Subscribe
Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan: The two hottest genres in comics gleefully collide head-on, as the most beloved American superhero gets the coolest Japanese manga makeover ever.
In 1966, during the height of the first Batman craze, a weekly Japanese manga anthology for boys, Shonen King, licensed the rights to commission its own Batman and Robin stories. A year later, the stories stopped. They were never collected in Japan, and never translated into English. Now, in this gorgeously produced book, hundreds of pages of Batman-manga comics more than four decades old are translated for the first time, appearing alongside stunning photographs of the world’s most comprehensive collection of vintage Japanese Batman toys.
This is The Dynamic Duo as you’ve never seen them: with a distinctly Japanese, atomic-age twist as they battle aliens, mutated dinosaurs, and villains who won’t stay dead. And as a bonus: Jiro Kuwata, the manga master who originally wrote and drew this material, has given an exclusive interview for our book.
More than just a dazzling novelty, Bat-Manga! is an invaluable, long-lost chapter in the history of one of the most beloved and timeless figures in comics.
The deluxe, expanded, limited, and autographed hardcover edition has a distinctly different cover, full-color printed endpapers, and an amazing extra adventure written by Jiro Kuwata (not included in the paperback), about a band of rogue alien robot art thieves at large in Gotham City. Guess who gets called in to save the day…
Pantheon, 2008. 384 pp.
Pantheon, 2008. 352 pp.
More about Bat-Manga!: Check out some images from inside Bat-Manga! and read an interview with Chip and Saul Ferris at About.com. Or read Chip’s recent interview with TIME Magazine. You could even watch Chip’s presentation of Bat-Manga! at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con. Or you could just skip all this mumbo jumbo and order yourself up a copy of the Limited Edition hardcover at Amazon.com
or Barnes & Noble or the unlimited edition softcover at Amazon.com
or Barnes & Noble.
LATEST JOURNAL ENTRY
Rough Justice.
The new book I worked on for Alex Ross, Rough Justice
RECENT CLIPPINGS
The Learners Paperback in The New York Times Book Review
The paperback edition of The Learners (available now
[read “The Learners Paperback in The New York Times Book Review” in its entirety…]
Chip Bids John Updike Adieu
Editors and writers remember John Updike over at Slate Magazine, and Chip is among them (and so, for that matter, is J. D. McClatchy):
Working with and for Mr. Updike was an honor and a treat, and because he was so prolific—not only in quantity but in type of book (novel, poems, essays, criticism)—there were many different kinds of design scenarios. One extreme was his habit of drawing up by hand the entire cover layout, including type specs, which I or another of us in the art department would then execute. On the other end of the spectrum, he would occasionally let us do whatever we wanted. And then everything in between.
[read “Chip Bids John Updike Adieu” in its entirety…]
The BDR on Being Digital
Joseph Sullivan over at The Book Design Review covers, so to speak, an oldie but a goody from Chip’s portfolio (and one that hasn’t yet made it into the Work. section of this site, but never fear: it’ll be there soon enough), Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital (1995):
I was lucky enough to live in London in ’94 and ’95, and I picked this up in a bookshop in Camden Town. I had no idea who Chip Kidd was, and only a marginal interest in graphic design at that point. But even I knew, back in ’95, that this was a pretty sexy way to package ideas.