(Batman is back and at his Golden Age peak! The Dark Knigh...)
Batman is back and at his Golden Age peak! The Dark Knight and Robin face off against a gaggle of their most fiendish foes, including The Penguin, Catwoman, the Joker and.... Frankenstein? This volume, with stories from 1947-1948, also features an introduction by historian Bill Schelly.
(A collection featuring the finest Joker stories of all ti...)
A collection featuring the finest Joker stories of all time revisits the Joker's greatest heists, feats of criminal merriment, and otherwise sordid crimes against the Dark Knight and the denizens of Gotham.
Bob Kane was an American legendary cartoonist and comic book writer, who co-created, with Bill Finger, the DC Comics characters Batman the Caped Crusader and Robin the Boy Wonder, Batman’s sidekick, as well as a collection of those crime fighters’ enemies, including the Joker, the Riddler, and the Penguin.
Background
Ethnicity:
His parents were of Eastern European Jewish descent.
Bob Kane was born as Robert Kahn in New York City, New York, United States on the 24th of October, 1915. He was the son of Augusta and Herman Kahn. Kane’s artistic talent was encouraged at an early age by his father, who worked for the printing operations of the New York Daily News as an engraver. Noting the high rate of pay the top cartoonists earned, Kane’s father realized that his son’s interest in cartooning could lead to a worthwhile profession, and he purchased instructional books on drawing for Kane to study.
Education
Kane graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and legally changed his name to Robert Kane. Then he studied art at Commercial Art Studio and Cooper Union before joining the Max Fleischer Studio as a trainee animator in the year of 1934.
Kane started his career by publishing his first pages in Wow! in 1936. The same year, he began working for the Eisner-Iger studio in New York City as a staff artist. He created 'Hiram Hick' and between 1937 and 1939, he drew features and fillers like 'Jest Laffs', 'Pluto' and 'Peter Pupp' under the Fiction House label.
In 1938, Kane went looking for work at DC comics and left to join them in 1939. At that time character 'Superman' was just appearing and Kane started out doing (filler) features like 'Professor Doolittle' (in Adventure Comics), 'Ginger Snap' (in More Fun), and 'Oscar the Gumshoe' (in Detective Comics). Kane also drew a couple of adventure features written by Bill Finger, such as 'Rusty and his Pals' in Adventure Comics and 'Clip Carson' in Action Comics. The collaboration with Finger eventually led to the creation of 'Batman' in 1939. The character, as Kane originally styled him, made his debut in Detective Comics number 27, published in May 1939. At this time he was a much more violent and grim figure than he later became. Shortly after the publication of the issue, Kane hired artist Jerry Robinson to assist him on the feature. Kane and his team also created all kinds of colorful and bizarre criminals such as 'The Joker', 'Catwoman', 'Two Face', 'The Penguin' and 'The Riddler'.
Kane would illustrate 'Batman' until the mid-1940s, and although his name appeared on the strip until 1964, the work was done mostly by other artists, initially Robinson, and later also Stan Kaye, Sheldon Moldoff, Dick Sprang, Jack Burnley, and Carmine Infantino.
As Batman evolved, a brooding, threatening quality was sustained in its predominantly black, night-time panels. The feature's quick success had led to several comic books, a newspaper strip version and two movie serials long before the campy TV version of the 1960s. 'Batman' has additionally appeared on virtually every form of merchandising known.
In the 1950s, Kane was asked to come to Hollywood to create a cartoon character and the TV show 'Courageous Cat' developed from this. Later, he was asked to help with the development of the upcoming Batman TV show in 1965. During that time, Kane also went to work developing new comic ideas and created an animated cartoon superspy, Cool McCool, for the Saturday morning television market.
Upon retiring in the late 1960s, Kane found a market eager for paintings and signed lithographs of Batman. Images of Batman now began hanging in art galleries on both coasts, to the satisfaction of Kane. He then released several sets of prints since the late 1970s and then wasn't involved with comics anymore.
In 1989, Kane published the autobiography Batman and Me, with a second volume Batman and Me, The Saga Continues, in 1996.
Kane also worked as a consultant on the 1989 film Batman and its three sequels with directors Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher.
Artist Bob Kane is best known for his creation of the Batman, one of the twentieth century’s greatest mythic heroes. Inspired by the success of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s character Superman in Action Comics, Kane and his writer/partner Bill Finger developed a costumed crimefighter who struck a responsive chord in the American psyche. Using dark, grim images developed in part from 1930s-era detective films, they created a hero whose realm was the dark urban underbelly of America. During his long career, Kane and his team also created all kinds of colorful and bizarre criminals such as 'The Joker', 'Catwoman', 'Two Face', 'The Penguin' and 'The Riddler'.
Kane was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1994 and then the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1996.
On October 21, 2015, for his work in motion pictures, he posthumously received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6764 Hollywood Boulevard.
Kane's work is still visible to the public, housed in such collections as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and St. John's University in Jamaica, New York.
Kane married his first wife, Beverly, in the 1940s. The marriage, however, ended in a divorce in 1957. They had a daughter, Deborah. Kane then married his second wife, actress Elizabeth Sanders Kane, in 1987.
