My all-time favorite comic strip is Pogo…and I felt that way before I even met, let alone got involved with its creator's daughter. Walt Kelly was a brilliant writer, a brilliant cartoonist and even a brilliant lyricist on occasion. Every year around Christmas in his strip, his lovely characters would debate the correct lyrics to their favorite carol. Here, set to music and to panels from the strip, are some of the lyrics that someone in Pogo insisted were the proper ones for the immortal holiday tune…
Several folks sent in the same question I got from Brian Fies…
All right, I've loved the series about the New Look Batman, how it impacted you as a young fan and the insights you gained as an adult pro, but you didn't answer the question I waited breathlessly to the end to learn: how do you remember that date? Was the change in logo and art style so momentous that March 26 was etched into your brain like December 7 or September 11? Did you note it in your diary? Are you revealing your hyperthymesia abilities and forming a superhero team with Marilu Henner?
I have a lot of mail with questions flowing from my seven-part Batman article and I'll get to as many of them as I can over the next few days. Ken Barrett wrote to ask…
I'm intrigued by your tale of spending time with Bob Kane while he was drinking vodka and telling you his version of history. I understand that for many years, he supplied Batman art to DC and it was actually done by Sheldon Moldoff. That stopped at some time. Did he tell you how and when it had stopped? And how long did you know him? What was your relationship with him like?
He only told me a little of it but I learned the rest from a number of folks including Moldoff, Julius Schwartz and Nelson Bridwell.
I used to roughly estimate when I had my first two meetings with Bob Kane but the other day, it dawned on me that I could figure it out. He invited a bunch of members of our local comic book club up to his apartment and we all brought along comics for him to autograph. For some reason, I brought along a copy of the latest issue of Batman, which was #204. It contained what I'm fairly sure was the first Batman story ever to have actual script and art credits for the men who actually did those tasks instead of a faux Bob Kane signature…
You'll notice that "Story by Frank Robbins" and "Art by Irv Novick & Joe Giella" are crammed in oddly and the lettering is not by the person who did the rest of the lettering on that story. From that, I conclude that the story was finished before its editor, Julie Schwartz — or someone at the office — realized, "Hey! Since we bought out Kane, we can start putting real credits on here like we do on all our other comics!" And the names were added at the last minute.
What had happened was that Kane's contract with them was expiring and DC wasn't about to give him the same terms again. At the time, they were in the process of selling the company and as I understand it, they needed a better release than they had from Kane that said DC owned Batman and he didn't. He got a lot of money from them…or what seemed like a lot of money at the time and probably looked like a bargain in later years.
Batman #204 came out on June 6, 1968 so our visit with Kane — when I was there as part of a group — would have been shortly after, probably the following Sunday, perhaps a week later. I vividly recall showing Kane that issue and noting for him that the comic now carried credits. I'd been puzzled why it didn't when almost all other DCs — especially those edited by Schwartz — did.
And I vividly recall the odd expression on Mr. Kane's face when he first laid eyes on a Batman comic book that credited Frank Robbins, Irv Novick and Joe Giella but not Bob Kane. He was not surprised. He knew it was coming because the new contract he'd signed months earlier had allowed them to do that…but it was still a jarring moment for him to actually see it in print.
Incidentally: The last six months or so of Kane supplying pencil art to DC occurred without the services of Sheldon Moldoff. Stories under the "Bob Kane" signature were ghosted by several men — Chic Stone, Frank Springer, Gil Kane and possibly Joe Certa. Schwartz's records (he kept good records) showed that Bob Kane was paid for the pencils on those stories so one might assume those men were paid by Bob. And one might be wrong.
I never asked Gil and I never met Joe Certa but Stone and Springer told me they were paid by DC. Shelly Moldoff's memory was that he drew all of the Batman stories Kane was obligated to supply until one day, Bob told him it was all over, so long, farewell…and Schwartz didn't recall.
