Lew Sayre Schwartz, one of the many anonymous men who drew great Batman stories signed "Bob Kane," died last Saturday morning at the age of 85. Shortly before, he'd taken a bad fall and struck his head, resulting in a brain hemorrhage. Surgery did not alleviate the problem and his son Andrew reports that, "…when the life-support was removed, it was a fast and peaceful departure."
I guess I'd better explain about Kane's odd working arrangement with DC Comics. In the mid-forties, he signed a deal with them that called for him to draw a specified number of pages per month…or at least to deliver that amount. Some of the Batman material that appeared in Batman and Detective Comics was purchased by DC editors from artists with no Kane involvement, even though it bore his signature. Some was provided by Kane under a contract that paid him a very high page rate. It was so high that he could afford to hire someone like Lew Schwartz (or at other times, Sheldon Moldoff or a few others) to actually draw the pages. Kane might occasionally draw or redraw a little of it but usually he turned the ghosts' work in to DC as they drew it. After paying the men who'd really drawn the material, Kane still made enough off the work to live very well.
Schwartz was working for King Features Syndicate as a production artist when Kane first tapped him to ghost some Batman material for him in 1946. By 1948, he was doing almost all of it, a situation which persisted until 1953 when Schwartz, as he put it, "just got tired of the arrangement." He went on to do more work for King Features and segued into advertising, where he was involved with commercials that won numerous Emmy and Clio awards. He was also a teacher at the School of Visual Arts in New York and largely responsible for the founding of their film department.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Schwartz along with the other two surviving Kane ghosts (Sheldon Moldoff and Jerry Robinson) at the 2009 Comic-Con. He was a delightful gentleman and there was an odd sensation of "bonding" among our panelists as they shared tales of their days with Mr. Kane. It was also fun to watch so many people tell Lew that he'd drawn their all-time favorite Batman stories. He certainly drew a lot of mine.