From that moment on, I felt a kinship with Win, an eccentric little man with a big heart and great sense of humor-and took more interest in his artwork. But Mortimer’s background was more of a mystery to me I couldn’t recall anything he had particularly done, though I somehow knew he was an old-time DC artist, as if his name had seeped into the part of my brain that stores comic book history.īut the more I saw of his pencilling, I realized he had drawn one of my favorite comics from my childhood, a pre-TV show Batman Brave & Bold, the team-up with Eclipso, issue #64, March ‘66 (with a great cover by Gil Kane!). Sparling’s work was still fresh in my mind then, because I was a big fan of his 1968 series Secret Six, “Johnny Double” in Showcase, and a couple of post-Adams Spectre stories. Win worked in a room with fellow DC Comics old-timer Jack Sparling. I worked with Win at Neal Adams’ Continuity Associates from 1983-85, pencilling storyboards and comp art (that Neal would ink and then have colored) for advertising agencies.
GREAT selection of covers, Dan! FYI, I delivered this at Win’s funeral in 1998: Mortimer penciled and inked them all, with one exception.
This is a 13 COVERS salute I’ve been waiting to do, because just check out these beauties. He died in 1998 but he quietly left an indelible mark on Gotham. Mortimer, who was born May 1, 1919, produced not only some of my personal favorite Batman covers, he produced some of the most famous and iconic Batman covers ever. When you talk Batman before the mid-’50s, fans frequently refer to the “Jerry Robinson look” or the the “Dick Sprang style.” Thing is, there were so many others whose names just never stuck to the tongue, like Fred Ray or Jim Mooney or George Roussos or, in this case, Win Mortimer. The Silver Age was all Carmine Infantino, right? Well, not exactly.Īnd so it goes all the way back to the Golden Age. People with short memories or a thin grounding in the Bronze Age think Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams single-handedly returned Batman to his darker roots - often forgetting names like Frank Robbins or Len Wein or Irv Novick or Bob Brown or Mike Friedrich. History loves shorthand, especially comics history. So even though Mortimer did a lot more than this, I’m sticking with these one more time. UPDATED 5/1/18: I first posted this two years ago and I set about doing another version but the thing is, I love these covers. Shining the Batsignal on one of Gotham’s forgotten heroes …
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