Posted By Dan Greenfield on Apr 14, 2025 | 5 comments

CATWOMAN WEEK and MORRISON MONDAYS collide — for a Sheldon Moldoff birthday salute!

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Welcome to CATWOMAN WEEK! One of the greatest characters in comics history debuted 85 years ago, in Batman #1, on April 24, 1940 — and we’re celebrating with a series of features saluting the Feline Fatale. Next week, it’ll be JOKER WEEK! For the complete index of CATWOMAN WEEK features, click here.

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By BILL MORRISON

I’ve spent much of my art career as a “ghost,” a term for an artist who draws characters in the style of their original creator, and under the signature of that creator. I was credited for my work at Matt Groening’s Bongo Comics, but whenever I draw The Simpsons or Futurama characters for Fox (which has been way more than I did for Bongo) I do it anonymously, ghosting for Matt. Because of this, I identify quite a bit with Sheldon “Shelly” Moldoff, one of Batman co-creator Bob Kane’s most prolific ghosts.

Shelly had his own style, of course, and he employed it before World War II on DC features such as Hawkman, Green Lantern, and All-Star Comics. After serving during the war, he returned to comics and continued drawing for various publishers, including Standard, EC, and Fawcett. And in 1953, he returned to DC and began his long, anonymous stint with the Dynamic Duo, secretly drawing stories for Detective Comics and Batman until 1967. Subsequently, thanks to the lifting of the veil that concealed Bob Kane’s ghost artists, Moldoff is more closely identified with Batman than he is with the comics he drew in his own style. And as much as I love his work on the Dark Knight Detective’s adventures, I’m fascinated by Shelly’s work in the horror genre.

So, to salute the anniversary of Sheldon Moldoff’s birthday, April 14, 1920, and to celebrate CATWOMAN WEEK here at 13th Dimension, I was inspired by the cover to Fawcett’s This Magazine is Haunted #5, published in 1952 and drawn by Shelly in his own realistic style.

My reimagining of this chilling pre-code horror cover, which features my favorite Batman villain in the foreground, comes complete with not one, but two staggering “What If’s?” First, what if Sheldon Moldoff had been allowed to draw Batman in his own style, instead of having to pretend to be Bob Kane? And second, what if the editors at DC Comics in the early ’50s had decided to boost the Caped Crusader’s sales figures by jumping on the horror bandwagon and making Batman a grisly horror comic? And standing in for Shelly’s host character, Doctor Death, who better than the scariest of Batman villains (at least, in the Golden Age) the Scarecrow!

With this, I honor the birthdate of one of the most versatile comics artists of all time, and one of the all-time greatest ghosts, Sheldon “Shelly” Moldoff — and I wish you all a purr-fect CATWOMAN WEEK!

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