Batman of Japan: Every Japanese Take on DC's Dark Knight

Historically, DC is the house that Superman built, but its name and modern-day identity are based more around his best friend, Batman. The Caped Crusader, like all superheroes, is world-famous, but we're talking about one particular country today, one with a unique comics culture all its own: Japan.

How does the World's Greatest Detective fit alongside the Gokus and Narutos of the world? The answer is much simpler than you think, and with a much longer history. To celebrate the recent release of Batman Ninja, we take a look back at every official take a Japanese manga or anime creator has had on the Dark Knight.

Batman (Jiro Kuwata, 1966-1967)

As first told to Western audiences in Chip Kidd's 2008 book Bat-Manga! The Secret History of Batman in Japan (which reprinted much, but not all, of this manga), the Batman '66 TV show and "Batmania" remained popular in Japan longer than anywhere else. So naturally, a manga spinoff was in the cards.

Published in the now-defunct weekly magazine Shonen King and written and drawn by famed cartoonist Jiro Kuwata, Batman saw a sleek jet-setting Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson battle weird foes like Professor Gorilla, The Man With No Face, and the only villain from the series to make it to American comics, Lord Death Man.

Like most weekly manga, some stories flow better than others (the ultimate ending to the Professor Gorilla story is a bit of a bust), and the dialogue as translated by Sheldon Drzka can be a bit clipped, but they all read quickly and are, on balance, very enjoyable. While a bit more sober-minded than typical stories from the Silver Age, this manga (available chapter by chapter or in digital and print volumes released in 2014) is a fascinating introduction if you've never read classic manga and as close to an official "What if Batman was James Bond?" take as we'll ever get.

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Batman: Child of Dreams (Kia Asamiya, 2000-2003)

By the turn of the millennium, outside of a short story done by Akira creator Katsushiro Otomo for the first volume of Batman: Black and White, not much outside of Kuwata's manga had been done. But by this point, the manga boom was on the rise and DC didn't want to miss out. As a way of testing the waters, DC reached out to Japanese mega-publisher Kodansha and acclaimed manga creator Kia Asamiya (Dark Angel, Compiler) to publish Child of Dreams.

Published monthly in Kodansha's monthly Magazine Z, Dreams was released in Japan in book form from 2000-2001 and released Stateside in 2003. The story sees Japanese TV cub reporter Yuko Yagi and a camera crew head to Gotham to make a documentary about, and hopefully interview, Batman. Unfortunately, she arrives at a time where imposters are causing crimes dressed as Bat-villains and, when caught, shrivel up and die, with no other reason other than a mysterious designer drug inside all their systems.

Notably, the book was adapted into English by acclaimed crime novelist, one-time Batman writer, and Road to Perdition co-creator Max Allan Collins, who brings his usual hard-boiled flair to the proceedings, which makes for a fun blend. Regrettably, while this style was on its way out at the time, Child of Dreams was flipped for Stateside release, meaning the art was reoriented to read left-to-right. While Stateside adaptation teams always tried to touch up the art in these cases to avoid inconsistencies, here, Two-Face is disfigured on his right side as a result, which makes this impossible to overlook.

Batman: Death Mask (Yoshinori Natsume, 2008)

By 2004, DC decided to embrace the manga boom and launched its own manga imprint, CMX. While it published plenty of varied manga titles. including Crayon Shin-Chan and Gon, they sought to bridge the gap between manga and superhero readers by inviting Natsume (Togari, Kurozakuro) to write and draw an original story for American readers.

The result, in Death Mask (available in print and digitally) is, in concept, a neat take on both Batman's globe-hopping training and the time-tested idea of putting the world's most rational superhero against the supernatural. In practice, it comes off as trying to plug Batman into the psychological horror of Naoki Urasawa's Monster, but with less command of the page as Urasawa has.

The plot is still intriguing: a serial killer who slices victims' faces off is stalking Gotham. Meanwhile, Batman's haunted by troubling dreams that and, at a corporate fundraiser for a Japanese corporation intent on doing business with Wayne Enterprises, he meets a girl who reminds him of his younger days spent in Japan, where he came to a dojo for martial arts training, and together, they uncover a mystery and a monster.

While the more seasoned reader can see the ultimate reveal coming pretty early on, it's still a fun ride, if a bit less than the sum of its parts.

