TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN: Still waiting for Jim Aparo's Artist's Edition !

Monday, September 22, 2025

Still waiting for Jim Aparo's Artist's Edition !

So we still have to hold out for one more week until the anticipated Jim Aparo Artist's Edition comes out and since I have already added all of the videos I can - at least at this point - to my Jim Aparo tribute post from last week I decided to take a much deserved break and see if I can add more Batman content to the blog and make it into Batman month or so.

Now as longtime followers of the blog might have already guessed this is not the post I originally envisioned when I was thinking about what kind of a special Batman post I could write to surprise all my faithful readers.

Because my first idea was to do a post with all the original artwork from the Batman titles that never get a post of their own because I just don't have enough material for any of the artists and that way I can put them all into one post. Which sounds like a great idea. And it is. But nothing is ever easy on TALES FORM THE KRYPTONIAN - as regular blog visitors can attest - because as a perfectionist I am never contend with the content I currently have and so I went on the internet to see if I had the best of the best of original art. As it could not be any other way I found a lot.

More than I bargained for. The second phase of the post was that I found a lot of original artwork where Dick Giordano had done either the pencils or the inks and for a while it looked like this would end up being a Dick Giordano post. I also found more original artwork by Marshal Rogers and I don't have to tell any Batman fan worth his salt how groundbreaking his run on the Batman books was. Naturally I saved all the artwork by artists like Norm Breyfogle, Neal Adams or Mike Grell - and yes even Irv Novick - for later since they will get their own BATMAN spotlights at some point.

But as I went on it became clear that this would turn into a Don Newton appreciation post. For me Don Newton is one of the best and at the same time most underappreciated artists at DC Comics and while a lot of his work on the Batman books is available in hardcover very little of it is actually in the TALES OF THE BATMAN : DON NEWTON hardcover since DC Comics saved the biggest part for the Gerry Conway Batman collection.

In any case, he is one of my favourite artists so I jumped at the chance to do another post about him especially since it is also kind of a tribute post for Alfredo Alcala who did a lot of the inks for the Batman books during this time period. Now it was kind of hard to bring it down to only 23 pictures for this post but I got the ones with the best quality in here.

There is still a lot of Don Newton artwork left that I could not include in this post and while it is not enough for another full blown Don Newton post I might turn it into a double feature with Marshal Rogers since I also do not have enough material - not yet - for a full blown Marshal Rogers BATMAN tribute post. And yes, that BATMAN Dick Giordano post is just postponed not scrapped. So anyway, without any longer preambles here is what I selected for this post since it is time for me to wrap this up as it has been a very long day for me. But what a way to start the week.