Heroes for the '90s #29: October 1995

My Greatest Adventures

Batman Adventures #36 

Writer: Ty Templeton
Penciller: Mike Parobeck
Inker: Rick Burchett
Colorist: Rick Taylor

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You can't underestimate the influence of the 1992-1995 Fox Kids show Batman: The Animated Series. The series showed that a superhero cartoon could made for kids without insulting their intelligence. It introdcued the actor - Kevin Contry - who many hail as the best Batman actor of all time. It led to an entire interconnected animated DC universe that has encompassed multiple TV shows and films, including the much-loved 2001-2006 Justice League animated series. It introduced the most popular new comic character of the past 30 years, Harley Quinn.

It also - improbably - had a huge impact on its own source material, the comics.

Batman Adventures was very likely intended is a quick cash-in. It debuted in October 1992, a month after the series premiere of Batman: The Animated Series on Fox. DC likely thought that if they could get some of the show's viewers to buy comics, that'd be a good thing. TV tie-in comics were nothing new. Spidey Super-Stories spun off from The Electric Company in 1974, ran for several years, and gave us the unforgettable image of Thanos in a helicopter with his name painted on the side. 

Over at DC, a 1976-1981 comic series tied in to the Super Friends cartoon and featured great pencils by Ramona Fradon, and between 1984 and 1986 there were Super Powers comics by Jack Kirby. Despite their quality art, these were generally looked down upon by most comics fans as out-of-continuity kiddie fare.

Batman Adventures was the first new-reader-friendly, TV tie-in comic that not only got respect from longtime comics readers and pros, but that some championed as better than the mainstream Batman books. Even Wizard liked it!

The series was initially created by the team of Kelley Puckett (writer) and Ty Templeton (artist), and was intended as a mini-series. Puckett was an assistant editor on the Batman books whose first writing work for DC had been a 1991 fill-in on Detective Comics. Templeton was better-established, having succeeded Kevin Maguire on Justice League in 1988. Templeton, with his clean, Silver Age-inspired artwork was well-suited for adpating the style of Batman: The Animated Series to the page.

But once the book got promoted to an ongoing, Templeton dropped off. With issue #7 along came Mike Parobeck, fresh off the cancellation of Justice Society of America and a four-issue Elongated Man miniseries (in which he was inked by none other than Templeton). 

Parobeck, teamed with inker Rick Burchett, was a perfect fit for Batman Adventures. As editor Scott Peterson put it, "Mike is such a phenomenal, yet underrated, talent. His storytelling is so strong, so unbelievably dramatic, yet so clear." His work was, in keeping with the look of the show, simplified down to the essentials, but as Burchett saw it, that was evidence of its brilliance: "There’s nowhere to hide in this artwork," he explained. "If it’s not drawn well, it shows up immediately, because we don’t have a lot of detail, crosshatching, or line work that sometimes hides poor draftsmanship in some artists’ work." (For his part, Parobeck said, "I've gotta say that Rick Burchett is the real artist on this book - the stuff that I pencil, he makes it just come alive.")

Likewise, Puckett's stories were simple and straightforward without being dumb or superficial. He eschewed narrative captions, and he eliminated subplots in favor of a simple three act structure that hearkened back to Silver Age comics. His stories were original, too, not adaptations of episodes of the show. Puckett wrote on his LinkedIn page, "The trick to writing Batman is to look at the character and see something there that the hundreds of writers before you didn't see. Something inherent, yet undiscovered." For Puckett that was to portray Batman as "more of a force than a charater." Akin to the show, he put most of the character work into the villains, using Batman as a personification of justice. 

The combination of elements likely would have gotten the book noticed no matter what, but it also happened to be the beneficary of good timing. Fans like myself were largely burned out on Lee-and-Liefeld-lite artists illustrating stories that were barely comprehensible. Batman Adventures was the proverbial breath of fresh air. Besides the critical acclaim, the book sold like hotcakes at the newstand market, meaning it was reaching non-traditional comics readers.

The only comperable book at the time was X-Men Adventures, a series that illustrated the opposite approach for a TV tie-in comic. For one, it adapted episodes of X-Men: The Animated Series. For another, the art was done in the then-popular style, which made it look like every other X-Men book on the stands.

So I feel comfortable giving Batman Adventures the full credit for the steady parade of "adventures" books that followed, and for showing Marvel and DC a new way to court new and old readers to long-running characters. There was Superman Adventures, Adventures in the DC Universe, and Adventures of Spider-Man, among others, all simplified takes on major heroes. And the effects were long-term. In 2005, Marvel even started a complete line of books called Marvel Adventures, while DC produced adventures-type titles to tie into the Justice League and Green Lantern TV series.

