Once a Flying Grayson

I’m featuring this sketch by Maris Wicks in honor of the panel that I moderated at yesterday’s Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo, featuring her, E. J. Barnes, Kriota Willberg, and Rosemary Mosco.

Maris and her sidekick Joe Quinones (his 2008 version of the TV Teen Titans Robin back here) recently collaborated on a story in the first issue of the Batman Black and White magazine. No Robins appear in their Harley-and-Ivy tale, but Dick Grayson had a fine New Frontier-style showcase in Chip Kidd and Michael Cho’s story earlier in the same magazine.

Today at MICE I’m moderating another panel, this one featuring R. Sikoryak, whose version of Robin provided the moral center of his version of Crime and Punishment.

Designing Death by Design

I wasn’t bowled over by Batman: Death by Design, by Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor [lots of hocus-pocus science, physiognomic inconsistency, no Robin], but I was intrigued by the new comics scripting format that Kidd developed for this project. A highly respected book designer, he found a way to work visually as well as verbally.

In an interview with Comic Book Resources before publication, Kidd said:

The one thing I did that he [Dave] said he really liked was that -- and I don't know how else to do it -- I didn't do a script that looked like any normal comic book script I know of. In other words, it doesn't look like a movie screenplay. I diagram all the pages out. It's very specific with me showing "This is how big this panel is, and this is what's happening in the panel, and this is the dialogue." Dave said he liked that because it did a lot of his work for him, and that was the idea -- to put as little guesswork in as possible.

But where he pleasantly surprised me was where he would deviate from that. There's actually one big huge deviation at the beginning of the book that just shocked me, and it didn't make me angry, but I had to go "Hmm. Wow."

The image above is from the back of the finished book showing a page from Kidd’s script. Each box is a panel, with a description and speech balloons in small type. Taylor sketched his ideas for those panels in the spaces. (Andy Khouri reported for Comics Alliance that “Kidd said that he also included sketches but that Taylor rightfully asked him to stop.”

Kidd discusses the book’s look in more detail in another CBR interview.

The Kidd-Millionaire Robin

The book designer and comic-book critic Chip Kidd recently published a Batman adventure subtitled Death by Design, with art by Dave Taylor. Impressive as that volume looks, it doesn’t feature Robin, so I haven’t sat down to read it.

Death by Design isn’t Kidd’s first Batman story, however. A few years back he scripted two adventures drawn by Tony Millionaire for DC’s self-parodying Bizarro Comics and Bizarro World collections. “The Bat-Man” reads and looks like an underground-comics version of the earliest, solo Batman adventures. A version of the Penguin hypnotizes Bruce Wayne’s fiancée, Julie Madison, as well as holding sway over a giant ape—things that a vampirical villain called the Monk did in Batman, #31-2.

Kidd and Millionaire’s “Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder” is a classic “Boy Hostage” story crossed with the high Gothic supernatural tone that dominated that first year of Batman tales. This time the villain is the Monk himself. Through completely unexplained means he kidnaps Robin’s consciousness, traps it in the body of a caged bird, and makes Robin’s body act evil. (See panel above.)

Back in 1939, Batman eliminated the Monk by shooting silver bullets into his coffin before Robin ever swung onto the scene. Once Dick Grayson appeared in April 1940, along with new chief editor Whitney Ellsworth, Batman’s guns and killing and the Gothic milieu all went away for decades. Kidd and Millionaire thus offer a taste of what the Dynamic Duo’s adventures might have been like if that hadn’t happened.

TOMORROW: When Batman went goth again.