After the break, check out the latest episode of Batman Books Are Burning In Hell, with cartoonist Anya Davidson joining your hosts Tucker Stone & Matt Seneca!
elcome back to Batman Books Are Burning In Hell, where this episode Tucker and Matt are joined by special guest star and master cartoonist Anya Davidson! Anya's work sometimes seems to encompass the whole history of American comics, harnessing the raw current of energy tapped by everyone from George Herriman to Jack Kirby to Fort Thunder - but it's also a world of its very own, its artist dancing in perfect counterpoint to a music only she can hear. Books like School Spirits, Band For Life, and Lovers in the Garden are as notable for their expert markmaking and perfectly composed sequences as they are for their rare level of commitment to building characters and the big heart beating underneath their skin. They're also vvery vveird stuff, so we are absolutely gassed to present a conversation about one of the all-time best Bizarre Batman Comics: The Jungle Cat-Queen (1954), by the legendary Dick Sprang, with writer Edmond Hamilton and inker Charles Paris, as presented in Detective Comics #211. This is the stuff that dreams are made of - LISTEN UP
0:0:42 - There's a whole lot of meat on the Dick Sprang bone indeed, Tucker! Do it now you guys - get all those laffs out of the way. We've got a long haul ahead of us... and that's really his name! Sprang is an all-time top three Batman artist, on the Mount Rushmore with Neal Adams and Frank Miller, and personally I wouldn't put him in third place among those guys either. From 1941 to 1963, Sprang did more than any other artist to codify and expand the visual world Batman inhabits, from towering Deco skyscrapers to an endless succession of oversized props and modified costumes, to this particular story's fetid swamps and explosions of jungle flora. Sprang's style, so cleanly rendered it looks stamped onto the page or rolled out like wallpaper, brought solidity and depth to the strange, surreal stories he was assigned to - the 1960s Batman TV show makes a farce of his bold expressionism and almost dangerously active visual imagination, but it exists wholly in debt to the strength of Sprang's artistic vision. These couple of 1990s prints, drawn well after Sprang retired from the monthly comics grind, are as solid a shorthand for the breadth, power, and quirkiness of that vision as one could ask for; here's the man himself, looking a lot more dapper than anybody that talented should be allowed to. Some guys have all the luck.
0:3:48 - Tucker said it in our Ronin podcast (another Frank Miller shoutout for you there)... if you're a serious comics fan, you also gotta be an original editions fan. The Greatest Batman Stories Ever Told currently exists as a multivolume series of short, cheap trade paperbacks with Alex Ross covers, ladling out a thin gruel of good stuff amidst plenty of filler in books designed to fall apart the second time you go through them... but the original 1989 version of the book, badass Walt Simonson cover and all, is a horse. Over 350 pages and carrying some solid supplementary historical writing, the book covers about as many bases as one tome can in showing off the multi-faceted world of Batman. Tastefully done color reconstructions of the older stories (including this one) round out a package that's still yet to be beaten - if you're gonna have one Batman book in your life, get this one.
0:4:13 - Here it is, the sequence that made me a comics fan for life! With its anthropomorphic props, blueprint-drawing technical precision, and incredible ability to zoom in and out on a scene without losing the individual style, this is Dick Sprang at his best.
0:18:15 - The Comics Code came to Detective Comics with March 1955's issue #217. It's easy enough to see how desperately the comics industry, especially family-friendly DC Comics, was pushing their new compact of government and self-censorship from the book's cover - the infamous Seal of Approval is printed nearly as tall as the Detective Comics logo itself.
0:21:16 - Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston was interviewed by his polyamorous lover Olive Richard for an article titled "Don't Laugh at the Comics!", which appeared in the October 25, 1940 issue of Family Circle. Beginning with some classic Elvis Presley logic, crowing that the Golden Age's million-copy sales figures constitute proof positive of the medium's import, Marston goes on to opine that superhero comics in particular gave the Greatest Generation's kids a much-needed dose of moral instruction and role modeling; an argument still much in force today. J. Edgar Hoover, for one, was skeptical, opening an FBI file on Marston once the issue was brought to his attention, and scribbling "I always thought this fellow Marston was a phoney & this proves it" beneath one of the typewritten memos it contained. To be fair, Marston's schtick came across way better when accompanied by the filligreed artwork of H.G. Peter...
