The Germans Always Make Good Stuff

Black Bat material might be hard to come by in North America these days, but the Germans are about to be treated to another batch of books by Blitz-Verlag. Volumes 10, 11 and 12 of their paperback series are currently available for pre-order on their website.

These appear to be reprints of the original material from the late 30s to the early 50s. I believe the books are The Black Bat's Triumph, The Black Bat And The Trojan Horse and The Black Bat's Dragon Trail, based on Google Translate's rough translations of the titles. Those came out consecutively in the early 40s.

So Blitz is among the chronological original material reprinting scene and they are using updated versions of covers from the first German series for their current releases.  Example below.

The artist for those covers, by the way, was the extremely prolific Rudolf Sieber-Lonati. He was responsible for a ridiculous amount of cover art for crime and fantasy books from the 50s to the 80s but I believe he was best known for his science fiction work.

In any event, researching him specifically led me to a boatload of Fledermaus covers I still had not found, though they are of small size and/or of poor quality. I might have a little work to do there but the collection is becoming quite complete.  Here are a couple that struck me as being particularly eye-grabbing.

Ladies And Gentlemen, Carol...Quinn!

Several of the Black Bat stories published in Germany included "extras" such as a blueprint of stately Quinn manor and character sketches.

I believe the one below, of the now married Carol Baldwin, was the back cover to one of the books and displayed during a sale on ebay.

I was going to comment that she looked a bit older than I'd imagined her to be but then if Anthony Quinn and Carol Baldwin got married, it would be at the tail end of their crime-fighting careers. So in fact her appearance is probably quite appropriate.

Very nice. Hope to stumble into quality images of the rest of the cast at some point as well.

Good Problem To Have

While becoming more familiar with The Black Bat, I was surprised to find out that much like a pulp version of David Hasselhoff, he became hugely popular in Germany after his popularity fizzled in North America. So after I was done with building the pages that would display covers and art from Dynamite Comics and Black Book Detective, I thought I would try to find as many cover images from Pabel Kriminalroman Fledermaus as I could.

And that has gone far better than I could have hoped.

I found about a dozen of them at first, from various sources, but later landed a bunch more while searching ebay listing from Austria and Germany.

Then earlier tonight, I came across a website which enabled me to search ended ebay listings. With that site's help, I scored about 40 more. Not taking into account the covers which do not display The Black Bat (and therefore are of no interst to me), my collection is becoming quite complete.

The collection has become so large, in fact, that it was becoming cumbersome to have all the covers on only one page. I have therefore broken it down over three pages. And as I continue to add images, then perhaps I'll expand from three to four to five pages, whatever. For now, that's where we're at.

I also came across something a little unexpected. Back in January, I bought one of these German mini-novels because it was cheap and had Canadian involvement. I'm Canadian and that the Black Bat would have anything to do with this country struck me as unusual, so I thought it would be a good issue to sample.

That was issue 498. Well, it turns out that issue 513 also involves Canada and it was also relatively inexpensive, especially for being shipped from Europe. So I bought earlier tonight and apparently I can expect to receive in about two weeks. Merry Christmas to me.

(Chase To Canada)

So while I wait for that to arrive, I'll embellish the cover images I found earlier tonight and start adding them to their respective pages.

Recent Page Updates

No specific news about Black Bat appearances to report at this time, just some updates to a couple of pages that regular visitors (if such a thing exists for this blog) may have missed.

Originally, I was hopeful of finding a couple of dozen covers or so to display from the German Black Bat novels that were published in the 60s and 70s.

I have been far more successful than anticipated. As I write this, there are 38 uploaded onto the "German version" page located under the banner and I have more than 50 more squirreled away on my hard drive waiting to be cleaned up and added.

If nothing else, It's interesting to see the styles change over the years. The first few are very colourful and flamboyant. They get darker over time and for a while, many included only an outline of the Bat's face over the scene of a crime. You can get a feel for that even from the small sample size currently posted.

There quite a few on which the Black Bat doesn't appear at all, making me question if he's even the subject of the story. Even if he is, I may not bother including those ones. Or if they are included, they'll be among the last ones posted.

I also finished the Moonstone Covers page, including solicitation material for books that were never released.

Though disappointing at the time, I think it can now be considered a blessing in disguise. Moonstone's first attempt at publishing new Black Bat material was rather poor. Their take on the character bore little resemblance to the source material. He wasn't particularly likeable on any level. But the various projects that Moonstone has planned for 2016, both prose and comic format, seem to be on the right track.

Hot Money For Canada

A few minutes ago, I treated myself to a neat little collectible.

I spent a good part of the afternoon yesterday tracking down covers to the German Black Bat novels that came out in the 60's and 70's.

Schwarze Fledermaus is the undeniable authority on the subject. Unfortunately it appears to be the only resource to speak of. My concern is that if the website is done away with, for whatever reason, all that information will be lost. That includes hundreds of cover scans that are otherwise quite hard to come by.

