Superman Through the Ages! Forum

By now we all know that Bob Kane never drew or wrote anything and that Bill Finger was responsible for most of the writing.  We also know that alot of the art in the first Batman story was swiped.

Now two Shadow experts dissect Finger's generous swipes.

http://www.comicmix.com/news/2007/06/24/the-case-of-the-chemical-syndicate/

Link from Mark Evanier:

http://www.newsfromme.com/archives/2007_06_24.html#013629

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"

http://www.dialbforblog.com/archives/112/

Interesting.  I have to say its hardly shocking.  The age of pulp and thriller entertainment was really copy and throwaway.  I still remember my mother (who was born in 1929) laughing that anyone would keep the books or remember the storylines.  I find the transition of Super Heroes away from this pulp model pretty early (adding Robin, etc.) interesting.

Well, of couse the pulp "lifts" don't end with The Shadow.  Batman also dresses like a bat (ala pulp hero The Black Bat), answers a signal flashed from the top of skyscraper (like the Phantom Detective) and accesses his secret cave via a grandfather clock (like Zorro).  There was even a "Commissioner Gordon" who starred in his own pulp tales.

Still, no one ever said early comics were created in a vaccuum.  Finger himself was the one who put these guys on the track of the Shadow source material by mentioning it in the Steranko book.  In a medium as disposable and ephemeral as comics were thought to be in 1939, it'd be a shocker if creators *didn't* steal from other sources. 

The issue with Kane isn't that he swiped images (you'd be hard-pressed to find an artist who didn't), but that he looked people straight in the eye for decades and swore up and down he not only invented Batman (all by his lonesome) but that he wrote and drew every story until 1964 or so, which is a kick in the nads to every guy who put his sweat and tears into making the character great.

This article is worth reading for this one line alone: 


How freakin' cool is THAT?  :o

"Holy Shades of Plagarism, Batman!!"

Meanwhile a year later it's that Dial B guy again with a whole new site and a 10 part serial/documentary with the secret origin of THE SHADOW...where?

At http://dialbforburbank.com/ (http://dialbforburbank.com/)...where else?

Tell 'em old Doc Furious sent ya........ ;)

(One of those two guys talking the Shadow/Batman connection is Bob Greenberger ex-DC-er and currently managing editor at WWN www.weeklyworldnews.com (http://www.weeklyworldnews.com)).


...see how it's ALL connected in real life like those Silver Age coincidences????

And to add insult to injury, he had it engraved on his tombstone, as discussed in an earlier thread I can't be bothered to search for. I know you shouldn't speak ill of the dead and all that, but Kane was an Olympic-level plagiarist.

This might be somewhat unpopular as a thought - but I wonder who really benefited after everything was said and done.  I mean, Superman and Batman are pretty much the defining characters of the comic genre.  You might as well throw Wonder Woman right in there - but I don't know whether her origins are as heavily tied to established pulp creations as the former two.

It would seem to me that Doc Savage benefited greatly from Superman, as did the Gladiator novel.  Very seldomly do you find historians fail to mention Superman's fathers in pulp - thus Superman could be said to have kept interest in the pulp fathers alive.

The same for Bats.  I would never have heard of the Bat, Shadow, etc. if I didn't discover them through a historian pointing out that Bats had his genesis in those earlier pulps.

Ultimately there could be argument made simply on the basis that those archetypes were redefined or redeveloped by their progeny in their own new genres and the old ones died away.

In some cases, I agree.

As a fan of all things radio and TV from the 30s through the 60s, I have always known of "The Shadow" equally to Superman or Batman.

I liked Chaykin's mini from the 80s.  I wonder if Greenberger was editor?

I knew who The Shadow was growing up, so he was pretty famous. There was even a film made.

Dont think so - he was at Marvel prior to DC.

Ciradoman writes:




I agree that without books like Steranko's History of the Comics I, for one, would never have discovered the joy of pulps.  What's more, it wasn't plagiarism that killed the pulps, it was a case of new media usurping an old one in popularity; pulps lost the kids to comics and the older readers to paperback thrillers, and sputtered to a whimpering end by the early 50s.

I'm also not one of those folks who's overly concerned with notions that Superman and Batman were the products of theft and plagiarism.  Pop culture is cannibalistic by nature and always will be.  And it should always be remembered that comics, at their inception, were regarded by their publishers as a fad to be exploited as thoroughly as possible before it died out, probably in less than five years.  No one back then imagined that comic books would still be around in the 21st century or that characters created to sell them would become American institutions.  They weren't interested in creating wholly original mythologies, they just wanted to sell as many books as possible using every strategy known to be successful at the time.

I enjoy Will Murray's investigations into what came from where but I don't get the sense he's trying to point fingers and call people thieves or con men.  He's just filling in the blanks of history.

That said, "benefited" is a relative term.  The comics killed pulps before they resurrected them. 

I'm going to have to dig that out now just because you reminded me; even better than the mini was the ongoing series written by Andrew Helfer with art by Bill Sienkewicz first, then Kyle Baker. I still have the originals, but I wish they'd reprint that in TPB (or have they?). It was a great series that got rudely cancelled. The Avenger mini that followed, also by Helfer and Baker, was gold too.

Can't remember what happened to that Shadow series - was it a copyright issue or were they just not selling enough?

I agree with everything you said til this point, only because I'm not buying so much that comics killed pulps as much as publishers figured people would rather look at pictures than read.  I believe the "exploitive money machine" philosophy had at least as much if not more to do with the death of pulps.

Fortunately for us, there are paperback novels reprinting those gems.