0:24:41 - Catwoman's next appearance following this one was, strangely, in Superman's Girl-Friend Lois Lane #70 (1966) - proof that the kink inherent to the character's dynamic with Batman and Robin was considered too hot for post-Code comics. Catwoman returned to Bat-world the following year, in Batman #197, whose story uses a fight with Batgirl over whose man Batman is as a proxy - swapping in a heteronormative love triangle setup for the sado-masochistic undertones that emerge whenever Catwoman and Batman come into direct conflict. It wasn't until a long Len Wein storyline in 1979 that Catwoman re-emerged as anything but a bit player in Gotham City - for the 12 years following her 12-year suspension, the character appeared in only 9 out of nearly 300 published Batman comics.
0:24:54 - Batwoman I, aka Kathy Kane, was hurriedly introduced in July 1956's Detective Comics #233 - according to Les Daniels' Batman: The Complete History, specifically to rebut anti-comics crusader Dr. Fredric Wertham's contention that Batman and Robin were obviously gay. Specifically, Wertham opined that Batman and Robin's life was "like a wish-dream of two homosexuals living together," which shows you the level of acquaintance with any of his subjects - or like, reality - that guy was working with. The notably more nubile Batgirl eventually replaced Batwoman in 1964, once the furor Wertham kicked up had died down and Carmine Infantino was allowed to modernize the character for the '60s - a changing of the guard, coincidentally, that swept longtime veterans like Sprang and Charles Paris off of the Batman factory floors for good.
0:28:26 - Catwoman appeared in most issues of Batman between #345-355 (1982-3), mainly in backup stories written by Bruce Jones (whose early-2000s run on Hulk is a Tucker 'n' Matt bin-diving fav) and drawn by Trevor Von Eeden, of Batman: Venom fame. Detective Comics featured a few Catwoman team-up storylines during the same period.
0:31:34 - Truly, Batman's bare hands are not to be taken lightly.
0:33:07 - Carl Barks collaborated on the first-ever Donald Duck comic, Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, in 1942, and created Scrooge McDuck in 1947 - but by the artist's own estimation, his peak came in the early '50s, right at the time Sprang was hitting his own apex on Batman. The two are fascinating to compare with one another. One of the Sprang Batman prints linked to above contains a small cutout panel of ancient ruins in the desert - a view no doubt influenced by the artist's own exploration of cliff-dwelling Indian historical sites following his comics career - and one that rhymes wonderfully with a famous panel from Barks' Duck opus Lost in the Andes, showing a similar topographical-map rendering of a Native village.
0:34:42 - This waterfall drawing is indeed a special one - the kind of thing that shows a true artist at work. Sprang didn't just love drawing Batman, he loved drawing, period.
0:36:07 - Here's as good an example as any of George McManus's high style - the detailed backgrounds and fanciful architectural fixtures, the obvious Art Nouveau influence.
0:40:53 - Probably the best sources for Dick Sprang reprints aren't in-print collections, but back issues of DC's 80 Pg. Giant series, which got kids to part with a whopping 25 cents ("for a COMIC BOOK?!?" indignant mothers screamed) in exchange for quadruple-length reprint bumpers of the publisher's best Golden Age stories. Issues #12 and #15 (1965) are almost all Sprang - with the original newsprint paper and shitty color registration - and can be had for the price of a cheap trade paperback if you're not a stickler for condition. Still and all, the total lack of a concerted, creator-focused reprint program for Sprang at DC is a fucking travesty whose absurdity can't be overstated. Same goes for Curt Swan, Sprang's contemporary over on Superman, by the way!
0:50:08 - Sprang himself must have sensed that he'd hit on something of primal power in this drawing; he redrew it for a panel in one of the Batman lithographs linked to above, recreating everything down to the positioning of the twisting tree roots... though he replaced Batman and Robin's animal-skin lingerie with their usual costumes for that picture. A pity.
1:02:43 - Anya's dead on to mention tattoo art in connection with Sprang - Sailor Jerry would be proud of this splash page for sure.
1:04:34 - It's impossible not to excerpt this many illustrations when a comic looks this good! Here's another of the many perfect sequences we're chewing the fat over; Anya is absolutely right to mention the decorative foliage Sprang places around his panels' edges. He's also a crack hand at drawing water, which anyone will tell you is the toughest thing to do well.
1:10:41 - Sprang's final work on a new Batman story was his utterly fantastic covers for Detective Comics #622-24 (1990), a 100% terrific murder mystery by John Ostrander, Mike McKone, and Flint Henry that everyone should track down right now because we're gonna get around to doing an episode on that one too one of these days, dammit! Sprang's drawings also function as the covers to "comics within a comic" in the actual story too. Must-read stuff.
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