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Batman Adventures ended in October 1995 with issue #36, a month after Batman: The Animated Series aired its final episode. Editor Peterson says the creative team had decided to move on, and that led to his decision to end the book. For some reason, Puckett signed off an issue early, with #35 (he'd go on to have a brief-but-memorable stint in the mainstream DC universe, co-creating the Cassandra Cain version of Batgirl and the Connor Hawke character in Green Arrow). Templeton returned to write the final issue, the last of an atypical 3-parter featuring Hugo Strange, Catwoman, and an amnesiac Batman.

A replacement title, Batman and Robin Adventures, debuted the very next month. This was designed to coincide with a new Saturday monrning version of Batman: The Animated Series, titled The Adventures of Batman and Robin. Templeton continued as writer, but Parobeck moved on. He didn't get a new ongoing gig, but instead did random projects here and there. 

While working on Batman Adventures, Parobeck had become the go-to artist for animated versions of other heroes. A newstand publication called Superman and Batman Magazine (1992-1995) featured short stories about the title characters as well as origins of the likes of Wonder Woman, Atom, Shazam, the Flash, and Green Lantern, almost all of them drawn by Parobeck and Burchett. While Parobeck had taken his lead from the designers of Batman: The Animated Series for Batman Adventures, his magazine stories turned the tables and made him the pacesetter for future animated versions of the entire DC Unvierse several years before the Justice League cartoon. 

He also did work in the mainstream DC Universe, albeit mostly when the story involved a character getting their own animated series, as happened in Superboy and Guy Gardner: Warrior. Parobeck worried about being typcast as a "cartoony" artist, and hoped, after Batman Adventures, that he could work on more in the style of the work he'd done for Justice Society of America (which he cited as his favorite accomplishment). 

But it wasn't meant to be. In early July 1996, just a few days before his 31st birthday, Mike Parobeck passed away. A Type 1 Diabetic, he had struggled to manage his condition, especially where it came to balancing his medicaiton and his diet. Wizard reported that he had developed anorexia nervosa, which likely led to his death. Though there's precious little information about Parobeck and his life, it tracks that he was suffering psycologically. Though those who knew him found him unfailingly kind, they also labled him as reclusive. He was apparently very hard on himself. In his only major interview, a brief profile in Wizard in 1995, he was self-depreicating to the point of alarm: "Every time I look at my work," he told Marc Shapiro, "something inside me flinches and I think, 'God! That's awful!' I just can't stand my stuff. I just can't imagine that people are buying it."

A couple of months later he did an interview for Comics Pro Magazine, and while he still wasn't bursting with enthusiasm (he said he didn't read current comics and hadn't for many years), he did express some optimism for the future. He said he planned to move from Chicago to Key West, and that in twenty years he hoped still be working in comics while living on a boat in the Keys or the Caribbean. 

He also revealed that his dream assignment was to draw an X-Men book, like his hero John Byrne before him. Sadly, the closeset he ever got was doing a poster for Fox's Totally Kids Magazine, and covers for three VHS releases of X-Men: The Animated Series and two issues of X-Men: The Early Years reprints.

Before his death, Parobeck had completed a few post-Batman Adventures projects: a beautful black and white 3-pager in Image's Foot Soldiers (#1, March 1996), the aforementioned Superboy and Guy Gardner books, and a full-length Impulse annual (July 1996). His final published work was a chapter in in Batman and Robin Adventures Annual #1. It included a heartfelt full-page tribute to Parobeck from Peterson.

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As a fan I still mourn the loss of all that great Parobeck work we would have gotten had he lived. The one small consolation all these years later is that - though he was out-of-step with the 1990s - his style stood the test of time. His collaborator on The Fly and Justice Society, Len Strazewski, said immediately following Parobeck's death, "In some ways, Mike's style was actually ahead of the industry. If you look at his work on The Fly and compare it to stuff Humberto Ramos is doing on Impulse, or the manga-like style that's being adapted on X-Men [by Joe Maduriea], you see that Mike was ahead of the curve in doing a ligher and more expressive style. His style was full of motion and character, and you're starting to see that in the hot comics of today." This is even more true now then it was then.

Sources:

• "Artist Mike Parobeck Dies of Diabetes Complications" Wizard #62 (October 1996)
• Eury, Michael. "Remembering Mike Parobeck" Back Issue #99 (September 2017)
• Kowalczyk, Mike. "The Dynamic Duo" Comics Pro. #1 (August 1995)
• O'Neill, Patrick Daniel. "The Other Batman" Wizard #40 (December 1994)
• Shapiro, Marc. "Eight to the Fore" Wizard #41 (January 1995)
• Youngman, Philip. "The Batman Adventures: An Enduring Legacy." Back Issue #99 (September 2017)