Bob Kane, Batman & The Truth About Lying

Superheroes in Hollywood. An on-going series of articles looking at the various superhero films pre-2000

‘Bob handled the truth a little carelessly.’

Much like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creator of The Joker and Robin the Boy Wonder, Jerry Robinson, didn’t see a cent from Batman. He saw nothing from the comic books that he didn’t write or draw. He saw nothing from the original films, TV shows, cartoons and the big budget movies.

As far as Hollywood was concerned, why should he?

It wasn’t their fault he made a shit deal back in the 1940s. He should have talked to Jerry and Joe before he signed.

Jerry Robinson wasn’t the only one who suffered from making shit deals with DC in their day. The list of creators who saw a pittance from film, if anything, reads like a murderer’s row of comic book history.

Writers, artists and editors – no-one was immune from the film industry or DC. Curt Swan, Kurt Schaffenberger, Neal Adams, Murphy Anderson, Frank Miller, Ross Andru, Wayne Boring, Carmine Infantino, Denny O’Neil, Elliot S. Maggin, Len Wein, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Al Plastino, Jim Shooter, Dick Sprang, Jim Mooney, Gerry Conway, Don Newton, Dick Giordano, Gene Colan, Norm Breyfogle, Alan Grant, Chuck Dixon and countless others, credited and uncredited over the years, saw their visions were being freely adapted and claimed as their own by Hollywood for the big budget movies.

In an amazing piece of reversal, when John Byrne crossed over from Marvel to DC and revamped Superman, he took story and developmental cues from the films of Richards Donner and Lester. In doing so, Byrne revitalized the character and made millions of dollars for himself. Hats off to him.

Byrne was an exception. Comic book creators saw very little, if anything, from the Superman and Batman films. In most cases they were moved on by the comic book companies when they were deemed to be old enough (usually when they hit the age of 50), or difficult to work with (when they asked for a piece of the action) and cast out to fend for themselves. Unlike Siegel and Shuster, they weren’t afforded the dignity of a pension from the parent company. Most found themselves destitute, and some even had the indignity of passing away, infirm, disabled and in poverty, relying on the largess of fans of their work or begging for pensions or money from Marvel and DC.

Not that they got much, that is if they got any at all. It wasn’t Marvel or DCs fault that they made such bad deals back in the days. They got paid for their work; what did the companies owe them now? Nothing. So, their ideas, creations and concepts would be mined to make millions. Welcome to the world of work-for-hire.

They should have spoken to Jerry and Joe, or Jack Kirby. It was often said that if Jack Kirby, nicknamed ‘The King’, could be ripped off as badly as he was, then what hope anyone else?

The King didn’t have great business sense. The King took the word of his employers at Marvel Comics when they told him they’d look after him and bring him in for profit participation. He happily created an entire universe, both alone and in collaboration with others. He laid the foundations for what would become a multi-billion-dollar empire. When Marvel told The King he’d be taken care of, financially, he believed it. When he got nothing, when he watched as his art, which had not been returned to him but instead stolen from the Marvel offices, openly sold by Marvel employees at various comic book conventions, and when he saw Stan ‘The Man’ Lee become a millionaire, he finally allowed himself to get angry. He raged, became bitter, and allowed himself to hate.

It made no difference. The King died; the industry went on making billions from his creations.

No wonder so many of the artists and writers from those eras ended up bitter towards the companies and the film industry.

There was one man, however, who made money from the many Batman adaptations. Be it cartoons, comic books, novels, the tv series, films, lunchboxes, t shirts – you name it, if it had the Bat symbol on it, he made money, and lots of it. One man chased, and received, fame and recognition from the public at large. And he was one of the biggest liars the comic book industry has ever seen.

The one who didn’t make a shit deal was Bob Kane. Or more to the point, Bob Kane’s lawyer, who was hired by Bob Kane’s father.

This is a long story made short.

