My friends Anthony Tollin and Will Murray recently made an amazing and important discovery about a piece of comic book history. As we all know, Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27, in a story entitled "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate." It was signed by Bob Kane and much of it may even have been drawn by him. It was written, sans credit, by Bill Finger, who later acknowledged a lot of inspiration from the pulp magazine character, The Shadow. As it turns out, "inspiration" was putting it mildly.
Anthony and Will are both experts on The Shadow and are involved in the production of new facsimile editions of that pulp and also Doc Savage, which Tony is publishing. Based on some leads from Will, Tony managed to locate a Shadow story that was clearly the template for that first Batman story, even to the point of it being about a "chemical syndicate." Here's the first part of a two-part interview with Anthony all about it.