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Things Undone


By Shane White (NBM/ComicsLit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-563-4

The sheer variety of themes and species in modern cartooning can be quite breathtaking to an old coot who grew up with the severely restricted comics fare of a baby-boomer in Britain – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. These days I can peruse a graphic novel on any subject in any style and incorporating any number of converging genres – and this compelling lit gem comes pretty close to defying categorisation.

Things Undone is a little bit romance, a little bit alternative biography, a little bit punk and a whole lot of terrific. Young Rick Watts is an artist and world-weary peon in the art-consuming field of video games graphics. He’s just moved to Seattle for a new job, but nothing’s really changed and relationship-wise things aren’t going so great either. Long-distance never works so he dragged his girl-friend clear across the country, and his seven year hitch with her couldn’t have ended more badly…

When you can’t catch a break and the new life proves no better than the old one, what can a guy do? And it’s only a matter of time before somebody notices that Rick is a zombie, what with him leaving decaying extremities and eyeballs and such all over the place. Maybe he should just get a gun and do the job right…?

This sharp and bittersweet examination of modern life is funny and poignant, using the populist imagery of the walking dead as an effective metaphor for modern life, but it’s the amazingly comforting art and production (the book is printed in black, white and shocking orange, in a kind of skate-punk cartoon style) that underpins this tale, making the tragic comedic and using confusion as the means of exploring the mundane horrors of urban living.

Clever, witty and one of the most sensitive funny/sad, real/imaginary stories you’ll ever read: so you should.

© 2009 Studiowhite LLC.

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Strange Suspense: the Steve Ditko Archives vol.1


By Steve Ditko and various (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60669-289-0

¡Perfect Christmas Present Alert! – For the discerning comics fan

Steve Ditko is one of our industry’s greatest talents and probably America’s least lauded. His fervent desire to just get on with his job and to tell stories the best way he can, whilst the noblest of aspirations, will always be a minor consideration to commercial interests that for so long controlled comics production. So it’s a sublime joy to be able to look at his work from a more innocent time when he was just breaking into the industry, relentlessly honing his craft with genre tales for whichever publisher would have him, unrestricted by censors or intrusive editors.

This superb full colour hardback collection reprints his early works (all of them from the period 1953-1955) comprising stories produced before the draconian and self-inflicted Comics Code Authority sanitised the industry, and although most are wonderfully baroque and bizarre horror stories there are also examples of Romance, Westerns, Crime, Humour and of course his utterly unique Science Fiction tales, cunningly presented in the order he sold them and not the more logical but far less revealing chronological release dates. Sadly there’s no indication of how many (if any) were actually written by the moody master…

Ditko’s first strip sale was held for a few months and printed in Fantastic Fears #5 (published by Ajax/Farrell with a cover-date of January-February 1954); a creepy, pithy tale entitled ‘Stretching Things’, followed here by ‘Paper Romance’ an eye-catching if anodyne tale from Daring Love #1 (September 1953, Gilmor) and a couple of captivating chillers from Simon and Kirby’s Prize Comics hot horror hit Black Magic. ‘A Hole in his Head’ (#27, November-December 1953) combined psycho-drama and time travel whilst the more traditional ‘Buried Alive’ (#28 January-February 1954) was a self-explanatory gothic tale drama.

Stylish cowboy hero the Utah Kid stopped a ‘Range War’ in Blazing Western #1 (January 1954, Timor), and the artist’s long association with Charlton Comics began with the cover and vampire shocker ‘Cinderella’ from The Thing #12 (February 1954). The remainder of the work here was published by Charlton, a small company with few demands.

Their diffident attitude to work was ignore the creative staff as long as they deliver on time: a huge bonus for Ditko, still studiously perfecting his craft and never happy to play office politics. They gave him all the work he could handle and let him do it his way…

After the cover for This Magazine is Haunted #16, (March 1954) comes ‘Killer on the Loose’ a cop story from Crime and Justice #18 (April 1954), and the same month saw him produce the cover and three stories for The Thing #13, ‘Library of Horror’, ‘Die Laughing’ and ‘Avery and the Goblins’. From Space Adventures #10 (Spring 1954) comes the cover and the witty cautionary tale ‘Homecoming’, followed by three tales and a cover from the succeeding issue: ‘You are the Jury’, ‘Moment of Decision’ and the superbly manic ‘Dead Reckoning’.

