Same Bat-Time, Different Bat-Comic
Chris Bolton, Powells.com
In January 1966, the comic book superhero Batman jumped to TV in a weekly series starring Adam West. Primarily known today for its camp humor and psychedelic visual style, the show became a worldwide sensation and caused a brief but powerful craze in Japan that led to a vast and dizzying array of Batman ephemera, from toys to masks to clothing.
 There was even a Japanese comic series printed in the popular manga magazine Shōnen King. Written and illustrated by famed manga master Jiro Kuwata, co-creator of 8-Man, the comic ran for slightly less than a year before it was cancelled. The stories faded into obscurity, known only to a handful of devout collectors.
One of them was Chip Kidd, the renowned graphic designer (and former Powells.com guest blogger) who has enjoyed a lifelong obsession with all things Batman, as witnessed in his book Batman Collected. Working with fellow collector Saul Ferris and photographer Geoff Spear, Kidd has assembled these unique, often breathtaking stories into the first collection ever printed in the United States or Japan.
Cobbled together largely from Kidd's and Ferris's own collections, Bat-Manga! is nowhere near complete — one storyline lacks its concluding chapter, while another is missing its first part — but as a sampler, it's delicious. While maintaining most of the character's lore, the stories are even more striking for their differences. Kuwata brings an energetic, distinctly manga style that looks and feels markedly different from the American comics of the time (or even today).
(Click here for a six-page preview.)
Batman fans will find familiar faces presented in a somewhat skewed manner, from a spunkier Robin to Batman's alter ego, millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne, as well as a gallery of memorable new villains like Lord Death Man, Professor Gorilla, and Go-Go the Magician. While newcomers to manga may have some initial difficulty getting accustomed to the Japanese style of reading from right to left (the front and back covers are reversed), they'll be rewarded with some of the most viscerally exciting and, often, hilariously bizarre Batman stories ever written.
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Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear and Saul Ferris
"The immaculately designed book, filled out with photos of rare Japanese Batman collectibles, often feels like listening to cover of a popular song that gets many of the notes wrong, but puts its own catchy stamp on the material. (Grade: A)" The Onion A.V. Club
"Kuwata's art is classic manga, simple and effective. But his stories are insane....Certainly this is the pop-culture artifact title of the year....We hope to see this Asian dark knight again..." Bookgasm
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Chip Kidd and Geoff Spear and Saul Ferris
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Described as "the closest thing to a rock star" in graphic design (USA Today), Kidd is an American master of graphic design. This volume collects all of his book covers and designs, as well as developmental sketches.
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Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli
In addition to telling the entire dramatic story of Batman's first year fighting crime, this collection includes reproductions of original pencils, promotional art, script pages, unseen David Mazzucchelli Batman art, and more.
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"Channeling Holden Caulfield via David Sedaris, Kidd produces a stellar debut." Publishers Weekly
"An irresistible comic voice that sounds so modern, and so right, even as it re-creates the undergraduate life of the late 1950s."
Los Angeles Times Book Review
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"Kidd invents a banter-filled workplace worthy of Howard Hawks, gleefully tweaks the old-guard panic of the Mad Men-era ad world, and even throws in a few typographic bells and whistles (consider page 62's layout a mini-master class). (Grade: A-)" Entertainment Weekly
"Whimsical...keen-edged and original." Kirkus Reviews
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Charles M Schulz and Chip Kidd
Winner of the 2002 Eisner Award for the Best Comics-Related Book
"The story of a great American cartoonist's artistic development and a beautiful example of book production....This collection will be treasured by cartoonists and Peanuts fans." School Library Journal
Bolton: Bat-Manga! is amazingly entertaining. For the past week I've been irritating friends by reading my favorite dialogue over the phone. [Laughter] And everyone's like, "Can I borrow that when you're done?"
Chip Kidd: No, buy one! [Laughter]
Bolton: How did this book get started?
