Bob Kane – Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Al Plastino — Batman’s Watery Doom!

June 1, 2021 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Batman Daily Strip — July 8, 1969

Bat sheets. Bat soap. Bat pajamas. Bat-a-rangs…

As nearly any pop culture fan knows, (especially — ahem — older ones like myself) the hugely successful camp 1966 Batman TV show launched a plethora of bat merchandise.

So it’s no surprise that DC launched a revival of the Batman comic strip, which had a successful, but brief run in the Golden Age.

The daily strips initially mimicked the campiness of the TV show, but ultimately moved closer to more traditional DC superhero stories, as did the comics after the show was cancelled in early 1968.

Al Plastino handled the art chores for many of the strips, following Sheldon Moldoff and Joe Giella.

The strip managed to soldier on until early 1973. Finally managing to collect all of them — the dailies and Sundays — into a three-volume LOAC series was an archival highlight of mine at IDW.

(It only took five years or so to convince DC to let us do it. Perseverance won the day.)

*The original art for the third and final volume of the Silver Age Batman strip books is featured here.*

Enrique Alcatena — Haunting Homage

November 3, 2019 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Batman of Arkham #1 (Elseworlds one-shot), June, 2000

When you think of homages — or outright swipes — to classic comic book covers, a few classic and obvious issues come to mind:

Action #1
Fantastic Four #1
X-men #141

But there’s an issue slightly less obvious that may be the record holder with the most homages, especially with the same character:

Detective #31 (1939) by Bob Kane is just the third Batman cover ever, and a great one. It inspired Neal Adams to create his own version about thirty years later, and at that point, the floodgates opened. See below for as near a complete gallery as I could assemble. (Some are looser than others, but they all aim to capture the spirit of original cover.)

Meanwhile, on this gorgeous original cover by Alcatena (why isn’t he doing more comic book work?!) third time was a charm for me. I was under-bidder when it came up at auction. Shortly thereafter, when a major art dealer had it for sale, I missed it, and it sold again.

But that owner only had the cover a short while before he sold (or traded) it back to the same dealer, and this time I quickly managed to stake my claim on this beautifully detailed cover.