Black Bat guest appearance in The Spider: Extreme Prejudice

I mentioned in an earlier post that while I'd been aware of The Black Bat character for some time, he didn't fully capture my interest until I heard of Moonstone Books' "Return of the Originals" event.  I began looking into the individual characters involved in that storyline and The Bat seemed like someone I could get into.

When the book finally was available for purchase, I initially got turned off by the ridiculously high shipping charges.  I was hoping to bundle the RotO graphic novel with a few issues of the Black Bat book, but only the first issue of that series was ever made available on the Moonstone Books website.  The whole thing pretty well slipped my mind after a while.

With Dynamite Entertainment now showing The Black Bat some love, my interest in the character has been stoked again.  I've obtained Moonstone's graphic novel (from Amazon) and am presently working my way through that.

Having looked further into that version of The Bat, I've come across a couple more of his appearances.  One is rather obvious, if you clicked on the links above.  The Black Bat was involved in another "return", this time of the Monsters.

Eh. I'm usually all for different interpretations, but that one might stretch the levels of my open-mindedness.

The other appearance is a little harder to find out about.  It seems The Black Bat guest-stars in a Spider prose book.

The SPIDER: Extreme prejudice SC:
Cover: Malcolm McClinton
6×9, 288pgs, $18.95

New short stories of SEARING WHITE HOT PROSE starring pulpdom’s most violent and ruthless crime fighter ever: THE SPIDER! More just than the law, more dangerous than the Underworld…hated, feared and wanted by both!

One cloaked, fanged, border-line crazy denizen of the dark force-feeding hard justice with a pair of 45′s!

Guest starring: The Black Bat, The Green Ghost, and Operator 5!

James Chambers, CJ Henderson, Will Murray, Ron Fortier, Rik Hoskin, Don Roff, Matthew Baugh, Eric Fein, Gary Phillips, and more!

I would assume The Black Bat only appears in one of the stories.  The Spider is not a character that has ever drawn me to read his stories but perhaps I can use this book as a way to be better introduced to the various guest-stars.

In any event, I thought completists should be aware of its existence.  The book is included in Moonstone May 2013 solicitations.

The Black Bat Omnibus vol 2 now available!

Well, that was a pleasant surprise...

Based on the comments about the first volume on the Altus Press website, the first volume of the Black Bat Omnibus came out around this time in 2010.  I picked up a copy for myself only recently and was working my way through it slowly, anticipating a long wait until another such book would be available.

I asked about volume two in the comments section and it was pointed out to me that it is currently available on Amazon (and appears to have been since March 15th).  Combined, the two books contain the first 6 Black Bat stories from Black Book Detective (late 1939, early 1940). Click on either image at right to be taken to that book's amazon page and view full product details (and in the case of the first book, a couple of reader reviews).

Perfect rainy evening reading at the cottage. Can hardly wait!

Miss Fury: Malibu Edition

Man, I just LOVED the Protectors.

That book mixed a number of public domain heroes, such Amazing-Man and Man of War, with some new characters created by Malibu Comics.  It was originally scheduled to be a six-issue series, but its early popularity caused it to be extended (to an eventual 20 issues) and led to a number of spinoff series and one-shots.

In the tenth issue, an all-female group of terrorists called the Cat Pack, led by Black Fury, storms the White House and takes the president and his family hostage.  The Protectors leap into action and free the hostages, but Black Fury escapes and manages to take the president's slacker grandson with her!

But all is not lost because, as the Protectors and the president discuss their next move, Miss Fury makes her grand (re)appearance.

At the time, I didn't know this character from a hole in the ground.  It "felt" like a big reveal, but I didn't really get it.

As mentioned earlier, Malibu had published a four-issue limited series featuring their version of the character through an imprint called Adventure Comics.  The Malibu Fury was the granddaughter of the original.

This particular storyline continued in issues 11 and 12 of the Protectors.  The standard fighting among heroes who meet for the first time takes place, with Fury kicking her fair share of ass.  She turns down an offer to join the team at the conclusion of the last issue, but does reappear later in the series.

The books were written by R.A. Jones and pencilled by Tom Derenick.  Issues 10 and 11 were inked by Bobby Rae.

"The Black Bat Strikes" by MonkeyUnitStudios

From time to time I'll post artwork of The Black Bat or (but preferably "and") Miss Fury that I happen to come across.

The image below was lifted from deviantart.  Click on it to be taken to the originating page which displays a larger version, credit and background.

Dynamite's Bat/Fury June solicitations

Well, I didn't intend for this blog to be so Dynamite-specific but it's just working out that way for the moment.

Below are the solicitations for the Black Bat and Miss Fury series, as well as the conclusion of the Masks mini.  Miss Fury figures prominently on the cover, which is good to see.

THE BLACK BAT # 2
Brian Buccellato (w)
Ronan Cliquet (a)
Jae Lee, Joe Benitez, Ardian Syaf, Billy Tan (c)
Fans & retailers, order the cover of your choice!
FC • 32 pages • $3.99 • Teen+ • 6/5

The redemptive quest of The Black Bat continues! As the cloaked hero launches his campaign against his criminal former clients, he must save the police from a mysterious captor. What darkness from Tony’s past threatens his newfound war on crime?

