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Mike Norris
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Posted: 20 January 2017 at 2:04pm | IP Logged | 1  

The Brave and the Bold was the only Batman title I bought on a regular basis in the 70's. So Aparo is my Batman artist. I used to wonder why he wasn't on the other Bat-books. 
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Jason Czeskleba
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Posted: 20 January 2017 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | 2  

 Mike Norris wrote:
I used to wonder why he wasn't on the other Bat-books.

From what I've read, The Brave and The Bold was outselling the other Bat-books in the mid 70s.  So it was the highest profile Batman assignment, and the logical place to put their best Batman artist.  I'm sure you probably know also that he did have a brief run doing Batman solo stories in Detective Comics in 1974-75. 

Edited by Jason Czeskleba on 20 January 2017 at 3:14pm
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Joe Hollon
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Posted: 20 January 2017 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | 3  

Aparo's is probably the Batman I most see when I close
my eyes and think of the character.
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Jason Larouse
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Posted: 20 January 2017 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | 4  

From what I've read, The Brave and The Bold was outselling the other Bat-books in the mid 70s.  So it was the highest profile Batman assignment, and the logical place to put their best Batman artist.  I'm sure you probably know also that he did have a brief run doing Batman solo stories in Detective Comics in 1974-75. 

**********

Brave and the Bold was also published once every two months, which gave him the time to pencil, ink, and letter all of them. I would imagine that having the complete artistic freedom was appealing. 
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Brian O'Neill
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Posted: 20 January 2017 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | 5  

Didn't know Aparo did his own lettering. So, he was awesome at that, too!
He has always been 'my' Batman artist, as much as I liked the work of Neal Adams. I'd lost track of Aparo after I dropped BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS(before Batman quit, and it became THE OUTSIDERS, in a 'deluxe' format), but around 1988, I picked up a random issue of BATMAN(which I had never read on a consistent basis), and 'discovered' that he and Mike DeCarlo were doing a great job together. It did take a few pages to adjust to seeing someone else's inks over Aparo's pencils, but once that no longer seemed "weird" to me, I loved the work.
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Shane Matlock
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Posted: 21 January 2017 at 12:28am | IP Logged | 6  

Jim Aparo was the Batman artist back when I started reading comics so I absolutely love his Batman art. It seemed like a continuation of the Neal Adams Batman (which I had a bit of in a big treasury edition comic and absolutely loved). JB does a fantastic Batman as well, and it seems to me to be indebted to Neal Adams and Aparo and JB is in my top five favorite Batman artists along with those two and Marshall Rogers and Alan Davis. Don Newton did a great Batman too. Shame there wasn't more JB on Batman. I feel like that's the one title he should have had a good run on but didn't (and I know it's because he wasn't comfortable writing those types of stories, but I still would have loved to have seen it). 

As for the pre-Adams Batman, no one could beat Dick Sprang, but that was the Batman of a different era. 
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Shane Matlock
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Posted: 21 January 2017 at 12:30am | IP Logged | 7  

By the way, that Zeck cover is great. I always felt like Mike Zeck was one of those artist like John Byrne, who, no matter what character he draws, they look fantastic. 
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Eric Sofer
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Posted: 21 January 2017 at 8:37am | IP Logged | 8  

Shane Matlock: "As for the pre-Adams Batman, no one could beat Dick Sprang, but that was the Batman of a different era."

Maybe Curt Swan - but then again, he could do anything.
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Shane Matlock
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Posted: 21 January 2017 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | 9  

For obvious reasons I don't even think of Curt Swan when I think of Batman. But when I think of Superman in comics his Superman is the first thing that pops in my head. Not sure if anyone drew any more issues of Superman than he did but Swan's art in the Superman comics was ubiquitous throughout my entire childhood and early teens. 

Also I thought those last two issues of the silver age Superman before JB's reboot that Swan did were just wonderfully drawn and showed he was still at the top of his game. I'm sure the Perez inks probably didn't hurt either to give it a bit of a more modern (at the time) look to his art.

Not many people outside of his fans probably know what JB did to make sure Swan still had a job after Byrne started doing Superman. It's never included in the list of Big Bad Byrne stories unless it's probably twisted into, "and he put Curt Swan out of a job."

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Brian Hague
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Posted: 22 January 2017 at 3:38am | IP Logged | 10  

Curt Swan was a regular Batman artist on World's Finest for years. There's no reason not to associate him with the character.

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Byron Graham
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Posted: 22 January 2017 at 6:04am | IP Logged | 11  

I really became a fan of Jim Aparo when DC reprinted his Spectre stories in 1988. That stuff was amazing.
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Brian Hague
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Posted: 22 January 2017 at 7:17am | IP Logged | 12  

Those Spectre comics are breathtaking. Aparo has long been one of my favorite artists. His lean, athletic figures move with grace and energy. His ability to convey emotion and mood is extraordinary. His storytelling and rendering are superb. His style was informed by the work of Kubert, Adams, and the best of the comic strip field, yet remained uniquely his own, so that one can look at either his earliest or latest work and, for all of the improvement, still see the same distinctive hand in it. The period in the middle when he was doing everything himself, and doing it as well as anyone ever had, continues to blow me away. The performances of his actors, the sense of time and place, the use of shadow and cross-hatching, all make for exciting, engaging, wonderfully-involving stories.

Time and changes in editorial policy led to his use of outside inkers and letterers towards the end of his career, and while I still very much enjoyed his work, I was saddened by the subtleties that were lost in the translation. Mike DeCarlo was a fine inker, but a distinctive artist in his own right, and lacked Aparo's finesse with texture and mood. So much was getting lost, but what was visible of Aparo's rendering was top-flight nevertheless. Of course, his storytelling was always dead-on.

So many of my favorite comics, sequences, and single images are the work of Aparo. The very few shortcuts or errors that I've noticed here and there stand out so much more than they do in others' work because they are so rare. He was one of the best in the business. A professional who gave every character and situation thrown at him the best one could give.

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