Free Comics: ‘Stray Bullets’ Meets ‘Stray Toasters’ – The David Lapham And Bill Sienkiewicz Unpublished Batman Story

by Richard Bruton

It’s always nice to get free things, and since this is the month of the delayed Free Comic Book Day, how about this for a freebie – a complete Batman Detective Comics written by David Lapham and drawn by the one and only Bill Sienkiewicz!

You can get the link here at David Lapham‘s Twitter. It’s well worth taking a look to see what might have been – file this one under a wonderful Batman run that’s only ever going to be seen in some wonderful imagined library of unfinished comics – probably filed next to Sienkiewicz’s run on Alan Moore‘s Big Numbers!

As Lapham says in his introduction, printed below, it was meant to be a 12-issue Detective Comics run, starting in issue 801 (2005), written and laid out/breakdowns by David Lapham and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz. But, for whatever reason, it just didn’t happen beyond Bill getting the first issue drawn and then getting delayed. So, the run ended up being shelved, the comic renumbered from issue #1, and Lapham joining artists Ramon Bachs and Nathan Massengill for the storyline, working to Lapham’s layouts of the City of Crime story.

Obviously, no offence to either of those great artists, but the loss of 12-issues of Sienkiewicz is a huge thing. But alas, it’s never going to see the light of day – DC have removed the files from the server, Bill’s sold the original pages, and all David has left are what he calls lo-res scans of smaller than comic size printouts.

But hey, they’re still rather impressive to look at and imagine…