Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Saw this over at Oddball Comics: Bob Kane's gravestone.

http://www.findagrave.com/photos/2001/222/kanebob.jpg

Very weird.

That's beyond weird.

When I first saw this thing, with all that text (!!!) I was going to dismiss it as a Photoshopped fake, but you know what, Bob's ego is all over it.  In fact, this may well stand as the one Batman-related work of fiction he ever created all by himself.

Holy Sense of Self-Importance, Batman!  It wasn't enough to "spin" history to flatter himself for 50 years, now he's doing it through Eternity.  Upon reflection, the only thing that still looks fake about this photo is that it shows a mere placque on the ground...I would've expected Bob to go for a 20-foot statue of himself with Batman and Robin springing from his brow.

Ah well, at least there's is a certain poetic justice in that a guy who relied so heavily on "ghosts" is now one himself!

I'm pretty sure he didn't carve the marble and engrave it himself! :D




The big joke is, now that Bob Kane is dead, he can hire himself as a ghost.

Wait, does that even make sense?
 :?

argh.. did Bob Kane ever create anything besides his own hype?

Every Batman idea, including Batman himself were created by other actually talented people and he took all the credit.

Do you think Bob set up his own gravestone?
Orwas it ...and one day...HIS HEIRS???

BATMAN WAS CREATED BY THE HAND OF GOD!

That is the single most insane thing I have ever read in my entire life. The egotism of claiming that you possess all the great aspects of your most famous ultra-competent creation, and further, the idea of claiming that you were, like the writers of the Torah, "divinely inspired" requires an ego the size of Nebraska.

If Bob Kane isn't dead, there's a lightning bolt with his name on it, that's for sure. Never has any mortal asked for it more. If you did this kind of thing in Greek Mythology, they did stuff like turn you into a cow and have your own children eat you.

For those of you out of the loop, please see this link:

http://www.geocities.com/batmanmagazine/nftc5.htm

One of my favorite "Kane moments" was his appearance on NPR's "Fresh Air," where he told Terry Gross one his "inspirations" for Batman.

According to Bob, as a Brooklyn teenager he belonged to a gang (a doubtful claim already from a guy his peers remember as a prissy momma's boy) and found himself one day being pursued by a rival gang without his own to back him up.  So he ran.  (The one believable part of this story!).  He ran onto a construction site, where, outnumbered but never one to say die, he ran across lumber piles, making great leaps, tossing boards down on some foes and sliding some into the heads of others, swinging from cables like Douglas Fairbanks and the whole nine yards.  Then the other kids caught him and beat the tar out of him (Bob's 11th-hour concession to something like reality).  But out of that episode came the germ of an idea for a swashbuckling hero who could not be felled as he was.

With all due respect to the great Garrison Keillor, this remains the single funniest thing I ever heard on NPR.

If I'd heard him make that claim about Batman being an inspiration from the Almighty, no doubt I would have swerved my car into a ditch from laughing.

But hey, at least Bob finally found one collaborator he considered worthy of sharing his by-line.  Wonder if that last act of largess got him in the Pearly Gates.

I swear, when I first read the tombstone text, I actually missed the "Hand of God" bit. My mind must have edited it out for me, to save my fragile psyche from imploding. It would be wonderful to find out who wrote this bit of weirdness; I can't help suspecting that it must have been cobbled together by stuff Kane himself claimed.

"Hey, kids, did I ever tell you about the time the Lord Almighty prompted me to invent a comic-book character based on myself? I was sitting at home, thinking how criminals are a superstitious and cowardly lot, and all of a sudden, God the Creator flew in through my window, and I knew."

I have to say, it's one of the most egotistical things I've ever read.  I do suspect that Bob Kane wrote the text for his own tombstone.  It seems like something he would have done.

If you can still get hold of it Alter Ego: The Comic Book Artist Collection (2001) has a few very interesting articles about Bill Finger's immense and largely uncredited contributions to Batman lore, and costume design, etc., which Bob Kane claimed all the credit for.

In fact, I though these articles were almost worth the price of the book alone.

I read somewhere else that sometime after Finger died (in 1974), Kane admitted to some guilt about not giving Finger due credit for his work on Batman - I don't know if this is true, or not.

I do know that when Finger died, he was a long way short of being well-off, unlike Kane.

Recently I was re-reading my copy of Steranko's History of the Comics Volume 1 (always a joy), and I was kind of surprised to see Batman's creation story was already, in 1972 or so, pretty much pieced together.  Steranko credits Finger with most of the input we now know he provided, but I was under the impression that Kane managed to surpress most of this info until much later.  I know a lot of it came out in a mid-60s fanzine article by Jerry Bails and Kane wrote to the same 'zine all but threatening them with a lawsuit for even suggesting Finger had any input whatsoever.

The funny thing is Kane seemed to actually believed that the people of the world saw the caped crusader and thought, "Hey, there's Batman, created by Bob Kane!"  He seems to have had his mind stuck in the era when Chet Gould, Roy Crane and Milt Caniff were as famous as their creations.  Frankly, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a lot of people who would associate Kane's name with Batman, any more than they would connect Jerry and Joe with Superman.  The perception seems to be that these are American icons that are too big and too storied to be tied to any one (or two) creators.  Sort of like Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed...they belong to the ages, and no one ever asks (or cares) who told the first story.

One reason Kane would've thought that people identified Batman as his sole creation was the fact that his name was on all Batman stories until (probably) the late '60s. I know I was shocked when I read in All in Color for a Dime that Batman was actually a group creation. While readers today don't know who Bob Kane was, kids who grew up in the '50s and '60s (I came in at the end of that period, but read a lot of reprints) at least knew his name, while they likely didn't know who Siegel and Shuster were.

Very true.  One of the few artists (I use the term advisedly) to have a byline in comic books.  I suppose the Batman newspaper strip carried his name as well, giving him a shot at the same sort of name recognition enjoyed by the cartoonists Nightwing mentioned.

Of course, his relentless self-promotion didn't hurt --he was allover the media when the Tim Burton film came out and had someone write his "memoir" Batman and Me at the same time.

I've read a few times that Bob Kane was once practically booed off the stage at a 1970s comic convention, because he tried to take credit for stories drawn by Neal Adams, and claimed Neal was one of his "assistants". I so hope that the story is true!

I've got to wonder what would have happened if Neal Adams himself had been in the room at the time...

It's a very strange dichotomy with DC's two most famous heroes. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were denied the splash page credit for creating Superman over many years; roughly the same years that Bob Kane was getting splash page credits he DIDN'T deserve!

At least he was consistent... in his autobiography "Batman & Me" he relates the same story.