I came across this while looking for something else (I can no longer remember what) and I puzzled for a couple of minutes wondering who could have made this drawing that set my heart aflutter. A good drawing of Zatanna is not easy to pull off. Google image search and you'll see a great number of drawings that cheapen the character. It occurred to me that there's only one artist who could have done it. Alex Ross.


A further google search with his name attached confirmed it.
It's one of those pictures where if I try to analyze it, it begins to fall apart in my hand. Those proportions can't be right, it seems to be a combination of conflicting planes, etc. Then I catch a glimpse of it half an hour later still on my screen, and I swoon all over again.

Zatanna at DC Wikia (found here)

My local paper had an article about the long running Uncanny X-MEN being put to rest. It was very salutational. The press pays so little interest to comic books that it doesn't realize how these things work. They're just closing down the one X-men comic so they can start up again with two. It will be a pincer tactic. One goes downwind of the readers with the bucket of shit, while the other creeps up behind and holds their mouths open for the first one to drop it all in. They could just have handed out knives and forks.

At the same time DC is restarting all their comics. They called a board meeting. "It's no good," they said, "We've made such a mess of it, the only thing to do is start over and see if we can make it come out right this time."

Hollywood has also realized that in the comic book genre everything gets less interesting the further it gets from the origin story. So Batman gets rebooted after the next one. The X-men is back to the prequel, etc etc. There was a spark of creativity a long time ago and the car was still coasting except now they're at the bottom of the hill and they all have to get out and push.

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Hayley Campbell explains why The Lord of the Rings is like anal sex.

Is that a bit like the famous scene from Monty Python?:

JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER:
Your Majesty is like a stream of bat's piss.
(gasps)
THE PRINCE OF WALES:
What?
JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER:
It was one of Wilde's.
OSCAR WILDE:
It sodding was not! It was Shaw!
THE PRINCE OF WALES:
Well, Mr. Shaw?

As a laddie in the mid-sixties, I discovered Batman at the same time as everybody else, through the TV show. To cash in on the unusual attention suddenly bestowed upon this character, Signet Books had released three compilations of old stories, from the early 1950s, in paperback form in black and white on small pages with one or two panels per page. The TV show was fun but these books were a strange and wonderful transport to a city of the imagination. When you're a kid and don't have negotiate your own way about the place too often, everywhere is a place in your imagination.

Living on the suburban outskirts of Glasgow, Metropolis never worked for me. The Daily Planet Building was too much out of a retro cityscape like a display at the Worlds Fair. It belonged in the world of my older relatives. If you look at the very first Superman story, you can see that Shuster wasn’t really interested in the concrete urban jungle. When the hero is jumping up and away among the skyscrapers they hardly seem to be completely there. Joe isn’t excited enough to make them real, or to even put windows on them. By the time they had worked out the meaning of Superman, he was a representative of small-town America rather than its big cities. A cover from a 1950 Superboy in Les Daniels' DC Comics: Sixty years of the World’s Favourite Comic Book Heroes is apposite. Superboy uses his x-ray vision to see the apple pie in the oven. “Oh dear,” says old white-haired Martha Kent, “I can’t keep any surprises from you, son”.


Gotham City, on the other hand, at least circa 1950, was very matter-of-fact, it felt not unlike the city I lived in and around. It was a big concrete playground compared to the absurd gothic nightmares of the more recent Batman movies, or the not quite convincing Hollywood set of the Tv show. Batman’s environment was a place of dark alleys where your parents might get mugged; of the unintelligible gibberish of yelling corner newsvendors; of hoodlums in zoot-suits whose thoughts we can never know; of perfectly dressed women with exotic scents haunting their slipstream. Everything here is impossibly huge and seen from the low point of view of a kid; and the larger world outside the city is hinted at via faux-exotic window displays of hula girls or festival parade floats of giant bananas. And on the outskirts of town where the long shadows reach, there are factories with open vats full of bubbling unspeakable chemicals.



