Billion Dollar Batman Read online

  A little more than a year older than Kane, Bill Finger, a bright and articulate writer, wanted to be a novelist, but married young and now had a wife to support. To make ends meet, he’d taken a job as a shoe salesman. Kane, with the din of the sewing machines from his uncle’s factory still echoing in his ears, understood how Finger felt. He offered Finger a job, agreeing to pay him to help come up with stories for his comic strips. Finger quickly agreed, but it was a Faustian bargain. He would help brainstorm and develop ideas, while Kane would do the drawing and deal with the comic book editors. Finger would receive a paycheck from Kane, but Kane would receive all the credit.

  With Finger as silent collaborator, Kane began finding success. In 1937, his 7-page detective story, “The Case of the Missing Heir,” was published in Detective Picture Stories Vol. 1 #5. The following year, he sold two juvenile features to Circus Comics, and began drawing the Walt Disney-inspired strip Peter Pupp for Jumbo Comics, published by his high school friend Will Eisner. By 1938, Kane was working for National Periodical Publications, doing fill-in work. Kane and Finger created a Terry and the Pirates-style strip he called Rusty and His Pals and sold it to National’s editor Vin Sullivan, who published it in Adventure Comics. They followed that up with another strip, Clip Carson, about the escapades of a globetrotting adventurer.

  Around the time that Rusty and His Pals made their debut, so did a character that would forever change the comic book industry. In the spring of 1938, National published Action Comics #1, with a cover featuring Superman, a character created by two young boys from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Superman quickly became a roaring hit, initiating a never-ending stream of superhero successors.

  One Friday in 1939, Kane went for a drink with Vin Sullivan, who told him that National was looking for another superhero character. Sullivan added that as a result of Superman’s success, Siegel and Shuster were earning $800 a week each. Kane, at the time, earned between $35 and $50 a week. Kane told Sullivan he would come up with a character over the weekend. And here’s where the story gets cloudy...

  Kane often maintained that he alone created the Batman character, inspired by a combination of Zorro, sketches of Leonardo da Vinci’s bat-like flying machine, the pulp character The Shadow and a movie called The Bat Whispers (1930). Kane said he had been toying with the idea since he was 13, when he drew a sketch (which he later published in his autobiography) that showed the back view of a figure with outstretched arms, a scalloped cape and pointed ears that was labeled “a hawk-man?” and “Batman?” In the opposite corner was another crude sketch of a human figure free-falling with what appear to be two wings sticking out of his back, labeled “an Eagle-man.” The middle of the page featured a very crude sketch of a man in a form-fitting costume with bat wings, a cowl that looked like the head of a bat, and a bat symbol on his chest. There was also a quote from da Vinci: “Remember that your bird should have no other model than the bat.” It was signed “Robert Kane 1/17/34”—a date when Kane would have actually been 18. Most comic book scholars believe this sketch is a forgery done by Kane at a much later date in an effort to convince the public that he was the originator of the Batman concept. It is rather suspicious, to say the least, that he signed it “Robert Kane” at a time when he was still going by the name Robert Kahn. There is also Kane’s own autobiography—published in 1989, years after Finger’s death—in which Kane admits that it was Finger who suggested changing the character into something more bat-like.

  Bill Finger insisted that when Bob Kane came to him on that fateful weekend, the Bat-man sketch Kane showed him was of a figure in a red union suit with black trunks, black bat-like wings coming out of his back and a little black domino mask—and Kane’s autobiography, surprisingly, confirms this, a few pages after having made the contradictory claim of having created the character on his own. Finger felt the hero looked too much like Superman. In an interview years later, he said, “I got Webster’s Dictionary off the shelf and was hoping they had a drawing of a bat, and sure enough it did. I said, ‘Notice the ears, why don’t we duplicate the ears?’ I suggested he draw what looked like a cowl...I had suggested he bring the nosepiece down and make him mysterious and not show any eyes at all...I didn’t like the wings, so I suggested he make a cape and scallop the edges so it would flow out behind him when he ran and would look like bat wings. He didn’t have any gloves on. We gave him gloves because naturally he’d leave fingerprints.”5 Finger also suggested changing the color of the hero’s suit from black and red to black and gray, to make it easier for him to conceal himself in the shadows.