Kane was an average artist who had the germ of an idea. He’d been earning a living drawing such strips as Peter Pupp and Hiram Hick. Neither strip was setting the world on fire, and he knew it. He got his foot through the door at DC Comics in 1938, just after Siegel and Shuster, and was put to work on Cave Carson and Rusty and his Pals. The work he was producing was serviceable, but it nothing special.

Vin Sullivan, seeing the instant hit that Superman was, bailed Kane up one afternoon and asked if he’d seen the character. Of course he had, everyone had. Sullivan then asked if Kane could come up with something just as good. Of course, Kane said, it was easy.

He took a germ of an idea, a series of artistic thievery really, and created a character. He swiped an old pulp cover and put a bat outfit on it. He then worked up some sketches, using his collection of Flash Gordon cuttings for ‘inspiration’.

In later years Kane would produce sketches that he claimed he’d done in 1934 when he was aged 13 of a ‘bat man’ and a ‘hawk man’, which he drew after seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of a flying machine with wings. The drawings are highly detailed and have questions and annotations in the margins.

Like most things Kane claimed through his life, it was a lie. He did the sketches later in his life in an attempt to show that he, alone, created Batman well before Vin Sullivan asked him for a new character. As it stood, all Kane had was a man who wore mechanical wings and fought crime, all dressed in a bright red outfit and named ‘The Bat Man’.

And that was it. That’s all he had. It wasn’t much. For Kane, that was all he needed. Not for the first time in his life, he’d get someone else to finish it off.

Knowing that what he had wasn’t up to snuff, he approached a writer he knew, Bill Finger, and had him flesh his germ out into a full-blown character. Finger took Kane’s character, gave him a backstory and motivation, suggested changes to the overall look and got to work writing. Finger changed the color from red to black, changed the wings to a billowing cape, added ears and had the eyes changed from round to little white slits. He suggested a bat logo for the character’s chest and gave him a utility belt. Once that was in place, Kane headed to DC.

The character? Batman.

Or, as he was first called, The Bat Man. That was the name he was registered under for the original trademark in November 1939.

‘If it were not for Bob Kane,’ Bob Kane said in 1995 with his usual modesty, ‘there would not be the movie; there would not be anything. I hate to sound prejudiced, but I guess I am.[i]‘

Kane always maintained that his inspirations were drawn from the Douglas Fairbanks movie The Mark of Zorro, The Bat (a 1927 silent film), Leonardo Da Vinci and, of course, himself. He often explained why Bob Kane rhymed with Bruce Wayne – because Bob Kane, in his mind, *was* Batman.

I'm Bruce Wayne. I have photos of me when I was 40, 45, 50, and I looked just like him - tall, dark and handsome, chiseled features, I could have played him but I'm not an actor. My face was the image I drew him in. I never wanted to be an actor, but behind the scenes I was actor, producer, director, writer and artist. I was the camera eye. That's why I am a good writer, I think visually.[ii]

I remember when I was 12 or 13, I was an ardent reader of books on how things began - the automobile, the steam engine, the parachute - and I came across a book about Leonardo da Vinci. This had a picture of a flying machine with huge bat wings. It looked like a bat man to me.’ He would tell others that he was influenced by the Douglas Fairbanks film The Mark of Zorro and The Shadow. ‘I know it sounds like I'm copying, but everyone saw what I saw. I was reinterpreting. It was my vision, my interpretation.[iii]

And this,

I was poor, and I created him in the image of what I'd be if I were rich. I made him a bat to throw fear into the denizens of the underworld-the idea came from The Mark of Zorro, who was actually a count in Mexico at a time when it was dominated by an oppressive conquistador government. I created the Joker in the image of The Man Who Laughs, by Victor Hugo, after I saw the way Conrad Veidt played him in the movie. The Penguin came from the character who advertised Kool cigarettes back then, Willy the Penguin.[iv]

They were the words of a braggart. And much like all words spoken by a braggart, they were pure bullshit. This was the bag of potatoes that Kane sold to DC. He was also canny enough to write Finger out of the picture but keep him on as the writer. Much like the official history of Superman omitted Siegel and Shuster for decades, the official history of Batman erased Bill Finger, only this was due to the co-creator more than the company.

