Batton Lash

Batton Lash (born Vito Marangi, October 29, 1953 – January 12, 2019)was an American comics creator who came to prominence as part of the 1990s self-publishing boom. He is best known for the series Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre (a.k.a. Supernatural Law), a comedic series about law partners specializing in cases dealing with archetypes from the horror genre, which ran as a strip in The National Law Journal, and as a stand-alone series of comic books and graphic novels. He received several awards for his work, including an Inkpot Award, an Independent Book Publishers Association's Benjamin Franklin Award, an Eisner Award, and nominations for two Harvey Awards.

Batton Lash was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied cartooning and graphic arts at Manhattan's School of Visual Arts.

In 1979, he began writing and drawing Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre, as a weekly newspaper strip which appeared in The Brooklyn Paper until 1996 and The National Law Journal from 1983 to 1997. In 1980 Lash was a courtroom sketch artist during the trial against John Gotti. In 1994, he and his wife Jackie Estrada founded Exhibit A Press to publish the series as a full-length comic book stories, renaming it Supernatural Law. It was later made available as a digital download on the Comics+ and Graphicly apps.

In 1994 he wrote Archie Meets the Punisher, a well-received crossover between the teen characters of Archie Comics and Marvel Comics' grim antihero the Punisher. He wrote eight issues of Radioactive Man for Bongo Comics, which received an Eisner Award for Best Humor Publication in 2002.^{[citation needed]}

In 2009 he began working with writer James Hudnall on "Obama Nation", a conservative political comic strip on Andrew Breitbart's website BigGovernment. The series drew national attention in 2011, when MSNBC commentator Lawrence O'Donnell criticized one of the strips as racist, accusing it of caricaturing Barack and Michelle Obama using stereotypes of African Americans.

He died at his home on January 12, 2019, from brain cancer at the age of 65.

• 1996: Don Thompson Award – Best Achievement by a Cartoonist (tie)
• 1997: Don Thompson Award – Best Achievement by a Writer & Artist
• 2002: Radioactive Man – Eisner Award for Best Humor Publication
• 2003: Mister Negativity and Other Tales of Supernatural Law – nominated for Harvey Special Award for Humor^{[citation needed]}
• 2003: Supernatural Law #35 – nominated for Harvey Award for Best Single Issue^{[citation needed]}
• 2004: Inkpot Award
• 2009: The Soddyssey, And Other Tales of Supernatural Law – Independent Book Publishers Association's Benjamin Franklin Award for Graphic Novel