Comic creator and writer Batton Lash, known for Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre, died on January 12, 2019. He passed from brain cancer at the age of 65.

Lash was born on October 29, 1953 in Brooklyn, New York and studied cartooning and graphic arts at Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts.

In 1979 he started writing and drawing Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre as a weekly news strip in The Brooklyn Paper. The title centered around the law practice of Alanna Wolff and Jeff Byrd, who specialize in legal issues of supernatural beings. The strip ran until 1996 in The Brooklyn Paper and ran in The National Law Journal from ’83 to ’97. He and his wife Jackie Estrada founded Exhibit A Press in 1994 to publish the series as a comic book, renaming it Supernatural Law.

He wrote Archie Meets the Punisher that saw the popular teen characters of Archie Comics with the Marvel vigilante. The 1994 comic is a favored crossover with Archie and the gang. He also wrote The House of Riverdale and Archie Freshman Year.

Lash wrote several issues of Radioactive Man in 2002 which earned him an Eisner Award for Best Humor Publication. He was contributor to The Big Book of graphic novel anthology series, including entries in Death, Weirdos, Urban Legends, and Thugs.

In addition to an Eisner, he has been awarded the Don Thompson Award, an Inkpot Award, an Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benjamin Franklin Award, and was nominated for two Harvey Awards.