So (I'm guessing here) Kane let Moldoff go prematurely, then realized more stories needed to be ghosted so DC selected and paid those ghosts. And maybe something was worked out where Kane reimbursed DC for what those men were paid or it was deducted from Kane's checks or something and that this "interim ghosting" went on until Kane's new deal was finalized and signed. You probably aren't as interested in this kind of thing as I am.
Bob Kane and Friend
My second visit with Bob Kane was about two weeks after the first one. It was on that visit that he gave me a very nice (I think) piece of art that he actually drew himself. I wrote about that here. Thereafter, I saw him here and there, off and on, and he sometimes remembered who I was and sometimes didn't.
One evening in the eighties, I hosted him, his wife, Julie Schwartz and a couple of comic-book-writing friends for an evening at the Magic Castle. Bob was chatty and he talked a lot, mainly about himself. He kept worrying aloud that people around us would find out who he was and pester him for autographs and sketches. At no point did he notice that sitting two tables from us — totally unpestered by anyone — was Johnny Carson.
I last saw Bob…well, I last saw him in 1998 but he was dead at the time. I was one of four people from the comic book field who attended his funeral, the other three being Paul Smith, Mike Barr and Stan Lee. One of these days, I should write about that afternoon. Before the ceremony, Stan took me aside and said, "They're expecting me to say a few words. Tell me what to say." I did and later as we both stood graveside, he was bored and he began telling me stories about Steve Ditko. I kept saying, "Shouldn't we be talking about Bob?"
My last memory of Robert "Bob" Kane was that after the services, as his friends filed past the open coffin, several of them shoved little toy Batmobiles and Batman action figures in there with him. If you ever met the man, you'd understand why that was not at all inappropriate.
I post this every year, partly because I love it and partly because I get mail from people asking if I'm going to post that neat little cartoon animated to The Drifters singing "White Christmas." Here's that neat little cartoon animated to The Drifters singing "White Christmas"…
This is the last part of this tale. If you want to read it from the beginning, go to this page and you'll have no trouble finding your way from chapter to chapter.
So we're finally back where we started. It's Thursday, March 26, 1964 and I'm 12 years and 26 days old as I walk up to Pico Drug, the store with the most glorious comic book rack in my area. I'm there to purchase the new comic books that were placed on sale earlier that day. One of them should be the new issue of Detective Comics, which always features one story of Batman and Robin, followed by one story of John Jones, Manhunter from Mars.
The rack shows the top fourth-or-so of each comic's cover — the title of the magazine known as the logo. It always looks the same on Detective Comics and on the issue I bought a month ago, it looked like this…
I have a moment of genuine surprise when I find the new Detective Comics as the logo — largely unchanged since the comic began twenty-seven years and 326 issues ago — now looks like this…
That logo screams "Something is different" in a way I will never see another logo proclaim. Designed (as I will later learn) by DC logomaster Ira Schnapp, it just electrifies. When you're twelve, you electrify easily. I study it for a long moment before I pull the comic out of the rack so I can gaze upon the entire cover.
It's Batman…but not like any Batman I have ever seen. Batman and Robin are not drawn by the guy(s) who did previous issues. They're drawn by the guy(s) who draw The Flash. The change is especially arresting if you do what I do when I get home with it. I lay the issue next to the previous issue. Stare and compare, stare and compare…
Click above to view these covers larger.
In addition to the different art style, the cover proclaims that the comic now features — "starting in this issue" — the adventures of The Elongated Man. John Jones, Manhunter From Mars is gone. (His strip, slightly retooled, would soon resurface in House of Mystery, now edited by Jack Schiff.)
Inside, there is a good, solid Batman story with no space aliens or interplanetary zoos. It isn't the Batman I'd been reading for a few years now but in many ways, it's more Batman than the last few years of Batman stories have been. I like it very much but it will take some getting-used-to.
The bat-insignia on Batman's chest now has a yellow circle behind it. I had noticed that in the most recent issue of World's Finest Comics, which went on sale two weeks earlier. I didn't know what it meant then but now I do. All part of the change.
