Posted By Dan Greenfield on Mar 26, 2024 | 5 comments

BATMAN WEEK: A fantastic commission colored by our own Walt Grogan…

—

Welcome to BATMAN WEEK 2024 — celebrating the 85th anniversary of the release of Detective Comics #27, on March 30, 1939. Over seven days, you can look forward to all sorts of groovy and offbeat columns, features and cartoons that pay tribute to the greatest comics character in the history of mankind. Click here for the rest of the BATMAN WEEK features. You’ll be glad you did! — Dan

—

This happens quite a bit: I see a great illustration online and message Walt Grogan to see if he wants to color it. (Walt did that nifty banner up top, by the way.)

Walt, agreeable sort that he is, is almost always game and this time out we’ve got a special BATMAN WEEK piece for you — a recent commission by artist Ron Frenz that he did for comics editor Brian Cunningham, formerly with DC and Wizard and now the editor-in-chief at Ghost Machine, the new, much-ballyhooed company founded by superstars such as Geoff Johns, Gary Frank, Bryan Hitch, Peter J. Tomasi, among others.

Dig this:

Now, check out Walt’s version:

I’m particularly taken not just with the retro Batman logo, but how Frenz honors many of the artists in Batman’s past. Just at a quick glance, I spy with my little Bat-eye tributes to Neal Adams, Carmine Infantino, George Perez, Tim Sale and Dick Sprang. Who do you see? (And, hey, that Two-Face reminds me of John Romita, for what that’s worth.)

Now, if you want to commission your own piece by Frenz, contact him through Catskill Comics.

—

MORE

— The BATMAN WEEK 2024 INDEX! Click here.

— BATMAN STRIKES AGAIN: What if JACK KIRBY Had Never Left DC Comics in 1958? Click here.

—

A 10-year-old Walt Grogan fell in love with the Big Red Cheese thanks to essays written by Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson in the paperback edition of All in Color for a Dime, released in 1970 and bought for him by his father off a paperback spinner rack in a liquor store on the South Side of Chicago. Walt runs The Marvel Family Web Facebook page devoted to all incarnations of the Fawcett/DC Captain Marvel and blogs about Captain Marvel at shazamshistorama.com.