You are correct, sir! It's been close to forty years since I
read
those books, and I can't say I'm likely to reread them any
time soon,
considering the pile of to-be-read books awaiting me. And I
have but
one Henry Kane book on my shelf, no doubt a sign of how I
felt about
him after reading it -- also at some point in the
sixties.
Mark adds, "My favorite Kane, however, has to be Bob, the
somewhat
recently deceased creator of Batman."
I don't want to rain on your parade, Mark, but Bob Kane was
pretty
much a hack and a fraud. (I recently -- after his death --
had an
exchange with Mark Evanier on this subject on the DC Comics
newsgroup,
and you can find more in my chapter, "The Spawn of M.C.
Gaines," in
ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME (recently reissued) -- the first
chapter in
the book.) Briefly, Kane did not "create" Batman. He *was*
the
first artist to draw it, but he quickly drew upon a studio of
friends
to do most of the work, and Jerry Robinson was the major hand
in that
studio (Kane was a terrible artist, as his pre-Batman work
makes
clear). Dick Sprang did the best post-Robinson forties
Batman
stories. By the fifties Kane -- who *never* wrote the stories
-- was
farming the stories out to other pencillers and inkers and
paying them
the bottom rates in the industry ($5.00 a page) -- with the
results
you'd expect. Kane was an egotist who took credit for the
work of
others most of his life, and his obituaries pretty much
reflected
this.
--Ted White
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.