DAY TWO... cont'd
The next panel was "Legends of the Batman" which was billed as featuring the last 3 living men who had worked on Batman prior to 1965. Taken at face value, that teaser would be pretty impressive. But consider that Batman’s been around since 1939, and these guys were involved with the character for most of that time, and the opportunity to see them took on an added "ticking clock" vibe.
It’s hard to describe this panel. The participants were Sheldon “Shelly” Moldoff, Jerry Robinson, and Lew Sayre Schwartz, but the topic of conversation was the (now deceased) creator of Batman and his total lack of redeeming qualities. It was sort of like a posthumous celebrity roast with sincerity taking the place of jokes. At one point it was mentioned that, now that Batman’s creator was dead, they were free to tell the truth about him, but to me it felt a little creepy to hear all sorts of bad things about a guy who could only respond via séance. So even though his name can be easily looked up, I hesitate to use it here… instead, let’s call him Bruce.
Here’s everybody’s beef with Bruce: although he came up with the general concept of Batman, it was writer/artist Bill Finger (also now deceased) that ultimately designed the character as we know it, and wrote most of the early stories. But Bruce ran a studio, and Bill was an employee at that studio, so Bruce took all the credit for producing the work. When Bruce ultimately sold the rights to Batman to DC comics, part of the deal was that only his name would appear as a credited creator on the stories, even though he was neither writing nor drawing the stories. And that was the way it was up until 1965, no matter what artists or writers were doing the work. Uncredited ghost writers and artists weren’t really uncommon in the industry, but Bruce was embarrassingly blatant in taking the credit, and shockingly dismissive of Finger, and that’s why he’s generally cast as the bad guy by comic book historians.
To Mark Evanier’s credit, it didn’t seem like his main interest was in making the panel a referendum on Bruce, probably because he figured the injustice was common knowledge and old hat with this crowd. Instead he initially tried to guide the conversation toward establishing a historical timeline on the panelists’ contributions to the Batman character. Shelly Moldoff was eager to respond to Mark… as long as he didn’t have to concern himself with what Mark was asking. Finally, after asking all 3 panelists about the specific years they arrived and left Bruce’s studio, Mark was set straight by Shelly, who had the longest history with Bruce (and, of course, I’m paraphrasing here).
“Mark,” he said, “those dates are probably more important to you than to us. At the time we weren’t keeping notes on when we did what. But I don’t think these people are here today to find out when we worked for Bruce. They want to know what kind of person Bruce was.”
Mark threw in the towel and said, “Okay, Shelly, what else do you want to share about Bruce?”
Shelly turned to the audience and put his mouth right up against the mike. “I knew Bruce probably better than anyone else here. I worked for him, I socialized with him, I went to his house, I had dinner with the family, we exchanged gifts. I think you could say we were friends. Are you familiar with the story of Dorian Gray?”
Most of the audience nodded or murmured “yes.” But Shelly either couldn’t see the audience reaction, or didn’t think that we had really caught that issue of Classics Illustrated.
“Well,” Shelly went on, “Dorian Gray was a story about a guy who had a portrait of himself, and as the years went by, every bad thing he did would make the picture turn uglier, while he stayed the same. It was like the picture was aging instead of him, and the picture was showing the true man inside while he stayed handsome and debonair. Well, I always thought that Bruce had a picture like that somewhere in his attic. He always wore the best clothes, looked real dapper, and was a real ladies’ man. But really, Bruce was the personification of evil.”
A pause. Then a little laughter from the audience at the hyperbole… and Shelly quickly responded:
“No, I’m serious. He was a bad man.”
From there the discussion turned into anecdotes attesting to Bruce’s membership-in-good-standing with The Dark Side. The other two panelists also attested to Bruce’s misdeeds (Jerry Robinson in particular made it clear he could never forgive Bruce for not giving Bill Finger the credit he deserved), but it was Shelly Moldoff that supplied most of the stories of the moral abyss that was Bruce. It made for an interesting and entertaining panel, but after listening to Bruce portrayed as a Lord of Darkness, I half expected to see his remains come shambling in to slap Shelly around. It was kind of creepy.
Which makes a nice segue into the next panel I attended: the Creepy panel. Creepy was a comic anthology magazine of horror stories, similar to the old 50’s EC comic books like The Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt. It was published in the sixties and featured some of the best artists in the business, along with its sister publication Eerie, and its nephews Slimy, Spooky, Ghastly, Grumpy, Dopey, and Doc. Dark Horse Publishing has been reprinting the magazine in nice hardbound collections and was announcing a revival of the title with new stories. Bill Warren was the publisher of the original magazine, and he’s a notably eccentric guy, so there were some interesting Bill Warren stories told, but no one suggested that his life was the basis for The Omen, so it was a nice change-up from the previous panel.
All material copyright 2009 Chuck Thornton