Batman created by Bill Finger with Bob Kane.
Okay, I don’t want to overload you with Byrne Superman Reboot talk, so I’ll probably stick to posting about that once or twice a week ’til I feel like I’ve said enough. But keep your comments and questions coming, since, as is my wont, I’ll probably spend some time responding to them in the near future.
I did want to cover a couple of other topics here, such as the fact I didn’t talk much — well, at all — about this year’s Free Comic Book Day. It’s not like I haven’t talked about before, and you can clickity-click that link to have my vast wisdom imparted upon you.
Like the last two or three years or however long it’s been, I can’t keep track, I’ll be posting the freebie tables in front of the store, instead of going through the trouble of rearranging the interior layout to make room for them. As you may recall, I started doing this post-COVID to reduce the number of bodies crammed into my little shop and hopefully lessen the risk of cooties exposure. Seems to have worked out great so far, since my creaky bones no longer have to strain at moving a ton of back issue boxes and heavy wooden tables in the shop, and having a huge crowd in front of the store around tables of free comics certainly grabs attention. And I certainly didn’t see any reduction of folks coming into the shop to take advantage of the sales.
So, yes, it still got a little crowded in the shop, but not nearly as much as if I was trying to have a big sale AND a freebie giveaway in the same space at the same time. It all works out.
I’m mostly ready to go…the bulk of the work occurs the night before and the morning of, so I just gotta get cracking soon as my doors close Friday evening. Plus I’m prepping other material to be given away, so that’ll probably take up my Friday afternoon. Oh, and I’m also taking in a large comics collection on Friday as well, from an out-of-town pal whose only opportunity to bring ’em by is that day, so I’ll probably be doing a little comics juggling over the next 24 hours. If the GUMBY OF SUCCESS was planning on making another visit to my store, now is the time!
Anyway, is this like the…23rd Free Comic Book Day? I mean, I guess it depends if you count that one year where it was called off due to COVID and the freebies were just sent out a few at a time to be given away each week. However you count it, I’ve worked ’em all, and look forward to doing it again this year!
They said it couldn’t be done, and yet Adam Farrar has done dood it: an oral history of the 1990s Marvel UK comic book series Blackwulf! (Here’s Part Two and Part Three.) It’s a whole lotta comics people in here talking, not just about Blackwulf, but the ’90s comics business in general. And who better to speak about ’90s comics than the man who saw ’em in and escorted ’em out…yours truly, Michael Ricardo Anatoly Sterling. I’m mostly in the first part, with a brief cameo in the second, but you should overcome your disappointment at the lack of me in the third part and read it anyway, but it’s all great.
Mark Evanier is trying to set the visual record straight on comics legends Robert Kanigher and Bill Finger, in that a photo of the former keeps getting identified as the latter. So he’s asked if comics folks would post this pic (leaving the file name unchanged, in case you decide to download it from here and post it yourself) to get those search engines to propagate the correct information:
Also the title of this very post is my attempt at getting some other Batman-related info scraped up and spread around.
“the visual record straight on comics legends Robert Kanigher and Bill Finger”.
I wonder why they keep getting mixed-up!
@ Snark Shark
Considering that Robert Kanigher had a fairly visible scar on his cheek, it does seem odd that he would have been mistaken for Bill Finger. I was recently rereading some old Silver Age Metal Men comics and I have to say that title might be my favorite work by Kanigher.
As to the whole who created what thing, it’s always a bit of a sticky wicket depending upon semantics. Even though Bill Finger created most of the elements that make Batman “Batman,” Bob Kane did create the name and prototype for the character (even if his version looked like a cross between syndicated newspaper strip characters The Phantom and Flash Gordon
with the addition of Leonardo DaVinci
inspired rigid bat wings. But then, too, Kane was probably “inspired” by the film “The Bat Whispers” and possibly by the pulp fiction character The Black Bat …or maybe by coincidence that character and Bat-Man (as he was first called) debuted at roughly the same time in the late 1930s.
But it’s kinda like the who created Spider-Man conundrum…it seems pretty obvious that Steve Ditko breathed life into the character and his world (as Bill Finger–and Jerry Robinson–did with Batman), but technically Stan Lee came up with the name and then had Jack Kirby design the first costume, which Ditko then told Stan looked too much like the costume for Simon and Kirby’s superhero The Fly (which had been created for Archie Comics a few years prior)…and the fly also had a villain named Spider Spry, and Joe Simon had been working on another project with C.C. Beck featuring a character called the Silver Spider, which never got off the ground, but which Kirby knew about or maybe had also been involved in…so, it makes it tricky to definitely say who created Spider-Man. Add to that the pulp fiction character The Spider (inspired by The Shadow), DC Comics’ Golden Age character The Tarantula who used suction cups to walk on walls and had a web gun, Archie/MLJ Comics Golden Age character The Web, plus several assorted obscure Golden Age female characters from defunct publishers–including the Spider Queen, who shot webs–and it just gets more complicated. Even the name “the Spider-Man” was first used for a villain that Captain Marvel “Shazam” fought once in the 1940s over in an issue of Whiz Comics published by Fawcett Comics. So, technically, Stan Lee didn’t even originate the name. Oh, and then there’s that Halloween costume company from the 1950s that Ditko might have “borrowed” some design elements from when he created his iconic Spider-Man costume.
https://www.gamesradar.com/spider-man-based-on-50s-halloween-costume-ben-cooper/
Mark Evanier seems to indicate that the cause of the Finger – Kanigher confusion is due to Robert Kanigher being the recipient of the Bill Finger Award, and search engines conflating the two.
Mark Evanier is the chairman of the award selection committee, so in a way, it’s all his fault!
So, I just happened to be reading JLA vol. 1, no. 91–the first part of a two-part JLA/JSA crossover “Crisis” event, and I noticed that there was also a reprint of a Robert Kanigher story in there featuring The Galaxy Knights–who happen to be from the 30th Century. That got me to wondering if the Galaxy Knights ever popped up in any Legion of Super-Heroes story, and if not, maybe they should.
It occurs to me that only a very few of the big names in comics would I be able to recognize, Lee, Kirby, and Bob Kane amounst them. Bob Kane for his relentless self-promotion, Lee for his becoming Marvel’s public face, and Kirby for being so amenable to convention appearances.
“The Galaxy Knights”
Sounds like a Saturday Morning cartoon!
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