The most prominent of Kane’s early assistants was Jerry Robinson, who was studying to be a journalist when Kane hired him, first to assist with lettering and background inks, until eventually, when Kane stopped drawing the comic in 1943, Robinson became the primary Batman artist (along with Dick Sprang). In 1940, while working for Kane, Robinson brought to work a drawing of a playing card featuring the Joker. The dispute comes about due to a disagreement about when Robinson brought in the card (which was recently loaned by Robinson to the Jewish Museum in New York City for a comic book exhibit). According to Robinson, he showed Kane the card and said they should create a villain based on it. According to Kane, the Joker had already been created when Robinson showed him the card. Kane noted that after he came up with the basic idea of a villain called the Joker, Bill Finger thought of Conrad Veidt’s character in the 1928 silent film The Man Who Laughs (about a man punished by being disfigured so that his face is in a perpetual grin), and suggested that that is how the Joker should appear (and with his white makeup, the grinning Joker did end up being based visually on Veidt’s character).
What makes this story different from other Kane stories is that this time Finger told a DC editor that he felt Kane’s version was correct. Robinson feels that Finger is simply confused about the time frame, and that the Veidt comparison came about after Robinson showed the drawing, but it is likely something that will never be sorted out for certain.
THE WHOLE DEBATE over the Joker’s creation might have been made moot if not for the actions of a DC editor. The Joker debuted in the first issue of a brand-new Batman title, Batman, in 1940. In the same issue, Catwoman also makes her first appearance—awkward as it is that such a notable creation should make her debut as second fiddle (sort of like how Lois Lane’s first appearance is overshadowed by that fellow with the S on his shirt).
At the time of Batman #1, Bill Finger was still handling most of the writing (although Gardner Fox also wrote some of the early stories), and Finger was not one for recurring villains. If you went up against the Batman, odds were you were going to end up dying in some manner at the end of the issue. The Joker managed to avoid this fate at the end of his first appearance, which was the lead story of Batman #1. In the tale, the Joker announces on the radio that he is going to kill a number of notable figures, and he keeps his promise, leaving it to Batman and Robin to stop him. They do so, and he is sent to jail. He returns to fight Batman later in that same issue, in the appropriately titled “The Joker Returns.” In that story the Joker escapes from prison and goes on a spree of jewel robberies. Batman sets a trap for him, and the Joker falls right into it. The two men fight each other, and during the struggle the Joker accidentally stabs himself with his own knife and dies at the end of the story.
Luckily for the Joker, he had an unforeseen benefactor. Batman editor Whitney Ellsworth (remember him from page 18?) felt that it would be a waste to kill off the character so soon, so he actually had them add an extra panel to the issue, after the comic was otherwise completed, in which an ambulance driver remarks something along the lines of, “My goodness! He’s still alive!” The Joker would go on to become almost as famous as Batman himself.
ONE REASON THAT there were so few recurring characters in the early days of the Batman comics is that the stories were a good deal bloodier than they later became. In fact, for the first year or so of his existence Batman routinely used a gun!
Even without the gun, Batman was not a particularly pleasant fellow. In his very first appearance, in Detective Comics #27, Batman breaks a thug’s neck with a kick and also punches a villain off a cat-walk and into a vat of acid, declaring that the villain’s gruesome death was “a fitting end to his kind.” Over the next year, Batman would break at least four more necks, and even after Robin joined him as his partner Batman kept up the killing, most notably in Detective Comics #39, in which Batman fights a Chinese gang called the Tong of the Green Dragon. During one fight, Batman intentionally topples an idol onto the bad guys, killing six members of the gang!
While to find Batman killing at all is odd, it is especially strange to see him bearing arms, but that’s what he did in Detective Comics #32, in which he uses a gun that fires silver bullets to kill a vampire. The next time Batman used a gun, editor Whitney Ellsworth stepped in once again.
In the second story of the aforementioned Batman #1, Batman faces off against the evil mad scientist Hugo Strange, who has developed a growth hormone that can turn normal men into monsters. While in his Batplane, Batman spies the truck carrying the monster men, and while he regrets doing it, he decides to use the machine gun mounted on his plane to riddle the monster men with bullets.
Ellsworth declared that Batman should never intentionally kill again, and he didn’t. In an amusing emphasis of this point, a few issues later Batman picks up a discarded gun and uses it to wing a bad guy. An editor’s note explains: “The Batman never carries nor kills with a gun!”
SOON BATMAN AND Robin were so popular that they even gained, in 1941, their own shared title with Superman, World’s Finest Comics. It had its origins in a special World’s Fair comic starring Superman, which National Publications put out in 1939 (this was before Batman was introduced). For the 1939-40 World’s Fair, DC also did a second one-shot comic, this time featuring Batman and Superman stories. The comic was such a success that they launched World’s Finest Comics (the first issue was called World’s Best Comics but was retitled with #2). The comic was originally a quarterly that featured stories with a variety of DC superheroes and always included Batman and Superman. The two heroes appeared on the covers together, but they never appeared together in the stories—there would be one Superman story and one Batman story.
