The Murder Maker (June 1948)

After a significant dry spell in my attempts at locating some of the original Black Bat material from Black Book Detective, I recently had the good fortune to find The Murder Maker for sale and snapped it up.

The book gets off to a quick start. A gentleman named Gallaway comes to visit special district attorney Tony Quinn at the latter's office. Gallaway has spent years and large sums of money attempting to rid the city of crime. He now believes that there have been two attempts on his life and that there will be more. He hands Quinn an envelope containing the name of the person he believes will murder him, as well as the motive behind the attempts, but does not want the envelope opened until he is killed, should that come to pass.

Naturally, Quinn is intrigued and believes that if the man will not give Anthony Quinn more information, perhaps he will be more willing to do so for...The Black Bat!!

And that's all covered just in chapter one!

Sure enough Gallaway is killed in short order and the Black Bat and his team are on the case. The matter is further complicated in that the person named in Gallaway's envelope seems to have a very solid alibi.

A few things stood out in this story. 

One of the Black Bat's aides is not entirely on board with the team's perception of the primary suspect. It doesn't reach the point of conflict within the little crime-fighting club but it raises an eyebrow nonetheless. Disagreement within the team is something I've rarely, if ever, seen in the original Black Bat material. Normally, the Tony Quinn/Black Bat, Carol Baldwin, Silk Kirby and Butch O'Leary team are all on the same page with little hesitation or doubt.

Also...we meet Captain McGrath's wife! She even has a line of dialogue or two! She has been mentioned numerous times but always seemed to be visiting a relative out of town or some such whenever the Black Bat dropped by McGrath's unexpectedly. I thought she had never appeared in-story. 

Finally, writer Norman Daniels did a nice job with an action scene around the middle portion of the story. As more original material was acquired, it came to light that not all of Daniels' action scenes needed to be shootouts or fist fights. Sometimes, the Black Bat may be trying to find his way out of a burning building, or perhaps he's involved in a car chase.

In this book, the Bat needs to escape a battle on a ferry on a foggy night. Daniels does very well in describing the challenges caused by the water, the cold, etc, faced by the character. And while the Black Bat can normally see in darkness, fog is another matter. 

The only area in which I might criticize the story is in its lack of a true mystery. You may not know exactly how Gallaway's murder (and other illegal activity) went down, but you do get a sense early on of who is responsible for it. That aside, Murder Maker pretty well hits all the right notes.

Forthcoming Black Bat Novella Cover by Jeffrey Hayes

This jumped out at me when doing a search on the character's name this morning on Twitter. It's more than a week old so I am kicking myself for neglecting that Twitter account as of late. 

Here are artist Jeffrey Hayes' comments about this image, lifted from a Facebook post from July 4th. 

Just got approval from author Marlin Williams to reveal the completed cover to his upcoming novel featuring the “Black Bat” due out later this year or early 2022. This was a blast to work on.  There plans for a few internal illustrations, but that will come a bit later.

You can view more of Jeffrey's graphics work on his website and have a look at Marlin Williams' past work on his Amazon author page. 

As much as I love the original Black Bat material, I'm always interested in other interpretations. A traditionalist nonetheless, I often joke that if you include the scarring around Tony Quinn's eyes, we can be friends. I've seen instances of artists displaying the scars when Tony's in his blind DA persona but not doing so when the Black Bat mask comes on. That irritates the hell out of me.

But I quite like what Hayes did here. The original stories often mention that when Quinn needs to revert to pretending to be blind, his eyes turn milky white so whether intentional or not, the white eyes in the image above are consistent with that description of the character's appearance. I tend to think that a full mask with scarring showing through the eye holes would be the most intimidating version of the Black Bat's look but what Hayes's has done here works very well on that level too, perhaps even better.

Gorgeous work. I'll be paying closer attention to see those interiors, too!

The H4H Black Bat Action Figure!

The April 6th post entitled Heroes 4 Heroes displayed a teaser of four public domain characters, including the Black Bat.

I didn't notice it at the time, but someone later took a guess on the Facebook post from which the image originated that it might hint to the creation of action figures based on public domain characters. One of the gentlemen tagged in the teaser stated that it was more than just a hint.

I could have sworn that I saw Jay Piscopo confirm that it was exactly that on his Instagram account yet when I went to locate the post again later, I was unable to do so. No matter, he added the image below on a Facebook group about public domain characters about an hour ago as I write this.

That appears to be the same figure that was announced in January 2015. Now, apparently, it will be used to raise funds for the Heroes 4 Heroes program. I stand to be corrected, because the Heroes 4 Heroes name comes up relatively often in searches, but I believe it is this group that stands to benefit.

The Dead Are Not Silent

Last fall, I took a chance and bought a Kindle version of a German Black Bat story, Blutgeld (Blood Money). I wrote a bit about it here. I was able to read it with an auto-translating extension to Google Chrome which enabled me to quickly flip the text from German to English.

I can't say Blutgeld blew my mind but I appreciated that writer Angelika Schröder seemed to get all the appealing aspects of the Black Bat character and his entourage right. I soon purchased another book by Schröder, entitled The Wrong Victim.

