Print

[WileyJ]

one of the great things about this site is finding out how  these golden age artist could change styles-sometimes dramatically! before I only knew moldoff as the kooky era batman the  whimsical blocky square jawed batman.its a real revelation to discover his more realistic style.im assuming dc insisted on this style? it seems dc preferred a cartoonish style on most of their superheroes in those days.

[jimmm kelly]

Moldoff worked for Bob Kane on Batman, so he was required to copy the Kane style for that feature. Looking at his body of work, he was very adaptive to whatever circumstances he was in. He did very nice Alex Raymond style art on Hawkman. He did some pretty gruesome horror art for other companies.

What knocks me out is that Moldoff did the art for a lot of the PSAs in the DC comics I was reading in the '60s, yet I never connected the PSA artist with the Batman artist--even when they appeared side by side in the same comic.

[WileyJ]

oh yes I should have guessed that. I thought maybe he was emulating dick sprang but im sure sprang was also emulating kane lol what a tangled web.

[jimmm kelly]

While Sprang also drew Batman according to the Bob Kane style, I imagine that a lot of older readers would have learned to identify him as the "good" Batman artist (like Carl Barks on Donald Duck or Dan DeCarlo on Archie). Whereas, for most readers, Sheldon Moldoff was Bob Kane--just as Lew Schwartz had been Bob Kane before that. Those ghosts disappeared into the style and didn't do a lot to stand out in the way that Dick Sprang stood out.

And there were other artists like Jack Burnley, Jim Mooney and Win Mortimer who drew Batman and Robin according to the Bob Kane model, but otherwise didn't alter their style . So a Jim Mooney Batman story is not that different from a Jim Mooney Supergirl story and you can easily tell that the same artist worked on both.

Now when I look at a Moldoff Batman story, I can spot his touch (nine times out of ten)--but it's never as obvious as Sprang.