The heroes finally met each other in a comic (discounting their work with the Justice Society of America, which featured a number of other heroes too) in 1952 in Superman #76. Interestingly enough, the two met on the radio show a number of years earlier, in another one of the episodes designed to give Superman actor Bud Collyer time off (Batman and Robin would fill in for Superman). Still, World’s Finest continued to offer two separate stories until World’s Finest Comics #71, in 1954. The reason DC decided to team up the heroes was a simple one—inflation!
Back in the 1940s and 1950s, comics dealt with inflation differently. Rather than raise prices, what publishers did was to reduce the size of the comic, in both its dimensions and the number of pages. For instance, World’s Finest Comics was one hundred pages long through #9, ninety-two pages long through #12, eighty-four pages long through #18, seventy-six pages long through #54, and sixty-eight pages long through #70. At the same time, the height and width of the comic slowly shrunk as well.
With #71, the book made its biggest jump, from sixty-eight pages to thirty-six. At this point, it did not have room for both a Superman and a Batman story, so instead they decided to team the two heroes up, and that was the way the book continued (except for a short period when World’s Finest Comics became a team-up book between Superman and various heroes) until the series finally ended in 1986, right before John Byrne’s Superman revamp. In 2003 DC brought its team-up book back; titled simply Superman/Batman, it has been one of DC’s highest-selling titles since its debut.
WHILE THERE HAVE been a number of stylistic changes over the years, the appearance of Batman has been remarkably consistent over almost seventy years. Perhaps the most notable change to the character happened when editor Julius “Julie” Schwartz took over the Batman titles in 1964. Schwartz was the editor behind the resurgence of superheroes at DC Comics in the late 1950s, with the introduction of new superheroes based on the heroes of the 1940s, such as the Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman, and the Atom. Due to his success on these titles, DC assigned him the Batman titles, which were in a bit of a sales lull at the time.
Schwartz brought with him Carmine Infantino, who had been the artist on the Flash revamp. With their first issues, they introduced a new costume for Batman. For the first twenty-plus years of hi
s existence, Batman’s chest insignia was a simple black bat on his gray chest. With Batman’s “new look”, the black bat was placed on top of a yellow oval.
Many theories have been proposed as to why DC chose to give Batman the yellow oval, the most popular being that DC wished to have a logo that it could trademark. You cannot trademark a simple depiction of a bat—it would be considered too common—but you could trademark a drawing of a bat on a yellow oval. While this is an interesting take on trademark law, it also has no basis in actual law, as the stylized Batman chest insignia is clearly unique enough to be considered a trademark. The drawing of the bat alone was already quite stylized.
That said, whether the Batman chest insignia would have been available for trademark without the yellow oval or not, Julie Schwartz has explained many times in the past that that was not under consideration when they made the move. Rather, it was an attempt to distinguish the new take on Batman from the stories that preceded it. Later, producer William Dozier would credit the Infantino visual redesign as a major factor in his choosing to do the Batman television series. (In an interesting turn of events, the television series was almost made using the original insignia—the first Batman costumes had the old insignias on them, but they were replaced with the new yellow oval ones just before the show began filming.)
The yellow logo became a long-standing part of Batman’s costume, although more recent artists felt that the bright yellow oval in the middle of his chest took away from Batman’s “creature of the night” appearance. While he was forced to use the yellow oval in his The Dark Knight Returns miniseries in 1986, Frank Miller first explained why Batman wore such a bright oval: it was where he carried heavy bulletproof armor, so he was essentially giving crooks a target where he was most protected—one that would draw them away so they would not shoot him where he was more exposed. Miller then demonstrated the effectiveness of this target by having someone shoot Batman in the yellow oval, and when Batman got his costume fixed later in the series, Miller surreptitiously dropped the yellow oval for the rest of the series. Eventually, in 2000, DC followed Miller’s lead and dropped the yellow oval from Batman’s costume in the comics, and it has not been used since (the current Batman film series also does not use it).
THE BATMAN TELEVISION series was one of the most notable comic-book-related pieces of pop culture to come into existence since comic books began. The influence it had was considerable, although that influence has also been overstated at times. One such overstatement involves the creation of the character Aunt Harriet Cooper, played by Madge Blake on the television series for three years. The creation of Aunt Harriet has often been attributed to the Dozier television series, but Aunt Harriet appeared in the comics a good two years before she was used on the show.
