Posted By Dan Greenfield on Oct 25, 2023 | 7 comments

An often untapped goldmine…

By PETER BOSCH

Eighty years ago, on October 25, 1943, the first Batman and Robin daily strip appeared in newspapers. The first week of dailies recapped who they were and then went into a new adventure with the second. Following the end of that second week, the first Batman Sunday strip made its debut.

The strip was never the long-running success, however, that Superman’s was (debuting in 1939 and running until 1966), and the Batman and Robin dailies and Sunday came to an end after three years in 1946. There were, of course, excellent resurrections of the strip in decades to come, but one of the problems with the earliest version was that it was only appearing in approximately 33 newspapers at the time. It also dealt very little with the great Batman villains appearing in the comic books. The Joker appeared in the daily strip and on the Sunday page but the others (Penguin, Catwoman, and Two-Face) were only in the Sundays.

Batman: The Dailies 1943-1946 (DC Comics/Kitchen Sink Press, 1990). Peter Poplaski, cover art.

That said, there were still things to enjoy about the original strip, including the art by Bob Kane for pencils — yes, it was really him — and Charles Paris for inks. Bill Finger is likely the writer of the dailies below, which include the Batman and Robin introductory week, published from October 25 to October 30, 1943, and the start of the regular daily strip, from November 1 to November 6, 1943. The first Sunday, below, was published November 7, 1943, and had a different storyline than the daily strip, but again with art by Kane and Paris.

Batman: The Sunday Classics 1943-1946 (DC Comics/Kitchen Sink Press, 1991). Dick Sprang, cover art.

Kitchen Sink Press, in collaboration with DC Comics, published the complete 1943-1946 run of the daily and the Sunday strips in 1990 and 1991, respectively, and did a great job of preserving them for all to see. These books were reprinted in 2007 by Sterling Publishing.

So, enjoy this tribute to the 80th anniversary of the first Batman newspaper feature — with the FIRST 13 STRIPS:

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MORE

— EXCLUSIVE: Rare BATMAN Art Unseen for Decades. Click here.

— EXCLUSIVE: More BATMAN Art Unseen in 45 Years. Click here.

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13th Dimension contributor-at-large PETER BOSCH’s first book, American TV Comic Books: 1940s-1980s – From the Small Screen to the Printed Page, was published by TwoMorrows. He is currently at work on a sequel, about movie comics. Peter has written articles and conducted celebrity interviews for various magazines and newspapers. He lives in Hollywood.