Batman: The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga Vol. 3
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Batman, as you�ve never seen him before! In 1966, writer and illustrator Jiro Kuwata became famous for introducing the Dark Knight to a brand new audience in Japan. Almost 50 years later, Kuwata�s classic tales remain the quintessential Batmanga. In this new translated collection, English-speaking audiences will be able to explore these legendary stories for the first time, complete and unabridged! Collects BATMAN: THE JIRO KUWATA BATMANGA digital chapters 39-52.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An oddity of comics history, this manga-fied Caped Crusader by Kuwata, writer of the contemporary 8-Man, came out during the Adam West Batman era of the 1960s and has some of that show s campy detective work. This is a straightforward reprint, lacking the analysis that appeared in Chip Kidd s Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan. The episodic stories start with a Japanese-English mix, introducing a villain, Death God Man, who s based on shinigami myths, but other installments feel as if they could be purely American in origin. As the heroes Batman and Dick Grayson as Robin go through the book, there s a theme of new technology s capability for causing disaster when mishandled by flawed human beings. While the book has no overall plot, the artwork revolutionary for its time is caught in that moment when the jump from paper strip to page-turner was being made, so it is remarkably clean if not overly imaginative in character design. Yet there are a number of instances of dynamic camera techniques, and the cityscapes are timelessly eye-catching. Color pages sprinkled throughout are a visual lagniappe. A charming blast from the past.