And now, stepping back to present-day, I would add this: I didn't know what the change in Batman meant in 1964 but now I do. The most immediate impact was that sales went up…not a huge amount but enough to stop all talk about the Batman comics being in trouble. And then less than two years later, the Batman TV show with Adam West went on ABC Television and that's when sales did go up a huge amount.
Looking back on the change on 3/26/64, I have two thoughts that prompted me to write this long, serialized essay. One is that I wanted to convey to you how monumental and exciting the change was that day…and how important it was to the continuing existence of that great character.
And the other thought is this: It can never happen again. Tomorrow, if DC Comics and whoever's running it this week decides that henceforth, Batman and Robin should be talking kangaroos, it will not have the same impact. Why? Because there's no one art style or one approach to Batman that prevails. Every writer and artist who gets within ten blocks of DC Comics has their own "take" on Batman — what he looks like and who he is behind that mask. I recall twenty years ago sitting in a hotel lobby at a convention with five or six guys who were then writing various Batman comics for DC and they were all talking about their approach to the character…
…and it seemed very clear to me that none of them were talking about the same guy.
I don't read a lot of Batman comics these days but when I do, I don't see that any two writers writing about the same guy or very few artists drawing the same guy. I'm not saying that some of those comics aren't interesting or exciting; just that to me, it's like there are eighteen different men named Bruce Wayne — some of them quite sane and some of them far from it — running around in about fifteen different costumes that all incorporate some of the same elements in different ways.
There absolutely is room for different interpretations. In times past, some companies and editors were too insistent that everyone draw the same way; when it all had to be homogenized down and someone would retouch work if it was too unlike what others were doing. Creativity was suppressed in service of conformity. I'm not saying to do that.
I'm just saying that DC could never do a story that changed the "norm" of Batman because these days, there is no "norm" of Batman.
Even as a number of Broadway shows are canceling performances (or closing altogether) for COVID reasons, The Music Man starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster has started previewing. It's supposed to lead up to a February 10 opening night but these days, I don't think any "prediction" is solid.
Am I a tremendous fan of The Music Man, Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster? You bet your shipoopi I am! So I should have tickets and plans for a New York trip…but I don't. It's that COVID thing and there's a very good chance I'll never see this production…or if I do, it'll be a national touring company with Scott Baio and the lady who plays Flo in the Progressive Insurance Company commercials.
As sacrifices go, it's a wee one. I wonder if all these folks who want to put Broadway-style musical comedy on prime-time TV have thought about doing this one.
Here's a few seconds from a recent preview performance…just the moment on the train in Scene 1 where when the traveling salesmen get finished talking about what a scoundrel "Professor" Harold Hill is, then discover he's been among them all the time…
I don't think they should have named the new strain of coronavirus "Omicron." I think someone should have figured out the Latin translation of "Ha! You thought it was almost over but it isn't!" Me, I'm sticking with my policy of not believing anyone's predictions about where this thing is going or when.
For now, I'm also sticking with my policy of not committing to where I'm going or when. I just respectfully declined invites to be a guest at two separate comic-type conventions in 2022. It's not necessarily that I think it would be a huge mistake to say yes. It's more like I don't want to spend every day for months wondering if I made a huge mistake saying yes.
I did say yes to WonderCon in Anaheim (April 1 thru 3) and Comic-Con International in San Diego (July 21-24) but (a) those don't involve getting on an airplane and (b) we'll see if they both happen and if so, if I feel safe about attending. I also decided firmly that there will not be a big 70th birthday party for me next March. Someone wanted to organize one but I like all my friends too much to make them fret about whether they should go to such a thing.
It has been suggested I remind you that I've found a really terrific mask…which is to say it works great on my face. Your face, you lucky individual, is different from mine so it might not work well for you. But it might. It's the 3M Aura N95 Model 9205 and you may also be able to find their Model 9210 which is just about identical. They ain't the cheapest but when your life could be at stake, do you really want the cheapest?