This Magazine is Haunted #17, (May 1954), again featured a Ditko cover and three spooky tales ‘3-D Disaster, Doom, Death’, ‘Triple Header’ and the intriguingly experimental ‘The Night People.’ That same month he drew the cover and both ‘What was in Sam Dora’s Box?’ and ‘Dead Right’ for mystery title Strange Suspense Stories #18.

He got another shot at gangsters in the licensed title Racket Squad in Action (#11, May-June 1954) producing the cover and stylish caper thriller ‘Botticelli of the Bangtails’ and honed his scaring skills with the cover and four yarns for The Thing #14 (June 1954): ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘The Evil Eye’, the utterly macabre ‘Doom in the Air’ and grisly shocker ‘Inheritance!’

He produced another incredible cover and five stories for the next issue, and as always was clearly still searching for the ultimate in storytelling perfection. ‘The Worm Turns’, ‘Day of Reckoning’, ‘Come Back’, ‘If Looks could Kill’ and ‘Family Mix-up’ range from giant monster yarns to period ghost stories to modern murder black comedies , but throughout, although all clearly by the same artist, no two tales are rendered the same way. Here was a true creator pushing himself to the limit.

He drew the cover and ‘Bridegroom, Come Back’ for This Magazine is Haunted #18, (July 1954), ‘A Nice Quiet Place’ and the cover of Strange Suspense Stories #19, plus the incredible covers of Space Adventures #12 and Racket Squad in Action #11 as well as the cover and two full stories in Strange Suspense Stories #20 (August 1954), ‘The Payoff’ and ‘Von Mohl Vs. The Ants’, but it was clear that his astonishing virtuosity was almost wasted on interior storytelling.

His incredible cover art was compelling and powerful and even the normally laissez-faire Charlton management must have exerted some pressure to keep him producing eye catching visuals that would sell their weakest titles. Presented next are the mind-boggling covers for This Magazine is Haunted #19 (August 1954), Strange Suspense Stories #22 and The Thing #17 (both November 1954) and This Magazine is Haunted #21, (December1954).

The Comics Code Authority began judging comics material from October 26th 1954, by which time Ditko’s output had practically halted. He had contracted tuberculosis and was forced to return to his family in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, until the middle of 1955. From that return to work come the final Ditko Delights in this volume: the cover and a story which originally appeared in Charlton’s Mad Magazine knockoff From Here to Insanity (#10, June 1955). A trifle wordy by modern standards ‘Car Show’ nevertheless displays the sharp, cynical wit and contained comedic energy that made so many Spider-Man/Jonah Jameson confrontations an unforgettable treat a decade later…

This is a cracking collection in its own right but as an examination of one of the art-form’s greatest stylists it is also an invaluable insight into the very nature of comics. This is a book true fans would happily kill or die for…

This edition © 2009 Fantagraphics Books. All Rights Reserved

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Like a Dog


By Zak Sally (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-165-7

Some people do it for money or fame and money. It doesn’t matter what form of creative endeavour “it” is. Whatever art-form you’re thinking of there are those who are rewarded for their creative efforts (fairly or otherwise is another can of worms and I’m not going there) as they either work within or expand the boundaries of their medium, and there are the other sort. Sometimes the other sort gets really lucky and finds fame and fortune along the way.

Why am being so obtuse?

Because unless you are one of those other types that will produce paintings or music or poetry or whatever shapes your life even after every other carbon-based life-form on the planet is dead – or worse yet, just ignores or humours you – then you have no idea of how powerful the compulsion to create can be.

Zak Sally has travelled far (usually as member of the band Low) and dabbled in photography and all forms of print media, but what he is at his core is a cartoonist. He sees the world in terms of incidents, epigrams and bon mots produced as sequential images. He has been producing stories, mini-comics, gags, nonfiction and biographical tales and even historical and political drama for over fifteen years in his self-published ‘zine Recidivist, and other peoples productions such as Mome, Dirty Stories, The Drama, Comic Art Magazine and other places discerning enough to print them.

Even if they hadn’t he would still have drawn them, and now they been collected in a magnificent hardback collection from Fantagraphics which gathers the first two issues of Recidivist in their entirety, plus another thirteen unique and compelling tales in a variety of styles and media, all copiously and tellingly annotated.

