Vintage 1966 Alan-Whitney Batman Signal Bat Sticker - Decal ✨ Dark Knight, Cool!

Size: 3.5 inches ~

Cool! That's still the only word for these. This is one of their Glo-Colors Bat Stickers: a solid black bat silhouette, wings spread flat and scalloped along the bottom edge, stamped onto a disc of bright fluorescent paper. Peel the kraft backing off and it's ready for a book, a bicycle, an auto bumper, a window or a wagon — that's the maker's own list, not mine. I'm holding a real stack of these: pick Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Orange, Light Orange or White, or grab all 7 Colors and have the full run.

The maker's own card says it best, so here it is close to word for word: "5 GLO-COLORS BAT STICKERS, (c) 1966 Alan-Whitney Co. Inc., New Haven, Conn., Made in U.S.A., 5 for 39c, Peel Off Backing Paper — Apply to Any Smooth Surface, for Books, Bicycles, Auto Bumpers, Windows, Wagons, etc." Thirty-nine cents for five bat stickers, and a company telling you flat out to stick one on your bike. That's a great pitch on its own, sixty years later. Alan-Whitney was a New Haven, Connecticut outfit, and bat stickers weren't their only novelty — they also made the 1964-65 Space-Bird fabric kite, a nice bit of colour in its own right, and Hal Levine, a name tied to Alan-Whitney Company, is acknowledged in "The Complete Book of Kites and Kite Flying." So this wasn't a nameless factory stamp; it was a small company with a name behind it, making the kind of five-and-dime novelties a kid would actually beg for.

1966 also happens to be the year the Batman TV series exploded onto ABC and turned the whole country bat-crazy — Adam West, Burt Ward, POW and ZAP right there in your living room, and every dime store and drugstore counter in America stocking up on anything bat-shaped to catch the wave. Alan-Whitney's own card doesn't carry a Batman name or a comics company's copyright line anywhere on it; it just sells "Bat Stickers." So I read it as a small novelty maker riding a national craze with its own bat design, not as an officially licensed tie-in — and either way, it's exactly the kind of thing that went home from a dime-store counter in 1966 and ended up on a bike fender by the weekend.

These are unused, still riding on their original backing paper — never peeled, never stuck to anything. The kraft-paper liner on the back carries a straight split line - that's where the peel-off backing opens, just as the maker's card says to peel it; that's how a sixty-year-old peel-off backing looks. I've got dozens of these across seven colours, so think of the photo as the floor of the stack, not the ceiling — most of what I'm holding looks just as crisp or crisper than the one pictured. The fluorescent colours especially still glow the way day-glo paper is supposed to; the white runs a little softer and creamier by comparison, which is its own kind of nice.

Each disc is 3.5 inches across. A full set of seven framed together on a dark mount makes a handsome little grid, bat wings all pointing the same direction. Pick your colour, or take the whole run. Cool, right?