Notice how in both cases the series’ title ( The Batman) isn’t just placed inside a sentence, but also redesigned to match the story title and genre: in the former with a gothic motif (it’s a horror tale), in the later tilted dynamically to the right (it’s more of an action yarn). Here are two original designs from issues lettered by Ben Oda: Batman #227 Detective Comics #405 The fact that they only did so occasionally made those specific stories feel more special from the outset. That was a relatively rare move in the early seventies, when most Batman title pages still displayed the standard logo, but it wasn’t an entirely isolated case, as editor Julie Schwartz clearly gave creators leeway to experiment every once in a while. The example above (cover-dated May 1971) actually disregards the typical logo, replacing it with a headless design that seems more suited for this particular page. You can see an example of this device in the freaky beauty below (another Novick/Costanza collaboration): Batman #231 One device that became increasingly common around this time was to move the series’ title away from the top, shifting it to different, specific areas of the page and thus allowing the words ‘The Batman’ to be incorporated into the initial narration while still standing out for readers at first glance. Notice that, while the logo remains stuck at the top, it doesn’t feel as isolated from the rest of the page because the whole layout is composed of separate boxes with similarly explicit information – except for the last box/panel, which transitions into the narrative by simulating a television screen! Here is one of the earliest attempts, which still preserves the logo’s shape, but places it in a smooth continuum with the story title’s psychedelic design (and colors): Batman #225 Irv Novick’s opening pages were among the first to mess with the logo, although I’m not sure whether the credit for this should go to him or to letterer John Costanza. It was only in the 1970s that this rule became more flexible. If you go back to the franchise’s first decades, you’ll see that traditionally the series’ logo (which changed over time, but tended to consist of variations of a stylized bat shape with the Caped Crusader’s creepy face and the word ‘Batman’ in an art deco-ish font) hovered over each opening splash like a generic stamp or a fixed background with little relation to the rest of the image… Detective Comics #113
The vast majority of Batman comics’ title pages either feature a pretty standard logo or – as it is often the case with modern comics – actually do without the logo altogether (it’s already on the cover, after all).īob Kane was no Will Eisner. That said, this is still rarer than you might think. Since The Spirit – along with Zorro, Dick Tracy, and The Shadow – is one of the main influences on Batman comics, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a number of artists have tried to pull off a similar trick in the Bat-books.Īfter all, artists love playing with the logos on the covers, so why wouldn’t they do the same in the interior work? For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spotlighting one of the trademarks of The Spirit, namely the way Will Eisner and later creators kept adjusting that series’ logo to fit the title pages, ingeniously inserting new designs into each particular image.
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