And it just sold at auction, too! I don’t think there’s any argument — at least not any legitimate argument — that there are any Bronze Age Batman/Joker stories that top Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams’ The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge! in 1973’s Batman #251, and Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers, and Terry Austin’s The Laughing Fish! two-parter that began in Detective Comics #475, about 4 1/2 years later. Both were not just enormously popular, they’re among the most influential Bat-stories of the last five decades. You can debate which is better, but I think you can at least make a solid case that The Laughing Fish! wouldn’t have happened without O’Neil and Adams resetting the tone of the Clown Prince of Crime in The Joker’s Five-Way Revenge! (Side note: Sadly, only Englehart and Austin are still with us.) Now, Adams was a particularly proud guy. He was very quick to talk at great length about his favorite artists, particular those who had come before him, but he wasn’t known for homaging others’ work in his own. Adams, for the most part, did Adams, and that was that. So it’s absolutely fascinating to see him homage Rogers — who came after him and who’s often considered second only to Adams himself when it comes to the Darknight Detective — in this undated original illustration that this week sold through Heritage Auctions: What jumps out immediately isn’t just that Adams flopped the image, but that he stayed absolutely true to Rogers’ take on the Joker Fish and the Clown Prince’s body language from the cover of Detective #475. At the same time, he kept the face his own, as if taken directly from the Batman #251 cover. The final price? $4,500 (including buyer’s premium), which is a helluva bargain, even if it’s well out of my price range. Note to our friends the Adamses, though: I certainly want a print of this. Here’s the official Heritage description: Neal Adams – Joker with Joker Fish Guns Specialty Illustration Original Art (undated). “All it takes is one bad day.” The Clown Prince of Crime flashes a maniacal grin while brandishing twin Laughing Fish guns in this wicked reinterpretation of Joker from the classic Detective Comics #475 cover by Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin, which introduced the Joker Fish. This one really reels us in,...
The celebrated Mr. K is opening his vault from the 1970s and ’80s… By PAUL KUPPERBERG I used to have a lot of stuff. Now, after more than a decade and a half of downsizing — or what I started calling “unburdening” — I still have stuff, just nowhere near as much. Much of it, largely comics and books, has been sold through eBay over the years. The remaining papers and work-related documents are all packed up to be shipped to Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. And now, the library of my printed comic book work, most in the form of bound volumes, is up for sale at the Heritage Auction site through August. Frankly, as cool and fun as it is to look at “brag shelves” full of my published work, it’s been a lot to schlep around all these years. And by now, a lot of the work has been reprinted or, at the very least, is available to read online, making the physical media somewhat obsolete, so, after offering the collection to Columbia University (which, as a rule doesn’t take in comics collections) and my son (who would have liked them but would have had to stick them in storage), I contacted Heritage Auctions and arranged for the sale. There are almost 50 volumes — most of them professionally bound by the company that did the bookbinding for DC’s library and each signed by me on the flyleaf — ranging from my first stories for Charlton Comics in 1975 through the late 1980s, as well as two volumes of Paul Levitz and my Etcetera and The Comics Reader, the 1971 – 1973 fanzines that helped launch both our careers. If you were a fan of my work on Superman (and Superboy and Supergirl and DC Comics Presents) or Checkmate or Vigilante, or Arion Lord of Atlantis, or even Marvel’s Crazy Magazine, here’s your chance to own a piece of me! I hope you’ll check it and if you decide to go for one of the lots, I bid you (see what I did there?!) good luck! — MORE — PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite Comic Book Stories I’ve Written. Click here. — PAUL KUPPERBERG: 13 Comics That Might Have Been. Click here. — PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a...
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