  Unlike other Superman imitators, Kane and Finger’s creation was not an alien or imbued with some amazing special power. Instead, he was just a regular mortal, albeit one with a keen intellect and admirable physique. “I didn’t want to emulate Superman and imitate it because I thought maybe they wouldn’t want that, and I wanted to come up with something original,” Kane said in a 1990 interview with National Public Radio’s Terry Gross. “And secondly, I felt that every person that doesn’t have super powers could relate to Batman a lot easier than they could to Superman. In other words, you didn’t have to come from another planet to be a superhero; all you had to do was be born rich and build your body up to perfection and have the urge to go out and fight crime.”6 A character that wore a skin-tight costume and fought criminals actually pre-dated Superman. The Phantom, created as a newspaper strip character by Lee Falk, made his debut February 17, 1936. The Phantom was the first comic strip hero with a mask drawn so that the eyes appeared as white slits, with no pupils. Falk got the idea from Greek busts, whose eyes were carved without pupils, which Falk felt gave them an awe-inspiring look. Finger, a voracious reader whose knowledge extended from the classics to pulps and comics, had apparently seen Falk’s comic strip.

  When Kane showed the final Bat-Man concept to Vin Sullivan, Sullivan felt the character would be a natural for his publication Detective Comics. To make him a detective character, Finger wrote the initial Bat-Man stories to emphasize the hero’s sleuthing abilities as well as his athleticism. “My idea was to have Batman be a combination of Douglas Fairbanks, Sherlock Holmes, the Shadow, and Doc Savage as well,” said Finger.7

  In developing the look of the comic, Finger and Kane were also influenced by two films by writer-director Roland West, The Bat (1926) and The Bat Whispers (1930). The Bat, based on a 1920 stage play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, was an “old dark house” mystery where characters in a mansion look for a hidden stash of money while a thief who calls himself “the Bat” murders them one by one. In the silent film, the Bat dressed in an all-black outfit with a cape and a grotesque mask that looked like the head of a bat, and was seen deftly scaling the exterior of the mansion with a rope. There was also a scene where a beacon projected a bat silhouette on a wall, but it’s a red herring—it’s actually the outline of a moth stuck on an automobile headlight. When sound films arrived, Roland West remade the film as The Bat Whispers, but now changed the Bat’s mask to a simple black hood. In the remake, which featured innovative model work and a fluid, moving camera, there were shots of the Bat lurking above his victims, casting a bat-like shadow over them—a clear inspiration on Kane’s later artwork.

  The Bat-Man, with a hyphen in his name that would be dropped after his first three appearances, debuted in Detective Comics #27 in May, 1939, in a story written by Finger called “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate.”

  In this initial six-page story, the Bat-Man is first seen in the title panel in silhouette, appearing like a giant bat against a full moon. A caption reads, “The ‘Bat-Man,’ a mysterious and adventurous figure fighting for righteousness and apprehending the wrong doer, in his lone battle against the evil forces of society...his identity remains unknown.” We are then introduced to Commissioner Gordon, entertaining pipe-smoking socialite Bruce Wayne in his home. When Gordon is called to a murder scene, Wayne tags along, but excuses himself when Gordon receives a phone call fro
m Steven Crane, who fears he will be the next victim. The action then moves to Crane’s home, where Crane is shot and killed by thieves who make off with a paper from his safe. The thieves climb up onto the roof of Crane’s house and encounter the Bat-Man, who knocks one of the men out and throws the other off the roof. Gordon arrives with the police, who shoot at the escaping Bat-Man, whom they consider an outlaw. The Bat-Man drives away in his car—a bright red sedan—and speeds to the home of a scientist named Stryker, who is the mastermind behind the murders of his business partners. The Bat-man saves another scientist from being killed, knocks out Stryker’s hulking assistant, and struggles with Stryker, who falls through a rail into a vat of acid—”A fitting ending for his kind,” says the Bat-Man, clearly a proponent of vigilante justice. The next day, Bruce Wayne again visits Commissioner Gordon, who tells him of the latest exploit of the Bat-Man. Wayne remarks, “A very lovely fairy tale, Commissioner, indeed.” After Wayne has gone, Gordon comments that his young friend “must lead a boring life.” But in the final panels, we are shown a door in Bruce Wayne’s home, which opens slowly to reveal the Bat- Man. “I thought it would be more exciting for Batman to work outside the law rather than inside it,” said Kane. “I guess growing up in the Bronx, we used to be vigilantes to survive.”8

