'' #475 (Feb. 1978). Cover art by Rogers and
Terry Austin. The story "The Laughing Fish" is considered a Batman classic. and raised there and in
Ardsley, New York. and then attended
Kent State University in
Ohio, where he studied
architecture. He said later that he felt this He studied architectural drawing, and his work was characterized by detailed rendering of buildings and structures. He left college in 1971 before graduating, and returned home to New York, where he discovered his family was moving to
Denver,
Colorado, where his father's employer,
Johns Manville, was relocating. Opting to remain, he completed a 52-page story he had begun in college and presented it in 1972 as a sample to
Marvel Comics production manager
John Verpoorten, who found Rogers' work wanting. The following summer he worked in a hardware store for several months, was fired, and while living on unemployment benefits approached the short-lived
Atlas/Seaboard Comics and, he said: At some unspecified point, Rogers recalled, he "bounced in and out of a shipping clerk job" and did some retouching work for
DC Comics on reprints of 1940s Batman stories. He eschewed the grey wash that was used in other black-and-white comics stories in favor of applying
screentone. With writer
Steve Englehart, Rogers penciled an acclaimed run on the Batman in
Detective Comics #471–476 (Aug. 1977 – April 1978), providing one of the definitive interpretations that influenced the 1989 movie
Batman and that was adapted for the 1990s
animated series. The Englehart and Rogers pairing was described in 2009 by comics writer and historian
Robert Greenberger as "one of the greatest" creative teams to work on the Batman character. DC Comics writer and executive
Paul Levitz noted in 2010: "Arguably fans' best-loved version of Batman in the mid-1970s, writer Steve Englehart and penciller Rogers's
Detective run featured an unambiguously homicidal Joker...in noirish, moodily rendered stories that evoked the classic Kane-Robinson era." In their story "The Laughing Fish", the
Joker is brazen enough to disfigure fish with a rictus grin, then expects to be granted a federal
trademark on them, only to start killing bureaucrats who try to explain that obtaining such a claim on a natural resource is legally impossible. The supervillain
Deadshot was redesigned by Rogers during his
Detective Comics run. Rogers also penciled the origin story of the
Golden Age Batman in
Secret Origins #6 (Sept. 1986) with writer
Roy Thomas and inker
Terry Austin. The two also did a sequel miniseries,
Batman: Dark Detective, and worked together on other series, including Marvel's
The Silver Surfer and a short run on DC's revived
Mister Miracle. Englehart and Rogers' first Batman run was collected in the trade paperback
Batman: Strange Apparitions (), and the second run in
Batman: Dark Detective (). Rogers remained as artist on
Detective Comics for a few issues after Englehart's departure from the series. With writer
Len Wein, he co-created the third version of the
supervillain Clayface. Rogers' other Batman work included a story arc in
Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight that was begun by writer
Archie Goodwin and completed by
James Robinson. An Englehart-Rogers story featuring
Madame Xanadu that sat in inventory for a few years was published as a
one-shot in 1981, in DC's first attempt at marketing comics specifically to the "
direct market" of fans and collectors. In 1986, Rogers drew a graphic novel adaptation of "
Demon with a Glass Hand", an episode of
The Outer Limits television series, based on a script by
Harlan Ellison. It was the fifth title of the
DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel series. At
Eclipse Comics during the early 1980s, he collaborated on the graphic novel
Detectives Inc. with writer Don McGregor, drew the
Scorpio Rose series and the first
Coyote series written by Englehart, and wrote and drew his own whimsical series ''Cap'N Quick & A Foozle
. In 1992, McGregor and Rogers crafted a two part-story for Marvel in Spider-Man'' issues #27–28 dealing with bullying and gun violence. ==Personal life==