Top Ten Batman Artists of All Time

With the release of next week's Batman #8, the Dark Knight will take over the attention of the DC Universe as he stars in the first major multi-issue, multi-title crossover of the New 52, the much-anticipated Night of the Owls story arc. To celebrate the impact that the Shadow of the Bat has on the rest of comics, we decided it was a good time to take a look at some of the greatest artists ever to grace his pages.

Bob KaneThe co-creator of Batman and the name most associated with the character, he not only drew the earliest appearances of the Caped Crusader but set up shop working other artists working with and/or under him and signing his name, keeping it a convention that "Bob Kane" drew Batman for years. But Kane wasn't just the creator of Batman--his design was a revelation to comics fans that stuck out like a sore thumb in the sea of strong-guy imitators that followed the creation of Superman. While it's often discussed how he managed to steal writer Bill Finger's thunder, it may have been somewhat more fair in this case than in many others, as the look of Batman was so radically different than anything else on the shelf at that time that it more or less demanded attention, and was likely a big part of why the character has endured.

Jerry Robinson Best known (and remembered) as the co-creator of The Joker (and thus the first artist, along with Kane, to draw that disfigured grin), Robinson spent a chunk of time as another of Bob Kane's ghosts. As one of the earliest artists to handle the characters besides Kane, his accomplishments are many and notable and over the years he frequently came into conflict with Kane over who created what; Kane contested the (widely accepted) claim that Robinson created The Joker, while Robinson insisted upon it. He also worked on the first appearances of Robin, Two-Face and Alfred Pennyworth, Batman's butler. Robinson's grasp of artistic fundamentals was arguably far greater than Kane's, resulting in work that has been widely imitated and reprinted over the years while even many of the artists who came after him seem dated by comparison.

Sheldon Moldoff Arguably the most enduring of Bob Kane's "ghost artists," Moldoff co-created a slew of characters from Batgirl and Batwoman to Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze. He worked on the Batman titles for 14 years and did work that bridged the gap between Kane's earliest interpretation of Batman and the one who would become a worldwide icon a few decades later. Moldoff is, in general, one of the great artists of the Golden Age of comics and had a hand in creating or defining dozens of characters for DC at the time. His final work for the publisher, Superman/Batman: World's Funnest by Evan Dorkin, was part of a delightful retrospective on the characters that featured the art of many of the characters' best creators and allowed Moldoff an opportunity to show off another character he co-created, Bat-Mite.

Dick Sprang Along with Moldoff, Dick Sprang was arguably the greatest Batman artist of the '50s and, while Moldoff was something of a missing link between Kane/Robinson and those who would come later, Sprang was very much a creature of that era, his art style embracing the insanity of the late Golden Age and early Silver Age of comics. His fluid and kinetic art style was perfectly suited to a Batman entering the jet age, with loving attention to detail making the ever-increasing variety of characters and gadgets that the Bat-titles demanded even more awesome after he drew them than they were in the scripts.

Carmine Infantino Regarded by many fans and critics as one of the best comics pencillers of all time, Carmine Infantino's resume is too long and impressive to do justice in a couple of paragraphs, but suffice it to say his Batman was a game-changer. When he came aboard, the Adam West series had not yet revived the popularity of the franchise and Batman's stock was falling. Infantino's exciting pencils were instrumental to drawing in casual newsstand fans who saw the Garder Fox/Infantino team (responsible for reviving characters like The Flash) as doing something special and dynamic with DC's character library. For years, Infantino's was the definitive Batman for fans around the world, and it didn't hurt any that he co-created a number of characters, including the Barbara Gordon Batgirl, whose popularity catapulted them to mainstream awareness on the TV series.

Neal Adams For all the good that the Adam West Batman series did for the character and the franchise, it left the stink of camp on the property and, when it was gone, threatened the long-term viability of the titles as fans viewed them as passe and silly. It was Neal Adams and his Green Lantern/Green Arrow collaborator Dennis O'Neil who came to the character's rescue with a gritty reinvention that owed more to Bill Finger and Bob Kane's original pulp/detective roots than any iteration of the characters in years up to that point. That down-to-earth take on the Dark Knight was exactly what Adams, whose photorealistic style and innovative approach to the page, needed to take his already-impressive pencils to the next level. Adams' Batman was a character so dark and effective that it would not only change the direction of the Batman books for years to come, but be a clear influence on future generations of artists all throughout superhero comics.

Jim Aparo Before he even got an ongoing Batman title, Aparo had drawn dozens of stories featuring the character in The Brave and the Bold. A contemporary of Adams, Aparo also drew a leaner, more athletic Batman in the vein of what would be seen for years in most of the Bat-titles (excepting Frank Miller, Jim Lee and very caricature-inspired artists like Ed McGuinness). In all, between The Brave and the Bold, Batman and The Outsiders and the core Batman titles, Aparo drew Batman more or less nonstop from 1971 until the early '90s. His long history with the character and popularity with the fans also saw him return briefly to the character, especially for follow-ups to his popular stories like "A Lonely Place of Dying" (which introduced Tim Drake) and "Knightfall" (which temporarily removed Bruce Wayne as Batman).

Kelley Jones Besides a series of wildly popular Elseworlds books starring the character, Jones drew covers for Batman during the Aparo run and later took over as the interior artist. His work was a break with the tradition that Adams and Aparo had established of drawing Batman as a more realistic and down-to-earth figure, with wildly exaggerated features that prized style and using the art to communicate a message over simple realism. Predictably, such a stylized approach to a long-standing and mainstream superhero character polarized the fans, making Jones one of the most beloved artists in years among a portion of the population and somebody who another segment of fandom just didn't "get." It's telling, though, that almost all of those complaints happened in the context of fans' monthly comics comfort zone; the Elseworlds stories on which Jones cut his teeth (vampire pun not intended) were almost universally loved.

Frank Miller One of the greatest artists in the history of American comics, Frank Miller's Batman was arguably the high point of his career. In addition to creating The Dark Knight Returns, which conspired with Watchmen to change the way DC looked at their supehero line and the way people read it, there was Batman: Year One, a story so enduring that it became the basis for Batman Begins more than twenty years after it was originally published. For years, every time Frank Miller picked up his pencil, it seemed like he was creating a classic. Even the widely-reviled Dark Knight Strikes Again and All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder sold gangbusters, demonstrating for the market how powerfully Miller's work and reputation resonated for the fans years after his last great work with the character.

Jim Lee It's tempting to include Greg Capullo here, if only because the New 52 relaunch has been such a massive success for Batman, but the reality is Jim Lee has had enduring Batman work both before and after the DC relaunch, both as the artist on Jeph Loeb's best-selling run on Batman and as one of the key creative forces behind The New 52. There's also the same factor that led us to name the Fleischer brothers on our top ten Superman artists of all time--mainstream awareness on the part of casual fans who may not know the name, but use Lee's Batman as the barometer for what they believe Batman comics to be. The omnipresence of Lee's Batman on t-shirts, notebooks, toys and the like established him as one of the iconic representations of the character with one of the largest audiences since the days of Dick Sprang.