Posted By Dan Greenfield on Mar 24, 2024 | 6 comments

BATMAN WEEK: Columnist PAUL KUPPERBERG brings you an interview he did with the late Gotham architect…

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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

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Modern rendition of Robinson’s original Joker card sketch

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.

1940

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 of the summer… well, I started out at 98 pounds because I was on the 98-pound track team, so I think I was down to 76 pounds. I averaged $17.50 a week. My mother persuaded me to take $25 of that hard-earned money and go away to a resort somewhere to fatten up because she didn’t believe I could survive the first year of college at my current weight.

I think it was in the Poconos. As I mentioned, I’m an inveterate tennis player because my older brothers liked tennis before me, they were on high school and college teams, and I played on my high school team. So, my first day out, I ran out to the tennis courts to find a game and I wore a painter’s jacket, which was a fad in colleges in those days, but the kids in my high school were imitating it because we lived near Princeton University. It was decorated by — people would put decals and whatnot on them, and I guess anybody who could draw would draw on theirs, which I did. I had cartoons all over me and I was wearing it as a warm-up jacket. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked who had done the drawings, and I confessed I had. He introduced himself and it was Bob Kane. I don’t know why he was at the tennis court because he didn’t play tennis.

Bob Kane

He asked me if I had heard of Batman, and much to his chagrin, I hadn’t. It had just debuted earlier that summer and there were only a couple of issues of Detective Comics out. We became friendly that week and, one day, we walked down to the local village to a candy store to find a copy and that was the first time I saw Batman.

I knew nothing about comic books. I used to enjoy the newspaper comic strips. I remember on Sundays we would get the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Record because they had the best Sunday comics. And when I was younger, I used to see these books that reprinted the syndicated strips, but that was it. So, I didn’t know anything about comic books when I saw Batman and I guess I wasn’t too impressed. I mean, I wasn’t really taken by my first exposure.

Batman #1. Robinson did some pencilling in this story — including the Joker card. Otherwise, he did background inks.

But Bob had been impressed by the drawings I’d done. I’d already been accepted at Syracuse University and was going to attend school there in the fall. Bob said that was too bad, because if I was going to be in New York he would offer me a job on Batman, which he was starting to need more help on. He told me I could make much more than I was selling ice cream. I was surprised. “Just for drawing pictures?” This immediately fired my imagination, so I quick called up Columbia University in New York, where I’d also applied, to see if my application was still good. It was, so then I called Syracuse and cancelled there, and finally I called home and told my mom I wasn’t coming home, I was going straight to New York. I went right from the mountains to New York City. And here I am.

Bob had no one else working with him at the time except Bill Finger, who should have been his credited collaborator, really. I was a student at Columbia by day and worked at night on Bob’s stuff. I started as his assistant and after about a year of burning the candle at both ends, I just couldn’t quite do it anymore. I don’t know how long I lasted at Columbia. Maybe two years.

Detective Comics #38. Kane pencils, Robinson inks

My most notable contributions to the Batman mythos were the Joker and coming up with the name for Robin, which isn’t often mentioned. The costume was a joint affair with Bob and Bill and me, we all pitched in different bits and pieces. The costume, like the name, was based on Robin Hood, not “Robinson” the Boy Wonder, as some publicity said at the time. When you’re 17 or 18 and you want to appear older, you don’t want to be called a boy wonder. You don’t want to be a boy anything. Now I’d be happy if anybody called me a boy anything.

Robinson’s original

I was responsible for the initial concept drawing and name of the Joker, the playing card, and that first sketch which has been reproduced everywhere. The rest was really a collaboration. Bob and all of us would throw ideas around and then they would get fleshed out. So, I would say, being very objective, things were mostly co-creations, except that the original concept of the Joker, the bizarre villain with the contradictory sense of humor, that was my concept. Bill wrote that first story and I think in words rounded out the concept and deserves as much credit as Bob or myself. And Bob fleshed out the rough visual of the character.

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MORE

— The BATMAN WEEK 2024 INDEX! Click here.

— The TOP 13 FIRST APPEARANCE BATMAN Action Figures — RANKED. Click here.

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PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a Bronze Age comic book creator, writer of Superman, the Doom Patrol, and Green Lantern, creator of Arion Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, and slayer of Aquababy, Archie, and Vigilante. He is the Harvey and Eisner Award nominated writer of Archie Comics’ Life with Archie, and his YA novel Kevin was nominated for a GLAAD media award and won a Scribe Award from the IAMTW. Now, as a Post-Modern Age gray eminence, Paul spends a lot of time looking back in his columns for 13th Dimension and in books such as Direct Conversations: Talks with Fellow DC Comics Bronze Age Creators and Direct Comments: Comic Book Creators in Their own Words. His latest, Direct Creativity: The Creators Who Inspired the Creators, is due out in April.

Website: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/

Shop: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/shop-1