Kidd: It all started in 1966 when Shonen King1 got the license from DC Comics to do their own stories. As far as I know, Japan is the only country in the world that did that. Everybody else was translating the American stuff, not making their own stories with their own artists. So in that sense, it's very unique.
The series ran for about a year, and then it kind of went poof and vanished into the ether. It was never collected over there, it was never brought over here and translated, and it just kind of fell into the memory hole.
I got wind of it during the early '90s from this artist, David Mazzucchelli, who was the artist of Batman: Year One. He was in Japan on a cartoonists' fellowship, and the publisher, Shonen King — which I think is now Shonen Jump — is still in business, very much so. I guess they extended an invitation to him to come into their archives and see it, because they had the issues archived. He didn't have time, but he knew that I would be interested, so he told me about it.
Then, completely coincidentally, years later, I met this other Batman collector, Saul Ferris, via eBay, when eBay first started. He was really into the Batman Japanese stuff, too. I knew about all the toys; I just didn't know about the comics.
Bolton: So, the comics in the book come from Saul's collection.
Kidd: Mostly. A couple of them are mine. I published this book called Batman Collected in the mid-'90s, and there was a whole Japanese section in there on tin toys and robots and this kind of stuff, which I loved. I wrote an essay about how I loved them, and why, and all of that.
Bolton: That was a great book, too.
Kidd: Thank you. That was my first project in this realm. So, Saul Ferris, this other collector, was much more adept at getting copies of these comics from Japan. I got one on Japanese eBay and it was really kind of a fluke. We started building a collection of these things in a very, very piecemeal way, which explains the piecemeal nature of the book. I only have two complete stories in there; the rest are fragments. Over the years we collected enough to put a book together, and then I went to DC and did a pitch. I said, "This is what I want to do. What do you think?" Because, of course, I could only do it through them.
Bolton: You said [DC Comics president] Paul Levitz hadn't even heard of these.
Kidd: Yeah, which sort of surprised me and didn't surprise me at the same time. I was actually kind of glad and relieved that he hadn't. Because otherwise it would have been like, "Well, yeah, we know that exists, and frankly we'd rather just forget about it." They could very easily have said that, and they didn't. I really owe them a lot. Then, the icing on the cake is that the artist, Jiro Kuwata, is still alive and we were able to contact him and do an interview.
Bolton: Is he still working?
Kidd: Well... I guess so. It's funny. He's very literally at a remove from me. He doesn't do email, obviously, and I think he barely uses the phone. But I have this intermediary in Japan who conveys messages. I've been pushing to do a new Batman story with him and publish it at DC. That has not gone past the "Hey, would you be interested" stage. He keeps saying yes, and I keep saying, "Can I see some recent samples of what you might do?" It hasn't gone beyond that, although I'd really like it to.
Bolton: He says in the interview that he'd love a chance to draw Batman again.
Kidd: I know!
Bolton: I'd love to see it.
Kidd: Yes! [Laughter] Who knows? At this point I'm waiting for Bat-Manga! to come out and hopefully get a great response. Then that'll give us some momentum to try and go forward with it.
Bolton: So, DC gave you its blessing. Did you go back to Shonen King to access the archives Mazzucchelli told you about?
Kidd: We did not. There are several reasons for that. First of all, at that point we had enough for a book anyway, in our own possession.
Bolton: Just from eBay purchases?
Kidd: Ebay purchases, contacts from Japan... By the way, this stuff is rare over there. On several business trips to Japan I would go to manga shops with color Xeroxes to show them and ask if they had any more, and they would look at me like I was nuts. "No, of course we don't have that. Where'd you get that?" [Laughter] To be quite honest, first of all, if we were going to access the Shonen King archive, it's like, do we go over there? You get these instant expenses. So, the photographer and I are gonna fly over to Japan to photograph this — that's gonna add up real quick, in terms of money. And I couldn't imagine in a million years that they would just send them over, willy-nilly, to us.
