Monday, May 13, 2024

Acknowledged in magazine about Batman's history

In 2019, Batman's 80th anniversary year, a magazine on all things Batman included Batman & Bill on a timeline of milestones.

This year, a similar magazine called The Story of Batman mentioned me on the final two pages (95-96) of its final chapter, "Bat to the Future":


...perhaps the most important event in the Batman's history happened in 2015—not in a comic book, movie, TV show, or any other storytelling medium, but in a press release, in which DC announced that it had reached an agreement with Bill Finger's family to add his name permanently as cocreator [sic] on all content featuring the Dark Knight. Finger's granddaughter and sole heir, Athena Finger, at the encouragement of Finger biographer Marc Tyler Nobleman, had been campaigning for the change. 

"We were coming up on [Batman's] 75th anniversary, and here I was, the heir, willing to fight for it publicly and talking about the Bill Finger story at comic conventions and participating in the culture," she says. Her position was supported by plenty of historical evidence of her grandfather's key role in the creation of Batman, provided over the years by Nobleman, various comic book scholars, and industry insiders, including [Michael] Uslan and early Batman artist Jerry Robinson.

The chapter ends thusly:

That real-life turn of events is the most satisfying conclusion imaginable to a fictional saga which has no end in sight. After all, if there is one thing that the Batman is all about, it's justice.

1 comment:

Jeff McGinley said...

My sister gave me this for my birthday, I noticed the usual pictures of Bob Kane all through it. Then I read it, and was happy to see a very different slant in the text, and that you got credit for raising the issue so well.