Nananananananana Batman! - My review of Batman: The Jira Kuwata Batmanga, Vol. 1

For such a small library, my local one has quite a good selection of comics, graphic novels and manga. One of my most recent finds there was Batman: The Jira Kuwata batmanga, Volume 1 and as soon as I saw it, I picked it right up as though I had heard of Batmanga, I had never seen any.

Before I begin to review the actual content, I would just like to take a moment to tell you how absolutely beautiful the book itself was. The cover art was stunning and the paper used for the pages was amazing quality and so thick, it was such a joy to hold and read such a well made book. 

The volume is a collection (the first 20 chapters) of Batmanga's written by Jira Kuwata written back in the 60's to bring Batman to the Japanese audience. The writing holds up incredibly as well as the art and reading it, it could have been written today. Adam West is my personal favourite portrayal of Batman (Michael Keaton is a close second), so having stories based on his character in the TV show was really good for me. 

I love that only the cover page of each story is in colour and the rest of the pages are in black and white. It shows the skill of the artist to get so much detail and keep the readers eye while not using colour. 

Each story is based on Batman and the Boy Wonder defeating a different enemy, the names of which are awesome (Dr. Faceless and Professor Gorilla as examples) but my absolute favourite name and story has to be the first one in the book about Lord Death Man. I love the slight cheesiness of it all and the incredible deductions Batman makes to solve each crime. 

It really pained me taking such a wonderful book back to the library and I genuinely will be adding this book to my collection at some point in the future, as well as the other volume. 

I started reading this book on the 6th of February 2015 and finished it on the 10th of February

I gave this book 5 stars on Goodreads