Thursday, May 26, 2011

Bill Finger, the creator of…Bob Kane?

The comics-posterity-preserving magazine Alter Ego #98 (12/10) features an interview with Alvin Schwartz, longtime writer of comics and beyond (including the creation of Superman’s archnuisance Bizarro); Alvin's 95th birthday is in 2011. This issue also reprints the first known professional photo of Bill Finger to be published, in Green Lantern #1 (1941)even though it’s “more than a wee bit blurry.”

It’s not the photo itself that is prompting me to mention it, since it already has been disseminated elsewhere (including here). Rather it’s the reason it was used. So says an editor, most likely the editor, Roy Thomas: “…we’d grown tired of showcasing the same handful of Finger photos over and over…”

He means these two.

But what I am most taken by is a comment by Schwartz that may be most profound with no further comment: “Without Bill Finger, there wouldn’t have been any Bob Kane.”

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