The Creators of Batman: Bob, Bill & The Dark Knight

By Rik Worth

In the early days 20th century the emerging medium of comics was beginning to grab the attention of children and adults alike. Then, in the 1930s, superheroes revolutionised the entire industry and culture as we know it. Gotham’s caped crusader, The Batman, swung into this pantheon of demi-gods in 1939 and secured his place as one of the world’s most beloved characters. But do know who created The Dark Knight? Do you know how artist Bob Kane, placed himself at the secret origins of Batman while his co-creator Bill Finger was forced into the shadows? Do you know how comic creators, journalists, and family members fought to have Finger credited for his work? The first prose book to focus both on Finger and Kane, as well as cast of supporting characters from one of the most exciting times in comic book history, The Creators of Batman: Bob, Bill and The Dark Knight gathers everything we know about these two monumental figures and lays their stories side by side. Bringing together the story of these two creators against the exciting background of the American comic’s boom and Batman’s Golden Age. It looks at how Finger and Kane constructed the world of Gotham and its denizens, and grapples with the legacy the creators left behind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526777621

Book preview

Chapter One

Starting Out

The American Dream

‘I was born with a pencil in my hand. I’d doodle on the sidewalks in New York, I’d scribble on walls. On the subway, I’d see an advertisement with the Colgate girl smiling with that beautiful set of ivory teeth, and I’d start blacking the teeth out. I must have been one of the all-time doodle-holics in the early days. I just used to scribble on anything I could get my hands on.’

–Bob Kane, People, July 1989

Superheroes were born at the start of the twentieth in New York City, specifically, the Bronx. Whether it goes by its own name, Metropolis,

Central City or Gotham, the shining skyscrapers of the Big Apple have always been home to the colourful caped and costumed characters who fly, swing and clobber through the avenues of our cultural consciousness.

It is often said that jazz is America’s only original art form, though that statement dismisses not only the creative endeavours of the Native Americans, it misses the fact that jazz was in fact formed from a blend of cultures. It is a mixing of African and European cultures through traditional music seeping into one another in the Louisiana heat.

It’s fitting then, that the New York of the Jazz Age, the most densely populated city on the planet at the time which was then alive with music at once foreign and uniquely American, would too become a crucible of cultures. It was home to millions of European immigrants who had been arriving since the before the turn of the century. Each brought with them their own languages, religions and traditions, as they fought and fell in love.

Arriving as strangers in an alien world these men and women from the Old Country would do what people around the world do best – they would go forth and multiply. Their kids, the second generation, would be caught between the traditions and stigma of the Old World whilst also being new Americans. And it was these new Americans who would create America’s other original art form; the comic books.

Life was not easy for those in the immigrant communities arriving in New York. During the late nineteenth century there was already a sizable community of German Jews who were subsequently joined throughout the start of the twentieth century by Yiddish-speaking Jews from across Eastern Europe and Russia as they fled the murderous pogroms. Similarly, around 13 million Italians, who had suffered economically under Italy’s unification, had chosen to emigrate to America over this time in what would become history’s largest-ever voluntary migration.

America’s hereditary rivalry with Britain, stemming first from the American War of Independence and later British support of Confederate forces during the American Civil War meant American leaders were sympathetic, at least in theory, to Irish settlers. The Irish had long been subject to a punishing British rule which had exacerbated the Great Famine, leading to the deaths of a million Irish nationals. America would make a new home for many Irish families seeking to escape the British yoke and it is reckoned by 1910 more people of Irish descent lived in New York City than in Dublin.

All these immigrant communities passed through Ellis Island, adopting new names to get by or to pretend they shared some relation to migrants already settled in New York. A huge number of these newly minted Americans would end up in the densely populated and poor Lower East Side. After the First World War, the Bronx would see a huge rejuvenation, as well as more industry and housing, as the subway system expanded, allowing those seeking work to travel to and from Manhattan. The new Bronx saw elevated trains rumble past tenement buildings packed with families.

Immigrants from all walks of life would move into the neighbourhoods here but many of the new industries were controlled by individual communities. There were Jewish jobs, Irish jobs, and Italian jobs. Everyone was looking out for their own. Cultural lines were hard to cross and resentments still created problems in finding work, and poverty was still a real issue.

To make matter worse, gangs based on ethnic backgrounds would control different blocks and buildings. Being caught in the wrong district would result in a beating while massive fights between gangs were not uncommon. And that was just the youths with nothing better to do. During America’s ill-fated flirtation with Prohibition between 1920 and 1933, Irish, Jewish, Italian and Polish organised crime rings took to bootlegging liquor. Prohibition did not make America or its new, less prudish citizens want to drink any less, and lawmakers massively underestimated the ingenuity of people and the downright obscene lengths they would go to get booze.

