The Kid Whiz |

Ben Torres’ cover to BB #10, guest-starring the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: Chris Ecker is the Knight Watchman and I am Galahad. Chris created Reid Randall, the original Knight Watchman. I helped out some, maybe suggesting the “K” to change it from Night to Knight. I think he originally had a Daredevil kind of character in mind (the Marvel one, not the Golden Ager) but when he started writing and drawing, it looked like classic Batman stuff to me.

Chris Ecker’s original Kid Galahad sketch.

I definitely encouraged him in that direction, being a DC guy, and we replaced all the Bat symbolism and mythology with our own Knight stuff, such as his motorcycle, the Iron Horse. The blueprint for KW character was the Crusader, which we did back in 1981’s Megaton #1 and that story featured not one but two former sidekicks.

We jettisoned just about everything else from that story but we kept the grown up partner bit, because the original Big Bang Comics concept was to develop a comic book continuity that followed more or less real time, starting in the 1960s and progressing to the 1990s, when we started Big Bang. The characters were to have aged over that time, growing older, retiring, dying, having kids. All the stuff that DC had done in their Imaginary Stories (and to some degree on Earth 2) was going to be our meat and potatoes.

The plan at Caliber Press was to introduce the characters in a 64 page Golden Age issue, reintroduce them in a full-length Silver Age issue and then fast forward to the modern incarnations of the characters as they currently were in the mid 1990s. That’s more or less how it happened, except the Golden Age material was split over three books because Caliber had a distribution deal with Walmart that specified 32 page issues.

Ben Torres’ design for the adult White Knight.

Since the “modern” stories took place thirty-odd years after the Silver Age material, we figured that many of the original heroes had been replaced, either by grown up sidekicks or newer heroes. The Knight Watchman’s sidekick was named Kid Galahad. In his origin he told the his mentor that “Every knight needs a squire”. The Kid Whiz grew into a Teen Whiz and dropped the “Kid” becoming just Galahad. While the Knight Watchman was a creature of the night and inspired fear in criminals, Galahad operated during the day, openly helping the police and became a symbol of hope for the citizens of Midway City, to whom he became known as the “White Knight”.

Kid Galahad and the Whiz Kids by Chris Samnee.

When the Knight Watchman retired, there was a resurgence of criminal activity and Galahad discovered that crooks didn’t fear him as they had his predecessor. With his mentor’s blessing, the White Knight adopted the Knight Watchman guise at night to convince evildoers that both knights were still on the job. His uncle urged him many times to simply adopt the Knight Watchman identity, but Galahad never felt that he could live up to his hero’s legacy.

Midway City’s defenders by Tim Stiles.

Of all the Big Bang characters, I found the Knight Watchman to be the most difficult to write. Chris wasn’t simply ghosting old styles. He was telling his own stories and I had a harder time getting into his head than into what Bill Finger and the others had done before us. My own Watchman stories tended to be the ones featuring the grown up Jerry Randall, operating as the Knight Watchman and/or Galahad in Image’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #9, Big Bang #10 and Knight Watchman: “Skeletons in the Closet”.

Galahad has always been one of my favorite Big Bang characters. It should come as no surprise to find out that Robin (Dick Grayson) was always my favorite comic book character, with Karate Kid (Val Armorr, not Ralph Macchio) coming in a close second. I remember driving around in Detroit with Chris Ecker and Don (Megaton Man) Simpson during a Motor City Convention weekend and they were talking about how as kids they both had wanted to be Batman and not Robin, and why would anybody want to be the sidekick and not the hero?

All I can say is that I started reading comics when I was five years old, and I spent a good ten years looking forward to being a teenager like Robin and the Hardy Boys. Through the 60s, 70s and 80s Dick Grayson was stuck as a teenager, except on Earth 2 where he grew up to wear some incredibly ugly uniforms. He’s been growing older in the regular DC continuity over the past twenty years but I haven’t been following it. I already had the chance to live that dream.