This story was produced in 1989 and followed the Daredevil story. It was used for the same purpose, to solicit work from publishers. This one would be more successful because of improvements in figure drawing, a more straightforward narrative style, and that I inked it. My finishes have always been stronger than my pencil work.
Download The Brave & The Bold PDF. You’ll enjoy it more if you read the blog post first.
What you’ll see in the PDF is not the final package sent off to publishers. Like the Daredevil story, those pages were destroyed in the purge of older work that happened after the San Diego Comicon in 1989. So these are the pencilled pages (and not all of them: four or five pages with Three in action are missing at the end), and they’re pretty degraded on top of being structural and sparse because I think inking is about drawing in ink, not merely going over pencil work. You can get a taste of the texture and mood in the sketch of the Riddler and the first page of the story.
I grew up on DC Comics from the late Silver age and the Bronze age, and foremost among those characters were Green Lantern and Batman. Neal Adams was the first artist I could recognise by sight, followed quickly by Gil Kane, Irv Novick, Joe Kubert and the rest that were the core stable of DC’s artists.
Denny O’Neil – with the Bat-artists and Julius Schwartz – redefined Bruce Wayne and his world, making them modern and dynamic and it captivated me as a kid. Meanwhile, Bob Haney and Jim Aparo did some amazing things over on The Brave & The Bold. They ignored continuity at times and put Batman in some very un-Batman-like situations. It was all in the name of telling good stories. It never bothered me that Batman was different in B&B. As a character, he’s iconic and flexible enough to support multiple interpretations. Englehart & Rogers in Detective Comics in the Seventies was just as valid as Moench & Mandrake a decade later, or Fox & Infantino a decade before. And as readers, I think audiences are flexible enough to enjoy the different interpretations as well.
When I think of my favourite Batman stories, mostly they’re not the big villain pieces. The notable exception is the original Ra’s al Ghul saga (the first Batman I read was #243 “The Lazarus Pit” from 1972 when I was six, and holy crap it was nothing like Adam West).
No, I always liked the stories that showed the man behind the mask. The moments where Bruce wrestled with his choices and what he had made of his life, and the consequences for himself and those he cared about. Writer Alan Brennert, first in a few B&B assignments, and then an amazing story in Detective Comics #500, really exemplified this approach and showed me – before I had ever heard of Alan Moore – that costumed heroes were something more than good guys versus bad guys. There are other stories I could mention, but you get the idea.
By the time the mid Eighties came along, bringing Crisis on Infinite Earths and The Dark Knight, I was a reader who had read most of the best Batman stories and had formed my own thoughts on what made Batman a great character. As you’ll see in this story, the visual language of Frank Miller’s Dark Knight very clearly informed the storytelling techniques. Miller had broken me out of the idea that I had to draw like Neal Adams (something I could never hope to accomplish) to be a comics creator, and I followed his work religiously by this point. But as much as I admired him at the time, I didn’t feel I had to portray Batman as he did. Batman would have no longer been the very human Bruce Wayne that I knew. So the Batman you see here is driven and a bit cold at the story’s opening, but he’s still from the tradition of the Batman before Crisis, or the changes the first Batman movie released later in 1989 brought.
In retrospect, while I thought Batman losing it on the entitled father worked for the story, it was more than a little callous of Batman to unload on him as he did. As a victim of devastating criminal violence, Batman might have despised the man’s reaction, but he’d reign that in and make his point a different way.
I always liked the Riddler. I mean the Frank Gorshin Riddler from the 1966 TV series. He was always better than the useless buffoon in the comics. So it was the Eighties and comics were becoming ‘mature’, and I thought, “Why not the Riddler?” A more complex, hateful version of the Gorshin Riddler. How would Batman and the police react to a Riddler that had become a real threat? They might underestimate him at first. And it could all go very wrong.
Nigma’s costume is, uh, very Eighties. I think I had a shirt with blousey sleeves like that, but don’t ask me to explain the slipper things. I still like the asymmetric quality of the details and the question mark wrapping around the neck and ending in a knee pad.
This was the first time I showed Three in the Waterworks, and just as important, I took Nuit Blanche who came from – of all places – the cover of an Ambush Bug fanzine I had done a few years before and made her Three’s foil. All of a sudden, my Batman/Daredevil/Deathstroke knock-off became something much more in my mind. While it would be a number of years more before I created the Historical Society, the core relationship of Three and the ghost Blanche came together with this story.
Progress in my figure drawing helped this story a bit. The backgrounds were simpler, more graphic, and these washed-out photocopies don’t help indicate them well, but in inked form they did what they needed to do. However, this story is a good example of a passing phase in my art where I was drawing midsections far too short. I know no better way to describe it than what Ty Templeton said to me at San Diego that year: “You’re drawing evil midgets.”
This would be the last of the full-length stories I would do as a submission, and it led to my first professional work in comics as an illustrator.
Up next : My first paying work, Law or Justice for Kodansha.
