Definitely Not Batman

 

Not to be confused with DC's contemporaneous Batman, the Black Bat ('Masked Nemesis of Crime'), dressed as a bat and brought justice to otherwise untouchable criminals in a US city.  Of course, Batman was a comic strip, while the Black Bat was a character in a series of novels published in the pulp magazine Black Book Detective.  The owners of both characters claimed that the other was a copy, but they both appeared, apparently by coincidence, around the same time in 1939.  Actually, this Black Bat should also not be confused with an earlier pulp magazine Black Bat.  The earlier character, though, didn't dress in a costume, being more akin to The Saint and similar gentleman secret crime fighters.  While he might not have been related to Batman, the second Black Bat has some interesting similarities to some other comic book characters.  His alter-ego is a DA, blinded in an acid attack by a gangster, (shades of Batman's Harvey Dent, who became Two-Face after an acid attack), who is eventually given a corneal transplant, restoring his sight.  He subsequently finds that not only can he see in the dark, but that his period of blindness has helped him accentuate his other senses, resulting in him becoming a masked crime fighter.  All of which sounds suspiciously like the later DC character Daredevil - a blind DA who moonlights as a masked crime fighter, his remaining senses accentuated.

In common with the early Batman, Black Bat spent his time fighting ordinary criminals, rather than flamboyant masked criminals.  As World War Two progressed, he increasingly found himself up against Nazi spies, saboteurs and fifth columnists.  His adventures in Black Book Detective lasted until 1953, covering sixty four novels, with a sixty fifth left unpublished at the time of the pulp's demise.  AS with many pulp magazines, the stories were usually published under a 'house name', (in this case G Wayman Jones), but in most cases were the work of Norman A Daniels, a prolific contributor to the pulps, later moving into radio and TV scripts.  Thrilling Publications, the company behind Black Book Detective (and a plethora of other pulps), also published comic books, often based on characters from their pulps, but, due to the issues over the Batman character, didn't produce a Black Bat strip.  They did, however, publish a strip about a character called The Mask, whose adventures were directly based on the Black Bat stories published in Black Book Magazine.  So, there you are, a pulp character who definitely wasn't Batman, but who seems to have had an influence, nevertheless, on subsequent comics characters, Black Bat, despite having a long run in the pulps, is nowadays all but forgotten, while his comics rival is still going strong.  A fate shared by most of the great pulp heroes from the forties and fifties.  Even The Shadow seems to have fallen by the wayside, along with other former titans of pulp, like Doc Savage and Captain Future.