Billion Dollar Batman Read online

  The Batman seen on the cover of Detective Comics # 33 was an anomaly, with a costume that included a gun holster on the utility belt. In a prologue written by Bill Finger, the seventh story in the series finally revealed the Batman’s origin. Millionaire Thomas Wayne was walking home from a movie with his wife and their young son, Bruce, when a crook emerged from the shadows with a gun. He reached for Mrs. Wayne’s necklace. Thomas tried to stop him, and the crook gunned him down. Mrs. Wayne yelled for help, and the crook shot and killed her, too. Days later, young Bruce knelt by his bed by candlelight and swore, “by the spirit of my parents to avenge their deaths by spending the rest of my life warring on all criminals.” As the years passed, Bruce became a master scientist and trained his body to physical perfection. Years later, in his father’s mansion, which he inherited, the adult Bruce Wayne sat by the fireplace and pondered what sort of disguise he should use in his self-appointed mission. “Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot,” he said, “so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible...a...a...” At that moment, a bat flew in through the open window. “A bat!” exclaimed Bruce. “That’s it! It’s an omen. I shall become a bat!” The next panel showed the Batman crouching atop a building, against the backdrop of a full moon. The continuation of the story, “The Dirigibles of Doom,” written by Gardner Fox, involved yet another mad scientist character, this one with a literal Napoleon complex (he looked and dressed like the Gallic general). Although the Batman carried a gun in this story, he never shot anyone with it. By the next story, the sidearm was gone. He’d also ditched the red sedan by the ninth story, replacing it with a blue “high-powered roadster” convertible.

  Batman continued as a solo character until April 1940, when Detective Comics # 38 introduced his teen-aged sidekick, Robin, the Boy Wonder, “the sensational character find of 1940.” Bob Kane said Robin was inspired by his childhood fantasies of imagining himself fighting alongside his idol, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., as well as a desire to “lighten up” Batman. Bill Finger maintained that Robin was invented to give Batman someone to talk to, so he wouldn’t always be talking to himself.

  “Adding a kid was Bill’s idea,” said Jerry Robinson, who said the Batman creative team “had a big session of the names, and we couldn’t agree on the name.”17 Finger favored mythological names like Mercury, but Robinson felt that since Batman was a real person, his sidekick had to be a real person, too. Robinson remembered a book he’d read as a child, a volume of Robin Hood stories with illustrations by N.C. Wyeth. Robinson quickly drew a rough sketch of a boy in a domino mask and outfit that featured a Robin Hood-like tunic and shoes, a short cape, and trunks. Kane agreed that this was the way to go; it helped that Robin Hood was portrayed in silent movies by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., his childhood favorite. “I thought that every young boy would want to be like Robin,” wrote Kane. “A laughing daredevil—free, no school, no homework, living in a mansion over the Bat Cave, riding in the Batmobile— he appealed to the imagination of every kid in the world.”18 Bill Finger said the name Dick Grayson, Robin’s alter ego, came from a combination of the pulp magazines and a novel. “Frank Merriwell had a half brother, Dick,” said Finger, “and Grayson came from a book I was reading, edited by Charles Grayson, Jr.”19

  Kane and Finger gave Robin an origin story similar to Batman’s. A member of the circus acrobat troupe the Flying Graysons, young Dick watched his parents fall to their deaths after a criminal put acid on their trapeze ropes. The young orphan was taken in by Bruce Wayne, who taught him boxing and jiu-jitsu and made him a partner in crime-fighting.

  Immediately after Robin’s introduction, Batman—now having dropped the article “the” as well as the hyphen—was given his own magazine. Just one year after his introduction, the character became almost as popular as Superman, and like Superman, spawned a number of imitators. The success of Batman showed that costumed heroes didn’t need to have special powers or come from another planet, they just needed a nifty costume, a Type-A personality and a pathological desire to wipe out evil. After Robin’s debut, almost all of them also acquired a wise-cracking young sidekick, as well.

