Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Untold tale of Bill Finger #2: His scripts couldn't hide

My picture book on Bill Finger (uncredited co-creator, original writer, and costume designer of Batman) is due out in 2012. It seemed especially apt to tell Bill’s story in that format. Among his peers, he had the reputation as the most visual writer of his generation.

He wrote scene after scene that was plain fun to draw. For example, he had a penchant for setting action scenes on oversized props. Not all were food-related, but some of the funniest were:

Batman #146 (3/62)

Detective Comics #222 (8/55)

Batman #87 (10/54)

A list of oversized props used is here, but it's not complete. (No giant toaster.) And while Finger was the mind behind this big idea, other writers came on board. (There was plenty of room.)

Artists could identify Bill's scripts even when they didn't contain a gargantuan globe and even when his name wasn’t on them.


“I got out of the comic business for a living in the mid-50s,"
artist Lew Sayre Schwartz told me in 2006, "but I remember those [Finger] scripts like it was yesterday.”

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