By the time of the stories in these books (early 1950s) there is no sense of awe about Batman like there was at the beginning in 1939, a fact which I liked and still like. He is a familiar figure in his environment, just another element of the city. Celebrity heroes and celebrity villains. Symbols of order and crackpot criminality walking about in broad daylight. Villains were never underdressed in those days, but on the contrary, overdressed, like vaudevillian dandies. And those were used sparingly. The stories seemed real to my 10 year old brain. The far-fetched ones could be depended upon to turn out to be hoaxes, such as Dr Edward Arvin and The Crime Predictor, a 1953 computer that was disturbingly about the size of the house next door. Or Lew Farnum, The Man who Could Change Fingerprints, with its atmosphere of old noir movies that had me terrified for a few pages. Another story presents the problem of what Batman is to do about his mountain of fanmail. One of his letters is 20 feet tall and can only be read from the other side of the street.


The stories were often very nicley crafted (For most of them we may never know by whom). Check out The Crazy Crime Clown (December 1952) which you can find in the DC collection The Greatest Joker Stores Ever Told, in which the Joker feigns insanity so he can be locked up in the nut-house beside a bank-clerk who embezzled a million but can’t remember where he hid it. Batman permits himself to be locked up in the guise of Mad Minos the Mystic, turban and all, and the three of them share a ward with Christopher Columbus, Isaac Newton, Franz the Strangler and a guy whose delusion is that he believes himself to be Batman, and has the costume under his mattress to prove it. Or The Joker’s Millions (February 1952), reprinted in the Les Daniels-Chip Kidd Batman book, a story full of clever irony which opens with the reading of the will of racketeer King Barlowe. "To Waxey Gates I leave the blackjack i took away from him after he tried to brain me when we were kids just out of reform school." The remainder of his millions he leaves to the Joker. Happy that he doesn't have to commit robberies any more, the Joker takes up his new life as a millionaire until a week later when he discovers that all the money is counterfeit. Then the taxman delivers the bill for 2 million inheritance tax. To save face the Joker has to commit crimes, but without leaving any hint that it's he who is behind them. Fate conspires against him; he robs the ticket office of a theatre without noticing that the show being performed is the opera Pagliacci, the famous story of a clown.


I loved these books. I coloured them with wax crayons. I kept them. Of course I grew up and I've been around real cities, but my memory of that fictional one sits there along with my memories of the real ones. The art in the stories is variously ghosted by Dick Sprang, Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Sayre Schwartz. After I received news of Lew's passing on Tuesday, I pulled these little books out once again, and I'm reminded of the words of Charlotte Bronte, who was writing about the great illustrator-engraver Thomas Bewick:

“…again we turn,
With fresh delight from the enchanted page,
Where pictured thoughts that breathe and speak and burn,
Still please alike our youth and riper age.”

The above is adapted from my introduction to the interview I published with Lew back in 2002. Pictures are from The Joker's Journal, 1953, illustrated By Lew, written by who knows.
Read Lew's obituary which I wrote for The Comics Journal.
earlier posts about lew Sayre Schwartz

similar to the situation i described yesterday re my old pal Mike Docherty, here's another example of the world getting smaller all the time. When I was younger still, just finishing primary school, I discovered old early 1950s Batman stories in a handful of little paperback books published in black and white (by Signet in the US, Four-Square in Britain) at the time of the Batman TV show. They were reprinted several times in 1966 and my copies are dated October, so I would have got them fresh off the shelves close to that date. They were probably the first paperback books I bought with my own money, and it would have taken a great deal of conspiracy among the people in my head to give myself permission to take such a daring step. I lovingly defaced many of the pages with crayolas.

