Thursday, October 15, 2015

Insulting Bill Finger early (1946) and posthumously (1976)

The calculated campaign to bury Bill Fingers role in Batman began earlier than some realize...and, in a particularly egregious manner, continued after his death.

Real Fact Comics was a DC Comics series featuring biographies of notable people. Real Fact #5 (1946) was apparently the only time the series profiled the creator of a superhero...the alleged creator, anyway.

The story was called “The True Story of Batman and Robin: How a Big-Time Comic Is Born!” (Thanks to Bill Wormstedt, Bill Jourdain, and John Wells for the scans.)







In this case, a more appropriate title for the series would have been Real Fake Comics. Not only is there no mention of Bill, but the events attributed to Bob Kane are preposterous. The capper: when Bob asks a friend to model a Batman costume his mother made.

Others including Bill Jourdain and Arlen Schumer have already covered this topic well.

Bill Finger died in 1974. Not even two years later, Amazing World of DC Comics #10 (1/76) ran a distasteful story called “Through the Wringer” about a chronically late writer named Phil Binger (get it?) who (spoiler in more ways than one) dies at the end. Even now would be too soon.








Again, others including the incomparable Robby Reed at Dial B for Blog have covered this.

Of course, since 9/18/15, this is all even more moot than before.

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