Now I don't want to copy the data displayed on SF. I want to complement and, frankly, better it where I can.

Perhaps I was just luckier than during past attempts, but I was able to score a number of these covers from ebay.de. And in doing so, I decided to pick up one of the books for my little collection.

"Hot Money For Canada" caught my eye because I'm, well, Canadian.  Mind you, I doubt that Canada figures prominently in the story as such. It's probably more about a scheme to transport items across the border illegally or something.

That's not particularly important, to tell the truth. The book was inexpensive (about $10 American, shipping included) and just happened to have a theme that interested me.

Is this a good time to mention that I don't speak or read German? This is going to be the slowest read for me in some time. Still, I want to be able to comment on these books with some first-hand knowledge so this will make for a good introduction.

As for the couple of dozen cover images I managed to locate to this point, I've begun building a page from which to display them. It is, of course, included under the banner up top. I've added translations of cover text where I've been able to make (relative) sense of it.

Since they were lifted from ebay listings, I take no credit for the original scan. However, all images have been resized, cropped, straightened, sharpened and/or submitted to colour adjustments. That's not in an effort to take credit, it is simply to make the graphic more appealing.

You may have noticed a new page for Moonstone Books covers as well. That's also in the building stages now that Moonstone has several Black Bat irons in the fire.

Good way to start the new year!

The Black Bat Companion

Before I say anything about this book, I want to heap some praise on Altus Press.  I purchased this book on Cyber Monday (so December 1st) and had it in hand on Thursday, three days later. They obviously wasted no time shipping it and I appreciated that a great deal.

The Black Bat Companion was released in the summer of 2011. I waited a while before getting it for two reasons; First, I wanted to read more of the original material available before acquiring book and second, reviews were a little mixed. While some referred to the book as being very thorough, others made it sound as though it was filled with useless information.

Ultimately, even though I'm still working through the book, I'm very pleased with my purchase.

There is some repetition in the information provided, usually in the earlier chapters, which makes the page count feel a little padded at times. For example, character bios will mention errors made in regards to their names in certain stories, then the Adventure Index will also point out the error(s). But in light of the volume of information shared, this is really just a minor annoyance.

The Black Book Detective Adventure Index seems good but since I intend to read the stories myself at some point I didn't want to get too deeply into it. The book becomes particularly interesting for me at chapter nine as it provides a list of all the stories printed in Germany (including BBD reprints). Being that there were nearly 600, you could probably create a whole other companion book specific to German story summaries (feel free to steal that idea, Altus).

At the moment, I'm reading the rejected Black Bat story, The Lady Is Out For Blood. It doesn't feel like a Black Bat story at all. The lead character is totally different in name, profession and appearance, as is his female assistant, but it makes for a good read nonetheless. There are also reprints of nine comic book stories of The Mask, a character nearly identical to The Black Bat but with minor name modifications to the cast.

From that point on, it is best to think of the book as a tribute to primary Black Bat writer Norman Daniels. The next few chapters feature an interview with Daniels, excerpts from written correspondence by him, biographical information and payment records. If your interest is specific to the Black Bat character, then you may not care how much money Daniels made for writing his stories, and even less for writing about other characters, but it provides a rare window into the scene at the time. Personally, I was pleased to have it all included.

Overall, while I would have preferred to have some sections filled out more (German Bat), and could have done without a few others (such as character profiles. If someone buys this book, he or she probably doesn't need to be introduced to Silk Kilby), The Black Bat Companion is an excellent compilation of information. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to gain deeper appreciation for the histories of the character, the genre and the era.

Die Schwarze Fledermaus

While I'm waiting for official news to come from Moonstone Books about their upcoming Black Bat projects  (apparently a solo book, as well as the team up with Domino Lady) and from Dynamite as to whether he and/or Miss Fury will appear in the second volume of Masks to any significant degree, I'm attempting to educate myself somewhat on The Black Bat's publishing history in Germany.

From what I can gather, reprints of stories from Black Book Detective began to appear in Pabel Kriminal Roman starting with issue #100 in 1961.  Rather than print them chronologically though, there seemed to be a rather random order as to how they were made available to the German public.  Issue 100 included the story "The League of Faceless Men" from 1951, among the last Bat stories published.  His next PKR appearance, in issue 103, featured "The Murder Makers", originally published in the United States in 1948.

Evidently, it took little time for his popularity to dictate that he should become the book's main attraction.  The Black Bat's stories appeared periodically for a spell but starting with issue 119, the title "Fledermaus" (German for bat, obviously) began to take prominence on the cover and by issue #135, he became the focus of the series altogether.  It looks as though that held true until about issue 667 or so inclusively, with new material being written for the character once stories to reprint ran out.

A significant portion of the information I've been able to find was lifted from the Schwarze Fledermaus website.  See the "galerie" page for cover scans of every issue for more Bat goodness.