MISS FURY # 3
Rob Williams (w)
Jack Herbert (a)
Joe Benitez, Paul Renaud, Billy Tan, Wagner Reis (c)
Fans & retailers, order the cover of your choice!
FC • 32 pages • $3.99 • Teen+ • 6/5

In 1943, Miss Fury is drunk and suicidal, dangling off the edge of Manhattan’s highest skyscraper. In 2013, she’s racing in a high-speed bike chase through Washington, DC, in pursuit of time-traveling Nazi agents. Which reality is true? Meanwhile, CIA Agent Harmon uncovers the true identity of those who unhinged her from time…

MASKS # 8 (OF 8)
Chris Roberson (w) Dennis Calero (a)
Alex Ross, Ardian Syaf, Sean Chen, Stephen Segovia (c)
4 regular covers will be shipped in equal ratios
FC • 32 pages • $3.99 • Teen+ • 6/26
The startling conclusion to the best-selling miniseries! The mysterious master of the Justice Party stands revealed – but is it too late for the greatest crime fighters of all time to stop the party’s far-reaching plans? Join The Shadow, Green Hornet, Zorro, The Spider, Miss Fury, and other pulp legends as they bring two-fisted justice to those who would corrupt the law!

I need to give credit for the above to Barry Reese, who posted Dynamite's entire June solicitations on his own blog.  He actually beat Dynamite themselves to the punch, after a fashion, since the company's website has yet to include them as I write this.  I believe comicvine.com first posted them earlier in the week, or late last week.

Dynamite's Masks #5 scheduled for release on March 20th

This may be jumping the gun a little bit.  Dynamite has not always had the best track record in terms of releasing books on time but I believe they have been punctual with this (limited) series.

Being that this is the 5th issue of the book, it may be rather pointless by now to go into great detail about it.  That said, a Black Bat reimagining in this series was handled more as a surprise than a selling point in the early going.  He appears in only a handful of pages throughout the first three issues (I don't have the 4th one yet) but it seems as though we'll finally see him full Bat-glory in #5.

Writer: Chris Roberson
Art: Dennis Calero
The Justice Party tightens its grip on the Empire State, and the vigilantes and heroes are preparing to go on the offensive. The Shadow, Miss Fury, Green Hornet, Black Bat and the others have gathered enough evidence to prove that the public officials who have established the new fascist police state are merely the pawns of more sinister forces who lurk unseen. No one has heard from the Spider since he left for Albany to investigate the new governor, and he is feared dead, captured, or worse. And while Green Hornet, Black Terror, Miss Fury, and others join the Shadow in preparing to attack the hidden masters of the Justice Party, two fugitives take to the streets as Zorro and the Black Bat.

The Masks version and the character appearing in his own series in May are clearly two different characters, a standard Dynamite practice.  Neither is fully committed to the "real" Black Bat's origin.

I'll be curious to see whether the 30's version continues on beyond Masks.  It's difficult to judge without having read the modern-day ongoing series yet, of course, but I suspect that the pulp version will be more appealing to me overall.

Unfortunately, the above cover is about the only one on which the Black Bat is particularly prominent.  Understandable, since he is not as established as the Green Hornet or the Shadow.  And he can't be drawn in the following fashion to mass appeal.

Not a fan of that kind of thing, frankly, but it comes with the territory, I suppose.

The Excelsior version

In this blog's first post, I explained that part of the appeal of the Black Bat character for me was the number of different versions available. To this point, I've only posted the Dynamite solicitations in order to be up to date with those, but today I had a closer look at the Excelsior Webcomics edition.

Clicking on the cover above will take you to the 12-page (to this point, the story is clearly incomplete) web comic.  Scroll to the bottom to start reading.

It's difficult to know for certain whether this project is still active.  Judging from their Facebook group, page ten was announced in November of last year.  Only two pages have been released since, so even if it is active, it is progressing at a rather glacial pace.  Still, we'll keep an eye on them for some more free Black Bat goodness.

Solicitation: Dynamite's Miss Fury #2

Bloody hell how I love this cover!

Writer: Rob Williams
Art: Jack Herbert

Transported through time to 2013, the original pulp heroine is tasked with hunting down cloaked Nazi secret agents in modern-day Washington. But as she suffers ever worsening mental flashes back to the 1940s and to a war-ravaged future, Miss Fury is forced to question her own sanity. Is any of this real? What are the giant triangular craft hovering over future Manhattan? And is the man she's supposed to assassinate really a Nazi agent, or is this just murder?

Scheduled for release on May 8th (at the same time as Black Bat #1, conveniently).  Click on the cover image to see the other options offered that week.

Solicitation: Dynamite's The Black Bat #1

Writer: Brian Buccellato
Art: Ronan Cliquet

A classic pulp from the 30's returns in this modern take on a seminal character that inspired several well-known comic icons. Tony Quinn is a brash Defense Attorney to the mob who compromises his ethics for financial gain. When he refuses to cross the line and commit murder, he is tortured and blinded by his gangster employers. But when a fortuitous meeting with a covert agency gives him a chance to make amends, Tony transforms into the Black Bat and embarks on a redemptive quest to right the wrongs of his past.

