The Bat and The Scar

It looks increasingly like Spider fans' loss are The Black Bat's fans' gain.

Moonstone Books gave The Spider a lot of attention over the past few years but now that they no longer have publishing rights to the character, they appear to be directing their energy towards Black Bat projects.

The Black Bat Facebook page recently made reference to a team-up book between our man and a character named The Purple Scar to be published by Moonstone.  I admit to not being particularly familiar with The Purple Scar so a little research was required.

There were only four stories published during the pulp era featuring this character. Altus Press has reprinted them in one volume.

The Purple Scar is a famous plastic surgeon, Miles Murdock. Dr. Murdoch's brother, a police officer, is murdered and during the attack, acid is poured onto is face causing tremendous damage to his features. His outrage at the brutality of the attack inspires Miles Murdock to create a mask based on his late brother's disfigurement and to fight crime.

Evidently, the fine folks at Airship 27 found The Purple Scar interesting enough to shine the spotlight on him.  They released a four-story anthology (176 pages in total) based on the character this past October and as you can see from the cover below, they made the scar mask far more graphic than that of the original.

How cool is that?  Click here to order the book from Amazon.

The frequency with which The Black Bat is cast into team-ups with characters such as Zorro (in Masks), Domino Lady, Captain Action, etc. is an unexpected treat.  I didn't anticipate that when I became heavily interested in the character. In this case, there appear to be quite a few similarities between Scar and The Black Bat so I'll be curious to see how the creative team (Ron Fortier and Rob Davis) gives each his own voice, so to speak.