Contributed by collector and Overstreet Advisor Art Cloos
Dick Sprang is considered one of the premier Batman artists whose work defined the look of Batman in the 1950s. He was born in Fremont, Ohio on July 28, 1915 and died May 10, 2000. He became a professional illustrator at an early age, painting signs and handbills for local advertisers. Sprang worked throughout the 1930s for Standard Magazines screening scripts as an editor, as well as contributing artwork to Standard, Columbia Publications, and Street and Smith – while still in high school.
He joined the staff of the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain in Toledo, Ohio shortly after graduating circa 1934 and continued to produce magazine work concurrently. He left the newspaper chain in 1936 to move to New York City where he began illustrating western, detective, and adventure pulp magazines in the late 1930s.
From the late ’30s to the early ‘40s, Sprang continued to work as a freelance illustrator, primarily for such pulp magazines as Popular Detective, Popular Western, Phantom Detective, G-Men, Detective Novels Magazine, Crack Detective, and Black Hood Detective/Hooded Detective, for which he also wrote some stories. In 1937-1938, Sprang provided assistance on the King Features Syndicate comic strips Secret Agent X-9 doing layouts and The Lone Ranger where he did pencil assists. In 1938, he also wrote briefly for The Lone Ranger radio series.
Late in the decade, the pulp magazines were on the way out, so Sprang moved toward comic book illustration. With Norman Fallon and Ed Kressey, he co-founded the studio Fallon-Sprang at a little loft in Manhattan. A promotional flier advertises the studio as comics packagers for such features as Power Nelson who was introduced in Prize Comics #1 (March 1940) and Shock Gibson. In addition. the shop did human interest features such as Speed Martin and the interplanetary feature Sky Wizard and a detective feature called K-7 – both of which were introduced in Hillman Periodicals’ Miracle Comics #1 (February 1940), and attributed to Emile Schumacher.
He continued to seek comic book work, which led him to submit art samples to DC Comics editor Whitney Ellsworth, who assigned him a Batman story in 1941. Anticipating that Batman creator Bob Kane would be drafted to serve in World War II, DC inventoried Sprang’s work to safeguard against delays. Sprang’s first published Batman work was the Batman and Robin figures on the cover of Batman #18 (August-September 1943), which was reproduced from art for the yet-to-be-published Detective Comics #84 page 13 (February 1944). His first original published Batman work, and first interior story work, appeared in Batman #19 (October-November 1943). He penciled and inked the cover and the first three Batman stories, and penciled the fourth Batman story, inked by Norm Fallon. Like all Batman artists of the time, Sprang went uncredited as a ghost artist for Kane.
Thereafter, Sprang worked almost entirely on Batman comics and covers and on the Batman newspaper strip, becoming one of the primary Batman artists in the character’s first 20 years. In 1955, Sprang got the chance to draw Superman, when he replaced Curt Swan as the primary artist for the Superman/Batman team-up stories in World’s Finest Comics, on which he worked until his retirement in 1963. Sprang also worked on a couple of stories for the main Superman comic, including the tale that introduced the first prototype Supergirl.
Sprang’s work was first reprinted in 1961, and nearly all subsequent Batman reprint collections have contained at least one of his efforts. However, his name never appeared on his Batman work during his career, due to stipulations in Kane’s contract. These stated that Kane’s name would remain on the strip, regardless of whether he drew any particular story, and this restriction remained in place until the mid-1960s. It was subsequently revealed, however, that Sprang was Kane’s favorite ghost artist.
Comics historian Les Daniels wrote that Sprang’s “clean line and bold sense of design” set him apart as “the supreme stylist” of the early Batman artists. Sprang used to study the way children read comics to experiment with page layouts and panel to panel transitions, hoping to create “the most suspense and the most fluidity to keep the pages turning.” Daniels singles out Sprang’s work on the 1948 debut of the Riddler as “a superb example of story breakdown and page design.” The tardiness of Sprang’s friend and frequent collaborator Bill Finger sometimes produced situations in which he would have to send in pencils for a story before the ending had been written, actions that “required some careful figuring.” In Batman #34, “Sprang drew Batman and Robin capering across...Mount Rushmore,” over a decade before Alfred Hitchcock filmed a similar scene in North by Northwest. One story drawn by Sprang, “Joker’s Millions,” was adapted into an episode of Batman: The Animated Series.
During the time that Dick Sprang began illustrating Batman, he taught his wife Lora Sprang to letter, and she subsequently lettered most, and also colored some, of his subsequent work under the pen name Pat Gordon. In addition to lettering and coloring her husband’s artwork, Lora Sprang also worked freelance as a photographer for Film Fun magazine, hand-lettered titles for industrial films, worked on the titles of Navy training films during World War II, and produced theatrical posters for 20th Century Fox.
During the 1950s Lora continued to letter for DC on stories featuring Superman, Batman, Superboy and others, before leaving the company around 1961.
Sprang moved to Arizona in 1972 after he retired from comics in 1963 where he lived until his death.