Many of the immigrants in New York had been middle-class in the Old World. They suddenly found themselves at the bottom of the social ladder with unsteady incomes and menial jobs but with a middle-class sensibility to the arts. For the second generation, it was a world of toughs and chancers, crime and noir adventures in real life layered with an expectation and a responsibility to support yourself and your family. If you were not fast or smart enough to grab the few opportunities that came along, you had better make your own. It was here, in the winter of 1915, Robert Kahn was born, and it was here he would grow up. But things weren’t much better for his future partner Milton Finger, nearly 1,800 miles away in Denver, Colorado.

Denver had been reeling from successive droughts and difficult winters which had damaged crops and created economic instability as the Panic of 1893 (a serious economic depression lasting four years) rolled across America. Though it created a nationwide downturn, Denver was able to survive and eventually to prosper thanks to its strong agricultural heritage. At the start of the next century, the city began to grow, with an influx of workers joining its food production industry. By annexing nearby towns, over the course of fifteen years, Denver changed from a frontier town of the Wild West to a prospering city.

Milton Finger was the firstborn child to Jewish parents, Louis Finger and his New Yorker wife Tessie, and he was born on 8 February 1914. At this time, the city was hot with union activity in response to its growing industries. The political climate was volatile, and it is possible that Louis, as a tailor, may have been swept up in union discord.

Denver also bought into the temperance movement, which would later lead to the enactment of the Volstead Act, the legal lynchpin of Prohibition. Colorado already had a state-wide ban on alcohol, believing it to be un-American but when the First World War broke out in Europe, with America joining the conflict in 1916, previously welcomed German communities and brewing industries suddenly became quite unpalatable. Anti-German sentiment quickly turned to anti-immigrant prejudice as not only were these new communities less likely to support Prohibition, there were also stories from the East Coast of foreign gangs working as bootleggers. It is unclear if Louis Finger was Polish or Austrian. If it was the latter, then he would have almost certainly spoken German and potentially, he would have identified himself as a target.

All this culminated in a dramatic rise in members of racist organisation the Ku Klux Klan across Colorado and Denver. The KKK began to routinely target Jewish and Catholic communities.

We can’t be certain that this was why the Finger family returned to New York, though it probably contributed to the move. At four years old, Milton was joined by a little sister named Emily. The record isn’t clear if she was born in Colorado or New York, but it seems more likely it was the latter.

Boyhood

Not much is known about young Milton’s childhood save for a few scant details. His father opened a tailor shop on the family’s arrival in the Bronx and Bill grew up in a household which struggled for money but was still able to indulge his creative passions. He loved the cinema and would spend whatever free time he had in the dark of the matinee enjoying the latest films from Europe; expressionist pieces like Fritz Lang’s sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis and F. W. Murnau’s copyright infringing Nosferatu. This was a time when feature films were still preceded by serials – short episodic tales of adventure with cliff hanger endings featuring adventure characters like Zorro, Tarzan and Flash Gordon. These mini-movies kept cinemagoers returning to the theatre even when the feature presentation was no good. In many ways, they were the precursor to cinematic televisions series we enjoy today. In fact, it was the serials that popularised the term ‘cliff hanger’ with one episode of 1915’s The Perils of Pauline ending with the lead actress literally hanging from the cliffs across New York’s Hudson River where many of the serials were filmed. Young Milton paid for these tickets in exchange for allowing theatre owners to advertise in the window of his father’s shop.

Milton had large, dark, bushy eyebrows and a friendly face but he was nervous about smiling in front of others because of a large gap in his front teeth which were also rather crooked. At some point during his childhood, Milton was bedridden with a severe illness, most probably Scarlet fever. Unable to work in his father’s store or go to the theatre to catch the latest instalments of his favourite serials, Milton turned to books to pass the time, devouring as much of the written word as he could and developing a life-long passion for reading. It was from these stories he would later take his inspiration in the building of the world of Bruce Wayne. Milton read broadly and even as a child, developed an extensive mental database of plots, characters and stories he could later use. He also demonstrated an aptitude for science and under the influence of his parents, who wanted him to become a doctor, he pursued those subjects at DeWitt Clinton High School. Within Milton’s first year at high school, during the 1929 semester, his mother gave birth to his second sister, Gilda. One more mouth to feed undoubtedly put more pressure on the family and the importance of Milton succeeding at school. To make matters worse, that was the year the Great Depression hit the United States.