Even then I figured there had to be more than one 'Bob Kane,' in the same way that Walt Disney was a whole mob of people, though that was the only 'signature' on these stories. Dick Sprang was obviously a distinct personality though I don't think I had a name for him for another couple of years. This was all very abstract to me at the time, but there was certainly a suspicion that something was going on; I knew all about artists and 'inkers' from the credited Marvel comics I had been buying, and I had pored over Jules Feiffer's The Great Comic Book Heroes in my local library. Once I ascribed a number of the stories to Sprang or 'artist B' (Kane being 'A"), there still seemed to be two distinct styles among what was left. They remained unnamed people to me for many years afterwards, though I felt I knew them as friends in my hyperactive imagination. I once got in an argument with a small press pal circa '84 who insisted that a certain Penguin story was Sprang's work. I said, 'no, look at all these tiny scurrying little figures. That's 'artist D,' who actually happens to be my favourite. He looked at me like I was referencing some archeological tome. In 1999 I drew this little panel in After the Snooter:


A couple of years after drawing it I actually got to meet Lew Sayre Schwartz. After I wrote this article online, somebody emailed and put me in touch with him. I verified by phone and fax (I had collected many other stories illustrated by him in the interim) that I had correctly identified the artistic personality at work. It was a thrilling couple of hour-long sessions during which Lew kept worrying about my phone bill. Around that time he had discovered that DC was reprinting some of his old stories, as they had contacted him about forwarding some royalties. I warned him to watch out for the fact that they were still misattributing many of the stories, but that it would probably balance out as for every one of his they gave to Kane, there would be one of Moldoff's they gave to Schwartz and in the final analyisis he probably wouldn't lose out. Moldoff was 'artist C' though I wasn't 100% sure he wasn't actually Kane; it didn't look like the then current 1966 Kane who drew Poison Ivy at any rate, though I was late in figuring out that was Moldoff too, still ghosting for Kane after 12 years. Recalling my blindness on that one still annoys me. In contrast to Sprang, who was a Kane ghost hired by the publisher, DC Comics, Lew was Kane's personal 'ghost' on this stuff. Kane would proprietorially tighten the figures of Batman and Robin a little before sending it in to the publisher, with the understanding being that he'd done it all himself (The way the Great Comic Book Database characterizes the working relationship tends to imply that Kane drew the figures and Schwartz filled in the rest of the pictures around them, which both my eye and Schwartz himself tell me was not the case). All the stories would then be signed 'Bob Kane', presumably by the letterer, and then inked by Charlie Paris (usually), whose job it was to make it look like it all came out of the same ink bottle, as he expressed it. 'Inking' is often misunderstood by folk outside of the comic book business, to be a kind of 'tracing' activity. Back then the inker was often a particularly slick artist who was trusted with superimposing the house style over the work of a number of artists, giving consistency to all the parts (before I figured this out it had baffled me that Batman's head always looked consistent even though there were obviously different artists drawing the pages) (an aside: I once hired an assistant for a short term job who laid down at the outset that he didn't want to be 'just an inker.' I informed him, to his dismay, that I wouldn't trust him with the 'inking.')
Here's a great Lew Schwartz splash page from Batman #52, Feb 1950. This is from a coverless copy in my possession. Lew confirmed he drew it and was especially pleased I'd picked this one to run by him as he remembered drawing his wife, Barb, into the bottom left hand corner. (click for a satisfyingly large version)


Here's a favourite Lew Schwartz moment from The Joker's Journal, Detective Comics #193, March 1953:


Lew was at the San Diego con in 2002 and I interviewed him on a panel there, having already done the honours in my own Egomania magazine and proved myself the man for the job. A couple of years later I got the chance to ( co-)write and draw a Batman comic book myself and I dedicated it to Lew (these days we get to be 'authorial' and dedicate our comic books). Now, on the whole I detest the present day version of the character. he is a thuggish brute. My Batman was an old fashioned thing set in 1939, before the MTV age, when millionaires still tried to have nice manners.


Batman was invited to join a London club of gentlemen who wear animal masks:


Who'd have thought they'd trust me with a Batman book? Who'd have thought I'd meet the guy who put the notion in my head thirty-eight years before? He was a special guest at the San Diego Comic Convention this year but I wasn't there, so I missed "... that great panel we did on the Golden Age of Batman with Jerry Robinson, Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Schwartz. If you're interested in the history of comics, it doesn't get any more historical than that." (Mark Evanier... I wonder if somebody taped it.) (I wrote about Jerry Robinson at length here, for those following all of these names)
My good friend Pam Noles made sure Lew got a copy of Leotard and took this photo:


It's funny how things turn out.

around 1989 my thoughts turned to an old pal of mine named Mike Docherty, whom I hadn't seen since I sat next to him in school in Glasgow 1969/71, when together we ruled the art class. I've been thinking about him again over the last week. Maybe it's a twenty year thing.
In 1969 we both intended to spend our lives drawing comic books. American ones. On the other side of the world. Later I presumed that neither of us would. Notwithstanding, we drew some stuff together, as little comicky dudes do. Here's a detail from a Batman on which he inked and coloured over my pencil, when we were fifteen.