  Finger cribbed the plot of the debut story from a pulp magazine. “My first script was a take-off on a Shadow story,” he said.9 It was, in fact, borrowed from the story “Partners of Peril,” published a few years earlier in The Shadow pulp magazine. In writing the Batman stories, Finger came up with names for all the major characters, including Bruce Wayne, the millionaire playboy who dresses as the Batman to fight crime. Finger said in an interview that the name came from Robert Bruce, the Scottish patriot, and Revolutionary War general “Mad” Anthony Wayne, though Bob Kane claimed that it was a name meant to invoke his own similar-sounding name. Finger also came up with the name for police commissioner James Gordon and decided to call the location of the stories—clearly modeled after New York—Gotham City.

  Like all comic creators in those early days, when Kane sold the idea to National, he signed away his copyright to the character. But Kane had an advantage other comic book creators did not—a protective father who knew from working in the newspaper business that publishers were not to be trusted.

  The elder Kane made sure that National did not entirely take advantage of his son. In return for Bob Kane giving up his copyright, National struck a deal that guaranteed that Kane’s name would always appear on comic book stories featuring “his” creation. “Being that they owned the copyright, I did the best I could at the time by compromising and getting a good piece of the action and a perpetuity contract,” said Kane. “So therefore, I did rather well compared to some artists who sold it away and didn’t get very much out of it.”10 Bill Finger and his contributions in creating the character were kept very much in the shadows, where they would remain for four decades; though some professionals working in the comics industry were aware of his contributions, fans were not.

  It was Finger who helped insure that Batman used his brains as much as his brawn, as Bob Kane admitted when he said, “I made him a super-hero vigilante when I first created him; Bill made him into a scientific detective.”11 Finger’s signature motif was to have Batman confront the villains on oversized props, like a giant pistol or a giant typewriter or giant bowling ball and pins, creating a fantastic world where miscreants like the Joker and the Penguin could seem credible. Finger also gave the artists research to help guide them; if a story took place on a battleship, he would clip photos of battleships to his pages. But Finger’s thoroughness came with a price: he developed a reputation for being a slow writer. Bob Kane said, “He was a little tardy in getting things in on deadline.” It was said that when a writer turned in the script of a story to National Comics, the editor immediately thumbed through it before signing the writer’s check. The reason? Finger has once turned in a “script” with one completed page stapled to the top of a stack of blank pages.12

  Batman artist Dick Sprang, in an interview with Joe Grant and Frank Squillace for Amazing Heroes magazine, said, “You know, Bill Finger was a funny guy. He almost never got his work in on time and he was the best writer they had—in my opinion. He was one of those fellows who couldn’t meet a deadline. But he was tops. Really tops.”13 Finger’s son, Fred Finger, told Comics Interview’s Dwight Jon Zimmerman, “My parents separated when I was four-and-a-half so I wasn’t too sure what it was all about. But I would stay with Bill on the weekends and he would be up all night, and I’d hear the typewriter going all night and then in the morning there’d be a stack of white originals and yellow carbons...I just knew that my father was crazy because he would be typing until three or four o‘clock in the morning all the time in order to get something in by Monday...which, in subsequent years, I found out was supposed to be due the previous Monday.”14

  To maintain the illusion that he was the sole creative force behind the Bat-Man, Kane did all his work outside of the National offices, in his studio in his parent’s apartment on the Grand Concourse. He already had a ghostwriter, Bill Finger, in his employ. Now, with the added workload of a monthly comic character, he added a ghost artist. Kane told a friend that he was looking to hire an assistant, and the friend recommended Sheldon Moldoff, a young artist just out of high school who lived in the Bronx. Moldoff went to Kane’s parent’s apartment, and told Kane that he had already sold some filler pages to National Comics. Kane hired him on the spot, and Moldoff soon began doing pages and covers for the Bat-Man, as well as inking, lettering and logos. Kane met with his artist and writer daily, usually over lunch or dinner, and then they would split up and go to their homes to do the work.

