Hero Complex contributor Liesl Bradner offers an intriguing look back at a forgotten age of heroics in Japan...

Five years before Lee Falk’s masked-man adventures with “The Phantom” began in newspapers, a hero called Golden Bat was saving damsels in distress in the streets of Depression-era Japan. He was first seen in 1931 (seven years before Superman first took flight and eight before that Gotham City fellow who dressed like a bat) and his exploits were told in kamishibai, which was street theater that used painted illustrations.

Author Eric P. Nash examines the little-known art form and predecessor to modern-day anime and manga in his recent book “Manga Kamishibai: The Art of Japanese Paper Theater.” I wrote about the book and this long-gone street entertainment for Culture Monster, the arts blog for the Los Angeles Times. Here's a bit from that piece that describes the street performance:

It was the simple clacking of two wooden sticks on a street corner that signaled to children the start of kamishibai, a popular pastime during Depression-era Japan. ... Storytellers would travel from town to town with their butai (miniature stage) on the back of a bike. The setup was reminiscent of a Punch and Judy show, but instead of puppets the narrator would slide a series of poster boards with watercolor illustrations in and out of the box. He would act out the script, which was written on cards placed on the back of a board.

You can read the rest of that piece right here. For Hero Complex readers, it's intriguing to see the parallels and unexpected overlap with U.S. comics and newspaper strips. With the series of images presented on the butai, kamishibai artists and writers worked in a similar fashion to classic comic strips.  

Although he resembles Captain America’s nemesis Red Skull, Golden Bat has more in common with a certain Man of Steel. Like Superman, he flies, wears a red cape, flexes superhuman muscles and gets away from it all in a fortress of solitude (the Bat's, though, is in the Japanese Alps).

Golden Bat’s creator, Takeo Nagamatsu, was thought to have been inspired by Lon Chaney in “Phantom of the Opera.”

Other characters in the vintage Japanese medium possess eerie similarities to icons of American comic books. The villain Pale Rider, for instance, has a mask that looks like a cross between Batman’s symbol and the Joker’s grinning, chalk-white face. There's also a dead ringer for the creature from the Black Lagoon in "Prince Gamma vs. the Giant Alien." In one illustration from a chapter of Prince Gamma, the title letters slant away from the viewer as they did in old Flash Gordon serials, which, of course, inspired George Lucas' rolling opening credits in the "Star Wars" films.

Kamishibai died in about 1952, with the introduction of TV into popular culture. Many of the form’s writers and artists then migrated into manga, such as Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka, known to many as the “Godfather of Manga.” -- Liesl Bradner

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Images, from top: Golden Bat, Pale Rider, Prince Gamma and Jungle Boy. All from "Manga Kamishibai" by Eric P. Nash / Abrams ComicArts 2009

EXCLUSIVE

The designer talks about his "secret history of Batman in Japan" and reveals his favorite screen version of the hero -- and it's not "The Dark Knight."

In a world that judges a book by its cover, Chip Kidd is a visual genius in high demand. The author, graphic designer and pop-culture connoisseur is the art director for American publisher Alfred A. Knopf, but like many of the superheroes he adores, Kidd has a secret identity as a “Batman purist.”

The 44-year-old (who has designed memorable covers for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, James Ellroy, Larry McMurtry, Elmore Leonard and Michael Crichton) had a childhood fascination with the caped crusader that has turned into an full-fledged obsession. More than a collector, Kidd has been both an archival force and a sort of safari hunter when it comes to intepretations of the superhero throughout pop culture.

That leads to Kidd’s latest book, “Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan," now in stores and uncovering a nearly forgotten history: At the peak of the 1960s Batman craze, Shonen King, the weekly manga anthology, licensed the rights to publish its own Batman and Robin tales in which the Dynamic Duo brawled with aliens, mutated dinosaurs and immortal villains. But the yearlong run of stories were never collected in Japan nor translated into English ... until now. The new release from Pantheon Books includes hundreds of pages of Batman manga comics more than four decades old alongside striking photographs of vintage Japanese Batman toys. There is also a $60 limited edition with a different cover and an adventure written by Jiro Kuwata, the manga guru who wrote and drew the 1960s material. All 7,000 copies of those limited editions are signed by Kidd.

Kidd will be in Los Angeles signing copies of his book at Meltdown Comics (7522 Sunset Boulevard) on Nov. 12 at 7 p.m. A new writer here at the Los Angeles Times, Yvonne Villarreal, chatted with Kidd the other day and put together this Hero Complex Q&A. Hope you enjoy.

YV: What is it about Batman that first captivated you?

Kidd: I was 2 years old when the TV show [starring Adam West] came out and so that was the main thing that got me into it. And, of course, it was a revolutionary show for its time so it had this massive appeal even to kids at a very young age just from the way it looked and the way it moved. And then, of course, as you get older, you start reading the comics. I got more into the story of it and the whole mythology around the character. It was well constructed as a piece of lore.

YV: As a graphic artist, do you find Batman aesthetically appealing?

Kidd: Definitely. I liked the whole design of the character and the way that he looked sort of like a demon even though he was a good guy.

YV: You’ve designed highly recognizable book jackets, including "Jurassic Park" and "The Road."  Can you recall the first Batman cover that caught your attention?

Kidd: I must have been like 2 or 3. My brother was two years older. It would have been a Detective Comics from like 1966 or '67. Definitely would have been drawn by Carmine Infantino.

YV: What was it like, as an artist, to see some of the illustrations from the Japanese comics that are included in the book?

Kidd: They’re very unique. What’s interesting about it ... for Batman fans, the real surprise is that they’ll have never seen any of this or even heard of it. That’s pretty radical. That’s like somebody finding five new Beatles songs that no one has ever heard of.