Lew Sayre Schwartz

Last week, blogger 'Sivercat17' (found via JLRoberson at the TCJ board) did us the favour of scanning a whole 1953 Batman story (minus the title page) from Detective #193, March 1953: The Joker's Journal

It's one of some 120 Batman stories ghosted for Bob Kane by Lew Sayre Schwartz, one of my favourite artists from way back long before I ever knew his name. I've been fond of his work since when I was ten or eleven and used to colour it with crayons in some black and white reprints that i still keep. I wrote a long essay on the subject, though note that the crayon coloured pages shown there are by Moldoff. In 2001 I interviewed Lew for the first issue of my magazine Egomania (still avalable for five bucks) and he identified The Joker's Journal as his, recalling that he put himself in one panel (see left smoking pipe).
The most recent volume (#6, 2005) of Batman Archives, reprinting all the Batman stories from Detective Comics, have the first ones (six of them) that Schwartz drew (always uncredited), but in my opinion have failed to correctly identify the very first (#122, April 1947):


Both DC and the Grand Comicbook Database give the art to Kane, but that would be the default position anyway. The work is too good to possibly have been drawn by Kane; i'm particularly enamored of this charming circus scene:


The trouble is that the job also looks superior to the immediately subsequent stories that Schwartz drew. The first time I saw this cinematic sweep of the Statue of Liberty I was baffled as to who the artist could possibly be and as late as ten years ago I still had it filed it under 'not yet identifiable'.


But don't we all try much harder on the first outing, in the hope of securing regular employment?

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.

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

Another thought about Lew Sayre Schwartz. He worked for Bob Kane for seven years and subsequently was partner in the animation/design firm of Ferro, Mogubgub and Schwartz. He's the only person in that sentence without a Wikipedia entry. Lew was a very self-effacing guy and a couple of those other names certainly weren't. Anyway, there's a job for somebody. Duncan Jones recently observed that it's not the victors who write history after all, but the Wikipedia updaters.

covers- BATMAN: The Order of Beasts.

I gave up the self-publishing at the beginning of 2003 and spent the following year painting a 48 page Batman book. The cover was the last part to be done. I made a couple of sketches. My editor said no to the first (2), probably because the arrangement of characters in the foreground gave away too much about where the plot was headed. The picture on the right (3) is a scan of the finished cover without the logo (1). Daren White co-wrote and Mick Evans did all the production work including the lettering using a font designed by Woodrow Phoenix (Mick also came up with the title; he's always good at that sort of thing). I was pleased with the way it worked out and with the fact that we packaged the whole book ourselves leaving space for DC to add a logo and drop in the indicia and credits. I'm still not sure howcome they allowed me to do all of this. I'd never even done a whole issue of anything for DC before, never mind a 'prestige format' book with a shiny card cover.

Here's the story behind it, since I have gotten into the swing of laying out the business complexities over the last few posts, though that wasn't my original intention when I thought of showing some old cover sketches beside their related finished versions. I was already working on this when I drew a line under Eddie Campbell Comics at the beginning of 2003. It started with either my short Batman piece in Bizarro that Hunt Emerson illustrated, or my interview in Egomania #1 with old time Batman ghost artist Lew Sayre Schwartz (who has remained a very dear friend over the last five years), or perhaps both. I had let the world know that I was something of an enthusiast for the old Batman stories, particularly late '40s early '50s (Schwartz, Sprang etc. -Here's an article I wrote on the subject way back in 2001. I just reread it and I still like it.) I was invited to pitch a script idea for a proposed Batman to be drawn by Tony Millionaire. I wasn't interested in that and I don't know if it ever came about with another writer, but when I mentioned the whole thing to my pal White, he said he had been sitting on his own Batman idea for some time, and how dare I turn down the gig without asking him first. I mixed this up with half an idea of my own and pitched it to Joey Cavalieri at DC. Somehow we got in.

Then I made things complicated. I said that nothing would make me happier than to draw this myself. They said they didn't allow a situation where a creator would both write and draw the same book unless he was 'incorporated'. I mentioned this to Whitey, whom you may remember is a chartered accountant, so that's exactly his field. He said, "It's not as complicated as you think. A company's just a box of documents you can keep under your bed." And it doesn't cost too much either, well compared to the amounts I've been bandying about here of late. Now, companies are usually named and indexed by having two unassociated words hinged together (well, this is the campbellian explanation), so he finds a combination that he figures will embarrass me, runs the checks to confirm it's not already in use, and next thing you know I'm director of a company named 'Antelope Pineapple Pty. Ltd', just so I can get to draw Batman.

Then I asked if I could paint it too. For a week it looked like this wasn't going to fly until I explained that all I meant by that was that they take the amounts they were going to parcel out to penciller, inker and colorist and give them all to me instead.

Somehow or other I got what i wanted and It all worked out well. That was my first full colour book, and I've been working in colour on all my books since then. It was the beginning of a new phase in my career, leaving the self publishing one far behind. However, that damn Antelope Pineapple Pty. Ltd lately became a millstone around my neck. I have a hard enough time remembering one set of tax dates and duties without being legally obliged to remember another and different lot. More than once I have been fined for missing a superannuation deadline or some other important pecuniary obligation. I decided to get rid of the thing.

So three months ago I went to see my regular accountant, and it cost me more to get out than it did to get in, what with things being in a muddle. But while on the way I passed a tea room and I pulled over on my bike. I was reminded of my Bruce Wayne having a cup of English tea at the beginning of The Order of Beasts. Outside they had a blackboard with an interesting quote chalked on it. which has stuck in my noodle: "Reputation is character minus what you've been caught doing" (by someone named Michael Lapoce). Anyway, the previous tax year had been bad for me, what with From Hell being out of print all that year, but me still paying large in taxes, and I got a huge rebate of $15,000 bucks. My accountant's young assistant accountant was handling it all for me. In a moment of bravado I told him why I had the damn company in the first place, and how it got its daft name, and Whitey's assistance in the matter, all just so I could draw a Batman comic book, and I think he thought it was very cool and interesting.

And as we were finalising the paperwork I said, "Now do I have to hand over that box of papers from under my bed?"
He looked at me for a minute as though to probe my noodle and find out if I was joking.
And then he said, "uh, no, you can keep that."