Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan

Chip Kidd's Bat-Manga! recovers the Batman comics that Jiro Kuwata drew for the Japanese weekly Shōnen King in 1966 and 1967, stories never collected in Japan and never previously translated.

Licensed at the height of the television-driven Batman craze, Kuwata's serials pit Batman and Robin against mutant dinosaurs, alien invaders and atomic-age villains in a brisk, brush-drawn style that owes as much to Osamu Tezuka as to Bob Kane. Kidd reproduces the stories from the original printed pages, yellowed paper and halftone included, and surrounds them with Geoff Spear's photographs of Saul Ferris's collection of Japanese Batman toys, trading cards and ephemera. An interview with Kuwata closes the volume. The book is issued as an oversized softcover with French flaps and a wraparound band, designed by Kidd in the manner of a period Japanese magazine.

Kidd, associate art director at Alfred A. Knopf and the designer of jackets for Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park and Cormac McCarthy's novels, has built a parallel body of work on comics history, including Batman Collected (1996), Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz (2001) and Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross (2003).