The other thing was, Saul, who was so totally into this project, basically said to us — and collectors will be horrified — "You know what? Don't even think about the bindings. Just lay it as flat as you can." Because these things are like miniature phone books. They're really, really thick. They're very cheaply produced, frankly.
Bolton: So, these would be in the same style of Shonen Jump today? They're the big, thick digest books?
Kidd: Exactly, except they're 40 years old and you've got to open them up to the middle of the magazine and make them as flat as possible. I can just imagine going to the Shonen King offices and doing that. They'd probably freak out.
These are the sorts of considerations, because it's a perfectly logical question, and as far as I know Shonen King did have everything in their archives. Early on in the process, I was worried that we would have enough for a substantial book, and thought, "Oh, we'll pad it out with tons of toys." And, of course, by the end it was like Cut, cut, cut, cut, beg for another 40 pages from the publisher. We have enough now to do another book. I think it's really worth pointing out that these stories appeared from May of '66 to April of '67. What's in Bat-Manga! represents less than half of what Kuwata did. It's an incredible output of stuff.
The other thing about it that I kept emphasizing to the Random House sales force, not that I needed to: It's a novelty. I understand that. But I think it's really, really good cartooning, too. When he's on his game, he's terrific.
Bolton: These are entertaining enough for stories published today, but to think of what the American Batman comics were doing at that time, compared to this, is astonishing. That was the height of the TV show, so those comics were pure camp.
Kidd: Right.
Bolton: These are so odd and quirky, which is really fun, but they're also so visceral and kinetic. I don't think there was anything like this in American comics for probably another decade, maybe.
Kidd: No, there wasn't. And when you bring up the camp factor, there's speculation among fandom about, frankly, why Batman didn't really catch on in Japan. It did for a year, and then it didn't. I think part of it is, the whole camp factor was hard for them to understand at that time. The show wasn't really serious, but it wasn't funny in the way that they understood things to be funny, so they just didn't get it. The fact that these stories came and went as quickly as they did is testament to that. I mean, that's speculation on my part, but if you look at the circumstances...
Bolton: You said you have enough material for the second book. Are there continuations of any of the stories from this first volume?
Kidd: Oh, yeah.
Bolton: Do we find out about Go-Go the Magician?
Kidd: We find out about Go-Go the Magician, and uh, what else..?
Bolton: Dr. Faceless. Is that Clayface again?
Kidd: No. The thing with that is, it's basically "What if Two-Face was his entire face?" Then, there's a whole sort of identity switcheroo that happens where they think Dr. Faceless is the doctor, but it turns out he's the other guy, the crook, and the doctor was kidnapped and all of this. And there's lots of stuff we found that obviously isn't in there. Really great villains. The Cat-Man, because I guess they couldn't deal with a Catwoman. [Laughter]
Bolton: Do we get a manga Joker?
Kidd: Unfortunately, no. It's a shame, because it seems like such a natural.If I get to interview Kuwata again, that will be one of my questions. I don't know how much of a geek you are, but the only American villains he kept were Clayface, obviously, and do you remember, in the '60s at that time, there was this mysterious sort of green, bubbly guy called the Outsider?
Bolton: Ooh, no. That one's beyond me.
Kidd: It was a story arc that ran in the mid-'60s, this weird Outsider character, and — well, I'll ruin it for you. It turns out in the end it was actually Alfred, and he was transformed by aliens or some crazy thing. [Laughter] Kuwata pursued that storyline as well; I guess there was something about it that he liked. But that's it. It's really a shame. I mean, it's funny, because Go-Go the Magician strikes me as a sort of Flash villain, like a combination of Captain Cold and the Weather Wizard, or something like that.
In Kuwata's interview, I think it's really funny when he describes some of what he didn't think would work for a Japanese audience. "In this one American comic this villain is asking Batman a question in a life-or-death situation, and if he can't answer it he will die. That just seems crazy to me."
Bolton: Whereas the Ghost-Bat makes perfect sense.
Kidd: [Laughter] Exactly!
