Bat Lash

Bat Lash
Cover to Bat Lash #3 (Feb./Mar. 1969) Art by Nick Cardy.
Publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
First appearance	Showcase #76 (August, 1968)
Created by	Joe Orlando Carmine Infantino Sheldon Mayer Sergio Aragonés
In-story information
Full name	Bartholomew Aloysius Lash
Team affiliations	Rough Bunch Black Lantern Corps
Abilities	Great marksman
Bat Lash
Series publication information
Publisher	DC Comics
Schedule	Bimonthly
Format	(vol. 1): Ongoing series (vol. 2): Limited series
Genre	Western
Publication date	(vol. 1) Oct./Nov. 1968 – Oct./Nov. 1969 (vol. 2) Feb. – July 2008
Number of issues	(vol. 1): 7 (vol. 2): 6
Main character(s)	Bat Lash
Creative team as of 1968–1969
Writer(s)	(vol. 1) Sheldon Mayer Sergio Aragonés Dennis O'Neil (vol. 2) Peter Brandvold Sergio Aragonés
Artist(s)	(vol. 1) Nick Cardy (vol. 2) John Severin Javier Pina
Colorist(s)	(vol. 2) Steve Buccellato
Collected editions
Showcase Presents: Bat Lash

Bartholomew "Bat" Aloysius Lash is a fictional Western character in the DC Universe. A self-professed pacifist, ladies' man, and gambler, Bat Lash's adventures have been published by DC Comics since 1968.

In 1968, Carmine Infantino, newly installed editorial director of DC Comics, and his editor, Joe Orlando, came up with the name and basic premise of the loner whose family had been wiped out by murderous thugs, and then brought in Sheldon Mayer (former DC editor and creator of Sugar and Spike) and Sergio Aragonés to further flesh out the concept. Shelly Mayer would write the first appearance (Showcase #76). Infantino claimed to have greatly rewritten it. The assignment was then handed to Aragonés, with Denny O'Neil doing the dialog over Aragonés' plots, and Nick Cardy providing the art. Issues were produced in a variation of the full script method. First, Aragonés would create a plot in thumbnail sketch form, then O'Neil would write the dialog, and last came Cardy's finished art.

Bat Lash first appeared in 1968, in a house ad running in Superman DC Comics. It featured a figure, in silhouette, stalking toward the reader, with the tagline, "Bat Lash. Will he save the West, or ruin it?".

The character's first published story appeared in Showcase #76. It featured a devil-may-care character, a peaceful, violence hating man who attracts trouble wherever he goes. Dialoguer Denny O'Neil summarized that, "He was a charming anti-hero, or as close to a charming anti-hero as comics ever came—at least as we did him. In subsequent handlings Bat Lash became a churlish anti-hero. Sergio [Aragonés] and I tried to make him in the tradition of the charming rogue. Bat had a conscience represented by the flower in his hat which he inevitably threw away whenever he was doing something ratty." [emphasis in original]