This Sporting Life

Alan Wake

In 1938, Bob Kane was a young comic book artist trying to come up with a new superhero that could rival the extremely popular Superman. He got as far as sketching a bat-themed crime-fighter before clocking out for the day to drink heavily and ignore Hitler (the two most popular American pastimes of the 1930s).

Kane decided to enlist the help of a friend, a freelance writer named Bill Finger, to help develop the paper-thin idea he had. This translated to getting someone else to do the bulk of the work for him.

“Bob’s original vision included no story of any kind,” explains Marc Tyler Nobleman, author of Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator Of Batman. “He drew the first sketches, which Bill then completely overhauled, including pointing to ‘bat’ in the dictionary and suggesting Batman’s cowl resemble [an actual bat].“ 

Finger also wrote Batman’s “murdered parents” origin story, as well as the first stories to feature Robin, Catwoman, The Penguin, The Riddler, The Scarecrow, Commissioner Gordon, Gotham City, the batmobile, Batman’s secret identity, and the nickname “The Dark Knight.” Essentially, Bill Finger gave life to Batman in every sense of the word other than magically transporting himself into one of the comics and impregnating Martha Wayne. To reiterate, he did all of that work based on one Bob Kane illustration, which looked like the above.