A year later he was doing very competent little ink drawings, among which this one is excellent. He was obsessed with Conan the Barbarian by this time:


My folks moved us down to the London area and I lost track of him. I surely would have done anyway as we were quite different sorts of people altogether. He wore leather jackets, after those school years I mean, and saved up to buy a Harley Davidson. And me, well you've read my blather here already I'm sure. Once in London I stood watching a long rally of bikers protesting against the new helmet law, hoping my old pal might turn up among the revving, thundering procession. Over the years apparently he had been keeping an eye open for me too. He was living in Santa Monica, California when he found one of my Alec books, the second Escape volume of '85 if memory serves, in his local comic shop in 1988. I was in North Queensland, Australia. I always figured as time moved on and we moved further adrift that catching up again would become more and more hopeless, where in fact the opposite is true. It is now easier to find people than it was twenty years ago. Anyway, we did hook up in California in 1989 and caught up and kept in touch. He came off the bike once too often and was now walking with a permanent limp. But it turned out he had achieved his goal and was drawing Conan for a living. Using the Grand Comic Book Database, an indispensible tool for this sort of thing, I see him first popping up in Conan The King #31 of Nov.'85. And the number of stories under his credit show that he was working hard after that. Regular readers will note the irony when I recall that he mentioned loathing it when the inking was sometimes assigned to Vinnie Colletta. Here's one of Mike's covers from a couple of years in, #43 November '87:


I had stopped following the American comic books a long time before, except for keeping a weather eye on them as a working illustrator might be expected to do. So I really didn't know what was happening there (apart from the obvious, like Watchmen), and it was a surprise to me to find that Conan didn't appear to be the big fan favourite it was when it started. After artist Barry Smith's tenure I always found it unreadable, like the original Robert E Howard books, from which I razored and kept the Frazetta covers. The character must have had its biggest popularity between the time Schwarzennegger played it in the first movie 1982, and the disappearance of the third one into development hell circa '86. Nevertheless there were three or four different regular Conan comic book titles all running at the same time in 1988. As far as I can figure out, Conan the King came to a conclusion that year and Mike found himself in the more prestigious Savage Sword of Conan from '89 and later in the flagship Conan the Barbarian, before the whole lot of them ground to a halt in 1995 and he found work outside of the comic book business, in animation mostly I believe. Mike has never bothered to put out much information on himself, so Lambiek has a rudimentary entry on him which doesn't include a year of birth (put 1955, Scotland, if you're reading). Here's one of his covers from Aug.1992.


And here's the only photo I can dig up:


It's from Glasgow paper the Evening Times, Sept 9 1992, one of those 'local boy makes good stories' that i always hate: "And while his former schoolmates shiver in a typical wet and windy Scottish autumn, Mike is enjoying the more temperate climes of Santa Monica..."
The story comes full circle as I see he is back in the funny book pages as an artist on a new work titled Jungle Reign, of which there is an online preview.


It's funny how things turn out.


(panel from my own The Dance of Lifey Death, drawn 1991.)

there are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie."- Franz Kafka

from the third set of Bent Books bookmarks, 2006

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in other news:
I just had lunch with my pal Daren White who mentioned that, after the whole rigmarole of starting school and explaining the days of the week and weekends and all that to his two wee'uns, he now has to explain why Wednesday Comics doesn't come out till Thursday. It's not even about shipping and distances any more, it's just that it's Thursday here when it's still Wednesday there. This is the first major comics confusion since the lads announced that the three leading members of the Justice League are Superman, Batman and Womany-man. Ever after, in our circle, Wonder Woman has been known as 'womanyman'.