The Sunday Review: "Bat-Manga: The Secret History of Batman in Japan"

By Chip Kidd with Geoff Spear and Saul Ferris (Pantheon Books, hardcover $60, softcover $29.95)

On sale now.

In one story from "Bat-Manga!" — the comics compendium lovingly edited by graphic-design rock star Chip Kidd — an already mutating scientist offers himself up for further research, imploring the Dark Knight to kill him should the experiment go awry. When the conflicted Caped Crusader fails to put the kibosh on the doc's catastrophic transformation, his cowardice throws the fate of the world into peril. Ultimately, "The Man Who Quit Being Human" is a moral tale of suicide as sacrifice, a metaphor for science as caution and an allegory for Nippon's shell-shocked lessons of WWII.

And yet "Bat-Manga!" is not the weighty, thinky "Secret History of Batman in Japan" that its subtitle suggests. Instead, it's an exhilarating pop-cultural artifact: This here is an alternate Batman, as interpreted in the '60s through an Asian filter. Kidd & Co. — photographer Geoff Spear, co-researcher Saul Ferris and translator Anne Ishii — have essentially renovated illustrator Jiro Kuwata's short-lived, long-forgotten Japanese take on the title, which hit the East in the wake of the campy TV series' international popularity. (Kidd and his publisher, Pantheon, have recently been criticized for the absence of Kuwata's name on the cover and spine. Though this oversight is indeed debatable, it should also be noted that "Bat-Manga!" feels like a radical packaging of Kuwata's work and that the creator is interviewed and given multiple credits within its pages.)

The fact that their collection, chiefly assembled from Kidd and Ferris' EBay vigilance, is admittedly spotty, merely lends more exoticism to the collection. Take our hero's dalliance with the dastardly, if fabulously named, Go Go Magician. Trapped in a block of ice, Batman fires up his "safe-cracking hand torch" to melt his way out of the chamber. One glitch: The torch's flame sucks up all the oxygen before he can burn his way out. With the next issue nowhere to be found, it simply ends there with Batman like we've never seen him — foolish, collapsed, facing certain death.

What emerges is a childlike discovery of the material enabled by Spear's interstitial snapshots of vintage imported Bat-toys, as well as Kidd's wondrous knack for playing with size, texture and color — techniques that elicit lingering gazes at the images at hand. Here, he zooms into every weathered pore of Kuwata's propulsive, now sepia-toned artwork as Batman throws down with sideshow villains like the hideous Dr. Faceless, the skeletal Lord Death Man — not to mention Professor Gorilla, the cerebrally advanced primate who unleashes a can of whoop-ass on humanity in retaliation for crimes against the animal kingdom! Never mind the absurdist set-ups or ridiculously frill-less dialogue (such as the preponderance of the parting shot, "Mwa ha ha ha!"), these are pulp-fiction foes who maim and dismember and kill. And when push comes to shove, so will this cool and unusual Batman.

-- Nisha Gopalan

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All images courtesy of Pantheon Books

EXCLUSIVE

The designer talks about his "secret history of Batman in Japan" and reveals his favorite screen version of the hero -- and it's not "The Dark Knight."

In a world that judges a book by its cover, Chip Kidd is a visual genius in high demand. The author, graphic designer and pop-culture connoisseur is the art director for American publisher Alfred A. Knopf, but like many of the superheroes he adores, Kidd has a secret identity as a “Batman purist.”

The 44-year-old (who has designed memorable covers for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, James Ellroy, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard and Michael Crichton) had a childhood fascination with the caped crusader that has turned into an full-fledged obsession. More than a collector, Kidd has been both an archival force and a sort of safari hunter when it comes to intepretations of the superhero throughout pop culture.

That leads to Kidd’s latest book, “Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan," now in stores and uncovering a nearly forgotten history: At the peak of the 1960s Batman craze, Shonen King, the weekly manga anthology, licensed the rights to publish its own Batman and Robin tales in which the Dynamic Duo brawled with aliens, mutated dinosaurs and immortal villains. But the yearlong run of stories were never collected in Japan nor translated into English ... until now. The new release from Pantheon Books includes hundreds of pages of Batman manga comics more than four decades old alongside striking photographs of vintage Japanese Batman toys. There is also a $60 limited edition with a different cover and an adventure written by Jiro Kuwata, the manga guru who wrote and drew the 1960s material. All 7,000 copies of those limited editions are signed by Kidd.

Kidd will be in Los Angeles signing copies of his book at Meltdown Comics (7522 Sunset Boulevard) on Nov. 12 at 7 p.m. A new writer here at the Los Angeles Times, Yvonne Villarreal, chatted with Kidd the other day and put together this Hero Complex Q&A. Hope you enjoy.

YV: What is it about Batman that first captivated you?

Kidd: I was 2 years old when the TV show [starring Adam West] came out and so that was the main thing that got me into it. And, of course, it was a revolutionary show for its time so it had this massive appeal even to kids at a very young age just from the way it looked and the way it moved. And then, of course, as you get older, you start reading the comics. I got more into the story of it and the whole mythology around the character. It was well constructed as a piece of lore.

YV: As a graphic artist, do you find Batman aesthetically appealing?

Kidd: Definitely. I liked the whole design of the character and the way that he looked sort of like a demon even though he was a good guy.

YV: You’ve designed highly recognizable book jackets, including "Jurassic Park" and "The Road."  Can you recall the first Batman cover that caught your attention?

Kidd: I must have been like 2 or 3. My brother was two years older. It would have been a Detective Comics from like 1966 or '67. Definitely would have been drawn by Carmine Infantino.

YV: What was it like, as an artist, to see some of the illustrations from the Japanese comics that are included in the book?

Kidd: They’re very unique. What’s interesting about it ... for Batman fans, the real surprise is that they’ll have never seen any of this or even heard of it. That’s pretty radical. That’s like somebody finding five new Beatles songs that no one has ever heard of.