Today is Batman Day!

Happy Batman Day! I celebrate the occasion with you by taking another look at Jack Kirby's above first drawing of the Caped Crusader, from the cover of 1973's The Comic Reader #100 (and over here you can see an alternate version of that cover that I hadn't seen before today).

Three of my favorite Bat-memories are: enjoying the Neal Adams artwork on his early 1970s Batman stories; marveling at the Marshall Rogers artwork on his late 1970s Detective Comics run; and being in attendance at the midnight premiere of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman side-by-side with an incredibly electrified audience of hard-core fans just like myself.

In an extensive article regarding Batman Day in today's Chicago Tribune, Neal Adams is quoted as stating that Gotham City is more like Chicago than New York City partly due to the fact that Chicago has a preponderance of alleys while NYC has a dearth of those crime-ridden urban passageways.

I will of course be helping myself to a copy of the free  Detective Comics #27 Special Edition generously being offered by DC Comics. You can use the map over here to see where you can pick up that special comic for yourself, with 1324 locations indicated in North America, 26 in Europe, 26 in Australia, and 12 in Asia.

Again, Happy Batman Day!