Today, we look back to April 1996 for Jim Lee’s first published cover for DC, as the company debuted the award-winning Batman: Black and White.
This is “Look Back,” a feature that I plan to do for at least all of 2020 and possibly beyond that (and possibly forget about in a week, who knows?). The concept is that every week (I’ll probably be skipping the four fifth weeks in the year, but maybe not) of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each week will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first week of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second week looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third week looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth week looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
A CREEPY ORIGIN
Mark Chiarello got his start in comics working as Archie Goodwin’s assistant when Goodwin was the head of Epic for Marvel Comics. Epic was initially a creator-owned anthology that expanded into a series of creator-owned works mixed with foreign imports, including an epic translation of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, plus mature readers superhero titles, like Elektra: Assassin. Chiarello was also a brilliant colorist, so while he had a chance to work as a Marvel editor, he instead when freelance. Eventually, though, the late, great DC editor Neal Pozner hired Chiarello in-house as DC’s head of coloring. Chiarello eventually became DC’s art director, but he also did the occasional special project for DC, and one of those was Batman: Black and White.
Chiarello explained the origins of Batman: Black and White in the introduction to the trade paperback collection of the series
A few years back, I was sitting around a dinner table with a few famous comic-book artists. It was late at night, after we had all put in a hard day at another long-since-forgotten comics convention. Being the diehard fanboys that we are forever cursed to be, we were of course talking about comic books.
Someone raised the inevitable “desert island” question: you’re stranded, cut off from civilization – what complete run of one comics title would you want to have with you?
Well, we all pondered for half a minute. A big-time penciller piped up, “Creepy or Eerie.” One of those comics painter guys said, “Yep, definitely Creepy.” I agreed, no question about it. Amazingly, we all agreed, pound for pound, page for page, there has never been such a collection of stellar artists assembled under one banner publication. And they all did their careers’ best work in those pages! Toth, Frazetta, Williamson, Torres, Colan, Ditko, Wrightson, Corben – the list goes on and on. Funny, spooky, corny, horrific stories, any kid’s comic dream, any artist’s dream comic.
Well, as we all know, comics are the synthesis of pictures and words. Someone had to write all (or most) of those stories. That’s guy name was Archie Goodwin. Probably the very best editor ever to work in comics, probably the best writer ever to work in comics. The work Archie did on the Warren books (Creepy, Eerie and Blazing Combat) was his homage to the favorite comics of is youth, the E.C. line.
Flash forward a whole bunch of years. For some unknown, godforsaken reason, I became an editor at DC Comics. I pitch the idea of a black and white anthology series featuring Batman. The key to the series’ success, I figure, is to hire the very best artists in the business. Most everyone at DC tells me it won’t sell. No one likes black and white comics. No one likes anthologies. Somehow the series gets the green light. In his infinite wisdom, Executive Editor Mike Carlin has Batman editor Scott Peterson come on board to keep me honest and make sure I don’t destroy the integrity of one of DC’s flagship characters.
JIM LEE MAKES HIS DC COMIC BOOK DEBUT
Chiarello and Peterson put out fliers to many famous artists, including legendary older artists like Alex Toth and Joe Kubert and modern superstars. One of their biggest gets was Jim Lee to do the cover, his very first published cover work for DC (Lee had done a pin-up for Legends of the Dark Knight #50 three years earlier for his first DC work period).
Two years later, Lee would sell his studio, Wildstorm, to DC and Lee would eventually become the head of DC himself. It was Chiarello, by the way, who later recruited Lee to draw the blockbuster “Hush” storyline in Batman with writer Jeph Loeb.
MCKEEVER GETS AN EISNER NOMINATION AND TIMM GETS DARK
The opening story (after a Mike Allred pinup) in the first issue was called “Perpetual Mourning” and it was written and drawn by Ted McKeever.
Batman solves a murder with the help of an autopsy, as he recreates the crime in his mind as he does the autopsy and eventually realizes that the victim solved her own murder by getting a piece of her murderer’s tooth. The story was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Short Story.
Bruce Timm wrote and drew an excellent Two-Face story where a “cured” Harvey Dent falls for a beautiful and sweet woman, but then her twisted twin sister comes into their life and tears everything apart.
The first issue also had a short story written and drawn by Howard Chaykin, a story written and drawn by Joe Kubert and a story, appropriately enough, written by Archie Goodwin (with art by José Antonio Muñoz).
The French comic icon, Moebius, drew the closing pinup in the issue…
A story written by Goodiwn (and drawn by Gary Gianni) that later ran in #4, also appropriately enough, won the Eisner Award for Best Short Story. Batman: Black and White also won the Eisner for Best Anthology and Chiarello and Peterson were nominated for Best Editors (and the series was nominated for Best Limited Series).
The series was a surprise sales success and DC has done many sequels in the years since (including one coming out right now), as well as merchandise tie-ins.
If you folks have any suggestions for April (or any other later months) 2011, 1996, 1971 and 1946 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
About The Author
