Comic Book Cats, number 16: Batman #406, drawn by David Mazzucchelli, written by Frank Miller, lettered by Todd Klein and colored by Richmond Lewis, published by DC Comics in April 1987.I must have read the Batman: Year One trade paperback a dozen times in high school. To this day, it remains one of my all-time favorite Batman stories. Many of the images from this story have burned themselves into my consciousness. So as soon as I decided to do Comic Book Cats, I just knew I was going to spotlight this page.
A pre-Catwoman Selina Kyle, her roommate Holly, and their menagerie of cats being awoken at 5 AM by the GCPD’s corrupt, trigger-happy swat team attempting to kill Batman by dropping bombs on him. Of course the cats now want to be fed, even though it’s much too early! I’ve always thought David Mazzucchelli did an especially good job on this page.
This is actually scanned from the trade paperback, which was re-colored by Richmond Lewis. As has been astutely observed & demonstrated by colorist
José Villarrubia
, newsprint has a different texture from the paper used in TPBs, and the result is that coloring done for the former will not reproduce accurately in the later. Batman: Year One is apparently one of the very few times when the original colorist was asked to do new coloring for a collected edition. Lewis’ work for the Year One collection is outstanding, and I’m grateful that for once DC Comics actually went the extra mile.
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