From The Killing Joke to Dick Sprang

One of Moore's best known--and most regretted--works is Batman: The Killing Joke, a savage little tale of the Joker permanently disabling Batgirl in order to drive Commissioner Gordon crazy. It was at the peak of Moore being sick of working for DC Comics and right after he had written the paragon of dark and gritty comics in Watchmen. Years later in the pages of Supreme, Moore wrote about Batman again, this time as Professor Night, but this wasn't a grim and gritty Batman, this was a silver-age version. As he said in an interview (formerly on mania.com and now on inverse.com):

"I’ve never really liked my story in The Killing Joke. I think it put far too much melodramatic weight upon a character that was never designed to carry it. It was too nasty, it was too physically violent. There were some good things about it, but in terms of my writing, it’s not one of me favorite pieces. If, as I said, god forbid, I was ever writing a character like Batman again, I’d probably be setting it squarely in the kind of 'smiley uncle period where Dick Sprang was drawing it, and where you had Ace the Bat-Hound and Bat-Mite, and the zebra Batman—when it was sillier. Because then, it was brimming with imagination and playful ideas. I don’t think that the world needs that many brooding psychopathic avengers."

You can find out more about the hilariously-named Dick Sprang here, but he was one of many artists who did the ghost art for Batman because Bob Kane put in his contract that Batman was to be credited to him even when he didn't do the art. He was also Kane's favorite "ghost."

Sprang came up with the Riddler and the 1950s Batmobile. He's well known for that smiley, lovable Batman at the start of the 1960s TV show. Sprang used to study the way children read comics in order to experiment with page layouts and panel to panel transitions, hoping to create "the most suspense and the most fluidity to keep the pages turning."

Once comic conventions started to become a thing, the artists behind Bob Kane became better known, and Sprang became a well-known figure. In later years he put out two wonderful lithographs that capture his version of Batman so well, and you can see why Moore would rather play in a world of so much invention and imagination.