From the Wikipedia article on him:

Quote:

In 1953, Moldoff became one of the primary Batman ghost artists who, along with Win Mortimer and Dick Sprang, drew stories credited to Bob Kane, following Kane's style and under Kane's supervision. While Sprang ghosted as a DC employee, Moldoff, in a 1994 interview given while Kane was alive, described his own clandestine arrangement:

I worked for Bob Kane as a ghost from ' 53 to ' 67. DC didn't know that I was involved; that was the handshake agreement I had with Bob: 'You do the work don't say anything, Shelly, and you've got steady work'. No, he didn't pay great, but it was steady work, it was security. I knew that we had to do a minimum of 350 to 360 pages a year. Also, I was doing other work at the same time for [editors] Jack Schiff and Murray Boltinoff at DC. They didn't know I was working on Batman for Bob. ... So I was busy. Between the two, I never had a dull year, which is the compensation I got for being Bob's ghost, for keeping myself anonymous.

Kane and Moldoff co-created the original Bat-Girl as well as the novelty characters Bat-Mite and Ace, the Bat-Hound. All three were largely phased-out in 1964 after a change in editors.

Moldoff was let go by DC in 1967, along with Golden Age artistts George Papp and Wayne Boring.

[end quote]

In my opinion, Batman should have been revamped both art and story-wise with a "New Look" in 1956.  The problem, however, was Kane's contract with DC which would have had to be renegotiated to wrest the delegation of artwork away from him (although new Batman releases would probably still have borne his signature).  Whether that could have been financially and legally finessed is an open question though. With Kane presumably skimming off part of the page rate that DC paid him before paying his "ghost", Moldoff must have been working for almost peanuts; it's no wonder he was hacking the stuff out.


Although (as I've said above) I'm fond of Sprang's early 1950s version, from the mid-1950s on my artistic preference would have been for a more realistic take on the strip. Not asking for a lot here as far as the scripts were concerned, just have France Herron, David Vern and Bill Finger write the sort of stories they were turning out five years earlier (and concurrently for DC's Gang Busters and Mr. District Attorney books),. The  only difference would be that both Batman and Detective Comics would have had an artistic upgrade designed to make the titles look more modern. 


As to who would have been a perfect artistic match for the character, that's easy-- and the irony is, he was already working for Schiff at the time on his mystery anthologies.  That would be John Prentice, a terrific talent whose style was very close to the later Alex Raymond.  Here's a sample of his work from the cover of the very first issue of My Greatest Adventure in 1956:


My_Greatest_Adventure_1.jpg



But they would had to hurry and get as much work out of him on Batman as they could because Prentice would get his big break outside of comic books that very year when he was chosen to take over the syndicated strip Rip Kirby immediately after Alex Raymond's death.  Following his departure, Ruben Moreira (who also ironically was drawing Roy Raymond  for Detective Comics at the time) could have done an interesting Batman too, but unfortunately was never given the chance.


Of course Alex Toth would have been another ideal choice for Batman as well, but he had ended his association with DC in 1952 and moved to California working on crime, war and romance stories for Standard Comics, then from 1960 did quite a bit of work for Dell (along with some later freelancing for DC).  To get an idea of the sense of bold design that Toth would have brought to Batman, just look at his version of Zorro that he did for Dell in the late 1950s:


jjt7.jpg



Whether he could he have been lured back to National earlier with the Batman gig is a question we may never know the answer to.  The downside from the editorial point of view is that there would have been endless battles between him and Schiff, beginning no doubt with Toth's absolute refusal to allow his art to be signed by "Bob Kane" (and for good reason).  He'd have been a pain to deal with in other ways too. But if they could have gotten the work out of him I sure would like to have seen some Alex Toth Batman pages circa 1956-1960, wouldn't you?




Last Edited By: alizarin1 Oct 18 13 9:44 PM. Edited 2 times.