I look forward to being able to visit it for a very long time to come.

This was written as the introduction to Kurt Busiek’s Astro City: Confession, 1999. The Batman story idea I talk about, that we came up with in the car, wound up being one of my favorite sequences in “Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader?,” a Batman story I would write a decade later.

Batman: Cover to Cover

I’ve almost never written Batman, but he’s what drew me into comics. I was six years old and my father mentioned that, in America, there was a Batman TV series. I asked what this was, and was told it was a series about a man who fought crime while dressed as a bat. My only experience of bats at this point was cricket bats, and I wondered how someone could convincingly dress as one of those. A year later the series began to be shown on English TV, and I was caught, as firmly and as effectively as if someone had put a hook through my cheek.

I bought—with my own pocket money—the paperback reprints of old Batman comics: two black and white panels to a page drawn by Lew Sayre Schwartz and Dick Sprang, Batman fighting the Joker, the Riddler, the Penguin and Catwoman (who had to share a book). I made my father buy me Smash!, a weekly British comic that reprinted what I now suspect must have been an American Batman daily newspaper strip as its cover feature. I was once thrown out of our local newsagents—literally picked up by the proprietor and deposited on the sidewalk—for spending too much time examining each and every one of the pile of fifty American comics, in order to decide which Batman product would receive the benison of my shilling. (“No, wait!” I said, as they dragged me out. “I’ve decided!” But it was already too late.)

What got me every time was the covers. DC’s editors were masters of the art of creating covers which proposed questions about mysteries that appeared to be insoluble. Why was Batman imprisoned in a giant red metal bat, from which not even Green Lantern could save him? Would Robin die at dawn? Was Superman really faster than the Flash? The stories tended to be disappointments, in their way—the question’s sizzle was always tastier than the answer’s steak.

You never forget your first time. In my case, the first Batman cover artist was Carmine Infantino, whose graceful lines, filled with a sly wit and ease, were a comfortable stepping-off point for a child besotted by the TV series. Text-heavy covers, all about relationships—Batman being tugged between two people: look at the first appearance of Poison Ivy (will she ruin Batman and Robin’s exclusive friendship? Of course not. Why did I even worry about such trifles?), looking here as if she’s just escaped from the label of a tin of sweetcorn. Batman thinks she’s cute. Robin’s not impressed. That was what I needed as a kid from a Batman cover. Bright colors. Reassurance.