  The first issue of Batman reprised the origin story of Batman and then introduced one of the serie’s most intriguing villains, the Joker. With a clown-white face, red lips, green hair, demonic smile, and homicidal nature, the original Joker was a nasty piece of work, killing his victims with a gas that left their faces contorted in a maniacal smile. Jerry Robinson claimed that he came up with the idea for the Joker after bringing a joker playing card to Kane and Finger. Kane claimed that he and Finger jointly created the Joker, with Kane coming up with the idea of a villain who played deadly practical jokes and Finger suggesting they base the look of the character on the striking make-up worn by actor Conrad Veidt in the 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs.

  Finger also laid the foundation for another classic character when he created a female cat burglar for whom Batman felt an irresistible attraction. In her first appearance, the Cat disguised herself as an old lady on a yacht to steal a priceless diamond. Batman trapped her, rubbed off her make-up as he admonished “Quiet or papa spank,” and revealed a raven-haired beauty with a face inspired by actress Jean Harlow. As Batman and Robin took the Cat back to shore, Batman purposefully allowed her to escape and said to Robin, “Lovely girl! What eyes! Say—mustn’t forget I’ve got a girl named Julie! Oh well—she still had lovely eyes! Maybe I’ll bump into her again sometime.” Kane thought of Catwoman, as the feline felon would come to be called, as a female counterpart to Batman. “We came up with the idea of associating her with cats because they were kind of the antithesis of bats,” said Kane.20

  The December 1941 issue of Detective Comics, issue # 58, introduced the Penguin, another memorable recurring Batman villain. According to Kane, the character was inspired by the penguin mascot on a pack of Kool cigarettes, whom Kane thought looked like a fat little man in a tuxedo. The inspiration for Two-Face, an attorney who became a criminal after one side of his face was horribly scarred by acid, was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The MGM version of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, starring Spencer Tracy, hit theaters in 1941. Posters for the film showed Tracy with one half of his face normal, and the other half monstrously contorted—almost a blueprint for Two-Face, who made his first appearance in Detective Comics #66 in August 1942.

  As word spread through the industry that Kane was not the sole creative force behind Batman, other comic book publishers began approaching his ghosts. Sheldon Moldoff was the first lured away. “I wanted to do my own characters,” said Moldoff. “I started to do Hawkman and other characters. Then I did The Black Pirate for Sheldon Mayer down at All-American Comics.”21 Jerry Robinson, George Roussos and Bill Finger also decided to leave Kane’s shop and strike out on their own. “When we began to get offers from all over, and the publishers began to realize that there was a staff, not just Bob, but there was Bill and myself, and we were leaving, then the publisher hired us directly,” said Robinson. “Really after the first year and a half perhaps, Bill and I were going to leave, and we were hired to continue Batman but directly for the publisher, so we were no longer responsible to Bob. So I began to do my own stories, my own covers, as well as to work on the ones that he worked on. We rarely saw each other after that.”22

  Kane continued hiring ghost writers and artists, whom he paid out of his earnings of nearly a thousand dollars a week—a lot of money in the early 1940s. But having learned from his experiences with Moldoff, Robinson and Finger, Kane now kept the ghosts separate, each working out of his own home, not knowing that other ghosts existed—or how much they were paid. “There were two kinds of Bob Kane ghosts,” said writer and comics historian Mark Evanier. “Bob contracted with DC to provide a certain number of pages per month and he hired men like Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Sayre Schwartz to draw them. But DC needed more pages of Batman art than that number and so the DC editors hired men like Dick
Sprang, Jim Mooney, Winslow Mortimer and Curt Swan to draw stories that never went anywhere near Kane or his studios. As per Kane’s deal with DC, no one else’s name could appear on them but his, but it would be wrong to suggest that Mooney, for example, was a Kane assistant. Or Sprang or [Carmine] Infantino or any of about two dozen others who did Batman art for DC.”23

  Kane was not only earning money from the three comic books regularly featuring Batman—Batman, Detective Comics and World’s Finest—but also from a daily syndicated newspaper comic strip featuring the caped crusader that debuted in March 1944. The money he earned from Batman allowed him to live a Bruce Wayne lifestyle. In 1943, when Columbia Pictures began work on a Batman movie serial, Kane traveled to Los Angeles to observe the filming. He returned in 1949 for filming of the second serial, and that same year, became a married man at the age of 34.