In later years, Kane softened a bit, and actually gave Finger some credit, albeit grudgingly. ‘When I first drew Batman, I had eyes in there and it didn't look right. Bill Finger said, 'Take them out.'‘ Finger also gave Batman’s alter ego the name Bruce Wayne.

Once everything was in place, Kane sold Batman to DC, who were happy to get another costumed hero on the books as Superman was beginning to resonate with readers after a year of publication.

But it was not that simple. Vin Sullivan loved the pages and approved the strip as a six-page, monthly feature. He drafted the standard contract for Kane to sign.

Kane asked to take the contract to his father. Sullivan had no problems with that, after all, what could possibly go wrong?

In retrospect, for DC a lot could, and did, go wrong. Kane’s father worked as an engraver for comic strips, so he knew a bit about the industry. He also knew publishing, and he knew lawyers. So, he took young Bob’s contract around to a few people and got it rewritten.

Just what DC agreed to was never fully revealed, but the guts of it ensured that Kane would have both the security of an income, no matter who worked on the character, and retained some control. He would make money from any other adaptation, newspaper strips, books, film (and later, television), radio and merchandise. DC, who were about to go to the printing plant with the first Batman story were over a barrel. They signed. Bob Kane was going to be rich.

The first person he told was Bill Finger. Bob was going to be rich; Bill wasn’t. Kane made sure that he signed his name to every single comic book that went out, ‘Batman by Bob Kane’. Not a mention of Bill Finger, who, to be fair, probably had no idea how long this was character was going to last. Like most people who grew up during the Great Depression, he was happy to be earning a steady living. A credit, well these things didn’t happen. Especially when the contract Bob and DC signed insisted that Bob Kane receive sole creator credit, in perpetuity, not that Bill knew that part.

It would take over a decade after Bob popped his clogs before Bill Finger would finally get a belated credit.

Much like Superman, DC fought the clones. One of the most notable was a character named The Lynx. Great idea – Bat=Lynx. Hell, both were nocturnal, one flew. One was a rodent, the other a cat. Even better, The Lynx was published by Fox Publications – Victor Fox, learning nothing from the Wonder Man saga, struck again.

It mattered not. The Lynx was a thinly disguised clone of Batman, so DC sued and shut it down. Fox lost again, and was hit with costs, again.

A comparison of the cartoons of ‘The Lynx’ with ‘Blackie the Mystery Boy’ published by the defendant Fox Publications, Inc. in its magazine ‘Mystery Men Comics,’ and distributed by the defendant Colonial News Company, Inc. with the cartoons of ‘The Batman’ with ‘Robin the Boy Wonder,’ published by the plaintiff in its magazines ‘Detective Comics’ and ‘The Batman,’ convinces me there has been a deliberate copying by the defendant of drawings and cartoons of the Batman and his companion Robin as contained in the issues of ‘Detective Comics’ of April 1940 (on the newsstands March 6, 1940) of May 1940 (on the newsstands April 6, 1940) of June and July 1940 (on the stands respectively on May 3, and June 5, 1940) ; and in the spring issue of ‘The Batman’ on the stands April 24, 1940. These publications were all duly copyrighted by the plaintiff.

The infringing publications by the defendants were contained in the ‘Mystery Men Comics’ August and September 1940 issues.

They were warned of the claimed infringement by letter on July 2, 1940, shortly after the August number came out, but did nothing about it and went on with their publication in the September issue.