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Batman: Gotham Knight (dir. various, 2008)

The third title in the DC Universe Animated Original Movie line, Gotham Knight is probably still the most experimental of those films. Released to tie-in to The Dark Knight and set in the 18 months between Batman Begins and that film, Gotham is an anthology film consisting of six shorts written by American writers and animated by different Japanese studios.

It was a gamble but one that paid off, as this film is immensely rewatchable. Like Batman: Black & White, the stories are impeccably measured, offering concise summaries on the Dark Knight, his character and his abilities, woven together with sumptuous, striking visuals, tied together by a stellar voice cast led by the one and only Kevin Conroy.

All the segments are worth checking out but if you want recommendations, I'd first go with "Have I Got A Story For You" (written by Josh Olson, directed by Shoujirou Nishimi, and animated by Studio 4°C) sees three kids at a skate park talking about how they each saw Batman tackle a villain called the Man in Black, but with different views. One sees him as a combat robot, one as a vampire, and the other as Man-Bat. The way Nishimi and 4°C bring the kids' tales to life with fluid animation, and the short's ultimate resolution, is really something.

My other favorite is "Field Test," written by Jordan Goldberg, directed by Hiroshi Morioka, and animated by Bee Train. A tense techno-thriller involving an advanced sound sensor that can repel bullets, the death of a community activist, and a shootout between Sal Moroni's men and Russian mobsters, it's some of the best "Batman fighting in the rain" action you'll see anywhere.

Batman Ninja (dir. Junpei Mizusaki, 2018)

Aside from Batman: Gotham Knight and this film, most of the DC Universe Animated Original Movie line has been animated by Korean studios. But for Batman Ninja, DC Entertainment and WB Animation reached out to acclaimed Japanese animation houses Kamikaze Douga, Yamatoworks and Barnum Studio and director Jinpei Mizusaki and, from the looks of things, told them to go buckwild.

RELATED: View the Batman Ninja Trailer

The film, written by Kazuki Nakashima and adapted into English by Leo Chu and Eric S. Garcia, is not, as the trailers might've indicated, a simple Elseworlds about a Batman of feudal Japan. Rather, it's a time travel story. While apprehending Gorilla Grodd at Arkham Asylum as he prepares to activate his time machine, Batman, along with Alfred, Catwoman, Robin, Red Robin, Red Hood, Nightwing, Joker, Two-Face, Deathstroke, Poison Ivy, Grodd and Harley Quinn, is sent back in time to feudal Japan when the machine explodes.

But because Batman was at the outer edge of the explosion, he arrives two years later than everyone else. Disoriented by this and the fact that none of his tech works, Batman gets sideswiped by samurai working for the Joker. Escaping, he finds Catwoman and learns that all the other villains but Grodd have established themselves as warlords vying to unify Japan, with Joker & Harley controlling the largest territory. Meeting up with Alfred, his sons and a clan of Bat Ninjas led by a man named Eian, Batman sets out to take down the bad guys, return home, and possibly fulfill a legendary prophecy along the way.

The overriding directive for this film seems to have been this: take Batman and throw him into a mix of the wildest chanbara (samurai movies) and the whole...everything of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure (which Mizusaki and Kamikaze Douga worked on). The result is something wildly entertaining and completely bonkers. This is the best movie you'll ever see involving Damian Wayne having a monkey sidekick and Joker commanding a giant megazord.

It's not perfect. The decision to blend lovely traditional animation sequences (including a key sequence that recalls the late Isao Takahata's final film The Tale of the Princess Kaguya) with a main story largely done with CGI anime models doesn't quite work. The motions are fine, but Afro Samurai creator Takashi Okazaki's busy character design results in some pretty limited facial animation, which doesn't do the dialogue any favors.

While the English-language cast, led by Roger Craig Smith as Batman and Fred Tatasciore as Grodd, are pretty solid, Tony Hale's Joker takes a while to find his footing, transitioning between a Mark Hamill impression and a high-pitched dervish before finally settling down into something more original.

Still, these are minor faults and the movie's weaknesses are outshone by its astonishing battle sequences, visual inventiveness and a bottomless supply for pulling out whatever set piece can appeal to the audience's inner ten year old. It's remarkable and if DC and Mizusaki decide to explore this world further through more films or a manga, plenty of fans would be on board.