The Black Bat Companion
by Tom Johnson, with Norman Daniels, Nico Mathies, Matthew Moring, Will Murray, Al Tonik, Prentice Winchell, and illustrated by Kin Platt and Raymond Thayer
One of the most beloved pulp characters, The Black Bat, is finally celebrated with this 340 page deluxe retrospective. Author Tom Johnson has indexed each issue, listing everything you need to know about the series, along with the following highlights:
- A complete reprint of the rejected Black Bat adventure, "The Lady's Out for Blood"
- A breakdown of the newly-discovered final Black Bat story, "The Celebrity Murders"
- All 800 German Black Bat stories newly identified for the english audience
- Nine complete reprints of the Black Bat's golden Age comic book stories
- An interview with series creator Norman Daniels as well as his complete payment records... available here for the first time
Featuring additional articles by Will Murray, this is the ultimate history of the series.
338 pages, approx. 6"x9"
22 Comments
Chris Yates
October 18, 2011Will there be a hardcover format for this title?
MB
October 18, 2011Yeah!! Its on the top of my list.
moring
October 18, 2011We had some formatting issues with the hardcover. I hope to get them corrected at some point, but I am unsure exactly when they’ll be straightened out, unfortunately.
Chris Yates
October 19, 2011Thanks for the quick response. Unlike the novels that I read, shelve, and (maybe) read a second time, reference books, like your Phantom Detective companion, get a serious amount of use (i.e., in and out of the bookshelf every time a reprint of an installment in the series appears). Hardcovers can take more use than a high page-count trade paper format before the spine gives out. I’ll (in)patiently wait for the hardcover. Keep up the great work!!
Chris Yates
June 4, 2012It’s been a bit over seven months from release and I haven’t seen a hardcover format.
No doubt you’ve since cranked-out some other fantastic titles…so no negative inferences intended in my question.
Will there be a hardcover format? Any schedule/firm plans?
Respectfully,
Chris
Matthew Moring
June 7, 2012Hi Chris-
At this point it’s looking grim. Lulu’s system thinks the pages are all different sizes and rejects it. I’ll continue to check with them on this, but for now, the softcover’s the only format available for the foreseeable future.
MBrown
October 23, 2011Ordered. another to add to my collection.
David
October 26, 2011Any chance of this coming out on the kindle soon?
moring
October 26, 2011I’d like to do ebook versions of all our books, but some would be more difficult than others. For example, this book heavily relies on images and 60+ pages of charts, all of which would be near-impossible to do given the constraints of ebook formatting currently. It’s possible we might release versions of such books with those sections removed, but it would be a big let-down compared to the print version.
David
October 26, 2011Besides the Doc Savage book, any of the other older releases scheduled for an Ebook release anytime soon? (Ravenwood, Blackbat Omnibus, The Bat Strikes…. etc etc). I own virtually everything in hardcover, but would love have them on my kindle as well.
moring
October 27, 2011I’ll probably answer this in greater detail in a blog post, but I’ve got an additional 5-10 nearly ready to go.
David
November 1, 2011Cant’ wait. Any idea when they will be released yet?
moring
November 1, 2011I hope to take another pass at it this week. I am looking into other solutions for this PDF issue it has.
MB
November 1, 2011Review posted to Amazon.
MB
November 7, 2011Revised review posted to amazon.
DD
November 3, 2011No longer available on Amazon – more on the way? Please?
moring
November 4, 2011Yep, it’ll be just a few days; thanks for your patience.
MB
November 4, 2011Strange, considering its POD thru Amazon’s “CreateSpace”…
Dennis
April 12, 2012Finally got a copy of this. While I appreciate Tom Johnson’s attempt to be as thorough as possible, I have to say I found over half the material here to be mere padding. Could have lived without Norman Daniels’ payment records that went on for pages (including all his non-BB stories), the exhaustive listing of German BB pulp novels (seriously, unless you’re a BB superfan who reads German fluently, does anyone really care?), and the many pages of The Mask (the non-Bat comic version of Tony Quinn — one non-blurry example would have sufficed).