In the class below the studious Milton Finger was Robert Kahn. Unlike Finger, Kahn was a born and bred New Yorker. He was born on 24 October 1915, to Augusta and Herman Kahn. He, like Finger, was the American child of Eastern European Jews. Robert’s childhood was better documented than Milton’s. His contemporaries would remember him as a mama’s boy. Even as he grew older and the other boys began to pal together, Augusta would still walk her boy to and from school. Robert was also the apple of his father’s eye and he was greatly admired by his son. Young Robert would later be joined by a sister, Dorothy.

Herman worked for New York Daily News – not to be confused with the unrelated New York Daily News which preceded it – as a printer and engraver. Herman would tirelessly carve out the recesses in the metal plates used for mass printing. Around a year after its launch in 1919, Daily News, under the slogan ‘New York’s Picture Newspaper’, would have a circulation of nearly 100,000. By the time of Robert’s tenth birthday, it would reach over a million New Yorkers with its gossip columns, city life features, photographs of the bustling metropolis and, to Robert’s joy, comic strips.

The pairing of words and images had existed in some form or another for centuries but the newspaper comic strip is where the format really came into its own at the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of The Yellow Kid in Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World. While Pulitzer would go on to give his name to the most prestigious prize in journalism, the Yellow Kid, a slum child with bad diction, a broad smile, bald head and jug ears would give his moniker to the term ‘yellow journalism’ – the type of journalism associated with ethically dubious sensationalism and catchy, albeit misleading, headlines. These exaggerated reports lived side by side in the tabloids with comic strips.

These strips were longer than they were tall to fit several on the newspaper page and were comprised of a few panels usually ending in a gag. The strips would have regularly occurring characters and it was common among fans to cut out and collect the strips. As the serials came to prominence in the theatres, so too did the strips. The papers diversified their cartoons to meet demands outside of comedy, adding adventures and sci-fi strips to their regular features. As they did, franchises were created, using the same characters across newspapers, cinema, and radio. So popular were these strips, newspapers would run several pages worth of them and they would frequently appear on the front page of Sunday editions. For artists, having a strip syndicated meant their work could be found in publications across the country and, while they lost ownership of the title to the corporation, they could still make a pretty penny.

Herman Kahn, working at Daily News, had heard rumours of the impressive paycheques being handed out to syndicated illustrators and was incredibly supportive of his son’s early addiction to drawing. Robert claimed he was so focused on art his childhood nickname was ‘The Doodler’. For most families living in the Bronx, professional artist was not an acceptable career goal, but this was not the case for Robert.

Herman regularly brought home the funny pages and other books on how to draw for Robert, encouraging him to copy and trace the illustrations within. Like any other artist, he discovered the first step on the road to developing his own style was to mimic the styles of those he looked up to. Robert became adept at copying the simplistic, elegant and humorous styles of the likes of Rudolph Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids, which ran for 106 years from 1897 to 2003, or Frank King’s Gasoline Alley and Elzie Crisler Segar’s Popeye, both of which are still syndicated to this day.

Robert was further encouraged in his artistic pursuits by two victories achieved in his early years. At 14, after prompting from his father, Robert took to drawing posters for local merchants. One such poster featured a cartoonish baker with a wide, frog-like smile holding a dripping, steaming pie, with the slogan, ‘Don’t go by, til you buy a pie!’ It is not clear if the pie in question is a pizza pie or a filled pie. In fact, because of the crude attempt in replicating steam rising from the mystery dish, it looks somewhat like mashed potatoes with the whisk stuck in it. Still, Robert’s journeyman illustration was his first commercial success. He was able to use a Photostat machine, an early precursor to a photocopier like Xerox, to make multiple copies of his poster and sold them to various bakeries across town for 50 cents each. It was his first taste of financial success.

A year later New York American, yet another New York title in the newspaper boom of the early twentieth century, held an art competition. Entrants had to reproduce an image of the characters from Ad Carte’s syndicated comic strip Just Kids. After months of deliberation, the judges decided that Robert Kahn of the Bronx deserved second place for his entry depicting the Just Kids characters Fatso and Mush. His prize was a piece of original art from the strip, signed by its creator, and a letter of encouragement wishing Master Kahn all the best in his future cartooning career.

