At Midgard Comics one Saturday afternoon, I picked up something I’d long wanted to see — the reprinted pulp adventures of the Black Bat, a black-caped, hooded crime-fighter who was coincidentally almost identical to Batman.
The Black Bat’s origin — a DA who’d had acid thrown in his face by a criminal — inspired the Batman villain Two-Face’s. And the Black Bat also anticipated Marvel’s Daredevil. Tony Quinn is thought to be blind. No one knows that a secret operation has restored his sight, or that a weird side effect of the procedure has given him super senses — the ability to see in darkness
The adventures of a “Bat-Man” created for the pulps play a little differently than those of one created for comics. The Black Bat relies on the lethal support of guns. You find less emphasis on spectacular physical derring-do, a slightly cagier protagonist who, because you are now aware of his interior life, seems more anxious and less perfectly self-assured.
Seeing someone as a superman always requires an outside vantage point, a certain distance from their watchful perch on that Chrysler Building Art Deco gargoyle.
The Black Bat’s first appearance in Black Book Detective 1 was cover-dated July 1939, while Batman’s debut in Detective Comics 27 was May 1939. That means the characters were being created simultaneously and independently.
Naturally, they eyed each other warily, but editor Whitney Ellsworth, who had worked for both publishers, worked out a deal — Batman would stay out of the pulps if Black Bat would stay out of the comics.
Batman lived up to his end of the agreement, but the sneakier character, the Black Bat, managed to get into comic books. “Tony Quinn” became “Tony Colby,” and the Black Bat became an owlish superhero called the Mask, for the first 20 issues of Exciting Comics.
I always regard the appearance of the characters as synchronicity. The fates decreed that, one way or another, we were going to have a Batman.
Bob Doncaster wrote: Heard of the character but unfamiliar with him. Good info
ReplyDeleteTom Stewart wrote: A few years ago, on a buying call, (when I was dealing in comics) I was called to a gentleman's house who had a storage locker full of stuff. I'd been there before, and has he was afraid of being ripped off, he would 'research' all his stuff and put prices on them. I always called this 'Antiques Roadshow Syndrome'. His prices always neglected to take into account condition, of course.
ReplyDeleteWell...
One this day, he's got a stack of stuff, mostly price way above actual retail, in this stack was the first appearance of 'The Black Bat', minus back cover. I think he'd priced this at ten bucks. I knew exactly what it was when I saw it. I gave him a fair price for just about everything, except, that. On that particular pulp, I took him at his price.
Edward Lee Love wrote: I like the Black Bat pulp stories. There was another Black Bat before him. He was a detective but his real name is never given. He's on the trail for an elusive criminal, but the stories concern other crimes that he solves along the way.
ReplyDeleteGiven how many Bats and Black Bats there were in the pulps, dime novels, and paper whites on both sides of the pond decades leading up to Batman, the creation of Batman does seem somewhat inevitable.