It covers my nose and mouth just fine and unlike other masks I tried, it makes a tight-but-comfy seal under my chin. I also like that it doesn't hook around my ears. It has two elastic bands that fit around my whole, otherwise-useless head. And even though they describe it as disposable, I'm getting an awful lot of facetime out of one before I eventually dispose of it. Whether it'll be as good for you as it is for me, I can't say but if you wanna give it a try, here's an Amazon link.
Nicholas "Nick" Georgiade, the last surviving regular cast member of The Untouchables TV show died last Sunday in Las Vegas at the age of 88. He was also one of the two last surviving cast members of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to have a speaking part. He played the policeman, seen above at left, who was working with Norman Fell's character to tail Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante).
Georgiade was best known as Enrico Rossi, sidekick to Elliot Ness (Robert Stack) on The Untouchables when it aired from 1959 to 1963 on ABC and forever after in reruns. The story is that one of his fellow cast members on that series, Paul Picerni, was originally cast in the role in Mad World but had to drop out due to a schedule conflict. When he did, he recommended Georgiade, who was hired for what you'd think, seeing the film, was a one-day part.
But when interviewed years after, Georgiade said he spent several weeks working on the picture, waiting to shoot other scenes which didn't make it into the final cut. He also said that he loved the whole experience, hanging around with so many fine comedians.
This makes Barrie Chase the last surviving cast member with a speaking part in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. She (of course) played Mrs. Halliburton, the bikini-clad lady who did the memorable dance scene with Dick Shawn.
This should be the next-to-last part of this article. Once again, if you haven't read Parts I through V, it would be wise of you to click this link which will whisk you to Part I…and from there, it will be a simple matter for you to find your way back to this chapter.
Two more men were key to establishing the "new look" for the Batman comics. Julius Schwartz's stable of freelancers included Joe Giella and Sid Greene, two artists who would be deployed mostly as inkers. Giella had been primarily an inker for some time. Greene's career at DC had been as an artist who penciled and inked but after Schwartz lost Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures, Greene found himself mostly being offered work inking other artists.
Neither man was the kind of inker to just trace what the pencil artist put there in pencil. Both inked Schwartz's three main pencilers — Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane and Mike Sekowsky. With Giella or Greene aboard, the end product rarely looked a lot like Infantino, Kane or Sekowsky. Giella especially approached pages penciled by others using an eraser as much as he used brush, pen and ink. This was never out of laziness. He might add as much as he omitted. He might redraw where he felt he could improve on what the penciler put down.
Editors might tell either inker (or any inker with such tendencies) to retain as much of the penciler's style as possible in certain situations but Schwartz did not tell that to Giella or Greene. Rather, he said he was counting on them to make the pencil art Bob Kane handed in less like Bob Kane art — less cartoony, more realistic and generally darker with more shadows. This was the art that was actually done wholly by Sheldon Moldoff but, as noted, most folks at DC either didn't know Moldoff was working on it, thought Kane was doing some of it or just decided not to ask for trouble and ask who was responsible for it.
After years of drawing roughly the way Kane might have drawn the comics himself since 1953, Moldoff felt lost. It was like "Draw it like Bob Kane but if Bob was drawing in a style he never drew in" and Moldoff hated the job. For one thing, it took longer to pencil a page that way but no raise in pay accompanied the new marching orders. For another, Schwartz asked for way more redraws than Schiff had ever demanded on the "old look" pages. He asked Kane and then Shelly had to do them…with at least one famous exception which Julie Schwartz described once on a panel I hosted at Comic-Con…
One time when Bob Kane dropped off pages, I asked him for a quick revision on one panel. Batman was punching someone and I wanted it to be a Marvel-style punch with a big fist coming right out at the reader. Bob said, "Okay, I'll take the page home and fix it and get it back to you tomorrow." By now, I knew he was going to have some assistant redo it so I decided to have a little fun with him. I said, "No, I need to send this story off to the letterer right away. Just sit down at a drawing table down the hall and redo the panel. He was turning pale. He said, "No, I need my own drawing table and my own art supplies to work." I said, "Come on. It's just one fist. The great Bob Kane should be able to knock that out in two minutes."
