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Southington Conn.

Jim Aparo, Batman’s Greatest Ally

Growing up in New Britain, Conn., Jim Aparo always wanted to be an artist. With only one semester of art school, he became a comic book legend, illustrating the exploits of Batman for more than a decade.

In the late 1980s, Aparo illustrated one of the greatest Batman comic-book novels, A Death in the Family, considered a milestone in American comic book art.

Jim Aparo

He was born Aug. 24, 1932, just before the dawn of the Golden Age of Comic Books. Superman first appeared when he was six. Aparo grew up loving the cheap, colorful magazines. Many, however, viewed them as disreputable. They were called ‘sadistic drivel’ and ‘the ten-cent plague.’

In 1954, a U.S. Senate subcommittee held televised hearings on how comic books led to juvenile delinquency. The next year, housewives in Norwich, Conn., held a public comic book burning.

None of that deterred Jim Aparo. He took art classes at New Britain High School while studying and copying comic books at home. He also took a semester at the Hartford Art School, but mostly he taught himself. After high school he started doing work for an advertising agency. Meanwhile, he submitted drawings to comic book publishers. For years he got nothing but rejection.

Finally around 1966 Jim Arparo got his big break. His work was accepted by Charlton Comics in Derby, Conn, a comic book publisher that existed from 1946 to 1985.

A Jim Aparo cover of a Batman comic

The Charlton Comics editor gave him his first assignment: a teenage comic strip character called Miss Bikini Luv. Eventually he was working full-time for Charlton. When his editor, Dick Giordano, moved to DC Comics in 1968, he brought Jim Aparo along with him and assigned him Aquaman.

Superheroes

That ultimately led to a 10-year stint illustrating a series that featured Batman, often with another DC superhero – a real challenge for an artist to research and render a different superhero every month. He also drew The Brave and the Bold, Green Arrow and the Spectre.

Aparo was an early adopter of the work-from-home ethos, producing most of his work at his home in Southington, Conn.

He won the Shazam Award from the Academy of Comic Book Arts for his 1972 work on The Demon Within for the House of Mystery series.

He illustrated his last cover in 2004 and died at home on July 19, 2005.

Images: Jim Aparo By MichaelNetzer – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16861406. A Death in the Family uploaded by Jimmy to Flickr, CC by SA 2.0. This story was updated in 2022.

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Flashback Photo: Queen of the May, 1942

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Queen of the May, 1942. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Fenno Jacobs took this photograph of a Queen of the May school celebration in 1942 as part of a war propaganda campaign. He was part of a team of photographers who spent the month in Southington, Conn., taking pictures of residents at work and at leisure. The photos were compiled into a booklet designed to show friends and enemies in Europe the traditions and values of typical American families. Thousands of copies were dropped over Europe from military planes during the Nazi occupation.

Jacobs titled the photo ‘Queen of the May’ and noted, ‘Half kids polish, half Italian.’

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Flashback Photo: Nick Grillo and his Thornless Roses

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Nick Grillo and his Thornless Roses. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The Thornless Rose was an age-old dream of floriculturists, one that Nick Grillo achieved even as he realized the American Dream.

Nick Grillo was born in 1888 in Tusa, Messina, Italy. As a boy he longed to come to America, and managed to save enough money for boat passage to emigrate. He started his own florist business in Southington, Conn.

Grillo had arrived as the wave of Italian immigration to Connecticut crested between 1900 and 1916. Italians first came to the state in numbers in the 1870s when a group of about 100 came to New Haven, most to work for a hardware manufacturer. Others worked on the railroad or as truck gardeners. In two years the population doubled and by 1880 there were 500 Italians living in New Haven. By 1907, the hardware factory that brought the first group over employed nearly 3,000 Italian workers, and a rubber plant nearby had about a thousand.

In 1916, there were 60,000 Italians living in the state. By 1938, Connecticut’s 227,000 Italians comprised the state’s largest ethnic group. Today, 19.3 percent of Connecticut — 694,00 people — is of Italian descent, making it the second most Italian-American state in the country next to Rhode Island.

The photo was taken by Fenno Jacobs in May 1942 as part of a government-sponsored photo essay about the Town of Southington. The War Department highlighted the town in a propaganda booklet called Southington, Connecticut —Microcosm of America. Jacobs and other photographers took pictures of residents at work, at leisure and in their homes and churches. The booklet was designed to show friends and enemies in Europe the traditions and values of typical American families. Thousands of copies were dropped over Europe from military planes during the Nazi occupation.

Nick Grillo arrived in Connecticut sometime around World War I. The caption to his photo reads, “Today, after 22 years, he is one of the world’s outstanding floriculturists, developer of the famous Thornless Rose, an age-old dream of his craft.”

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