I’d have preferred that those same pages be devoted to a more in-depth examination of the individual stories from BLACK BOOK DETECTIVE (the entries were entirely too short). Or if not, then just leave out the extraneous material and give us a thinner and cheaper book.
Sorry to sound so negative — I found Rick Lai’s books on Doc Savage and The Shadow to be so much closer to what I’m looking for in a pulp hero “companion” book.
Hard to believe we have companion volumes devoted to the Black Bat, Phantom Detective and Operator #5 and STILL no history/companion volume devoted to The Spider??? What’s up with that?
moring
April 12, 2012Hi Dennis,
The intent of this book was to collect all the material that’s been written on the Black Bat in one place, along with several new pieces. The Daniels payment records are historically important and appeared in print here for the first time thanks to Al Tonik. Several new facts were discovered thanks to these. You mentioned the list of German Black Bat stories being overkill. This book was intended to be all-encompassing. Again, this is the first time such information has seen print. And Tom Johnson’s discovery of the whereabouts of “The Celebrity Murders” should rank as one of the more important discoveries of the hero pulps in quite some time. That fact was broken first in this book.
Sorry you did not enjoy this book as much as the others. Since these Companion books are by different authors, the approaches are going to be different. Other readers have expressed an interest in learning more about the character, while others like you have requested more of a synopses of the series. With people in both camps, we take a look at how which approach would work best for each.
If you’d like a good history of The Spider, I’d recommend Bob Sampson’s book on the series. We would’ve liked to have included that in our Companion series, but another publisher has had the rights to it for several years, with no sign of it. Unfortunately, I am unsure if it will ever appear.
MB
April 12, 2012Sorry, have to disagree. I like the exhaustiveness of the work.
As noted, there IS a history/companion volume to The Spider by Bob Sampson. I was able to get a copy from its previous publisher: Bowling Green University Press/Popular Press. Black Dog Books promises to bring it back into print (along with Sampson’s Shadow book), but who knows when.
Dennis
April 13, 2012I don’t want to belabor this too much, but perhaps I can clarify what I see as the problem. A couple of pages of Daniel’s payment records (as they relate directly to the BB stories) I can see; it establishes when he wrote the stories in relation to other stories that may have come before or after and/or been imitative. The non-BB payment records should have been published somewhere else.
Regarding the German pulps, while it’s interesting to learn of them, a mere transliteration of a list of German pulp story titles (again, that consumes pages and pages) does nothing for anyone. (In fact, it would have been more useful to anyone actually seeking to collect those stories to just print the titles in German.) A list of translated titles is useless unless you wanted to give plot synopses, which could (and maybe should, somewhere, in a future publication) fill an entire book by itself.
Regarding the comic strips of the The Mask, while an interesting footnote, they are, in general, printed too small and too blurry to be comfortably read, and to be honest (yes, I AM a fan of Golden Age comics) are among the most banal of strips published in that period. As I stated before, a single, sharply-reproduced example would have sufficed to make the point, along with the text commentary.
I would not gripe so much at the inclusion of all this material that I consider mere window-dressing, were it not for the fact that the main section in the front of the book discussing the characters and stories is so frustratingly short. Whole novels are glossed over in a paragraph or two. This would also have been the place to include THE definitive article (as much as can be, since most of the principles are deceased) on the Black Bat-Batman connection. That Whitney Ellsworth Standard/DC connection has always been worrisome to me, along with the last-minute editorial change of Daniels’ original Tiger to Black Bat. This would have been the venue to try to nail down, as closely as possible, who did what, and when. It strikes me as entirely possible (due to the unreliability of Bob Kane’s testimony) that Ellsworth may even, in fact, have directed Kane to create a bat-themed hero. Coincidence is one thing, but Ellsworth’s connection makes me think there’s more to it.