Batman The Jiro Kuwata Batmanga

When the Bat-mania of the 1960s, incited by the camp television show, had reached a fever pitch, mangaka Kuwata stripped away the self-mockery and offered his country some superhero derring-do, Japanese style. Reprinted with the original right-to-left orientation and mainly in black and white, the ever-staunch dynamic duo face six original villains, including the apparently unkillable Lord Death Man and the Human Ball, an acrobat who bounces off of both concrete and fists (though the Magician bears a striking resemblance to Flash villain the Weather Wizard). The stories are rendered in the friendlier, more cartoony style of Astro Boy-era manga, and Batman's own aesthetic and attitude are ever so slightly different than the familiar version, which will prove either fascinating or exasperating, depending on how exacting your Batman fan is. For older readers, the main interest here will be as a time capsule, but filled with an undeniable energy and some nifty action sequences and structured to be read in small parts, this will offer many young readers a great Bat-time.--Karp, Jesse Copyright 2015 Booklist

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. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.