A BIRTHDAY SALUTE to the late artist, who was born 74 years ago…
By SCOTT TIPTON
If there’s a Mount Rushmore of Batman artists, there’s no denying it: The late Marshall Rogers is on that mountain. Rogers, who was born 74 years ago on Jan. 22, 1950, is best known for his legendary run on Detective Comics with writer Steve Englehart, which gave readers a more nuanced and realistic Dark Knight, as well as one of the all-time greatest and most influential Joker tales with The Laughing Fish. However, my personal favorite Batman work from Rogers is a little harder to find, and much more unique, consisting of a series of full-page illustrations accompanying the first Batman prose tale ever published.
Writer Denny O’Neil gave Batman the noir treatment in Death Strikes at Midnight and Three!, a taut short story that first appeared in DC Special Series #15 in 1978, which also featured this atmospheric Rogers cover…
… and this glorious back cover, which was repurposed from a page inside:
With dark, cinematic illustrations provided by Rogers, the story details Batman going after Milo Lewes, a refined mob boss who orders the murder of a Gotham prosecutor who’s getting too close to conviction. In a tense confrontation in which Lewes taunts Batman with his purported intelligence, Batman warns the mob boss:
“Milo, drink your wine. Savor it. Then put your affairs in order and call your dear friends and tell them goodbye, tell them your next address will be a prison or a grave because – hear me, Milo – I will find the blind man and I’ll return and I’ll destroy you. I’ll watch you whimper and beg and crawl.”
True to his word, in short order Batman finds the blind man (the sole, integral witness that can put Milo away) and apprehends the thugs sent by Milo to eliminate him. Realizing the jig is up, Milo makes plans to leave the country via private jet, and is already planning on taunting the Batman by sending a postcard from his new hideaway. Plans, however, are about to change:
O’Neil’s prose brings a wonderful hard-boiled flavor to the story, while still remaining unmistakably Batman, and Rogers’ moody illustrations subtly complement the copy. I only wish O’Neil and Rogers would have done a whole series of stories in this style.
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MORE
— ‘THANK YOU, GOD’: STEVE ENGLEHART Recalls First Seeing MARSHALL ROGERS’ BATMAN Art. Click here.
— STEVE ENGLEHART: The Great DETECTIVE COMICS Covers of MARSHALL ROGERS. Click here.
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Scott Tipton is 13th Dimension’s longest-tenured contributor-at-large. He’s best known as the writer of scores of Star Trek comics published by IDW.
January 22, 2024
A great spotlight on a great story. The Batman Spectacular is the first comic I recall begging my Mom to buy for me. I couldn’t even read at the time, but Rogers’ visuals stuck with me. He is my personal favorite Batman artist of all time. Incidentally Ryan Daly and I did a dramatic reading of the story for our Knightcast Podcast a few years back, as a tribute to the then-recently passed Denny O’Neil: http://fireandwaterpodcast.com/podcast/batman-knightcast-29-death-strikes-at-midnight-and-three/
January 22, 2024
What a really impressive prose this is. Also, happy birthday to the late Marshall Rogers.
January 22, 2024
Great story, but technically not the first Batman prose story. That distinction belongs to the 1966 paperback novel Batman Vs 3 Villains of Doom, followed by Batman Vs the Fearsome Foursome, the novelization of the 1966 Batman movie.
January 23, 2024
And the Big Little Book: The Cheetah Caper. True!
January 30, 2024
Forget about the BLB. And I had that WAY before I had either of the paperbacks.
January 23, 2024
Bear with me, this obscure piece of trivia has been knocking around the back of my head since I was a 12-year-old: One of David V. Reed’s earliest (and I think the best) of his Batman stories for editor Julie Schwartz was “The Daily Death of Terry Tremayne” in Batman #269, a Dashiell Hammett pastiche that borrowed heavily from The Maltese Falcon and was dedicated to Hammett in the credits. In a subsequent lettercol, Schwartz or his assistant revealed that just as David V. Reed had done a Hammett tribute, so was Marty Pasko writing an Ellery Queen homage, and Denny O’Neil was writing one in the style of Ed McBain. Sure enough, the Pasko story showed up in Detective Comics #459 (suitably entitled “A Clue Before Dying!”), while we never heard anything more about O’Neil’s McBain riff. I now think that assignment eventually morphed into this story “Death Strikes at Midnight and Three!” It is not a perfect match to McBain’s style, but O’Neil does use the alternating shifting perspectives McBain frequently employed between his protagonist and the criminal element, and Denny’s evocation of Gotham City in this story strikes me as similar to how McBain often described his fictional city of Isola. It’s never been acknowledged, but I’d be willing to bet this story is what finally emerged from that editorial story conference of several years previous.
January 23, 2024
A helluva theory and one that makes sense!
January 23, 2024
Marshall had drawn a back Cover for the issue, but DC decided to reuse the interior page for the back cover. Thus they considered it a reprint and paid Marshall the reprint fee for it. I think it was $7.50. He used to carry the check around and would show it when telling the story.