Personal favourites – and there are many – include the bleakly informative ‘Dresden’ (because haven’t we all wanted to be rock stars?), the graphically bold ‘Dread’ and ‘The War Back Home’ but unfettered by commercial pressures the author has been able to turn his attentions to whatever caught his eye and the book is a broad anthology of material ranging from horror to comedy to surreal dreamy pure imagery, all underpinned by a keen wit, a canny eye for design and a great ear for dialogue.

Without doubt the best pieces are the utterly superb ‘At the Scaffold’ (an account of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s imprisonment by the Tsar and ‘The Man who Killed Wally Wood’ an “it-happened-to-me” recollection that will captivate any fanboy with an ear for scandal and rumour…

This is a gloriously rough-hewn and hands-on collection from a compulsive cartoonist and storyteller packaged with the flair and imagination that has become a trademark of the world’s leading publisher of fascinating comics. This book won’t appeal to everybody, (especially devotees of the superhero mainstream) but Sally’s dedication to innovation, exploration and imagination will astound and entrance anyone who knows capital A Art when they see it.

© 2009 Zak Sally except where otherwise noted. All rights reserved.

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Wonder Woman: Love and Murder


By Jodi Picoult, Terry Dodson & various (DC Comics)
No ISBN: 978-1-84576-640-5

When Wonder Woman was (re)relaunched after Infinite Crisis and 52 with Terry and Rachel Dodson illustrating the scripts of TV big gun Allan Heinberg (Grey’s Anatomy, The O.C. and Sex and the City among others) there was much well-deserved attention, but the comic was plagued by missed deadlines and most of the series’ momentum was lost. Eventually the tale was abandoned unfinished and a new writer was parachuted in. (The creators regrouped and the initial story-arc was concluded in Wonder Woman Annual volume 2, #1, and collected as Who is Wonder Woman?)

That writer was Jodi Picoult, a best-selling author with a reputation for strong characterisation and a tendency to explore “hot-button” issues. This collection (reprinting issues #6-10 of the Amazing Amazon’s latest periodical incarnation) sees Picoult pick up the threads of WW’s latest secret identity and hit the ground running.

Field agent Diana Prince is an operative of the Federal Department of Metahuman Affairs, tasked with keeping an eye on all those pesky superhumans that abound in the DC universe. Her partner is the dashing but annoying Tom Tresser, an extraordinary agent and master of disguise known as Nemesis.

Something is far from right at DoMA. Whilst Prince and Nemesis are babysitting a new government sponsored superhero nefarious doings are occurring at the office of their boss Sarge Steel, all engineered by one of Wonder Woman’s most relentless enemies. These culminate in the resurrection of Diana’s dead mother…

When Wonder Woman is subjected to a dubious “rendition” by DoMA and made an illegal captive, the hidden mastermind initiates a plan to use the Amazons of Themyscira to rescue her and coincidentally destroy America. But there are plots within schemes and another hand is actually manipulating the manipulators…

This is a strikingly effective tale that peters out towards the end not because of the excellent scripts or the stunning art of Terry and Rachel Dodson, Drew Johnson, Ray Snyder and Rodney Ramos but because the story dovetails with the publishing event Amazons Attack! and intervening episodes and story advancements occur in a completely separate book.

If you can revel in delightfully arch “get-a-room” dialogue and quirky “Moonlighting” sexual tension rendered in spectacular, clever, glamorous ‘big visuals’ this is a very fetching read, and a canny interpretation of the genre’s greatest female character, but if you want it all to actually make sense then you’ll definitely need to supplement your purchase with the aforementioned Amazons Attack!, but not after as the last page of Love and Murder advises, but from somewhere between parts 3 and 5.

Just don’t ask me what order to read succeeding chapters in…

© 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Prison Pit volume 1


By Johnny Ryan (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-297-5

Johnny Ryan is a cartoonist with an uncompromising vision and a clear intention of producing shock and even revulsion whenever he wants to. In this latest book, derived from his fascination with casual violence, social decay and the mythology of masked wrestling as well as his appreciation of the “berserk” manga strips of Kentaro Miura, he presents a brutally child-like view of a different sort of Hell.

The Prison Pit is an extra-dimensional purgatory where the most violent felons are dumped to live or die, plagued with monsters, vile organisms and the worst specimens of humanity society has ever produced. Into this hellhole is cast C.F. a masked wrestler who’s not prepared to back down for anybody or anything.

What follows is non-stop excessive force and graphic carnage: a never-ending battle delivered in the raw primitivist art of an impassioned engrossed child…

Savage, cathartic and blackly funny this is violent juvenilia pushed beyond all limits into the darkest depths of absurdist comedy. Not for children, the faint-hearted or weak-stomached, this is extreme cartooning at its most visceral and pure.

