Bill Finger

Milton "Bill" Finger (born February 8, 1914 in Denver , † January 18, 1974 in New York City ) was an American comic book author . He was best known as the co-creator of the cartoon character Batman and many elements of the Batman universe.

Life and activity

Finger was born into a Jewish family in Colorado in 1914 . His father Louis came to America in 1907 as an emigrant from Austria . His mother, Tessie, was from New York City. In addition to Finger, the family had two daughters, Emily and Gilda. During his childhood, the Denver family moved to the Bronx, New York, where his father ran a tailoring business. Finger graduated from De Witt Clinton High School there in 1933.

In the following years, Finger made his way as a shoe seller. Because of his ambition to become a writer, he joined the newly founded comics studio of Bob Kane , whom he had met at a party, in 1938 . Kane initially assigned Finger to ghostwriting comic strips for the Rusty and Clip Carson series .

After the National Comics publishing house had had a terrific success in 1938 with the restarted series about Superman , a fighter for justice and against crime equipped with superhuman abilities, and almost established the new genre of superhero comics, the publisher endeavored to to replicate this success with more superhero characters. Kane was therefore commissioned to design a new superhero for National Comics in his studio, which the publisher hoped would bring him another series that would prove to be a bestseller.

Kane then developed the character "the Bat-Man" ("the bat man"), which had very little in common with the Batman character that is common today: In the first drafts that Kane created, the superhero appeared as a blond man in a largely red costume with a domino mask and stiff wings fixed on his back. Finger, to whom Kane presented this draft, took on the task of revising it by giving Batman a gray and black costume instead of a red one, gloves and a mask covering almost the entire face and a black cloak.

It was also Finger who invented the name Bruce Wayne for the man who hid behind the masked Batman and gave him the secret identity of a supposedly inconspicuous rich playboy and wealthy heir from a wealthy family. He chose the first name Bruce as a reference to the Scottish folk hero Robert the Bruce , while he took the surname Wayne from Mad Anthony Wayne , as the name Wayne was typical of the class of the wealthy East Coast patriarch from which the man came. Finger also came up with the idea of ​​not just making the new character a superhero, but also making her a science-savvy detective.

The first ever published Batman story then appeared in May 1939 in issue 27 of the Detective Comics series . It was authored by Finger, but his authorship was not mentioned in the booklet. Then Finger acted almost continuously for more than twenty years, until the early 1960s as one of the lead authors of the stories published in the series Batman and Detective Comics about the hero developed by Kane and himself. During the 1940s and 1950s, Finger invented numerous elements that are fixed or at least recurring components of the Batman universe to this day: For example, Batman's hiding place and the quarters from which he plans his missions, the one hidden in a cave under Bruce Wayne's country house " Bat Cave ", Batman's car, the" Batmobile "and the name" Gotham City "for the New York City-based city where most of the Batman adventures take place. A quirk of fingers that developed into a recurring topos in Batman stories was to furnish his stories with oversized props such as gigantic penny coins or building-sized typewriters. So were z. B. the huge replica of a Lincoln penny and the animatronic Tyrannosaurus corresponding in size to the size of a real Tyrannosaurus Rex, which have since been constantly seen as trophies / decorations in Batman's hiding place, the Bat Cave, in stories written by fingers in the Bat myth introduced.

In addition, as an author, Finger invented numerous well-known helpers and opponents of the superhero in the 1940s and 1950s. So most of the members of Batman's classic villain gallery are Fingers' Creations. Among them: the murderous joker who looks like a clown and whose crimes are often thematically related to humor, comedy, joke articles and the like; the graceful thief Catwoman; the physically disfigured and split personality Two-Face , a former prosecutor who turned to crime ( Detective Comics # 66, August 1942); the cultured and shrewd master criminal Penguin ( Detective Comics # 58, December 1941); the elegant gentleman gangster Cavalier, who cultivates the appearance and mannerisms of a coat and epee hero; obsessed with riddles and the urge to prove his superior intellect ( Detective Comics # 140, 1948); the high-pitched and notoriously unsuccessful killer moth who, as a contrast to Batman as protector of the innocent, tries to succeed as protector of criminals in Batman's hometown; the marksman Deadshot ; Fear-obsessed University Professor Jonathan Crane, who disguises himself as a scarecrow and commits crimes; the "clay man" Clayface II, who can deform his body almost at will (Detective Comics # 298, December 1961); and the Mad Hatter, one of the characters of the same name from Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland modeled after criminals.

