Three Minutes: Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd gets his chat on, speaking to the proprietors of common sense movement site, Stodgy is Sexy. Just behind Mr Kidd lurks one of my all-time favourite cover collages, the extreme frame contraction that serves as the attract point for a re-release of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Kidd cannily captures all the creased, despotic hysteria of that book in a frenzied zoom on a mad, probing bat-eye. All hail the Gotham City Batman!

Holy Bat-Culture!

Out at the end of October is this bizarro cultural artifact: Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan. Unfortunately it's not a tell-all pulp sleazer chronicling Bruce Wayne's hopped up days gun running with yakuza in Nagasaki (curses!), instead we get oodles of long-thought-lost Shonen King Dark Knight manga.

Printed from 1966 to 67, and principally drawn by jailbird 8-Man (Japan's first cyborg hero!) co-creator Jiro Kuwata, Shonen King's Batman ran in tandem with the hugely popular Adam West biffer show. Why all new stories? Apparently the licence to reprint US Batman material had been granted elsewhere. Plus! Typical DC world greatest detective tales do not fit your young-teen Shonen aspirational remit. Action clone or bust! Read much more here - an interview with book compilers Chip Kidd and Saul Ferris.

Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan is out October 28th. Expect all-new peculiar villains.