SFBG: In terms of characters, was he creating original characters or was he just drawing from the Batman universe?
CK: The villains are mostly of his invention, with the exception of Clayface in the book; that's an American villain. And you have Inspector Gordon instead of Commissioner Gordon, but of course it doesn't really look anything like the Commissioner Gordon in the American comics. So Batman and Robin themselves are very, I think, true to the spirit of Batman and Robin in the U.S., and everything else that's going on around them has a much more sort of '60s Japanese sensibility to it.

SFBG: On a more general note, what do you see as the appeal of the Batman character that allows it to be exported everywhere?
CK: In this particular case, the appeal is actually something of an illusion. The TV show, was extremely popular in America and was exported all over the world. It became this phenomenon, and the Japanese sort of embraced it because it was a fad, but let it go just as quickly. All of this happened in almost a year.
But I think Batman has a sort of surface appeal -- it's the forms, the way Batman and Robin look, and their whole milieu. [In Japan] they loved the car. The one thing in the comics that carries over from the TV show is the Batmobile, and they loved the idea that it's running on atomic power.

SFBG: Has Batman appeared in other cultures? How widespread is this interpretation of the American Batman for a foreign audience?
CK: At the time, the stories were exported all over the world, but they were just merely translations of what was going on in the U.S. version. The Japanese were the only ones who wrote and drew their own stories. In Japan, they really made it into their own image.

SFBG: So this really was unique to Japan, then, and everyone else was translating?
CK: Exactly. You will see [other countries] often do their own covers, and those are interesting to see. But the interior's the American art.

Chip Kidd, photo by Patrick McMullan
SFBG: Speaking of translation, in Bat-Manga!, you talk about trying to capture the style of the original Japanese manga while translating it to English. What major issues did you and the translator face?
CK: The primary translator's a woman named Anne Ishii. There were several sorts of problems. Certain characters would be spelled differently phonetically from issue to issue. In that sense there was a bit of a continuity problem. But the main thing for me is I felt I actually had to translate the translation, because when you literally translate a lot of this stuff, it just doesn't sound coherent. Like if somebody's literally saying, "This dangerous situation sure is dangerous.” I wouldn't want to leave something like that be -- it's going to sound silly, when I don't think that's the case.

SFBG: The TV show's obviously really campy, but you'd say the comics definitely had a more serious tone?
CK: Yeah. The camp factor's largely gone. I think that part of the reason the Batman TV show came and went so quickly in Japan is this whole camp sensibility. I think they loved the way it looked, but when it came down to what was actually going on, it was a real puzzle to them, and one that just wasn't working. It's not totally funny, it's supposed to be an adventure show -- why is this so strange? In the comics, most of that [quality] is missing, which I think is great. It's another reason why I like the comics so much.

SFBG: There's a lot of great Japanese Batman merchandise advertised throughout the book. Were you able to get your hands on any of that stuff?
CK: Sometimes yes, sometimes no. [The advertisements are] a convenient way of showing all the different Batmobiles they made. But if we ran an advertisement for something, it probably meant that we didn't actually have it.

SFBG: Any closing thoughts about Batman, manga, or the two combined?
CK: I dearly love this stuff and that was the prime motivator in putting this book together. It's kind of extraordinary to me that this work, as good as it is, with a character that has this kind of universal appeal, was virtually unknown. There were people in Japan that had a memory of it, but in terms of any active reprinting, no one ever seemed interested. On the one hand, it amazes me, and on the other, I'm really grateful, because I got the opportunity to do it. This stuff is great, and it deserves as wide an audience as it can get.