I never bought the series except a few quarter-bin issues.  I like both Baker and Sienkiewicz but the series was too glib and fantastic for me and seemed to pick up a; the wrong cues from Chaykin --I liked the pulp-y extremes of Chaykin but not the 80s irony of the others, for some reason (this at the same time I was enjoying things like Lloyd Llewellyn).  Go figure.  Maybe it was the writing?

Didn't know of the Avenger series.

Criadoman writes:


I'm pretty sure that if pulps had still been selling well, they'd have kept publishing them, comics or no comics.  Or anyway I should say "hero pulps".  The likes of Doc and the Shadow saw their popularity dwindle as the fortunes of Superman and Batman rose...the logical conclusion is that kids left the former for the latter.  But "pulps" as a format did soldier on for quite a while afterward, evolving into the lurid "true crime" magazines I remember seeing on stands as late as the 70s (usually featuring photos of women being held at gunpoint in their underwear), and the "Analog," "Alfred Hitchcok Mystery" and  "Asimov's SF" magazines that are still being churned out today.

Also it should be remembered that pulps in general were much racier, lurid and more violent than comics, and if they'd still been big in the 50s it's likely Wertham and Kefauver would've driven a stake right through their hearts.  At least comics had funny animals, teen romances and westerns to fall back on when crime and horror fell out of vogue.

TELLE writes:


Thank You, YES!  Weren't those great books?  I was beginning to think I was the only one who missed them.  I nearly dropped the series toward the end of Sienkewicz's run, but Kyle Baker knocked my socks off.  This'll sound funny coming from a guy who complains about violence so much, but I loved the sheer meanness of that book.  I remember when two of the (Seven Deadly) Finn brothers threw a guy off a balcony and took a bet on how he'd land.  The one brother goes, "Heads again!  You always win!"  :D  See where a little knowledge of physics can pay off, kids?


Apparently the copyright holder, Conde Nast, was extremely displeased with the direction the series took, and forced DC to pull the plug.  Keep in mind that by the end of the Helfer/Baker run, the Shadow had been killed, his body accidentally destroyed by his dufus half-Tibetan sons and his head attached to a huge robot body.  Probably NOT what the caretakers of his legend envisioned when they let DC borrow him.  :D  An oversized one-shot was announced that would've resolved the plotline, but it never saw print.

(http://www.comics.org/graphics/covers/3379/400/3379_4_19.jpg)


I liked the atmospherics and the Barreto art on the next DC series, "The Shadow Strikes!," but it never had the spark of the Helfer run.

Oh, and I didn't dig the Chaykin mini nearly as much.  It was kind of an 80s, "Shadow in Armani" take that didn't click for me.  Plus with all the sex it came off as a poor man's American Flagg, like much of Chaykin's stuff (the worst being his "Blackhawk").

I was doing a bit of studying.  Apparently it is attributed to the combination of comics, paperback novels and TV that killed pulps in the main (in addition to a rising price of publication).  I guess this is pretty much speculation anyway, but there really is no good reason a few pulp mags (like Analog) could have lived and the others just died.  What worked for the ones still alive should have for any other pulp that was worth something or made to be.  Analog is a good example.  It's a little known fact that Analog is actually the retitle to Astounding Science Fiction - one of the most important pulp mags of the 30's, and key to developing science fiction as we know it, thank you one Mr. Joe Campbell.

But, my only real thought on this overall matter is that it has 80-90% more to do with the person or crew driving the publication than the market.  For instance, this site is another good example.  This site I think impacted the heck out of the revamp of Supes in '86 and is one very important reason the Iron Age Supes is over and we seem to have gotten back our Superman.  Who else bothered to try and keep pre-Crisis Supes in all incarnations alive?

As always, you can always tell the real people who matter after some disaster (for the pulps, probably the paper-shortages of WW2, although comics, and paperbacks could be some others for that industry).  They are always the ones still standing, sticking around and getting the show back on the road.  (Kinda like Kirby over at Marvel during the 50's and early 60's.  The word is that whilst Stan was contemplating closing shop, Kirby came in and said we can work this out, and Atlas came back to life and later Marvel was created.)

Whoops - that's "John Campbell".

That's what it was! I remember now. It may sound horrible, but the multiple desecrations of the Shadow's body were really hilarious. Nice to know someone else misses that series as much as I do.

Nightwing and Permanus, I wonder if you would have liked a similar turn of events in a Batman comic.  What if a doofus Robin accidentally killed Batman and they had to attach his head to a robot?  Granted, that sort of thing was maybe ahead of its time but the whole thing just seemed too easy.  Much harder to write/reinvigorate a serious adventure comic with a 50-year old character than to lampoon/deconstruct it.

The sex in Chaykin's Shadow (but no in Blackhawk, which I enjoyed more) was off-putting.  Much more at home in American Flagg!

I remember when Chaykin was interviewed and was asked about fan reaction to his updated "adult" takes on classic characters (I think Harlan Ellison objected to Blackhawk).  I sometimes feel like those critics even though I rarely buy superhero comics and really could care less about many of my childhood idols/idylls.  I just like to see craft and character taken seriously.  Comics need editors.

This sort of conservatism has been battered away over the last decades or so to the point where smashing idols is now called continuity.  On the other hand, this past Wednesday, Darwyn Cooke was intervied on the Space channel here in Canada about the Spirit annual.

Somehow, I missed this thread and only stumbled upon the Batman/Shadow connection, yesterday, while perusing through Bud Plant's catalogue. I find it fascinating and look forward to reading the listed Pulps. Anyone read these stories, yet? 

Point taken, but actually I think it would have been just as funny in a Batman comic book; even moreso!


Chaykin's sex always puts me off, because it's always so sordid, but it worked in American Flagg because it was so over-the-top. I agree, it was completely inappropriate for The Shadow.