  Kane’s original Batman contract came up for renewal in 1949, around the same time that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were planning to sue National over the rights to Superman. They encouraged Kane to join the proceedings, figuring National would be more likely to buckle if the creators of their two biggest properties mutinied at the same time. Kane, however, responded by going to National and telling them of Siegel and Shuster’s plan, indicating that it would be better if National cut a deal with him to keep him out of the lawsuit. When National countered that they felt the ownership of the Batman rights were indisputable, Kane pulled an audacious stunt—he lied about his age. According to Gerard Jones’s book Men of Tomorrow, Kane told National that his original contract with them was invalid because he was a minor at the time he signed it. Although he was about 23 when he signed his deal, he now indicated that he had actually been under 21. His birth certificate, he said, had disappeared, and his parents would testify that he was born in 1919, not 1915. Rather than engage him in a messy lawsuit, National returned legal ownership of Batman to Kane, guaranteed him a certain number of pages per month at a high page rate, and a percentage of subsidiary rights. The only condition was that Kane keep quiet about the deal. Kane, who had kept his ghost writers and artists secret for years, had no problem with that caveat. He then told Siegel and Shuster that they were on their own.24

  In his book, Kane relates that after an “important artist”—no doubt he was referring to both Siegel and Shuster—lost a lawsuit with National, Kane joined editor Whitney Ellsworth for a drink at the local bar. “It was January,” wrote Kane, “and I said, ‘Whit, it looks like it’s going to be a very cold winter for so-and-so.‘ He touched my martini glass with his hand and answered sardonically, ‘I‘m not cold, are you?‘ Somehow in that terse remark, Whit summed up the self-preservationist philosophy of most people, and that is: ‘Better him than me.‘”25

  Sheldon Moldoff, the first ghost artist to leave Bob Kane’s studio, returned to the Batman comics in the 1950s. “When I met Bob again in ‘53, he said he needed a ghost,” said Moldoff. “He wanted someone to do his Batman. Would I be interested? I said, ‘Yeah, let’s talk about it.‘ We came to an agreement, shook hands, and that was it.” Unlike his previous tenure, when he just assisted with the comics, Moldoff now actually drew them. “When you‘re a ghost, you do it, and you don’t say anything,” said Moldoff. “He did very little. He would look at it, and then he would fool around with a nose or a chin or something like that. I picked up the script from him and then laid out the eight or ten pages or whatever it was. I did the whole thing from beginning to end.”26

  Moldoff, his wife and daughter socialized with Kane, his wife Beverly and their daughter Debbie for the next several years, while Moldoff continued working on the Batman comic books. During that time, Kane’s womanizing ways brought an end to his marriage. In 1957, while getting a divorce, Kane once again traveled to Los Angeles, where he pitched an idea for an animated TV series called Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse, a kiddie take-off on Batman and Robin, with main characters that lived in the Cat Cave and were summoned by the Cat Signal. They fought an adversary named the Frog using an array of devices such as the Cat Mobile, Cat Plane and Cat Boat. 130 five- minute episodes were produced and put into syndication in 1960. Sheldon Moldoff later revealed that he actually wrote the stories and sketched the storyboards for Kane’s animated series.

  After his divorce, Kane moved east to Sutton Place in Manhattan. Moldoff handed in his Batman work to Kane, who presented it to DC Comics (as National came to be known; DC was an abbreviation of “Detective Comics”). Meanwhile, Moldoff also drew other DC titles like Mr. District Attorney and Blackhawk, and sometimes inked Curt Swan’s Superman art. Charles Paris inked Batman, but when Paris got behind, Batman editor Jack Schiff sometimes asked Moldoff if he could do it—and handed Moldoff artwork that Moldoff had just turned in to Bob Kane a couple of days earlier.

