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I wouldn't say these stories are any good - they really aren't - but they are rambunctious and joyous and campy in all the ways you want Batman manga from the 60s and 70s to be. Some props are certainly to be given to Mr. Jiro Kuwata, who took a distinctly American icon and recast him as a Japanese superhero. Not always successfully, mind you, but with creativity and aplomb that any creator would love to have. If Tezuka was the Japanese version of Jack Kirby, then maybe Kuwata was Chris Claremont or David Byrne.

The real story, of course, isn't the manga itself, but rather the work Chip Kidd put into this. His collection of material was clearly painstaking; this is comics research at its finest, and it's clearly the proverbial "labor of love". The result is a marginally complete (some chapters are missing, leaving gaps in the story or, in one very notable case, leaving it completely unclear how Batman escapes death by asphyxiation in a giant block of ice) tour of some really strange stuff. And the giant oversized hardcover format certainly makes this a candidate for the single-most attractive book published this year in any genre. Any fan of Batman, manga, or the history of pop culture would be extremely well-served by this book.

One person found this helpful

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Stephen BluNotte Tjandra

It just brings you back into a past thats longs been overlooked and forgotten

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 6, 2020

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It just so awesome, i mean like being to see stuffs that was even made before i was born. WOW. come on folks, you gotta just say I LOVE IT!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 26, 2015

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I love this book. It is a little pricier than the soft cover edition, but you get an autograph and beautiful full color illustrations. For completists, it is a must have since it contains all of the stories in one book. I highly recommend it for the serious Batman collector.

One person found this helpful

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J. L. Garrell

Highly Recommend!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 11, 2012

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This book is awesome! I love how it reads in reverse. Incredible artwork and a must have for any fan of Batman. This was a gift for a friend, so I could only enjoy it for a short while before I gave it away, but what I saw, I loved.

One person found this helpful

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bennett price

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 5, 2016

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BROUGHT ME BACK TO EARLY DAYS BATMAN AND ROBIN, THANK YOU MR KIDD

One person found this helpful

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Max Gottfried

Bat sushi mighty yummy!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 27, 2009

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A really terrific book on unknown or rarely seen Batman comics and selected memorabilia. I was hoping more for the later, but it's a wonderful insight nonetheless. Chip Kidd should have printed the stories on newsprint for greater authenticity, but I can understand it may have cheapened the overall product. A great surprise was that this edition was signed! Wow!

One person found this helpful

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Chihiro

So ridiculous!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 18, 2014

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Great wacky Batman & Robin adventures from Japan! Don't expect any dewy eyed ladies, it's drawn in the way Japanese think foreigners draw.

One person found this helpful

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Roland Cassard

Adam West goes east: A glorious, colourful and very Japanese take on the Dark Knight

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 9, 2014

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This is such a beautifully designed book which, although it chronicles a somewhat obscure Japanese comic books, will have very wide appeal to fans of Japanese culture or Batman, or 1960s pop culture or graphic design.

Chip Kidd examines the brief, fantastic explosion of popularity of Batman in mid-sixties Japan. Central to this was a manga comic by Jiro Kuwata which offers a particularly Japanese view of Batman and Robin. The reprint of the comic is fascinating, of course, if incomplete (DC Comics did not have the manga in their archive, and the private collection that was photographed for the book was missing some of the issues). For me, however, the great joy of the book isn't the manga, but all of the ephemera: posters, toys, adverts: gloriously colourful gems of 1960s pop culture, stunning artwork that will thrill any fan of the Dark Knight, any manga otaku, or any graphic design guru.

I especially recommend the hardcover version of the book. It is a limited edition so might be trickier to track down, but it has an additional story, as well as extra colourful goodies from the archive. It also has a different cover design which will make the book look stunning on display in your home: it's sure to entice and amaze visitors. At time of writing this review (September 2014) there are plans to release the complete manga comics in three volumes (also on Kindle!) and I would recommend those as well.