© 2009 Johnny Ryan. All rights reserved.

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Rip Kirby: Buried Treasure Daily Strips 12 June -23 September 1950


By Alex Raymond (Pacific Comics Club)
No ISBN

Some strips are simply more addictive than narcotics or chocolate. After recently reviewing a giant-sized Rip Kirby collection (re-read after too many years in advance of an upcoming IDW compilation project promising to reproduce the entire saga) I simply couldn’t stop at just the one…

This complete softcover adventure follows immediately upon ‘Gunpowder Dreams’: released in 1980 and still occasionally available in shops and on the internet. You can’t miss it since the thing is a huge 340x245mm (that’s nearly 15 inches by 10) and its glossy white pages present another captivating tale of one of America’s most famous fictional detectives, drawn by one of the world’s most talented artists.

An intoxicating blend of 1950s style and fashion, this is another yarn that will suck you into a captivating world of adventure and resurgent post-war glamour, but this time with the added drama of a ruthless arch-enemy thrown into the mix, and all played against the backdrop of America’s post war fascination with the Italian glamour of La Dolce Vita…

During the 1930s Raymond made Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim and Secret Agent X-9 household names all over the world, but when the USA joined the War so did he. On returning to civilian life, like Milt Caniff and his iconic post-war adventurer Steve Canyon rather than rekindle old glories Raymond wanted something new.

From King Features Editor Ward Greene’s concept and scripts he designed a different kind of private detective: a rather unique individual: retired marine; intellectual, easy-going, musically and artistically inclined but physically powerful and who preferred to use his mind rather than fists and guns.

His steady girlfriend Judith “Honey” Dorian and mousy but competent manservant Desmond (a reformed burglar) completed a regular cast with plenty of depth and scope. Remington “Rip” Kirby debuted on March 4th 1946, to instant approbation and commercial success.

Greene wrote the scripts until 1952 when he was replaced by journalist Fred Dickenson and Raymond drew it until September 6th 1956, when, aged only 46, he died in a car crash. John Prentice assumed the art duties with Dickenson writing until 1986 when he left due to ill-health, from which time Prentice did that too. The feature closed shop on June 26th 1999 when Prentice retired.

Slick, polished and so very chic, old friend and flighty heiress Margie Pelham has found the man of her dreams in an Italian Count. Her lawyers are less ecstatic and want Rip to thoroughly investigate the uppity foreigner, so Honey Dorian is dispatched to accompany her old friend on the ocean cruise to Sorrento, but no one is aware of a lurking menace.

The Mangler was a brutal gangster brought low by Kirby, and he’d been craving revenge ever since. Now hooked up with a Nazi deserter he’s on his way to Sorrento too, in search of stolen treasure buried by the German in the very teeth of the allied invasion. The cash could set up the Mangler in a new life and the thought of settling with Kirby and his friends makes the brutal thug’s fingers itch and his mouth water…

This is another brilliantly stylish caper, packed full of tension, romance and lots of tricky plot twists, with oodles of action, beautifully executed by an absolute master of brush and pen. Just imagine Alfred Hitchcock in panels not movie screens…

Your chances of tracking down this gem are admittedly quite slim, but well worth the effort if you’re an art-lover, as Raymond’s drawing at this size is an unparalleled delight, but in fairness I should mention than the lettering here is appalling. I can only assume the art was shot from foreign printed copies (the rest of the world has always appreciated graphic arts more than us or the Americans) and lettered back into English by well-meaning but unprofessional hands.

Nevertheless these are still strips every fan should experience; even in the meagre dimensions modern strips are reprinted. Any Rip Kirby collections are a treat you simply cannot afford to miss. Let’s hope we’re not waiting too long…

© 1950, 1980 King Features. All Rights Reserved. Book © 1980 Pacific C.C.

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The Big Kahn


By Neil Kleid & Nicholas Cinquegrani (NBM/ComicsLit)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-561-0

When Rabbi Kahn died it shook the close-knit, devout community he had spent four decades building and guiding. But his funeral, where his first born son Avi delivered a eulogy and prepared to assume his father’s role, was a shambles. Rebellious and troubled daughter Lea preferred furtive sex in a synagogue broom-closet to her rightful place beside her grieving mother and young Eli was clearly in a state of shock.

