Death-Man was created by Bob Kanigher and Sheldon Moldoff in Batman #180, cover dated May 1966. The character was not created by Bat-manga artist Jiro Kuwata. I don't know if the change in his name to "Lord Death-Man" was an accident of translation (in either direction) or a deliberate choice by Kuwata, but it definitely sounds better.
I don't expect some new guy at Newsarama to know something as obscure as this, and I have no idea if Chip Kidd or Saul Ferris know it or whether they attribute the character's origin correctly in the text of their Bat Manga! collection. But someone, somewhere, needed to point this out, so here it is.
I believe it isn't acknowledged in the Bat-Manga book ... which treats the Japanese strips more as collector's curios like toys and Bat-cereal than a straight-up reprint.
ReplyDeleteThe approach kinda bugged me, but the manga is still pretty cool!
Death-Man? Was he the guitarist in The Misfits? Or the bassist in The Who?
ReplyDeleteNo, the bassist in the Who was Death's Head.
ReplyDeleteOf course I thought of the Ox, but we're still waiting for him to come back.
ReplyDeleteKeeper: yeah, like everyone else I followed the controversy over this book and the way it presents the reprint material...and saw just how petulant and thin-skinned Chip Kidd is about taking criticism. A simple "huh, guess we goofed with the cover credit" would have gone a lot farther. But I like what I've seen of the manga itself.