Batman (comic book) work, and first interior-story work, appeared in "Batman" #19 (Oct.-Nov. 1943), for which he drew the cover and the first three Batman stories, and penciled the fourth Batman story, inked by Norm Fallon. Like all Batman artists of the time, Sprang went uncredited as a ghost artist for Kane. Villains which debuted during this early era included the Mad Hatter in issue #49 (October 1948) and Killer Moth in issue #63 (February 1951). In 1953, Sheldon Moldoff became another one of the primary Batman ghost artists who, along with Win Mortimer and Dick Sprang, drew stories credited to Bob Kane,
Comic book pseudonymous writer "Drake Waller" (Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller), penciler Matt Baker and inker Ray Osrin, touted as "an original full-length novel" on its cover. In 1971, writer-artist Gil Kane and collaborators devised the paperback "comics novel" "Blackmark". Will Eisner popularized the term "graphic novel" when he used it on the cover of the paperback edition of his work "A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories" in 1978. In 2017, the comic book market size for North America was just over $1 billion with digital sales being flat, book stores having a 1 percent decline, and comic book stores