JERRY ROBINSON: How a Tennis Match Led Me to the World of BATMAN
BATMAN WEEK: Columnist PAUL KUPPERBERG brings you an interview he did with the late Gotham architect… — Welcome to BATMAN WEEK 2024 — celebrating the 85th anniversary of the release of Detective Comics #27, on March 30, 1939. Over seven days, you can look forward to all sorts of groovy and offbeat columns, features and cartoons that pay tribute to the greatest comics character in the history of mankind. For instance, this excerpt from columnist Paul Kupperberg’s book Direct Comments, in which the late, great Jerry Robinson reveals how he got involved with the Caped Crusader. Dig it. And click here for the rest of the BATMAN WEEK features. You’ll be glad you did! — Dan — JERRY ROBINSON (As told to PAUL KUPPERBERG) I was born in Trenton, New Jersey, too long ago for my taste. Everybody says that anybody who plays tennis as well as I, can’t possibly have worked on the original Batman, so I’d rather leave it at that. I guess I was always an artist, but I wasn’t interested in art, as contradictory as that seems. I never thought of being an artist. I’d always drawn as a kid. They tell me when I was in kindergarten I used to lie on the floor and draw, portraits of my grandfather and so forth. But I never took art in school because in those days, you had to be a dullard to take art courses because they didn’t give you any credit towards college. But I was the cartoonist for the high school paper and one of the editors as well. So, in that sense I was drawing all the time but never with any thought of becoming an artist. What I finally decided to be was a journalist and I came to New York to study at Columbia and that’s how I got into this mess. I sold ice cream that summer, to earn enough money for my first year of college. The ice cream cooler was on a bicycle with a cart on the back, that’s how they did it before things were mechanized. Being the new boy on the block, they gave me the outer most franchise of the city so by the time I bicycled all the way out there, sold ice cream and rode back, I think at the end...
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