Inasmuch as formal findings of fact and conclusions of law will be filed, it is not necessary to continue this memorandum. Judgment will be directed for the plaintiff, in the form approved in the case cited, against the defendants Fox Publications, Inc. and Colonial News Co., Inc. (the action having been discontinued as to the Interborough News Co.), with costs, $2,000 damages and $500 counsel fees.[v]

There was a positive from that one when DC hired the artist for The Lynx. The thinking was, plagiarism aside, The Lynx strip looked great, so Jim Mooney, who drew it, was promptly hired and became one of Kane’s Batman ghosts.

Kane wasn’t making a great deal from the strip in the early days, but then he didn’t really do much. As the artist, he was great at outsourcing every aspect of illustration, down to drawing the panel borders. As was the wont in the day, nobody got credited for what they did with comic books unless they wrote their names into the art. Like Bob Kane did. Scripts would come in from Finger and others, Kane would then assign them to his ‘ghosts’. Sheldon Moldoff, Dick Sprang, Jim Mooney, Win Mortimer, Charlie Paris, Lew Sayre Schwartz, Jerry Robinson and more all worked on ‘Batman by Bob Kane’, and all without any attribution.

Robinson, Sprang and Moldoff went further. Between them they, working with Finger, created The Joker, Robin, Mr. Freeze, Alfred Pennyworth (the faithful butler), Poison Ivy, Calendar Man, the Riddler and any number of secondary characters, both good and bad. Naturally, they were given no credit, these characters were the property of Bob Kane.

If you asked Bob Kane who created all those characters, who wrote and drew the comic books and newspaper strips, he’d simply reply, ‘Me.’ With a big, shit-eating grin.

As for ghosts? He’d simply boast about it.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The main thing is that my name will go down as the creator and all the ghostwriters are forgotten. My imprint is left on the sands of the time and I'm very proud of that.[vi]

Not one artist signed their name to the strip. Contractually they weren’t allowed to. For nearly two decades, people were under the impression that Kane actually did draw everything, including the eventual newspaper strip. Even into the 1960s, when artists such as Neal Adams and Carmine Infantino came along, Kane insisted that he drew the strip and the others just inked his pencils. By then nobody was buying the bullshit he was selling. People knew better.

When it came to Bill Finger, Kane was only slightly more generous.

I give Bill a lot of credit, he was the unsung hero. In those days somehow the credit only went to the creator, we didn't put on the writer's name, or the inker or the letterer or Uncle Joe or Aunt Tilly like today. We only had the one name for the creator of the strip, or creators - Siegel and Shuster created Superman, so it was two names. Well, Bill came in after the fact, he didn't create the Batman, but he did help with many of the villains, he co-created some of the villains, and he deserved more credit than he got during his lifetime. In retrospect I feel badly about that.[vii]

Isn’t it great to be proud of stealing credit? By the time Kane said those words, Bill Finger was a decade and change in the ground, so it wasn’t like he was going to say anything, nor was it ever likely to change anything either.

Bill Finger died in poverty in 1974. Kane, meanwhile, sat back and raked in the cash and did nothing to earn it.

DC was cruel. They had a page in the fanzines celebrating Finger’s efforts, or as much as they were contractually allowed to. In the same year that he died, DC were about to publish a story called Through the Wringer. The central character was called Phil Binger. The character looked like Bill Finger. The story is one of the most mean-spirited and cruel comic book stories that a professional comic book company has ever published. It poked fun at Finger in the same way a bully flushes his victim’s head in the toilet that he’s just crapped in and not bothered to flushed.

It wasn’t DC’s best moment. They pulled the story and published it two years later, much to the guffaws of the crappy editors who should have known better.

Back to Bob Kane.

As we know, shortly after World War Two was over and he was back home, Jerry Siegel went to lunch (or was it dinner?) with Kane and told him of his and Joe’s plans to file suit against DC to get Superman back. By this stage Jerry was constantly pushing DC for more money, and more work, to the point where people at DC began to see Jerry as a troublemaker. Jerry wanted a piece of Superboy, who he insisted he created (no credit for Joe Shuster there, even though Superboy was a derivative character, and Superbaby had appeared in the first issue of Action Comics), Jerry wanted a piece of the radio show, the cartoons, the TV show, the movies, books, shirts, outfits, underwear, socks – you name it, Jerry wanted to wet his beak with everything Superman related.