So tempers naturally flared when the unsavoury gentile Roy Dobbs intruded upon the event demanding to see the body of his brother one final time…

With mixed emotions the surviving family and larger congregation are forced to confront a terrible truth. David Kahn, Holocaust survivor, brilliant rabbinical scholar, wise and loving parent and spiritual glue of an entire community for more than forty years, was in fact Donnie Dobbs: a two-bit grifter and con-man who came to the neighbourhood to fleece the yokels but found something better and stayed and grew and blossomed…

With his death everything has changed. The man they all knew was a lie, so doesn’t that mean that everything he said and did was too? Surely the children of David Kahn are tarred with same brush and destined to repeat his thoughts and deeds?

How the implications affect the Kahn children and their broken, bereft mother is a masterpiece of human scrutiny, related with deft skill and great understanding, and the discreet, masterfully underplayed black and white art is effective and compassionate, never intruding into the tale but always providing just what the reader needs to see.

Here’s an intriguing human drama that deserves the widest possible attention, so I’m stifling my usual impulse and pleading that somewhere a sensitive and creative independent film-maker has the sense to option it. The Big Kahn is a witty and powerful exploration of truths big and small set against the backdrop of a traditional Jewish American community, and cannily examines not only faith’s effect on individuals but how mortals shape religion…

Until such a time however you can enjoy one of the best dramas of the year just by picking up this lovely, thought-provoking book.

© 2009 Neil Kleid & Nicholas Cinquegrani.

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Elric at the End of Time


By Michael Moorcock, illustrated by Rodney Matthews (Paper Tiger)
ISBN: 1-85028 032-0

He doesn’t demonstrate it often enough but Michael Moorcock has a wicked, absurdist sense of humour. One occasion of this is marvelously captured and reinterpreted in this deliciously odd collaboration with fantasy illustrator and heavy metal/prog-rock art icon Rodney Matthews. The prose book this tale is taken from collects short stories of the doom-drenched last-Emperor of a dead race, with the titles tale deviating ever so slightly from the breast-beating norm…

Elric is a tragic incarnation of the Eternal Champion, reincarnated in every time, place and alternate dimension. His life is blood and tragedy, exacerbated by his dependence on a soul-drinking black sword and his sworn allegiance to the chimerical Lords of Chaos. But what happens when he is lost in a place where time has ended?

Misplaced from his proper situation he finds himself in the indulgent, entropic, oh-so-bored company of the Dancers at the End of Time where an effete and omnipotent group of beings are desperately trying to keep themselves amused until the inevitable finally happens.

Elric believes he’s been shanghaied to the realms of ultimate chaos – a belief his hosts are delighted to encourage – and only the duty-bound Una Persson, Top Agent of Time Central, cares about returning the lost Melnibonéan to his point of origin before all reality unravels…

This novella is a mock heroic, surreal delight, that revels in lancing its own pretensions, expanded to fill this lush 120 page album by the incredible, unique art work of Matthews who eschews sequential narrative for a panoramic series of (21) lavishly painted plates, spreads and vignettes and a further 11 illustrations ranging from cameos to spreads in eerie black and white.

Controversial among fans who either love or hate it, this is still a terrific read, outré and startling, and one that fantasy and illustration fans should see. Well worth the effort needed to track it down.
© 1987 Dragon’s World Ltd. Text © 1981 Michael Moorcock. Illustrations © 1981 Rodney Matthews. All Rights Reserved.

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All and Sundry – Uncollected Work 2004-2009


By Paul Hornschemeier (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-285-2

In his relatively short artistic career Paul Hornschemeier has produced relatively little work, but all of it has been of phenomenal quality and boldly dedicated to deeper themes and compelling expansions of the medium of graphic narrative. Its also manages to be funny sad and pretty all at once. Don’t take my word for it: acquire The Collected Sequential, The Three Paradoxes. Let Us be Perfectly Clear and the incredible Mother, Come Home and see for yourself.

While you’re at it, the perfect accompaniment for that enviable investigation is this delicious collection of art and ideas ranging from the broadest sketches, prose and ideas to fully finished and coloured strips and stories gathered from such disparate sources as the experimental strip anthology Mome to the back up strips produced for Dark Horse’s comic interpretation of Michael Chabon’s brilliant novel The Escapist.

