In the mid-1960s one TV show took the world by storm: Batman! But did you know how popular he was in Japan?
Let's look back at a fascinating slice of comic book history - BatManga!
The 1966 Batman TV show created a wave of Batmania in Japan. Batman toys, records and games flew off the shelves. The popular weekly magazine Shōnen King were determined to capitalise on it.
So they approached DC Comics for the rights to write and draw their own Batman stories for the Japanese market. DC agreed, and these were published in Shōnen King between 1966 and 1967.
Jiro Kuwata was given the job of illustrating the Japanese Batman stories, having created a number of other manga heroes such as 8 Man and Maboroshi Tantae. He gave his Batman a similar manga style.
Many years later American graphic artist Chip Kidd found out about these Japanese Batman strips from avid collector Saul Ferris. With DC's agreement he bagan to collate and republish the stories, giving them the name BatManga!
BatManga stories don't feature the usual Batman villains like The Joker or The Penguin instead Jiro My data created a new range of enemies: from the sinister Doctor Faceless...
... to the epic immortal foe Lord Death Man.
The BatManga anthology was published in 2009 and contains a wealth of photos, stories and strips about Batman in Japan. Do check it out if you can
More superheroes another time..
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let's take a look at the extraordinary work of Victorian illustrator and cat lover Louis Wain!
Louis Wain was born in London in 1860. Although he is best known for his drawings of cats he started out as a Victorian press illustrator. His work is highly collectable.
Wain had a very difficult life; born with a cleft lip he was not allowed to attend school. His freelance drawing work supported his mother and sisters after his father died. Aged 23 he married his sisters' governess, Emily Richardson, 10 years his senior.
Over the years a number of people have asked me if I have a favourite pulp film. Well I do. It's this one.
This is the story of Alphaville...
Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (1965) was Jean-Luc Godard’s ninth feature film. A heady mix of spy noir, science fiction and the Nouvelle Vague at its heart is a poetic conflict between a hard-boiled secret agent and a supercomputer’s brave new world.
British writer Peter Cheyney had created the fictitious American investigator Lemmy Caution in 1936. As well as appearing in 10 novels Caution featured in over a dozen post-war French films, mostly played by singer Eddie Constantine whom Godard was keen to work with.
Al Hartley may have been famous for his work on Archie Comics, but in the 1970s he was drawn to a very different scene: God.
Today in pulp I look back at Hartley's work for Spire Christian Comics - a publisher that set out to spread the groovy gospel...
Spire Christian Comics was an offshoot of Spire Books, a mass-market religious paperback line launched in 1963 by the Fleming H. Revell company. The point of Spire Books was to get religious novels into secular stores, so a move into comic books in 1972 seemed a logical choice.
The idea was to create comic book versions of popular Spire Books like The Cross and the Switchblade; David Wilkinson's autobiographical tale of being a pastor in 1960s New York. It had already been turned into a film, but who could make it into a comic?
It was a phenomenon, spawning a franchise that has lasted over fifty years. It's also a story with many surprising influences.
Today in pulp I look back at a sociological science-fiction classic, released today in 1968: Planet Of The Apes!
Pierre Boulle is probably best known for his 1952 novel Bridge On The River Kwai, based on his wartime experiences in Indochina. So it was possibly a surprise when 11 years later he authored a science fiction novel.
However Boulle had been a Free French secret agent during the war. He was captured in 1943 by Vichy forces in Vietnam and sentenced to hard labour. This experience of capture would shape his novel La Planète Des Singes.
Today I'm looking back at the work of British graphic designer Abram Games!
Abram Games was born in Whitechapel, London in 1914. His father, Joseph, was a photographer who taught him the art of colouring by airbrush.
Games attended Hackney Downs School before dropping out of Saint Martin’s School of Art after two terms. His design skills were mainly self-taught by working as his father’s assistant.