I even hate to bring that one up because its title is actually a spoiler. As soon as you are made aware of the crime that the Black Bat is tasked with investigating, the title comes to mind and you immediately know what the outcome will be. It's just a matter of being entertained while the characters figure it out.

Still, it was the better of the two stories, I thought, and any praise I might have for Mrs. Schröder's knowledge and meticulous usage of the character's most interesting traits were still applicable.

I was curious about other interpretations though so I tried another story from further down the line entitled The Dead Are Not Silent. This one was written by Margret Schwekendiek and published by Blitz-Verlag in 2015. 

Schwekendiek is a veteran writer but doesn't have the character nailed to the degree that Schröder did, in my opinion. I am nearly at the halfway point of this book and we are just now getting hints that Tony Quinn will be making use of his Black Bat persona. Butch O'Leary has barely been mentioned.

The most glaring inconsistency with the original material is that interactions with McGrath feel off. McGrath will address Quinn as "sir" on occasion, like a subordinate would, which I don't believe took place a great deal in the original stories. If my memory is sound, he even does so with Silk Kirby at some point in this story.

When a disagreement about the handling of a murder investigation flares up, Quinn goes off on McGrath with far more venom than I was used to reading. At one point, Quinn goes as far as forbidding McGrath from following a certain course of action as a detective. Schwekendiek pushed to the extremes the relationship between the two men who, at the end of the day, are just seeking justice in their own way and they each know this. An appearance by Commissioner Jerome Warner is quite welcomed, on the other hand.

Also, while this is hardly something I can drop at Mrs. Schwekendiek's feet, the auto-translate tool seemed to struggle with her first chapter but has since settled in. I'm not sure why it rebelled against the German text initially but to be fair, perhaps the translation affects the delivery of the story.

Early original Black Bat stories often included a weird (though eventually debunked) mystical or supernatural aspect. "The Dead", written around a superstition that an artist's sculptures are coming to life and killing people at night, would probably fit better among those earlier tales than the latter ones which tended to be more straightforward murder mysteries or involve the theft of large sums. 

In summary, the writing is not necessarily poor but the grasp of the character and the features that make him interesting appears to be lacking at the halfway point of this story.

Heroes 4 Heroes

Artist Jay Piscopo posted the image below on his Facebook page with the caption "Coming soon! Stay tuned!"

Four other gentlemen are tagged in the picture, each assigned to a character, if that means anything; Joeseph Simon (Black Bat), Brian Augustyn (Airboy, lower middle, for those who may be unfamiliar, unlikely as that seems), Paul Clarke (Red Panther) and Michael Norwitz (Weekender, top middle).  

I don't want to speculate too much on this just yet but it has the makings of a pretty dynamic team. 

Beware...The Black Bat!

As the AMK Comics Black Bat graphic novel continues to move forward, artist Michael W Belcher shared art on social media of the character design with which he chose to proceed. 

I can be be open-minded to alternative versions of the character but there's no need to be here. To me, this hits pretty well all the right notes in terms of the Black Bat's appearance. I prefer a full face mask, the shoulder holster (as opposed to hip or lower back) and, of course, the scarring around the eyes is mandatory. 

Very nice, I look forward to seeing the project continue to take shape. 🦇

Black Bat Graphic Novel On The Way!

Man, I can't believe I missed posting this. 

Based on art found on social media, I speculated on February 12th that a Black Bat comic might be in the works.

Four days later, writer Ron Fortier gave a pretty thorough description of the product to come during an Airship 27 podcast. I thought I shared it here but evidently I failed to do so.

I've tried to set the video below at the right spot but if I've failed to do that too, Mr. Fortier begins talking about the project at the 58:40 mark or so. 

Mr. Fortier also wrote about it on the Airship 27 Flight Log a couple of days later.

Compared to some other past projects involving this character, it sounds like it's moving along at a pretty good clip. Being that it's going to be a print-on-demand graphic novel, it seems reasonable to assume it will considered an AMK Comics products and sold from their Indyplanet store. 

Is There a Black Bat Comic In The Works?

Today's content is once again brought to us by Mike W. Belcher.

Sneak peek of the only non-Man in the Mask story (at least so far), I have in the works. And not written by me to boot. More to come...

I again initially saw these on Mr. Belcher's Instagram account but if Instagram isn't your thing, you can find his work on Twitter as well. I loathe Facebook so I couldn't tell you if he's on there.

I should point out that his posts include sketches of Tony Quinn without the Black Bat suit and the formidable Carol Baldwin so float on over there to see those. You might also be interested in his Man In The Mask series published through AMK Comics.

For a while, I had so many consecutive posts about Lucky Comics material that I thought I was coming off like a shill for them. I hope to have the same "problem" with AMK or whatever publisher Mr. Belcher might be doing this work for.

A Little Black Bat / Domino Lady Celebration!

Sharing a little bit of art today from Mike W Belcher that I happened to come across on Instagram.

Celebrating the release of Ron Fortier’s latest book out from Moonstone. The Black Bat/Domino Lady Danger: Coast to Coast. Get yours today!

I really like this Black Bat fella.

Well then I hope we'll see your take on him a bit more often!