Bolton: Completely logical. I love the fact that Clayface doesn't just transform into a giant bat; somehow Batman glances at him and realizes he's a Ghost-Bat! [Laughter] Okay, so, let's geek out here: where would you rank Lord Death Man, Go-Go the Magician, and Dr. Faceless in the pantheon of Batman villains?
Kidd: The one that intrigues me the most is Lord Death Man. It's such an interesting story because, first of all, there's so much that's simply not explained. Who is this guy? How is he invading Bruce Wayne's dreams — or is that just a coincidence? Is that a mask, one presumes? Et cetera, et cetera.
There's also a situation where, as Kuwata says, he was sort of learning on the job. He says he had, quote, "American Bob Kane2 comics," unquote, to work off of, to show how to style the characters. The Lord Death Man saga has four parts, and in the first three parts, Batman's costume looks different than it does in the last part. His mask and cape are all dark and the ears sort of point out to the side.
Bolton: Yeah, it's very 1930s-era Bob Kane.
Kidd: Exactly. Then, all of a sudden, in the fourth part he looks much more like the [then-modern] Batman. I just love that about the story, as well. I think it's a shame, actually, that Kuwata switched to the more contemporary style. I love the older style. So, that also indicates to me it must have been one of the first stories.
Bolton: That's one of the intriguing things about these comics. It's not just a combination of Batman and manga; the design of Batman, as you noted, goes back to his roots, back to the early style. He's very noir in his design.
Kidd: Yeah, and I just love Robin. He's 12 years old, he's a little kid...
Bolton: These comics are the first time I've ever liked Robin. [Laughter] He actually has a personality! The scene where he has the argument with the woman and calls her an old hag — I just thought that's the coolest thing Robin has ever done!
Kidd: [Laughter] And it's sort of like, "Get your hands off my man!" And Bruce is like, "Okay, you two, calm down..."
Bolton: "There's plenty of Batman to go around."
Kidd: Right, and I'm sure all of that is unintentional.
Bolton: Those little differences are so amazing. And the fact that, in the U.S. version, Bruce Wayne is a put-on. The millionaire playboy persona is all part of an act. Whereas, in these stories, when he gets exhausted as Batman hunting down Lord Death Man for a week, Robin tells him, "Relax, go to a party." [Laughter] Which is your favorite story in this book?
Kidd: It's a tie. There's the Lord Death Man one, and then "The Man Who Quit Being Human." That whole shoot-out scene with Lord Death Man is so great, and when they capture him the first time and they take him to the courtroom and he just drops dead in the courtroom... it's just so great. But the splash pages alone in these stories are worth the price of admission to me. They're just beautiful. Like, "Wow! That's a beautiful Batman drawing that just happens to be in Japanese and drawn by a Japanese artist." And there are plenty more where those come from.
Bolton: There's that great sequence in the last Lord Death Man story where Batman and Robin are fighting his henchmen, and Batman is hanging onto a rope from the end of the Batmobile and he has Robin drive in circles, to "build up the centrifugal force."
Kidd: [Laughter] Which would never work!
Bolton: It's crazy, but the art is spectacular. You almost get motion sickness from looking at it. And that two-page spread is dynamic.
Kidd: He very rarely did that. There aren't a lot of two-page splashes.
Bolton: What did Levitz say when you showed him this stuff?
Kidd: I had a copy of the final book sent to him about a week ago and I haven't heard anything. That's not unusual; he's a busy guy. But in the initial meeting he was great. He was like, "Wow, I've never seen this before; thank you so much!" And basically, he said, "The only caveat is, we have to run this by Legal to make sure we still have the rights to this stuff." It's all very clearly marked — I would have been amazed if they didn't. But you know what happened with the Superman Fleischer3 cartoons?
Bolton: No, what happened with those?
Kidd: They fell into public domain. Which, actually, wouldn't have been the worst thing for us because then we could have done the book anyway.
Bolton: Not to get into complicated copyright law, but doesn't DC own the universal trademark on the characters?