The genesis of the Aunt Harriet character (the maternal aunt of Dick Grayson, also known as Robin, who came to live with Bruce Wayne and Dick at stately Wayne Manor) took place for much the same reasons that Bob Kane and Sheldon Moldoff created Batwoman in 1957 (and later, Bat-Girl in 1961). For years, people had made crude jokes about the relationship between Batman and Robin. However, in 1954, when psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham began his campaign against comics with the publication of Seduction of the Innocent , which ultimately led to a congressional hearing about the effects comic books had among children, he made a point of stating that Batman and Robin’s relationship, living together alone in a mansion, appeared to be a homosexual one. Quickly, Kane and Moldoff (who was ghosting for Kane at the time) introduced Batwoman as a love interest for Batman and, a few years later, Bat-Girl as a love interest for Robin.
When Schwartz took over the title, he did not like Batwoman or Bat-Girl, but he did think there was something to be said for deemphasizing Batman and Robin’s close living quarters. He felt that a way to avoid such an interpretation was to add a female to the cast living in Wayne Manor. So Schwartz had Batman’s loyal butler, Alfred Pennyworth, killed off and brought in Aunt Harriet to replace him.
While Dozier liked the addition of Aunt Harriet, when he read the first script for the new series, he noted that there was no Alfred in the show. When he was informed that they had killed him off, Dozier was displeased and demanded that Alfred be brought back. If he was going to be in the series, Schwartz felt he should be in the comic as well, so Schwartz had to find a way to bring Alfred back to the comic, and fast, with the end result being trouble for Batman writer Gardner Fox.
When Fox got rid of Alfred in the comic, it was in a fairly direct manner. In Detective Comics #328 from 1964, Alfred pushes Batman and Robin out of the way of a boulder, which ends up killing him. It is fairly difficult to bring back an ordinary human from being crushed by a boulder, especially when the resurrection has to occur promptly. So what Schwartz had the Batman creative team do was to take a story line that had been going on for a while and abruptly make it about Alfred’s return.
For a number of months, a mysterious villain known only as the Outsider had been terrorizing Batman through various intermediaries. In Detective Comics #356 from 1966 (right around the time the Batman television series debuted), the identity of the Outsider is revealed—and it’s Alfred! Apparently, a scientist had taken Alfred’s body and attempted a regeneration experiment on the corpse, the resulting regeneration made Alfred appear like a monster. He also gained superpowers and an overwhelming desire to kill Batman and Robin, not to mention a disdain for humanity as a whole—he felt “outside” of humanity, hence the name.
At the end of the issue, Batman manages to reverse the effects of the regeneration, and Alfred is back to his usual self. Everything went back to the status quo, just in time for the television series.
Of course, what happened was that Schwartz had writer Gardner Fox change the original identity of the Outsider (whom exactly Fox originally wanted the Outsider to be is still a mystery) and make him Alfred, so that he could quickly get Alfred back into the comics to appease Dozier.
IN SEPTEMBER 1967, in the beginning of the third season of the Batman television series, Yvonne Craig joined the cast as Batgirl. Although she first appeared in the comics in early 1967, Batgirl’s origins are inexorably wrapped up in the Batman television series.
As mentioned before, there had been a Batgirl in the comics before (or rather, a Bat-Girl), but she had disappeared when Schwartz took over the titles. When the Batman television series began, though, Carmine Infantino immediately thought about what effect the television series might have on the comic book. Schwartz was thinking this too, so he asked Infantino to work on improving the supporting cast of the Batman title, specifically with characters that could be used for the television show and even more specifically female characters, which the Batman books had a shortage of, save Catwoman.
Infantino’s first creation was the villainous Poison Ivy, a plant-themed villain, who debuted in 1966, in Batman #181.
Poison Ivy never made her way on to the television show, but she became one of the more notable Batman villains on the animated series in the early 1990s and ultimately became one of the main villains of the third Batman film sequel, Batman & Robin, in 1997.
When Dozier was attempting to secure a third season of the Batman series from ABC, he asked Schwartz if they had any female characters that he could take to the network with as a promise for the show. Schwartz gave Dozier some designs Infantino had done for a new Batgirl, which Dozier brought to the network, who liked the idea enough to approve a third season of the series, with Batgirl to play a prominent role. The next step was to actually introduce the character, which Infantino and Gardner Fox did in Detective Comics #359. They decided to make the new Batgirl noticeably different from Kane and Moldoff’s Bat-Girl, who was more a hanger-on than an independent character. The new Batgirl was Barbara Gordon, the young-adult daughter of Commissioner Gordon, who worked as a librarian by day and a crime fighter by night. Batgirl was soon popular enough to appear regularly over the next two decades, and Yvonne Craig certainly made an impression on ma
ny viewers with her one season portraying young Ms. Gordon.
WHILE BATGIRL WAS a popular supporting cast member for a number of years, by the 1980s she began to become a less important figure in the Bat titles. Additionally, as noted earlier, during the mid-to-late 1980s, the influence of Frank Miller’s work on Batman led to much darker comic book stories, where there was not as much room for a librarian fighting crime in high heels (although, by the mid-1980s, Barbara Gordon had actually been elected to Congress!).
Brian Cronin Page 4