nightwing
Defender of Kandor
Council of Wisdom
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« Reply #10 on: June 13, 2006, 01:26:29 PM » |
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I agree it's not right to deny Kane at least some credit. On the other hand, he spent most of his life denying that anyone BUT him deserved credit for anything related to Batman, so you could argue he started it!
Mark Waid, Evanier and others have done a good job over the years pointing out all the ways Kane "ripped off" various pulps and earlier comics, but there seems to be some underlying assumption that a concept like Batman has to be somehow totally original to be of worth. In fact, there's been almost no characters in the history of comics who couldn't trace their origins back to some predecessor in mythology, pulp fiction, comics, movies, etc...including Superman. Shelley Moldoff, a great artist of the Golden Age, swiped most of his Hawkman art from Flash Gordon, and Joe Shuster's Superman is pretty much Roy Crane's Captain Easy. What makes Kane's case different is that he was the only creator to stubbornly insist his inspiration came not from stories he read in the immediate past, but from a direct transmission from the Almighty, making "Batman" the first divine writings since the Gospels. And it's hard to find much to admire in a guy who lived off the work of others without at least acknowledging their contributions...in fact steadfastly denying them!
It's interesting to see where those famous panels came from, just as it was interesting to learn the cover to Detective #27 was swiped from an Alex Raymond "Flash Gordon" panel. In time we'll no doubt figure out where every panel Kane 'drew" was swiped from. But in fairness it should be remembered that no one in 1939 imagined for a moment that comic books would have a shelf life beyond the month they were published. It was work to be turned out fast, and then forgotten. Kane swiped stuff not only because he had to (he was a humor artist assigned to produce a dramatic strip, and thus in over his head) but also to meet a deadline. If he'd known we'd still be reading this stuff 70 years later, maybe he'd have taken the time to do something truly original. But odds are it wouldn't have looked as good even if he had.
And while I'm no expert, Super-Monkey, there's plenty of comics historians who are, and they remain in agreement that Kane contributed art to at least the first year or so of Detective strips, the first few issues of Batman and a number of the newspaper strips (since it was his dream job, as it was any artist of the day). Also, a few 60s stories are credited to Kane, and unless they had a nine-year old on staff at DC at the time, I can't imagine anyone else I'd credit that artwork to.
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