He gave Dick a 3 page story to pencil, ink & letter,
telling him to return in 4 days. When Sprang returned, Ellsworth was so
impressed by the young man he immediately gave him a 13 page Batman story to
draw. A heady feat since only 4 artists had drawn the Batman until this time.
Sprang would later become one of the main artists for the character, their two
lives (real and unreal) inextricably woven together from this point in
history.
His first appearance as a Batman artist came with Batman
#17. The issue had four stories and a cover by Sprang. It was not long before
Sprang was doing the stories and covers steadily for Batman Comics, just as
Wayne Boring was doing the same for Superman in Action Comics.
Having established himself as the preeminent Batman
artist, DC felt that they needed to get more work from Dick and decided to let
him just pencil stories and assigned him an inker. It was at this time he met
famed DC inker Charles Paris, with whom he would work for nearly two decades.
Charles Paris inked Sprang Batman stories almost exclusively the entire period
of his comic book career, eventually leaving the field in 1963 and retiring to
his 150 acre ranch in Utah. |