NYCC News: Dynamite Entertainment announced today that Brian Buccellato, the current co-writer of The Flash for DC Comics, will pen a new Black Bat comic for Dynamite in 2013.  The original Black Bat appeared in the pulps in 1933, but it was a re-launch of the character in 1939 in Ned Pines’ Thrilling Publications that provides the memorable figure of District Attorney Anthony Quinn, who is blinded by acid flung in his face by criminals and then has his sight restored via a secret cornea transplant operation.  During the time he was blind he picked up skills that now allow him to "see" in the dark.  It is this Tony Quinn, who decides to use his new abilities to punish criminals that are out of reach of the ordinary strictures of the law, who will be the nocturnal vigilante hero at the center of Dynamite’s new Black Bat comic.

 

The Black Bat appeared in the pulps simultaneously with the debut of Batman in Detective Comics in 1939 and there was talk from both publishers about possible lawsuits over the similarity of the characters, with each side saying the other had copied their work.  Two years later DC did borrow the acid-in-the-face trope for both Doctor Mid-Nite and then the Batman villain Two-Face (District Attorney Harvey Kent, whose last name was later changed to “Dent,” suffered his fate in 1942, three years after the publication of the Black Bat’s origin story in 1939).

 

But because of the near legal donnybrook between DC and Thrilling Publications, Nedor, the comic book publishing arm of Thrilling never published a Black Bat comic per se, though it did publish a series featuring a hero named The Mask who was based on the Black Bat.

 

With its growing line of pulp magazine heroes that also includes the Green Hornet and The Shadow, Dynamite appears to be ideally positioned to bring another classic pulp creation to mainstream comics.