I kept after him until he finally agreed to do it. He took the page and went off down the hall to where there were some drawing tables for artists to work at. It took a half-hour or so but he finally came back with the page and the fist was perfect. He did a real good job. I was impressed until later, I found out what happened. He sat there for twenty minutes, erasing and redrawing, erasing and redrawing. Finally, he paid Murphy Anderson ten bucks to redraw it for him.
The "Bob Kane" art done by Shelly Moldoff for the new order was awkward but adequate, I guess. Let's say "barely adequate." It definitely was not the old style but it was not very organic. Shelly was no longer drawing like Bob Kane but he wasn't drawing like Shelly Moldoff either. He got a lot of help from the inks by Giella or Greene.
It was nowhere as fine as what Carmine Infantino was doing on the covers and on the stories that Kane had nothing to do with. Infantino's Batman had great movement and charismatic poses. Batman moved like Batman, not just like any old guy in a bat-costume. And Infantino "told" the stories — especially the ones by John Broome — very well. Most importantly, the Batman stories in Detective Comics (where Infantino alternated with "Kane") looked like today instead of like reprints from the Batman comics your father might have purchased when he was your age.
It was an exciting time to be a kid reading those comics. I'll tell you about that in our final chapter tomorrow. It starts with me going to the comic book rack at Pico Drug, the store near my home, on Thursday, March 26, 1964.
Here's the current draft of this year's "TCM Remembers" video. I say that because in years past, if someone of note in the movie community dies after that video comes out but before January 1, they go and edit him or her in. One hopes that will not be necessary this year.
My dear sweet Betty Lynn is in there…in a clip I believe they took from her 1948 film, June Bride. And yes, I know her belongings are being auctioned now. I even recognize some of the items.
This is running longer than I'd expected but hang in there. We'll get through it before Christmas. If you're joining us in progress, go back and read from the beginning. This link will take you to Part One and from there, it'll be a cinch to find your way through other chapters.
When DC did that editor-swap, there was one casualty — or what a number of readers felt was a casualty. Jack Schiff took over editing Mystery in Space from Julius Schwartz. Its contents would henceforth be done by the freelance writers and artists Schiff employed instead of the ones Schwartz had employed. World of difference. Instead of having its lead feature Adam Strange written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Carmine Infantino, it was written by Dave Wood and drawn by Lee Elias.
Wood and Elias had done fine work on other comics but Fox/Infantino was a hard act to follow and the change in the feature was jarring. It wasn't at all the same strip and it wouldn't be long before Mr. Strange was no longer appearing in Mystery in Space. And not long after that, there was no Mystery in Space. The Strange Adventures comic, which Schiff also took over from Schwartz, only fared a little better…and before long, Mr. Schiff retired or was retired.
Fox and Infantino were busy helping Schwartz retool the Batman comics. In fact, Infantino turned out to be the key to upgrading the artwork in them, giving Batman a "new look" and having the comic look like it was drawn in the sixties instead of a decade or two before.
As you may recall, DC had a firm contract with Bob Kane to produce pencil art for most of the Batman stories that ran in the Batman comic and Detective Comics, and Kane jobbed that task out to Sheldon Moldoff. Moldoff was as good as most guys who'd drawn adventure-type comics in the forties and fifties but unlike many of them, his style had not evolved. It wasn't supposed to. He was supposed to draw like Bob Kane did, way back when Bob Kane had actually drawn (with a fair amount of help) Batman comics. That was why he picked Moldoff.
Pencils by "Bob Kane" (Jim Mooney) Inks by Charles Paris
When Schwartz and others at DC told Kane that a change in artwork was necessary for Batman's sales, he said no at first. He liked the idea that everyone (well, most people) thought he was drawing all those comics and that was how he drew even though he wasn't drawing it. He probably, to them, kept up the fiction that he still did, albeit with assistants.