Also included are assorted commercial illustrations from magazines such as the Wall Street Journal, Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Nickelodeon Magazine, Penguin Books and many others, designs and typography for the numerous foreign editions of his creations and many other visual treats from this always enchanting and thought-provoking creator.

If you want – or need – a peek inside the head of a truly creative force, or just love great drawing and fine amusing, sad whimsy this is a book you must have.

© 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 Paul Hornschemeier. All Rights Reserved. The Tick © & ™ Ben Edlund; The Worst Comic Book Heroes That Never Existed written by an © Michael Kupperman; The Escapist © & ™ Michael Chabon

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Batman: The Black Casebook


By various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-84856-312-4

Despite having his name writ large on the cover the only thing Grant Morrison produced for this weird and wonderful collection is the introduction, so if he’s the reason you buy Batman you’re in for a little disappointment. However if you feel like seeing the incredible stories that inspired him, then you’re in for a bizarre and baroque treat as this collection features a coterie of tales considered far too outlandish and fanciful to be canonical for the last few decades but now reintroduced to the mythology of the Dark Knight as a casebook of the “strangest cases ever told!”.

Tales from the anodyne 1950s (with just a little overlapping touch of the 1960s) always favoured plot over drama – indeed a strong argument could be made that all DC’s post-war costumed crusaders actually shared the same character (and yes I’m including Wonder Woman) – so the narrative drive focuses on comfortably familiar situations and outlandish themes and paraphernalia: but as a kid they simply blew me away. They still do.

Starting things off is a ‘A Partner for Batman’ (Batman #65 June/July 1951) by Bill Finger, Lew Sayre Schwartz and Charles Paris, wherein Batman’s training of a foreign hero is misconstrued as a way of retiring Robin, whilst a trip out west introduces the Dynamic Duo to their Native American analogues in ‘Batman… Indian Chief!’ (issue #86, September 1954, by France Herron, Sheldon Moldoff and Stan Kaye), and ‘The Batmen of All Nations!’ (Detective Comics #215, January 1955 by Edmond Hamilton, Moldoff and Paris) took the sincere flattery a step further by introducing nationally-themed imitations from Italy, England, France, South America and Australia, all attending a convention that’s doomed to disaster…

A key story of this period introduced a strong psychological component to Batman’s origins in ‘The First Batman’ (Detective Comics #235, September 1955) courtesy of Finger, Moldoff and Kaye, and the international knock-offs returned to meet Superman and a new shocking mystery hero in ‘The Club of Heroes’ (Worlds Finest Comics #89, July/August 1957 by Hamilton and the magnificent Dick Sprang and Stan Kaye).

‘The Man who Ended Batman’s Career’ introduced the malevolent Professor Milo (Detective Comics #247, September 1957, Finger, Moldoff & Paris) who used psychological warfare and scientific mind-control to attack our heroes. The same creative team brought him back for an encore in Batman #112, in ‘Am I Really Batman?’

France Herron scripted one of Sprang and Paris’ best ever art collaborations in the incredible, spectacular ‘Batman… Superman of Planet X!’ (Batman #113, February 1958) and Finger, Moldoff & Paris introduced the Gotham Guardian’s most controversial “partner” in ‘Batman Meets Bat-Mite’(Detective Comics #267, May 1959), but ‘The Rainbow Creature’ (Batman #134, September 1960) is a rather tame monster-mash from Finger and Moldoff which only serves to make the next tale more impressive.

‘Robin Dies at Dawn’ is an eerie epic which first appeared in Batman #156, June 1963 by Finger, Moldoff & Paris (supplemented by, but not dependent upon, a Robin solo adventure sadly omitted from this collection). In it Batman experiences truly hideous travails on an alien world culminating in the death of his young partner. I’m stopping there as it’s a great story and plays a crucial part in the latter day sagas Batman: R.I.P., and The Black Glove. Buy this book and read it yourself…

But wait: There’s more! From the very end times of the old-style tales comes the inexplicably daft but brilliant ‘The Batman Creature!’ (Batman #162, March 1964) by an unknown writer, Moldoff and Paris, wherein Robin and Batwoman must cope with a Caped Crusader transformed into a rampaging giant monster. Shades of King Kong, Bat-fans!

Even though clearly collected to cash in on the success of the modern Morrison vehicle these stories have an intrinsic worth and power of their own, and these angst-free exploits from a different age still have a magic to captivate and enthrall. Do not dismiss them and don’t miss this book!

© 1951, 1954-1960, 1963, 1964, 2009 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.