1945 Sprang Batman Original Artwork

I snapped the above photo at C2E2 last week. (At conventions I enjoy browsing through pages of fabulous comic artwork that I will never own.) Batman #32 was released in 1945 and the twelve-page story from which the above comes featured the title character interacting with The Three Musketeers. The gentleman selling the artwork at one time owned all twelve pages but is now splitting them up for in the vicinity of $10,000 apiece.

It's a bit of a miracle that these art pages still exist because, during the Golden Age, "comic art was routinely destroyed by publishers after publication or casually discarded by the creators themselves" (as so well put in the copy for a Heritage auction that I came across). The story goes that Dick Sprang (who pencilled, inked, and lettered the story (and whom I one time told you invited my then-young to sit and draw with him for an entire day at a Chicago Comicon a couple of decades back)) was such a fan of The Three Musketeers that he asked his editor if the pages could please be returned to him. Good idea!

You can enjoy viewing crisp photographs of all twelve original pages over here.