Besides being a Transformers fan Batman is what i follow slightly more in comics (Mostly because IDW constant mini-series and having different ongoing series is REALLY ANNOYING on keeping up the events) So i noticed several times on the internet people SLAME Bob Kane on being a selfish jerk and not giving Bill Finger enough credit. I do agree Bill doesn't get the credit he deserves for his part but still Bob Kane was the one who came up of the idea of Batman while Bill Finger is the one who wrote the stories. Anyways who do you think deserves more credit for creating Batman. I think both deserve equal credit
Equal. From what I've read, Batman would be almost completely unrecognizable without Finger's iconic contributions. The concept was Kane's, but Finger was crucial. Edit: I mean, just look at this crap
Finger. Definitely Finger. Anyone who has read the accounts of the people around at the time know Kane brought next to nothing. He was just a much better businessman than anyone else involved. He put his own name on it, then hired someone else to write it and someone else to draw it. There's a reason the industry has a Finger award and not a Kane award.
Yeah Finger did most of the work, but Kane did come up with the idea, so both are equal, but Finger a bit more, if that makes sense.
Both of them contributed significantly. Yes, Finger has always suffered from a lack of recognition, but the answer isn't to go completely the other way and claim he did everything and Kane did nothing. It was both of them, and as conflicting stories and claims have been made in SEVENTY YEARS of history over who did more/what, the only logical answer is equal credit.
Don't laugh that hard. The original concept of Superman was Lex Luthor's visuals with Brainiacs powers. And he was a morally ambiguous character. And during the 50's Stan Lee created prototypes of about half the Marvel universe. If you ever hear him talk about playing around with concepts of characters, that shit was published in a comic. You can find an Atlas comics era comic with a fly man in it. As well as characters clearly proto versions of Hulk, Dr. Doom, Dr. Strange, Thing, and Prof. X.
Bill Finger. A lot of what you know and love about Batman he created. The cowl, the cape, his dual identity, Bruce Wayne, Gotham City, and he made Batman the great detective he is. Bob Kane may have coined "The Batman" but Finger contributed a lot more than that and didn't get any credit for years.
And the thing that I don't think gets brought up enough is that there are other creators who may deserve less credit than Finger, but still probably deserve as much, if not more, than Kane does.
From what I've read, Bill Finger. To me it's like the equivalent of finding out that Bruce Wayne really was a playboy all the time and Alfred was the servant and the real Batman. Apparently Finger was just happy to be working and Kane had no problem taking advantage of him. Sad thing is the world is full of stories like that.
Yeah agreed. The key elements of Bats were thought up by him. I'm actually amazed that he didn't get more credit.
Bob Kane (and his corporate lawyer dad) paid him to keep his mouth shut is why. But I think that it was an equal collaboration.
Kane took advantage of a lot of people. He hired ghost artists without DCs knowledge, didn't allow them any contact with DC so they couldn't ask for better money, and for years let DC think he was drawing the material himself (and keeping most of the money) while letting people like Moldoff go completely uncredited at the time. Eventually, DC found out and these artists have been credited in reprints, but it is only through current magazines like Alter Ego that all sides of these stories have come out through interviews with the involved parties. Maybe the most scumbag move Bob Kane ever came up with was the revisionist origin of the creation of Batman that actually saw print as a comic. He gave partial credit to only one other person. Was it Finger for coming up with the concepts and writing the stories? No. Was it Robinson for creating characters like Robin and Joker? No. It was BOB KANE'S MOM, for supposedly creating a physical Batman costume for Bob Kane to draw from. It's ridiculous and incredibly insulting to his collaborators. lol@ "Real Fact Comics": Unbelievable. The final insult and a complete lie:
To make matters worse, when he was doing the drawing, he would sometimes straight up copy full scenes from other books. I don't have a link (it's in my "Batcave Companion"), but the first issue that showed the murder of the "Waynes," had panels that were almost all copied from a different comic/artist.
Here's a LINK To be honest, I'm willing to give him a pass on some of the examples they say are copies. Some of them are really a stretch. But a lot of them are outright swipes.
Heh, I should have known you'd have the links. This is specifically what I was talking about: And then there's this: ..which I always think of as one of the most iconic, early images of Batman, and it's kinda sad that's it's not even his pose.
Not defending it or anything, but ripping off top strip dudes like Hal Foster was what almost every book artist was doing in the late 30s. I could give him a pass for that and even credit for being able to outcrook a publisher of that era, but systematically screwing other creators and lying about it for 50 years really make the dude reprehensible as far as I am concerned.
Yeah, I'm on pretty much the same page. The referencing art thing was mostly a combination of deadline pressure combined with low pay, plus the fact that most of the comic book artists at the time were just kids barely out of high school who hero worshiped the comic strip artists. I'm a huge Sheldon Moldoff fan for his Golden Age Hawkman run, but it's widely known he was borrowing from Alex Raymond here and there. I can live with that. What I can't stand is Kane screwing over of the creators he worked with. And then, yeah, the half century of cover-up.
An interesting article regarding a forthcoming book about Bill Finger and Batman - CCI: Revealing Bill Finger's "Batman" Contributions - Comic Book Resources
