Oddly, given my solitary perspective in those pre-Internet days of the early to mid-Silver Age when little was known about comics, their creators and their history, I knew Jerry Robinson for a feature that appeared in the New York Daily News titled “True Classroom Flubs and Fluffs” – never aware of his (teen) titanic (pardon) contributions to one of the greatest franchises of all time!
Especially, ironic when one of my favorite television images was this...
Mark Evanier (the best in the business at this sort of thing) has perspective on Mr. Robinson HERE.
5 comments:
Joe,
I have quite a lot to thank Jerry Robinson for... It was his book THE COMICS (just recently re-released) that educated me about a fair number of classic comic strips!
Chris
I met Jerry Robinson in 2004 at BigAppleCon in NYC and got to shake his hand. I regret not getting an autograph, but it was strictly meet and greet.
I think after Bob Kane died, Robinson got to enjoy the recognition he deserved for co-creating the Joker and Robin with Bill Finger. The Comics Journal had printed a big issue back in 2006 that featured an interview with him, and they promoted it on the cover with just a single image - a tiny "joker" playing card. :)
And I got to attend a Bob Kane lecture panel at San Diego 1988-89? Sometime around then. He had quite the ego.
After a point, it became impossible to regard Kane as the sole creator of Batman and everything that surrounds him. Why not loosen up and at least publicly acknowledge that to Finger, Robinson, Moldoff, Sprang, etc. Yeah, I know… money.
I think Kane saw it as "these were guys working for me and under my name" and that logic was no different than handing over characters you created to the company - along with all the subsidiary rights.
Michael Uslan's book, "The Boy Who Loved Batman", has a picture of a newspaper clipping of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" with the announcement that he was cast as the Joker. Uslan painted over the photo to make Jack look like the Joker - isn't that a story Bob Kane used to tell? HE imagined Jack as the Joker and drew a picture of that character on top of a photo of Jack from the Shining.
Oh, Bob...;)
I posted a review of Uslan's memoir. It's an odd book. Paul Dini could get away with it. Grant Morrison already has. Uslan? I don't know. It's presented as if he's a legend himself.
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