Saturday, June 6, 2020

Bill Finger in Little League

Batman is in the Justice League. Meanwhile, Bill Finger is in Little League…or rather would have been, if not for the pandemic.

This year, my March birthday timed perfectly with the world shutting down. But before we realized how seriously COVID-19 would affect life as we know it, my friends had lined up a most special gift: they sponsored a Little League team, which gave them the honor of naming it. 

That name: “Bill Finger’s Bat Men.”

(Get it?)


Yet another first for Bill Finger…and probably also for youth sports.

I’m sure all those young athletes would have been thrilled to play for a team named for a comics creator. Sports and superheroes don’t always go together. Then again, these days, you do see lots more crossover than I noticed when I was a kid—now it seems almost everyone likes at least one superhero. (This is predominantly due to movies rather than comic books.)

This sweet gesture was fitting in a way beyond the double meaning of the team name: one of the few known photos of Bill shows him in a baseball cap.


Sadly, due to the virus, the season was canceled, and therefore so was the name (not to mention the T-shirts). 

But for a fleeting moment, Bill was at bat.

Thursday, June 4, 2020

Nobleman: by day an author, by night…also an author

An artist named Luke Walsh (whom I don’t know) tweeted a humbling, charming two-panel comic strip about my Bill Finger work. 


Fact-check: I could never pull off that costume in real life. 

Thank you again for the kind post, Luke!

Tuesday, June 2, 2020

1990 Bill Finger co-creator credit…in Brazil

Eduardo Pereira, the director of a public library of comics in Brazil who is working on a book about Bill Finger, kindly called to my attention a 1990 Brazilian reprint of the 1988 DC Comics limited series Cosmic Odyssey.



I don’t speak Portuguese but I do speak Bill Finger, and there’s his name on the title page…as Batman co-creator. (“Criado por” = “created by.”) Not only that, but it says “and” (not “with”) Bill Finger.

Bill had received equal billing in DC Comics publications before this—the earliest I have found is from 1969—but not, to my knowledge, on a title page as an “official” credit.

Thank you again, Eduardo!