Holy blogosphere Batman! Brendan McCarthy and the Dark Knight

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Artist Brendan McCarthy is one of those singular talents who doesn’t have any competitors. Nobody can do what he does, as good as he does.

I’ve been a massive fan since his days on Shade The Changing Man. I was familiar with his work on 2000AD before that, but Shade was special.

Back then in the early 1990s I was a poor student and could only afford two American comics a month. Cerebus was one, Shade was the other.

I hadn’t read Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns or Sandman by that point, and it was Shade that made me realise what comics were capable of. This was Vertigo before Vertigo, a truly ground-breaking title. Shade was the first time I realised that comics could cater to an adult audience, with writer Peter Milligan touching on issues like transgenderism and same-sex relationships.

Following characters Shade, Lenny and Kathy on a road-trip across America was like Jack Kerouac for the acid generation, and it was McCarthy’s mind-bending covers that drew me in.

So I’m delighted to see that he has joined the blogosphere with The Strangeness of Brendan McCarthy. This is definitely the coolest thing I’ve seen on the Interweb for yonks.

I only wish DC had went for his Batboy proposal. McCarthy said: “I recently pitched DC Comics a new Batman spin-off series, a kind of twisted ‘Larry David’ satirical take on the comics’ industry and superheroism in general. Apparently, Dan DiDio loved it, but Paul Levitz, not so much! The Bat-franchise must be kept ‘unpolluted’ from some indolent slacker’s morbidly morbid view of the world .”

I’d buy that.

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Tags: Batboy, Brendan McCarthy