Kidd: I don't know what all the particulars are on the Fleischer situation, but somehow those fell into public domain. That's why you can find so many different companies putting out DVDs of them. I guess, as long as they just put "Superman copyright DC Comics," they can do it. And beyond that, I don't understand it.
Bolton: You've pretty much owned up to having a lifelong Batman obsession. Where did that begin? What drew you to him?
Kidd: It would have been the 1960s TV show. I was two years old when it came out, and my brother was two years older than me, so he was totally into it, and therefore I became into it, and that led to the comics and everything else. DC's always been very good about archiving itself. They would run old stories from the '40s in the backs of some of the big hundred-page spectaculars, and those started to intrigue me far more than the stories of the time. That just totally thrilled me, like, "Wow, look how cool Batman used to look!" It was just different. That first Joker story is just so fantastic, much like the movie this summer. I think that's part of why it was such a big deal, is because it really, truly captured the spirit of the character.
Bolton: What did you think of The Dark Knight?
Kidd: Oh, God. [Laughter] That's a whole other thing. There was lots of stuff that I really liked about it. I do not like their approach to the Batman costume. I never have. It's just too high tech-y, gimmicky... and it just doesn't look like Batman. It looks like a giant cockroach to me. But all the Joker stuff was great, as everyone said. And what was so great about it was that it took a grassroots approach to him. Why would you go with such a grassroots approach to the Joker and not to Batman?
Bolton: Getting back to the book, what was the process used to photograph the comics? Did you literally break the spines of the books?
Kidd: We didn't ruin them. In some cases, because Saul is so amazing at finding this stuff, he would find flat pages that had been removed, and people were selling that. Like, "Oh, I removed all the Batman pages and I'm selling them flat." You can tell when you look at the book, there isn't any sense of any kind of curvature, and that's why. In the cases where we had to shoot from inside the book, we would lay it as flat as we could and take a big piece of glass and put it on it and shoot away.
Bolton: And that didn't actually break the spines?
Kidd: No, I mean, it didn't break the spine in the sense that the thing cracked into two pieces. But any serious bibliophile would be horrified by that.
Bolton: You mentioned that you'd like to work with Jiro Kuwata on a new comic story. I read the "Batman vs. Superman" you wrote in Alex Ross's Mythology. Do you have any interest in writing or drawing your own comics?
Kidd: There are a couple of ideas I have for projects. I have been talking back and forth with Tony Millionaire about doing something original. But as a geek, I'd love to write something for DC. I'd love to write Superman, Batman, whatever, for them, with an artist who I really just loved. We've done the dance a little bit, but it hasn't really gone beyond that. I mean, I had a couple of ideas for some things, so we'll see. I've scratched that itch a little, or at least enough to feel like at least I've done it a little bit. The Alex Ross thing is sort of like, anywhere you go from that is down. [Laughter] I just loved the story. It was like magic. He gave me story credit, but we really wrote it together. And just to see it materialize was incredible.
Bolton: Who would be your dream artist for this project?
Kidd: Oh, there'd be a lot of them. I think Darwyn Cooke is just dreamy, amazing. He's far too busy, but he's a great guy. John Cassaday is amazing.
Bolton: You mentioned your friendship with David Mazzucchelli. Is there any chance you could coax him out of Batman retirement?
Kidd: There is absolutely no chance whatsoever. [Laughter] We at Pantheon are going to be publishing his long-awaited, long-form graphic novel in the spring. It's called Asterios Polyp, and it's amazing. It's going to take a lot of people by surprise.
The only thing that I can tell you, and he said I was allowed to talk about this, is... DC's been doing a series of black-and-white Batman statues, and they're doing a Mazzucchelli one. They contacted him, and he has this really good friend who does sculpts for toys and that kind of thing, and he said, "I'll only allow you to do it if you use my friend, because he's the only person I know who could do a good job." They said okay, and David really likes it a lot. He said, "It looks like my drawing." And he's very adverse to trying to translate a two-dimensional drawing into three dimensions, but he said, "He nailed it." It's the classic pose that they used in all the advertising for Batman: Year One.
