One of the panels we'll be doing at the Comic-Con International in San Diego this year will be about Batman comics from the beginning through the 1964 "New Look" makeover. The dais will include — and this is a sad comment on the passing of time — three of the only four artists still alive who pencilled Batman stories before '64.
Among the topics I want to zero in on is how much Bob Kane did on the early Batman stories. We all know he did next to no artwork whatsoever on the comic books or strips after about 1946 but some people have — wrongly, to my understanding — declared he never did any of it. No, the man could draw…not well, perhaps, but there were certainly worse people drawing comics in the early forties. He also did a lot of swiping, we must note, copying poses out of pulp magazines, newspaper strips and elsewhere.
There's a weblog devoted to the illustrator Henry E. Vallely that has made an interesting discovery. What was probably the single most famous panel Kane "drew" in comics — a panel from the story in Batman #1 — was copied from a drawing Vallely did for a then-recent pulp magazine. Take a look and see.