Jerry told Bob that it’d be great for Bob to team up with Siegel and Shuster and walk into DC together, announce their plans to sue to get ownership of their characters. Upon winning the rights to Superman, Batman and all the secondary characters, they’d form their own company which would publish Superman, Batman and other new characters that they’d create. They’d hire artists and writers, like Will Eisner, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, to work at their new company. Whatever ideas they came up with, they’d retain ownership of (sound familiar? Yep, decades later, a group of highly popular creators would march into Marvel Comics, take their ball and form Image Comics – and you were wondering what all of this has to do with Spawn, weren’t you?).

Bob listened, nodded his head and made the right noises, as Jerry, naïve and trusting as ever, laid out his plans. Dinner (or was it lunch?) over they went their separate ways. Jerry wandered back to wherever it was Jerry wandered off to during the day (or evening) to contemplate his next move, happy and safe in the knowledge that they had Bob Kane on their side.

There was one flaw in the plan. Bob Kane only ever looked out for one man – Bob Kane.

Once he left, Kane scurried straight up to the DC offices and promptly spilt the beans on Jerry’s plans to Harry Donenfeld, Jack Liebowitz, Whitney Ellsworth and anyone with ears really. What came next was inevitable.

DC duly fired Jerry and Joe.

Bob Kane was told to behave and not do a Siegel and Shuster, or he’d be next out the door. He sat there and listened and then dropped another bombshell – he claimed that when he’d signed his original 1939 Batman contract, he was a minor. This meant the contract was illegal and thus invalid. Kane could, anytime he wanted to, simply walk out the door with Batman and there was nothing, legally, DC could do to prevent him. This was despite the fact that Bob Kane had gone to school with Will Eisner, who was, you’d figure, the same age and was legally an adult back in 1939.[viii] Eisner always maintained that Kane was a year and half older than he was, now Kane was a year and half younger.

With that stench lingering in the air Kane left DC, went home and awaited the inevitable phone call.

DC shit itself. Contracts and dates were checked, and the lawyers broke the news. With a lack of an official birth certificate, Kane’s parents were insisting Bob was a minor back in 1939 and said he was born in October 1919 (this would mean that he was 15 when he began to work professionally, as he was working for the Max Fleischer Studio in 1934). There wasn’t a lot that could be done. The Kane family had DC backed against the wall. DC didn’t legally own Batman. They instantly called Kane back in and presented him with a slightly better contract than before.

Kane laughed his dogs off. DC could bash that contract up their collective chutes. The barrel was out, DC were nearly bent over it and their pants were down. Kane saw his chance, greased them up and went at it like a seagull eating hot chips.

First up, Kane wanted all mention of Bill Finger eradicated. Gone. Finger could write the strip, but he would never, ever be mentioned as a creator. Same with that bastard Jerry Robinson and the claims that he created The Joker and Robin. It didn’t matter that Finger was the true co-creator of Batman, and that Robinson had created The Joker, Robin and other characters, from this point on the strip had to say, ‘Batman by Bob Kane’, regardless of who wrote or drew it. And he would get a larger cut from the strip, the films, the radio shows, lunchboxes, anything and everything yet to come (including the TV show). Everything had to say that he, Bob Kane, created Batman and all the characters that would come to appear in it.

DC would also be responsible for paying the Kane ghosts too. DC could directly employ them for all Kane cared. Any money Kane got; Kane would keep. Let the ghosts chase DC for their pittance. Kane was now set on living a life of utter leisure.

Siegel and Shuster probably spat out their cornflakes upon hearing this. Why did they have to wait until they were of a legal age before they approached DC and signed on? Why didn’t they hide their birth certificates as well? Idiots!

