That is not only a photo of Bill Finger, it is darn near the only photo of Bill Finger. He did not leave many behind. What he did leave us was his contribution to the creation of Batman — a contribution that was formidable and throughout Finger's lifetime, criminally neglected or even denied.
That injustice has been undone somewhat as the credits on Batman now say "Created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger," whereas they used to just say "Created by Bob Kane." It's sad that Mr. Finger never lived to see this happen but at least it has happened. Unfortunately — and yes, I've written about this before here — his face has also been miscredited. Maybe that's his fault for not taking more photos when he was around but I keep seeing photos of other longtime contributors to DC Comics identified as Finger. Here are the two most often wrongly identified as him…
The man on the left is Robert Kanigher, who wrote Wonder Woman for about eight million years and who edited and often wrote DC's war comics for a very long time. When Kanigher received a posthumous Bill Finger Award, I procured that photo from a relative of Kanigher's and did an awful lot of Photoshopping to make it look even that good. It was part of the press release announcing the award.
The photo on the right is Gardner Fox, who wrote Justice League of America and The Flash and Hawkman and who created the last two and many others. Fox actually was the second writer to write Batman, shortly after the debut story, which was by Finger. Fox also won the Finger Award and therein lies some of the confusion.
The way search engines like Google and Bing index photos is that they find photos and then they find words and names near those photos. If I were to go onto the 'net and post a photo of you on many websites with the word "aardvark" near your pic, the engines would eventually decide you were an aardvark and would probably display the pic of you when someone searched for an image of an aardvark.
Because the photos of Kanigher and Fox have often appeared near the term "Bill Finger" on the web, the search engines display them when you search for a photo of Bill Finger…so I keep seeing them identified as him. The new issue of Comic Book Creator magazine has the Kanigher image identified as Finger. So I made up these two graphics and I'm posting them here to alert anyone who comes here…but I'm also posting them because I want them to get into the database of Google, Bing and other search engines.
Maybe now people who search for a photo of Mr. Finger will see these graphics and understand what is and is not a likeness of Bill Finger, the most neglected man in comics. Feel free to help out and post them anywhere you like.