The photo at left above is our pal Frank Ferrante who, as you know, plays Groucho Marx in a wonderful touring show that I plug here more often than I plug my own endeavors.
The photo at right is of Robert Kanigher, a writer and editor who worked in comics for years, mostly for DC. What do these photos have in common? Answer: They're constantly being misidentified on websites. Hundreds of pages identify the shot of Frank as the real Groucho and this photo has even turned up on several Groucho CDs and DVDs. The picture of Mr. Kanigher is often identified as a shot of Bill Finger, who worked for DC Comics for much of the same time.
Why the frequent mistakes? Because people are looking for a photo of Groucho or Bill Finger and they go to Yahoo! or some other search engine, search for the name and these photos come up. Right this minute, if I go to Google and search for "Groucho Marx," the shot of Frank is the second thing I see.
This is not because any person at Google thinks that's Frank. It's because of the way search engines work. Almost every time the Google "spiders" that crawl the Internet come across that photo, it's adjacent to the words "Groucho" and "Marx." Google isn't saying it's a photo of Groucho. It's saying that photo relates to the term "Groucho Marx."
Same deal with Kanigher. In point of fact, photos of Kanigher and of Bill Finger are very scarce. When Kanigher passed in 2002, I searched high, low and everywhere to locate one to use with my obit of the man. I couldn't find one and had to do without.
In 2014, we presented Kanigher posthumously with the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. For this, as administrator, I had to track down someone in Kanigher's family so we'd have someone to present the award to. I located his daughter and she supplied several photos to me, the best of which was this one…though it was torn and had sections of his face missing.
I did some fancy Photoshopping to clean it up and it was used in the announcements and press releases and such. Anyone who uses it now has taken it from there, which is fine with me. But it's annoying to see people who are writing about the criminally-undercredited Bill Finger display it as a photo of Bill Finger.
(And you've probably figured out why they think that. If you search for "Bill Finger," it's one of the top hits. That's because of the award. That photo may never have appeared on the 'net more than an inch or so from the phrase, "Bill Finger.")
Devout fans of Groucho Marx or Bill Finger have been known to get exasperated when their heroes are represented by photos of others. The Marx fans have to put up not only with photos of Frank dressed as Groucho but of other folks like photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt in Marxian makeup.
They're right to be annoyed at art directors and web authors who can't tell the difference…but the root of the problem is that they don't understand this: Google Images isn't saying that's a photo of Groucho Marx. They're just saying that's a photo that is often accompanied by the words, "Groucho Marx."