Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan was published a couple of weeks ago. I noticed the book at Borders. The thing that drew my attention was that it was released in two formats- both hardbound and paperback. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.
In the late 60′s Shonen King, a weekly Japanese manga anthology for boys, licensed the rights to Batman and Robin. Drawn by Jiro Kuwata, the weekly stories featured Batman and Robin fighting giant robots and mutated dinosaurs.
The stories only appeared for a year. Evidently even DC Comics forgot that Batman and Robin were licensed in Japan. The stories were rediscovered by the book’s authors, Chip Kidd and Saul Ferris.
Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan not only features the original Jiro Kuwata strips translated into English for the first time, it includes an exclusive interview with Jiro Kuwata along with photographs of vintage Japanese Batman toys.
Evidently the book as been met with at least some criticism from some in the comic book blogosphere. The reason? Jiro Kuwata’s name fails to appear on the book’s cover. I guess I could understand the controversy if the book only contained the work of Jiro Kuwata. It doesn’t.
Some of the criticism has been overly brutal.
Chip Kidd has responded to the criticism and has offered an analogy:
But I would put forth the analogy: when Ken Burns made his documentary on the Civil War, the subsequent book had his name, and his writer Geoffrey Ward, on the front. It did not have the names General Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, or Abraham Lincoln, or any contemporary historians that Burns interviewed. That may sound like a stretch, but it’s the same situation. We took it upon ourselves to put this project together because of our love for this material. We spent far more of our own money amassing everything then we’ll ever see out of sales of the book; and without going into details, any money we did get as an advance went right back to Mr. Kuwata, who was thrilled to get it. As he is thrilled with the book—I’ve heard nothing but compliments and thanks from him.
Normally I hate analogies because they almost always invariably suck. This one doesn’t. I think it’s right on the mark.
