In memoriam Alan Grant, Norm Breyfogle, Adrienne Roy, Albert De Guzman, Dennis O’Neil and George Cordeiro.
I haven’t written here in a while, but it’s that time of the year. It’s also been a year since we moved to a house next to a Victorian cemetery. Before the clocks change, this week has had very dark mornings, and later in the day the light in the cemetery has been really beautiful. A golden halo has showered the tombstones and funerary monuments in a way that won’t come out properly in a digital photograph.
Walking through the cemetery yesterday, as I often do, I was thinking about the ofrenda de muertos I haven’t done this year yet (but will do this weekend), and unavoidably that leads to thinking on those who are no longer with us in this same spatiotemporal dimension (becasue they do walk among us, even if no longer ‘here’).
As I walked, I also thought of what has shaped my imagination, and specifically my visual imagination, with respect to cemeteries, and who had produced those images, how I had come across them, what they had meant for me, where would those creators be now, and how amazing it is that, to date, they still matter to me, and in many ways helped me become the person I have tried to be (or become- still an ongoing process).
When I got back home, I went through the box of comic books I brought with me to the UK from my childhood home in Mexico City, some few selected items (for example, a whole original run of Sandman). And there it was, my copy of Detective Comics 610, cover dated January 90, which means it must have been out in the shelves around November or December 89 if I’m correct.
The cover of this issue has to be one of my favourite Batman comic book covers ever. It actually reflects what happens in the story, which is a plus; isn’t it annoying when a great comic book cover has nothing to do with the story inside apart from showing the main character(s)? So much I could say about the cover and this story but my time is limited… (the use of light and shade, of depth and surface; the movement of some of the birds, that in the distance could be/are bats, etc; the fact the story was set in a Gotham City that was a combination of London and New York but mostly London; the reuse of Gothic motifs).
What really stayed with me, from the very first time I held this copy, was that the last names of the creative team behind this issue appeared as engraved on the tombstones depicted in the cover art:
Soon it will be 34 years since this issue reached my hands, and it has come to pass that most of the members of the creative team behind that issue have now sadly passed. Three of them between June 2020 and January 2022. May they all rest in peace- great artists all: Alan Grant in July 2020; Norm Breyfogle in September 2018; Adrienne Roy in December 2010; Albert De Guzman in January 2022; Dennis O’Neil in June 2020.
Something I had not paid enough attention to before is that the first page credits include an acknowledgement, between parentheses, to George Cordeiro. Back in 1990 (probably the last time I had read this issue) I had no way to know who he was. I don’t know the story behind the acknowledgement, but I’d guess it was added by Alan Grant, who had ties to Dundee, as I am assuming the George Cordeiro acknowledged is the same George Cordeiro behind the now-closed Dundee comics shop, The Black Hole. Cordeiro retired from the shop in 2017, which led to the shop to close. Doing some digging online, I was sad to read that he died in September 2021. I have also subsequently learned that Cordeiro was a creator himself too.
As I walk through the cemetery and as I flip through this comic book of my youth at home, I think of those who have now passed. Their work and their memory remains, and we remember, and we are grateful.
Everything is Connected 
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