  After the first couple of stories featuring the Bat-Man appeared, Kane hired yet another ghost artist, Jerry Robinson. Like Sheldon Moldoff, Robinson was a recent high school graduate. He was preparing to go to journalism school at Syracuse when his mother, who feared that he was underweight, suggested he spend a little time at a health spa. On the day of his arrival, Robinson, a tennis player, went out to the spa’s tennis court wearing a white painter’s jacket covered with illustrations. “That was a fad then, kids would get these linen jackets with all the pockets and personalize them with all this razzmatazz,” said Robinson. “I was wearing mine as a warm-up jacket and someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked, ‘Hey, who drew that stuff?’ It was Bob Kane, who had just finished the first issue of Batman. I didn’t even know what that was. He showed me the issue that was on sale there at the local village. I wasn’t very impressed.”15 Nonetheless, Kane offered the young illustrator a job. Robinson switched from Syracuse to Columbia University, and went directly from the health resort to New York, where he began working for Kane. He started by inking Kane’s artwork and eventually took over illustrating some of the stories. In an interview with Vincent Zurzolo of World Talk Radio’s The Comic Zone, Robinson said, “We lived and dreamed and ate and slept Batman, and by working over and over again and of course studying what was around and observation, I gradually improved quite a bit over the first year until I was actually drawing and inking Batman.”16

  In 1940, another artist joined the stable—George Roussos. Orphaned as a child, Roussos and his sisters lived at the Brooklyn Orphan Asylum until graduating from Public School 125 in the Woodside neighborhood of Queens. A self-taught artist who entered the comics business lettering the Spanish- language version of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, Roussos was hired to assist Jerry Robinson with inking, drawing backgrounds, and lettering. Roussos and Robinson now worked out of an office Kane rented for them in the Times Building in Times Square.

  Bob Kane in the mid-1960s, with one of his Batman oil paintings (Photofest).

  Not all of Kane’s co-creators worked outside of the National Comics offices. Helping to shape the early Batman mythos was Gardner Fox, a Brooklyn native whose imagination had been fired by the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs in his you
th. Fox passed the New York bar and practiced as a lawyer for nearly two years, but as the Great Depression deepened and his clients evaporated, he began freelancing as a fantasy writer, contributing stories to pulp science-fiction magazines and to National Comics. In July 1939, he was asked to write the third Bat-Man story. In pitting the crime-fighter against a mad scientist named “Dr. Death,” Fox made significant innovations to the Bat-Man character. For instance, he showed where the Bat-Man kept his crime-fighting costume—in a trunk. His yellow belt now had glass pellets of “choking gas” attached, a precursor of the “utility belt” to come, and besides a lasso, the Bat-Man used “suction gloves and knee pads” to help him scale a building. Fox immediately wrote a sequel, in which the Bat-Man again encountered Dr. Death, apprehending him at the end of the tale and leaving him bound with a note for the police to find.

  In the fifth story, co-written by Bill Finger and Gardner Fox, readers were introduced to Julie Madison, Bruce Wayne’s fiancée. His gloves were now lengthened into gauntlets that covered his forearms, and he had more gadgets, including a boomerang called the Batarang, and a bat-shaped autogiro called, naturally, the Bat-Gyro. In this odd two-part story, the Batman—now with no hyphen—traveled to Paris and Hungary to save his fiancée from the clutches of the Monk, who was revealed to be a vampire. To release Julie from the Monk’s spell, the Batman melted down a silver statue to make bullets and, finding the coffin of the Monk, shot him.