Let The Pictures Do The Talking Part Five: Dick Sprang

Ah, childhood. When you're a kid, you don't care about the names on the comic books. You don't really see Adam West's Batman as being any different to the stories you read in the funny books. When you're young, it is, as they say, all good.
Looking back, I remember a large Batman anthology that my dad had that I read from cover to cover on a regular basis. The only other superhero that got a look in at that time was Spider-Man; I had a small paperback collection of the first six or seven Lee & Ditko stories that every time I cracked open those pages, my mind went BOOM. Literally B.O.O.M. I don't have that collection any more but I do have the first six or seven Essential Spider-Man collections, and if I went over to the bookshelf right now, my mind would do the damn same thing. BOOM. I wouldn't return to this entry until I'd flicked past that first Sandman story, or the Doc Ock intro, or that timeless Face it Tiger, you just hit the jackpot.

But I digress. That Batman anthology started with those crude Kane and Finger tales, moved through Jerry Robinson and a variety of other artists, ending with some of those gloriously gothic Denny O'Neill/Neal Adams tales from the seventies. But the bulk of this anthology featured the art of a man who depsite my not knowing his name, came to represent Batman to me more than any other artist in my youth: Dick Sprang.

It wasn't my fault that I didn't know his name. Up until the sixties, all those Batman stories were simply attributed to Bob Kane. You could spot stylistic changes, but heck, I was a kid. I thought Adam West trying to spray shark repellent and trying to dispose of that BOMB on the pier was high drama. (For the record, I still love that movie, and I wish they'd release the TV series on DVD.)
Sprang was hired to ghost on Batman in 1941 when it was anticipated that Bob Kane would be drafted to fight in World War II, and that the then current artist Sheldon Moldoff's workload was growing increasingly large. In complete anonymity, Sprang received his Batman script, drew it and sent it off to be inked. Having no creative authority, it all seemed to imply that he would just be another Batman artist.
But Sprang worked at DC for twenty years, and on the flagship characters at that. Just Supes and Bats. He was Golden Age royalty.

When I look back at those reprints I have of Dick Sprang's work, I have that same frisson that I get with those Lee/Ditko Spidey stories. The art leaps off the page at you. Every panel is alive with detail and frenetic angles. Sprang's Gotham was filled with oversized everyday props that Batman and Robin would almost certainly be swinging into the scene from, or dodging as the Joker loosed them as he made his all too brief escape. Sprang used all the weapons that the great comic artists had in their arsenal: insane perspectives, aerial shots, worm's eye veiws, compositional variation from panel to panel... and he used with the utmost panache. No one drew a more insane Joker, terrifying Two-Face or affecting Batman or Robin.



Although Sprang retired in the sixties, in 1995 he created a gorgeous lithograph, The Secrets Of The Batcave, signed and numbered and limted to 500, and then in '96, Guardians of Gotham. They're both reproduced above and they're simply gorgeous. They crop up on ebay from time to time, and one day I'll buy one, as the very sight of them takes me back to my childhood. Before the bills and the problems and the day to day that gets in the way of the simpler and more beautiful things in life. Ah, childhood. Thanks, Mr Sprang.