  Still, Moldoff kept Kane’s secret. “I never told anybody,” he said. “The way I saw it at the time, they knew he had a ghost. As long as the work was there on time, they didn’t really care. I’ve read recent articles where it’s said it was the ‘worst kept secret,‘ and everybody knew it. I don’t buy that. Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, I don’t think too many people knew about it.”27

  Moldoff didn’t mind doing the work and letting Kane get all the glory, so long as Kane’s checks cleared the bank. He felt it was a trade-off; many comic book assignments only lasted a year or two, until the titles were cancelled. Batman was a steady thing, with no end in sight. “I would have liked to have had my name up there. I would have liked him to give me a mention or credit. That would have been nice. But Bob wasn’t that type of person,” said Moldoff.28

  By the early 1960s, Bob Kane had become like Batman—a wealthy playboy harboring a dark secret. While he lived a life in the limelight, Moldoff toiled away on various Batman projects. “I was doing the Batman for Bob, and he had also started the Sunday and daily strip for The Newark Star Ledger, which I was also doing. I was loaded to the gills with work. And on top of that, he kept coming up with ideas for games and merchandising. Bob was always thinking up something. Then he would give it to me and say, ‘Work this up into a presentation. I‘m going to bring this around and see if I can sell a card game with the Batman and Joker.‘ Things like that. I was always doing extra stuff. I was really working my head off.”29

  Though actually drawing very little of Batman, Kane felt compelled to perpetuate his claim of being the sole creator of the Caped Crusader. In a September 1965 response to the fanzine Batmania, which had previously published an interview with Bill Finger in which Finger candidly spoke of his involvement with Batman, Kane wrote, “The Myth: Bob Kane is not the sole creator of ‘Batman.‘ (I’ve heard this a thousand times in my lifetime), that ‘Batman‘ was really created by Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson, Carmine Infantino, Jack Schiff, Julie Schwartz, my publisher, etc., etc., and my housekeeper!

  “The Truth: All hogwash! I, Bob Kane, am the sole creator of ‘Batman.‘ I created ‘Batman‘ in 1939, and it appeared, if memory serves me correctly, in Detective Comics as a six or eight page story, and I signed the first strip, ‘Robert Kane.‘” Kane goes on to write, “It seemed to me that Bill Finger has given out the impression that he and not myself created the Batman, as well as Robin and all the other leading villains and characters. This statement is fraudulent and entirely untrue...let me state that I still draw about ninety percent of all Batman stories. I do all the stories for Batman Bimonthly, and share Detective Comics with Infantino, who draws every other one. Infantino now does all the covers for Batman and Detective Comics. As for inking and lettering, I am not too sure myself who finishes my pencils. However, the results are good, so I don’t care.

  “I do know one thing though, that in the ‘Golden Age‘ of Batman, I penciled, inked, and lettered my strip by myself.”30

  Around this time, of course, Batman exploded on television as a live-action prime-time series. The success of the TV show couldn’t have come at a more fortuitous time for Kane. Sales of the Batman comics, which had been steadily decli
ning to the point that it was rumored the title might be canceled, suddenly went through the roof. The deal he’d made with National to credit him as the sole creator of Batman paid off, as Kane was featured on magazine covers and invited to appear on talk shows. More importantly, his deal was now up for renewal. Moldoff, who was secretly doing all the heavy lifting, was overwhelmed with work. “It was too much,” said Moldoff. “Finally I gave up. I said, ‘I just can’t handle it all, Bob.’ He said, ‘I‘m working on a new contract [with DC]. You‘re going to get a lot of money when this thing is settled. Just try to keep going.’ But I just couldn’t keep it all up, so finally he said that someone else would do the newspaper strip, and I would just concentrate on the magazine.”31 With Batman suddenly more popular than ever, Kane struck a sweet deal with DC. Able to increase his percentage of the take while at the same time retiring from the comic book, he decided to let his secret art studio go. “Bob owed me a lot of money,” said Moldoff, “because he said he couldn’t afford to pay me for all the extra work, but that I would get it eventually. Then one day he called me and said, ‘I’ve signed my contact.‘ And I said, ’that’s great! When do I start collecting?‘ He replied, ’the only problem is that the office is going to do all the drawing from now on, and I have nothing to do with it. They‘re going to handle it.‘ I said, ‘Where does that leave me?‘ He said, ‘I feel terrible, but there won’t be any work.‘ That was the end of it! It ended just like that! It was all over.”32 Moldoff never saw Kane again, nor did he ever work on any other Batman comics from that time forward.