10/28/2008

The new book by Chip Kidd Bat Manga! The Secret History of Batman chronicles Batman’s seemingly gay life in Japan. In an interview in this week’s TIME magazine Chip Kidd explains that:
“Japan was the only country in the world that contacted DC Comics and said, ‘We want to license the right to write and draw our own Batman and Robin stories.’ These stories appeared for exactly a year, from April ‘66 to May ‘67. And they kind of came and went. They were never collected, never translated. They just appeared and then vanished…There’s this one villain called Lord Death Man, and his ability is basically to die. But much more importantly, he comes back to life and starts to haunt Batman’s dreams. All kinds of wonderful weird things happen that don’t get explained.”

Photo thanks and more Bat Manga pix at About.com.