John Cheves wrote to ask…
When I read the letters to the editor in 1960's Batman comics — where your own name occasionally appeared — I see fans who wrote in to compliment Bob Kane on his artwork. They truly seemed to believe that Kane drew those comics.
For example, in Batman no. 181 (June 1966), Jeff Sosnaud of San Francisco complimented Kane for getting better over recent issues, adding, "Looking at the work he is producing today, it seems almost incredible that he is the same artist."
Of course, Kane wasn't drawing the comics. Other artists drew them, with Kane — as per the terms of his contract with DC — getting the sole art credit on interiors. The artists behind the particular issue of Batman that Jeff praised were penciler Sheldon Moldoff and inkers Joe Giella and Sid Greene.
The weird thing is, based on their comments, the letter writers clearly understood that a stable of uncredited writers penned Batman's stories. They knew names like Robert Kanigher, Bill Finger and Gardner Fox, and in their letters, they speculated as to who wrote which tale.
And yet — the fans believed millionaire 50-something Bob Kane was drawing all of those comics every month? Or did they? Thanks for any insights you can provide.
First off, I wouldn't take the contents of any comic book letter column as indicative of what "the fans" thought. Some of those letters, at least after they stopped printing the readers' full addresses with them, were phony. Some of the real ones that came in were so highly edited or rewritten that they might as well have been phony. (A couple that I had published were almost unrecognizable to me.)
More importantly, the letters you read in those letter pages were selected by an editor from a pile that represented a fraction of a percent of the book's readers. And like I said, they were selected. If you or I had written in a letter that said, "Hey, I know Bob Kane isn't drawing this comic. Isn't that Shelly Moldoff?" the editor — or whoever assembled the letter column — wouldn't have printed it. Kane's deal then was that he would get sole credit for drawing the strip.
So the editors were free to say in the letters page that a given story was written by Gardner Fox but not to say who really drew it.
The one exception to that was that when Carmine Infantino began drawing some of the stories, editor Julius Schwartz said that he was able to get Kane to make an exception. He said he pointed out to Kane that Infantino's work was highly identifiable and his name was well known to readers from his work on other DC Comics. So they'd recognize those stories as drawn by Infantino and if DC tried to claim that was Bob Kane, it would blow the fiction. The readers — and I was one then — didn't know what Sheldon Moldoff art looked like so it was safe to say those stories were drawn by Bob Kane.
Also, I'm not sure Schwartz or any DC editor then knew that was Shelly Moldoff's penciling. Somewhere else on this blog, I probably quoted what DC editor George Kashdan said when I asked him about it: ""No one thought Kane did it all or even most of it. But Kane had this contract and it was easier to just do 'Don't ask, don't tell.' As long as the pages came in on time, which they almost always did, no one cared. I guess we figured Shelly was doing some of it and weren't shocked to hear he was doing all of it."
Shelly himself told me they didn't know…even though Shelly was inking (and occasionally penciling) for other DC books and often was hired by them to ink "Bob Kane pencil art." Me, I think they were just playing dumb.
They did know, of course, that there were Batman stories signed "Bob Kane" that Kane had nothing to do with. This confuses some people so I'd better explain it again: Kane's contract called for him to deliver a specified quantity of penciled pages that his "studio" would produce. DC editors would buy the scripts. Kane would have them drawn. They assumed he was doing some of it with help from various assistant he hired — and early on in this arrangement, when Lew Sayre Schwartz was assisting Kane, Bob did do some of the penciling. Eventually though, he scaled back to drawing either very, very little of it or none whatsoever of it.
This was not at all unprecedented in the business. Siegel and Shuster had a "studio" arrangement with other artists, all uncredited, assisting or ghosting for Shuster. A lot of artists in comic books had uncredited assistants. Kane might have been the only comic book artist whose assistant(s) did all of the work. (I said "comic book artist" because there were plenty of newspaper strips drawn wholly by assistants. One example of many: Walt Disney did not draw the Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse newspaper strips. They were even signed with his alleged signature long after his death.)
Now, if DC wanted to publish more stories of the Caped Crusader than that specified quantity, they could hire Curt Swan or Jim Mooney or Dick Sprang or Winslow Mortimer or anyone else they wanted to draw those stories. Sometimes, they even hired Shelly Moldoff to ink them. When Julie Schwartz took over as editor of Batman and Detective Comics in 1964, he decided that the stories in the eight issues of Batman a year would all be penciled by the Kane "studio." In the monthly Detective Comics, half the stories would be penciled by Kane and/or his mime(s) and half would be an artist Schwartz engaged directly. These were the stories drawn for a few years by Infantino and Carmine also did all the cover for both books.
A few years later, Kane's contract with DC expired and he got a new one which did not involve him or anyone working for him producing any art whatsoever. By that time, it was getting around that others were doing all the work signed "Bob Kane." But I don't think a lot of fans knew it before. And a lot of readers really don't care who drew a story.
