Bummer News From Bud

I have a Google alert set up so that whenever "The Black Bat" appears in the news, in articles, etc., I receive an e-mail notification.

That often means that I am made aware of a baseball/cricket player using a black bat, pro wrestler Sting making an appearance somewhere, Jack White's Black Bat Licorice song, the horrid black bat flower and a variety of other subjects that have nothing at all to do with Anthony Quinn, masked nemesis of crime. But today's alert did, and the news wasn't good.

I was directed to Bud's Art Books website. Bud sells...well...books, including the Sanctum reprints of the Black Bat stories from Black Book Detective.

Since I was there anyway, I looked to see if anything new had been added of late. I had read some time ago that Sanctum's 10th issue of The Black Bat was scheduled for this month. #9 had only recently been released so that seemed unlikely. Hopefully Bud would set me straight as to #10's release date.

Alas, Bud did so but indirectly. He included the following information with the description of #9.

Publication note: I spoke with publisher Anthony Tollin in October 2017 and was told that this series and The Spider will now appear on an annual basis, which may help explain the long wait between last issue and this one.

Blargh. Altus Press releases have slowed to a crawl and now this. Collecting the classics is turning into a chore.

But let's not shoot the messenger with twin .45s. Between the quality of preview images (see below) and his own description of the product, Bud does a great job selling these and his shipping charges are the best I've seen. I might just give him a little business soon even if he ruined my evening. ;-)

Good Things Come In Fours

From Lucky Comics' Facebook page:

New this Winter: Unknown Tales #2 - With TWO origin stories: The Rotting Corpse and the Golden Age Black Bat!

Sweet.

These books are only 8 pages long so the plan is for The Black Bat's portion to take up the last four.

Meanwhile, work progresses on Lucky's modern day version of the character. The cover revealed earlier is now showing a little colour. I've added it to the Lucky Comics page above, but here it is below.

Four pages from that book are going to be made available to download for free on Christmas Day so after you're done opening presents, float on over to Lucky Comics for some Bat goodness.

We Are Experiencing A Lull

Aside from Lucky Comics, it seems that publication of Black Bat material has ground to a halt for the time being. Probably the most we can hope for, at least early in the new year, are more reprints of original tales from the 1940s from Altus Press and/or Adventure House.

I was using the free time that was thrust upon me to add to the Pabel Fledermaus cover collection.  With several hundred Black Bat stories published in Germany, that's a task I may never live to see fulfilled to my expectation. But while searching out more covers from that series, I found out that the Black Bat caught on to some degree in other parts of the world as well.

From what I've been able to uncover, DetektivMagasinet was published in Norway between 1928 and 1966. It included a few Black Bat stories, under the name Svarta Pantern, but did not embrace the character to the degree that Pabel Kriminalroman did when they made the character their leading feature.

Somewhat oddly, Svarta Pantern actually translates to Black Panther, not Black Bat, so I am slightly curious as to how the translation handled references to the character's appearance, specifically the ribbed cape made to look like bat wings.

And the pretense of being blind was so much more appropriate to a bat-themed character. It seems like deviating from that causes more problems than it solves.

In any event, I'm going to attempt to record which stories were reprinted and when. Finding covers to display may be more problematic but as you can see from the example at left, they tend to be knock offs (and poor ones, at that) of the original Black Book Detective covers anyway so that may not be much of a loss. As far as I can tell, the story Murder Among The Dying was the first to be reprinted, in 1947.

The Black Bat also had a presence in Sweden, it would seem.

Nyckel-Bockerna ran from 1934 to 1970 or so. In its final years, it tended to publish Westerns more so than pulp detective stories but for some time it did reprint original Black Bat tales.

As you can see from the cover at right, like DetektivMagasinet, Nyckel also duplicated the original Black Book Detective covers (rather poorly, mind you) and credited G. Wayman Jones. It also inexplicably used the Black Panther name.

The more I write that the less I get it. That's like taking Spider-Man and and naming him The Red Mouse.

But whatever. I shall track down some info about these as well. In order to make room, I've combined Dynamite's Masks series covers and the Black Bat 12-issue series pages into one and I will create a new page specific to Norway/Sweden reprints and whatever graphics I can find.

Hopefully that gets me through this dead zone and we can have new Black Bat material to look forward to.