Recently, someone asked me “Don’t you think that you’re protesting a little too hard that the Knight Watchman really isn’t Batman?”
I told him “No. We just use the character to tell Batman stories, drawn in the styles of classic Batman artists.”
“But doesn’t that essentially make him a Batman rip-off?”
“That’s what a lot of people think” I said. “To me, it makes him an avatar, filling in for an archetype.”
We never tried to pretend that we were reinventing the wheel – a cool new take on an old character. Nighthawk, Moon Knight, Midnighter, Catman, Big Daddy, Nightwing (Superman in Kandor), Night Thrasher and a bunch more I can’t think of are all based on Batman. Some are closer than others. A highly trained mind in a highly trained body.
After all, wasn’t Batman based on Zorro, the Shadow and the Scarlet Pimpernel?
The Big Bang retro stories were just for fun, told in shorthand recognizable styles. The real Big Bang was going to be the modern stuff, the second or third generation of heroes taking over for the archetypes. Guess what – – we never quite got there. The Knight Watchman stories “Graveyard Shift”, “Knight of the Living Dead” and “Skeletons in the Closet” were the closest we got to the modern continuity, plus the Free Agents story in the Caliber Press #4 issue.
When Chris Ecker first created the Night Watchman, he was thinking along the lines of Daredevil and Captain America. I suggested he add the “K” and it became “Knight” and started us down the road to creating a mythology based on a knight instead of a bat.
Chris never set out to ghost Dick Sprang or Shelly Moldoff in the way that latter Big Bang artists did. He nudged his style in the direction of those artists but wasn’t slavish about it. A lot of the guys were better ghosts than he was, but make no mistake about it: Chris Ecker really WAS Tom King. The KW was a stylized version of Chris’ own style.
One of my favorite memories is of Shelly Moldoff critiquing one of the early stories and telling Chris what he (Shelly) would have done differently for a Batman story. Chris took some notes, bit his tongue and later told me something along the lines of “It isn’t a Batman story – it’s the Knight Watchman.”
Very early on, we thought we would be telling the Watchman’s stories in the styles of all the great artists and writers of the past: Siegel & Shuster, Simon & Kirby, Will Eisner, Jack Cole. What could be neater than a Wayne Boring Knight Watchman story?
We ended up not doing too much mixing and matching of archetypes and creators , but today I’m sharing with you some of the ones we did have a bit of fun with, and some that maybe we should have pursued.
One of my favorite Big Bang stories is “The Camera of Doom”, a Knight Watchman yarn that appeared in Big Bang Presents #1 and was the last KW story I wrote prior to “Skeletons in the Closet”. It was a full blown Spirit story, with not a trace of Batman in it and Jeff Austin did a fantastic job translating it. I’ve always loved the splash page.
Also shown here is the Knight Watchman and Kid Galahad as drawn by Mark Lewis in Simon & Kirby style (or Simmons & Kingler in the BB universe). We should have done a full story this way, but Mark and I told some wonderful Badge stories instead.
And just for fun are some Ultiman pieces a la some not so Superman related styles. First up is a fun pin-up of the Ultimate Human Being as interpreted by John Thompson by way of C. C. Beck. Let’s not even get started on homages or rip-offs of the Man of Steel (who was himself descended from the Man of Bronze – Doc Savage, Gladiator and John Carter of Mars).
Here’s a sample page by Mike Kirsten done in a nice approximation of Alex Raymond and Flash Gordon. I wish we had followed up with a whole story. There just wasn’t time or resources to do everything we wanted to.
Finally, here is a great Ultiman cover by Jerry Acerno looking as if it were published by Timely (Marvel) Comics in the early Golden Age. More Captain America than Superman? Jerry is probably best known to Big Bang Comics readers for his gorgeous Shadow Lady stories.
That’s it. I’m done protesting. Jessica Rabbit said, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” My point is that the Big Bang characters were intended to take the readers on a trip through comics’ history and they did. The future – – it has yet to be written.