Bolton: With the arm out?
Kidd: With the arm out, and the cape covering half of Batman. It's just a classic stance. I haven't seen anything yet, but that is happening eventually, and he totally endorses it. So that's as close to any kind of forthcoming Mazzucchelli Batman thing that's being done.
Bolton: How exciting is it for you to have Bat-Manga! all finished and ready? Do you just flip through the pages and turn into a fan-boy?
Kidd: Oh, yes. It's very self-indulgent. The pain of putting it together just sort of evaporates, which is very nice.
Bolton: How long did it take?
Kidd: The serious work on it took about a year and a half. But, in order to keep the costs down and also maintain control of it, I Photoshopped out all the Japanese dialogue personally. And it took forever! It was so tedious. Somehow I thought it would be sort of therapeutic to do it, and it was for a little while, and then it was like, "Oh my God, this is taking forever."
Because you can't just take the cloning tool and do whatever you want. You have to pay attention to all the nuances of the bad printing and it was just like, "I must be out of my mind! Why do I not have an assistant helping me do this? There's no reason I have to be doing this by myself!" That was a real pain in the neck. The pagination on something like this is also very frustrating to figure out. It's hard to explain — it's very tedious and technical — but you only have so many pages per signature, and how do you divide it all up? Which stories go in and which stories don't, because of page count? And blah, blah, blah.
Bolton: I'm guessing it would have been even more of a Herculean task to translate the sound effects.
Kidd: Yeah, at first I thought we would, and then I had the translator translate some of them. First of all, I didn't want to erase them because I thought they looked great. And then, as I said in the production notes, "Crash" is "Crash." "Pow" is "Pow." It's not anything you wouldn't expect it to be. Whatever you think it is, that's what it is.
Bolton: Like with the giant snake, where you're not sure what's going on, but it's kind of fun to just imagine it.
Kidd: Right. It's probably a big, scary "Hiss." [Laughter]
Bolton: I guess it's probably too early to talk about this, but you said you have enough material for a second Bat-Manga! book.
Kidd: Definitely.
Bolton: Is there enough for a third?
Kidd: It all depends on what you talk about in terms of page count. Personally, I'd rather do Volume Two with a beefed-up page count and cover it all, and then that would be that. But I don't know what our grand page count is. There probably is enough for a Volume Three. And Saul is constantly finding more toys. There's a bunch of stuff that we shot for this book that we ended up not being able to fit into it.
Bolton: We haven't talked about the photographs of toys yet, but some of those are almost mind-boggling. I had to study some of them for minutes just to figure out what I was actually looking at.
Kidd: Yeah, I took something of a chance by not really captioning those. I thought, for the most part, it's pretty obvious. And when it wasn't obvious, I would put it into the gutter on the previous page. Like that 3-D movie viewer; on the previous spread it says, "Next spread, this is a 3-D movie viewer," that I think they gave away with an issue of Shonen King, or something.
Bolton: It was almost more fun trying to guess what they were. There's that one with the round face and the Lone Ranger mask with the Batman emblem branded on its forehead.
Kidd: Oh! It's a little baby mask. I couldn't figure out who it would be for. It's about four inches in diameter. It's a mask, and the only thing it would fit would be like a tiny baby. And yet, there are no air holes. So, who knows? [Laughter] It's actually much bigger in the photograph than it is in real life.
Chip Kidd was interviewed by Bat-phone on Wednesday, September 21, 2008.
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1. A manga anthology series. Wikipedia defines "Shonen manga" as, "comics typically aimed at young males between the ages of about 8 and 18." back
2. Bob Kane is the artist who, along with writer Bill Finger, co-created Batman in May 1939. back
3. From Wikipedia: The Superman animated cartoons, commonly but somewhat erroneously known as the "Fleischer Superman cartoons," were a series of seventeen animated Technicolor short films, released by Paramount Pictures between 1941 and 1943, based upon the comic book character Superman. back
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