Jerry Robinson always called him a prick. And Jerry was right, Both Jerry’s were right for that matter. Bob was a prick. He stole credit for everything.

Even the Nicest Man in Comic Books™, Jim Mooney, struggled to find something nice about Bob Kane.

I didn't take to him too much to be honest. You know how it is with people, you can meet them and say right away ‘hey, I like this guy’. You might change your mind later but usually your first impressions are pretty solid. And I thought Kane was somebody that I'd not care to spend much time with. He tended to have a rather unpleasant display of ego and tended to put people down, which I wouldn't take, and I'd put him back very nicely. He was full of it.

Bob handled the truth a little carelessly, let's say. There's a guy I know very well, Shelly Moldoff, who was truly Bob's ghost, and all the things that Bob supposedly did was done by Shelly Moldoff.[ix]

Handling the truth a ‘little carelessly’ was an understatement. Bob Kane not only buried his ghosts, but he also pissed on their graves when there was no need to.

Bob Kane would later claim a lot of things, amongst them that he once used a young Norma Jeane Baker as a life model, before taking her to his couch for a quick romp on the fabric. Of course, this was Norma Jeane who later changed her name to Marylin Monroe. Naturally, Kane waited until after she had died before he started spreading the story.

Eventually, Bob Kane and Jerry Siegel would join forces. Kane hired Jerry to write scripts for his cartoon series, Cool McCool. His other great 'creation' was Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse, a cartoon cat and mouse version of Batman and Robin. Recycle and resell.

After the TV series, Bob then began to dabble in the fine arts, painting lovely little oils which he signed and sold. He’d be photographed painting some nubile thing languishing on his sofa in a dingy studio (one could easily imagine these studios being used for stag movies, and that he probably leant over and breathlessly whispered his favorite pick-up line to the young girls, ‘I fucked Marylin Monroe on that couch.’). At least he was photographed holding a brush to a canvas.

He didn’t paint a stroke. In 1966 he hired an artist named Lynne Feldman, who, it was reported, was a former Miss Israel and the former wife of singer/actor Alan Dale to paint the many oils of Batman, Catwoman and other characters for $100 a pop, plus 10% of the final selling price.

Bob Kane posing with Lynne Feldman (who actually painted the image Kane is pretending to paint) as Catwoman

In true Bob Kane fashion, he reneged on the contract he’d had Feldman sign and she sued him. She asked for $500,000 in damages. He probably refused to pay after she refused to hit the sofa with him (you never know, you might be the next Marylin Monroe!). He started to belittle her and her artistic talents, so, off to the lawyers it was. It made the news and people laughed at how anyone could get sucked into Bob Kane’s schemes.

That was Bob Kane. He never stopped hiring young, attractive women to do his paintings, and he never really lived up this end of the deal, resulting in them suing him over and over. Once Todd McFarlane, Frank Miller, David Mazzuchelli, Norm Breyfogle and other stylists began to make Batman popular, Kane simply traced their drawings and passed them off as his own, resulting in a brutal rebuttal cover by McFarlane on Amazing Heroes #179.

But Bob was wealthy and the media, at large, found him to be good copy. When Hollywood came calling, they found Bob Kane.

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[i] The Desert Sun, 8 Jul 1995

[ii] Comics Interview: Batman Super Special

[iii] The Associated Press, 17 June 1989

[iv] The Washington Post, 18 June 1989

[v] DETECTIVE COMICS, INC. v. FOX PUBLICATIONS, ·INC., ET AL. (District Court, S. D. New York, Aug. 14, 1942) 54 USPQ 485. 46 F. Supp. 872

[vi] The Desert Sun, 8 Jul 1995

[vii] Comics Interview: Batman Super Special

[viii] Kane’s official birthdate is 24 October 1915. This meant he was at least 23 years old in 1939.Will Eisner was born on 6 March 1917.

[ix] AI 14 Mar 2004

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