Robert was a handsome, charming, and outgoing kid, but not academically inclined. When he entered DeWitt Clinton High School, he began to work infrequently as a cartoonist for the school newspaper, The Clinton Newspaper, where he produced gag strips but was routinely beaten to the punch for recognition by his more talented classmate Will Eisner. Their relationship was amicable, however, and would come to benefit them both a few years later.

Robert and Milton attended high school during the Great Depression and they would have been all too aware of the effects it was having on families just like their own. Multiple factors lead to the American economy crashing in October of 1929, and the results were devastating. Nearly 13 million Americans lost their jobs as businesses went under and banks folded. Savings were lost as poverty saw a dramatic rise. All of this was worsened by an epidemic of tuberculosis. The disease was able to spread thanks to the inability of families to afford treatment. Cramped living conditions only made matters worse as more people moved into crowded tenement buildings where large families would live in tiny apartments, often with lodgers just needing a cheap place to stay. In New York, in Central Park and Riverside Park, ‘Hoovervilles’ were erected; huge shantytowns housing hundreds of homeless families in constructs made from scrap. They were named after Herbert Hoover, the President who presided over the depression, and the man who many believed was to blame for the country’s plight.

After a great influx of immigration throughout the previous century, the Great Depression saw a swell in migration. Americans, those who still had some money anyway, headed to Canada, Australia, Europe and even the Soviet Union. For those Jewish immigrants who had worked so hard to escape persecution and had little to nothing, they had no choice but to stay and tough it out.

Sometime after graduating DeWitt Clinton in 1933, with its large Jewish student body, Milton started to go by the name of Bill. It was quite common for Jewish Americans of this time to go by anglicised names for several reasons. Robert Kahn, Bill’s future partner, changed his name to Bob Kane and sometimes Bob Kaye or Robert Kane for work reasons. His new alter ego allowed him to produce more work (and make more money) for publishers by working under different pseudonyms.

Fellow comics legend Jacob Kurtzman, better known as Jack ‘The King’ Kirby, grew up at the same time as Kane and Finger. Among the various youth gangs and rivalries, he adopted what he thought sounded like a more Irish name in the style of Hollywood tough guy James Cagney. Stanley Lieber became Stan Lee – a snappier, friendlier name which better suited the face of the comics industry. Stan ‘The Man’ held onto his birth name as back-up for the great American novel he always wished he had written. In all of these cases, these leading creatives tried to downplay their Jewish heritage to avoid persecution and prejudice. Milton isn’t exactly a Jewish sounding name to modern ears, but back then it was. Much like how Jacob, coming from Yacov, became Jack, Milton, coming from Moishe, became William and then, Bill.

The Great Depression continued throughout most of the 1930s and although the economy started to stabilise in later years, America was still blighted by huge unemployment and low income. Both the Kahns and the Fingers were affected by this economic downturn. The tailor shop Louis Finger had opened on his arrival in New York had been hit hard and subsequently closed. For Bill, who dreamed of becoming a writer, this was a mixed blessing. It meant the parental pressure of becoming a doctor vanished as his family could no longer afford to send him off to college, but in its place he took on some of the financial burdens of contributing to the family income – a sure-fire way of hindering his literary dreams. He took on a series of menial jobs to support his parents and sisters as best he could and before hitting the big time, he would make his living as a part-time shoe salesman.

While at school, Bob had earned money in the afternoons selling newspapers and was lucky enough to obtain a $2,000 scholarship to the prestigious Cooper Union Art League, attending a two-year art course with lessons held in the iconic Flat Iron building. He had moved from tracing newspaper cartoons on a makeshift drawing board made from his mother’s old breadboard to life drawing classes. At the same time, he was pitching his artwork around town to various publishers, sending out hundreds of images to magazines and

Reviews for The Creators of Batman

[Steven Bloomfield · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fantastic research and a wonderful story absolutely loved it READ!!

[gothamajp · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you aren’t familiar with their story then this is a good overview as it pulls together a lot of the recent published research into a cohesive and sympathetic narrative that tries to present a balanced viewpoint of two very complex men, their relationships, and careers.

[m_k_m_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Does a terrific job of sifting the contributions made by various individuals which led to the enduring character of Batman as we recognise him today. He is not a figure who arrived fully formed on the page – nor even from one mind – and Rik Worth is impressively fair in teasing out who brought what to him, while remaining sceptical of the easy narratives on offer. Kane was no more a villain than Finger was a tragic failure (or Jerry Robinson overlooked, for that matter), but understanding how those images of the men have been formed is important in understanding the creation of Batman – and, perhaps, something about human nature.