Here again, Dynamite takes certain liberties with the character.  The original version of The Black Bat is certainly not employed by the mob or healed by a covert agency.  I am open-minded to that but Dynamite has been critisized a number of times for making significant changes to established characters.  It will be interesting to see whether their take is well accepted by purists.

As with the Miss Fury #1 solicitation post from yesterday, clicking on the subscription incentive cover below will open the Dynamite solicitation page for this book.  It displays several other cover options for the book.

Solicitation: Dynamite's Miss Fury #1

Writer: Rob Williams
Art: Jack Herbert

THE PULP HEROINE RETURNS! When Miss Fury foils a wartime plot by Nazi secret agents, she is catapulted through time... or so it seems. Is she really careening from past to future and back, or has she lost her mind? And if her sanity remains intact, can one lone heroine possibly hope to end World War II by herself, a conflict still waged into the year 2013? As witness to generations of bloodshed and violence, Miss Fury has lots of righteous rage... and anger is her fearsome power!

The book has a release date of April 3rd.

Dynamite has a history of adding their own take to existing characters and they appear to be doing so again here with a time travel/insanity aspect. Writer Rob Williams (Daken: Dark Wolverine, Ghost Rider, Robocop/Terminator) explains this a bit more thoroughly in the following except from an interview with Comics Book Resources.

Miss Fury is still Marla Drake, Manhattan socialite, but we've given her a new origin story where she's not a superhero at the beginning. Marla is bored and fairly amoral when we meet her in 1943 -- she's a thief who doesn't need the money. When she runs across Nazi secret agents, Marla finds herself thrown into a time machine; the result is she's fighting World War II in 2013 and beyond. This woman who believed in absolutely nothing at the start of our tale asks herself what she's willing to fight for.

You can think of this series of "Miss Fury" as "Homeland" meets "Back To The Future." The catch is Miss Fury is constantly shifting through time -- she has no control over it. One minute she's in the '40s, the next it's 2013 and then she's into the far future. There's cloaked, armoured Nazi super agents hiding as major political figures in our time, and Miss Fury is told to assassinate them. The question then becomes, is she being told the truth? Is she being sent to assassinate innocent people? Or is the time traveling all in her head and she's actually gone insane?

The above cover is by Alex Ross, as is the subscription variant below.  Click on it to be taken to Dynamite's solicitation page where the other cover options, as well as some interior art, are displayed.

Welcome to The Bat & The Fury!

"But there must be some means of identification," Quinn pursed his lips.  "Something by which men can recognize me.  An insignia - a name, Silk - I have it!  I've been blind - as blind as a bat.  I still am as far as anyone knows.  I shall prowl during the night.  Bats are blind and fly by night also.  I'll be the bat, Silk.  The Black Bat!"

If you've visited my other blogs, this one may be slightly surprising. Of late, my focus had been on Canadian comics and characters. And it still is.

However, The Black Bat and Miss Fury are two characters in which I've had an interest for some time.

In the case of Miss Fury, I first became aware of her in the early 90's. I was a huge fan of the Protectors book from Malibu. She appeared in only a handful of issues, but a number of fans expressed excitement at her inclusion on the team resulting from a 4-issue mini-series published a little earlier by Adventure Comics. In any event, I enjoyed the character but assumed that she "died" along with the rest of the Protectors. I didn't really get the whole "public domain" thing at the time.

I've also been a Green Hornet fan for a while and bought Dynamite's Masks limited series on that basis. Miss Fury's involvement in that book, as well as recent news of her own series spinning out of it, was a pleasant surprise.

As for The Black Bat, Moonstone's version of the character is the one that caught my eye some time ago as they were preparing their "Return of the Originals" event. I was a hugely interested in Dynamite's Project Superpowers book (and its various spinoffs) at the time, so Moonstone's plans seemed to be right up my alley too.

I only vaguely knew of the Bat up until that point, but reading about him made me realise how many characters he helped inspire (at least allegedly; I know there's some debate about that). His origins and abilities mirror those of Batman, Two-Face and Dr. Mid-Nite, among others.

The Black Bat is currently appearing in Dynamite's very fine Masks book as well and will also have a series of his own starting in May, the first issue of which is scheduled to be released at the same time as Miss Fury's second issue. For both characters, the solo series appear to be different versions of the characters appearing in Masks, which is not a new phenomenon for Dynamite.

Another aspect of The Black Bat which I've found interesting is his sudden surge in popularity in recent years. Aside from Moonstone and Dynamite, other publishers have put their spin on the character. I'll use this blog to help sort out the various versions.

As I chip away at all that, I am presently reading the first volume of The Black Bat Omnibus, seen at the top of the right column. It contains the character's first stories from 1939 and only a few chapters in, I'm completely hooked. Clicking on the image will take you on the Amazon.com page from which you can order it for yourself. I don't believe you'll be disappointed.