And what I'm telling you in this part here is what Kane told me when I spent some time with him when I was 16 years old. Some members of our comic book club got to go and visit him in an apartment he was then renting on Wilshire Boulevard near Westwood. We interviewed him for several hours and then he invited me back for a separate visit.
This was because I seemed to know more about comic book history than my friends did and because I was interested in writing and maybe even a little drawing. Kane, I came to realize, was interested in seeing if I could be of any possible use to him as a ghost of some sort. So he had me bring samples of my work and he eventually told me I had no future as either a writer or an artist. I more or less agreed with him even then about the artist part but I've been making my living as a professional writer now for 52 years.
In that one-on-one afternoon chat, Kane told me his life story and about what a prick or idiot every single person at DC Comics was. This was his opinion and it was not said dead sober. We were both drinking throughout — ginger ale for me, vodka for him — and boy, do I wish I'd had a tape recorder running. Still, I remember an awful lot of it…like how he kept referring to the men who had actually done Batman art as his "assistants," not his "ghosts." This included men who'd done 100% of the work on those pages. It even included artists Kane had never met who'd been hired directly by DC to do Batman stories in excess of what his contract called for him to provide.
Pencils by "Bob Kane" (Jim Mooney) Inks by Sheldon Moldoff
He said that he at first he resisted the idea of a "new look" Batman. The art style, he said, was part of the comic. Dick Tracy was a strip drawn by Chester Gould. Li'l Abner was a strip drawn by Al Capp. Steve Canyon was a strip draw by Milton Caniff. If the creator didn't draw it, someone else drew it in his style. (All of Kane's reference points were comic strips, not comic books…which made sense. When he was a kid thinking about becoming a cartoonist, his heroes were the strip guys. There were no comic book artists to admire then and certainly no one who got rich and/or famous in comic books.)
He also pointed out that when Alex Raymond (one of his biggest heroes, he said) died in a car accident, the syndicate didn't give his strip, Rip Kirby a "new look." They hired John Prentice, an artist whose work was to many, indistinguishable from Raymond's. "That," he said, "is how it's supposed to work."
Two things changed his mind, one being that they convinced him Batman might be in real sales trouble. The last thing Bob Kane wanted was to see the Batman comics get canceled and/or the character become a minor property. And the second thing was this: His contract with DC, as mentioned, allowed them to hire other artists to draw Batman stories as long as the work was signed "Bob Kane." They'd been doing this for years, employing guys like Jim Mooney and Dick Sprang.
Most stories that Kane handed in — the ones Moldoff actually drew — were inked by Charles Paris but DC also hired Sheldon Moldoff to ink some of them. The stories drawn by Mooney or Sprang or Curt Swan were inked by Paris or Moldoff and they didn't look that different and most readers weren't like me. Most readers didn't notice the difference so the fiction that it was all drawn by Kane went unpunctured.
Pencils by "Bob Kane" (Sheldon Moldoff) Inks by Charles Paris
But DC had the right to hire anyone they chose to draw the Batman pages that didn't come from Kane, and Schwartz would be having them drawn by Carmine Infantino, Infantino was an artist who didn't draw like Kane, an artist whose work was known and recognizable to a lot of the readers. That would puncture the fiction. Kane realized that readers would say, "Bob Kane didn't draw that. That's Carmine Infantino!" Infantino would also be drawing the covers — he was probably the best guy DC had when it came to cover designs — and Kane decided he was trapped.
All he could do was (1) agree to waive the contractual "Bob Kane" signature on the stories Infantino drew and (2) try to have "Bob Kane" (i.e., Moldoff) draw in the more modern style DC wanted. The new fiction would be that Bob Kane was modernizing his approach on the stories he did. And with that, DC was poised to launch its "new look" for Detective Comics and Batman — as will be discussed here in the next (and probably next-to-last) part of this article.
I love photos of old Las Vegas and my pal Anthony Tollin just sent me this link to a nice online gallery of some. You'll see in there a shot of the Desert Inn dated around 1950. That's where my parents got married on March 3, 1951.