Batman's best-known ally, the finger created, is his young assistant Robin, who made the finger a partner of the superhero in 1940 in his fight against crime ( Detective Comics # 38, April 1940). Finger created the original version of the character as a young circus acrobat named Dick Grayson who was orphaned by a criminal attack. Other allies of Batman, who were the mental children of Finger, are: The eternal police chief of Batman's homeland, the honest and tough Jim Gordon; Bruce Waynes / Batman's faithful butler and factotum Alfred Pennyworth; the resourceful reporter Vicky Vale, a recurring love interest from Bruce Wayne. In the 1950s, he added some extremely shrill elements to the Batman universe, which, in keeping with the zeitgeist, became extremely tame and child-friendly for a number of years, which (in a revised form) still exist today: So Bat-Mite, a powerful and naive magical goblin from another dimension obsessed with Batman, whom he admires as a hero, emulates and wants to prove himself ( Detective Comics # 267, May 1959); and Batman's dog Ace, a German shepherd dog who accompanies Batman on his adventures ( Batman # 92, 1955). In the 50s, Finger also created the character of Kathy Kane, aka Batwoman, a female counterpart to Batman, with the rumor that arose from the prudish zeitgeist of the 50s that Batman and Robin, who lived together as bachelors, were homosexual, countered should be.

In addition to Batman, Finger wrote for numerous other series in the 1940s and 1950s. From 1940 to 1947 he wrote the adventures of the character invented by Martin Nodell, the superhero Green Lantern, who fights crime with a magic ring for DC Comics. He has also written stories for DC for the Superboy and Wildcat series .

In addition to DC, Finger wrote for other comic book publishers such as Timely Comics, Fawcett Comics, and Quality Comics. In addition, he worked on various scripts for films in the 1960s, including the scripts for the films Demons from Space (1967), Monster from Space (1968) and Track of the Moon Beast (1972/76). Finger also co-wrote two episodes for the Batman television series of the 1960s.

Finger died in his Manhattan apartment in the mid-1970s. He was cremated and his ashes scattered by his son on a California beach.

Finger's significant share in the development, elaboration and deepening of the Batman concept and many locations, characters and other elements of the Batman universe was only made many years after his death by the Time Warner Group, the owner of the DC publishing house that produced the Batman comics relocated, publicly recognized:

When he sold the Batman character to National Comics (the predecessor of DC Comics) in 1939, Bob Kane had an obligatory creator "byline" in all Batman comics, among other compensations, in the contract by which he transferred the rights to the character (and all adaptations of the material in other media) stipulated who named him, Kane, as the inventor of Batman. Finger was not mentioned in this by-line from 1939 to 2015 despite his contributions to the creation of the character.

Bob Kane stated in 1989 that he regretted that Fingers' role in developing the Batman myth had not been appreciated to the extent that it was deserved in light of his accomplishments. Kane announced that if he could turn back time fifty years, he'd get fingers the same by-line in the Batman stories (named as co-creator of the character) that he got himself back then and wrongly called him one "unsung hero". Jerry Robinson , who worked in Kane's studio in the 1940s , even stated that Finger had a lot more to do with shaping the Batman idea than Kane: "Bill had a lot more to do with shaping Batman than Bob. He did He did so many things in the early stages ... he made up almost every other character in the series ... the whole Batman persona, the whole character of the series. " ("[Bill] had more to do with the molding of Batman than Bob. He just did so many things at the beginning, ... creating almost all the other characters, ... the whole persona, the whole temper.") . And the ink artist George Roussos remembered that Kane had rough ideas, but that Finger was "the man behind Batman" ("Bill was the man behind Batman").

In 2007, DC Comics first casually admitted to Finger as co-creator of Batman in a press release, saying that "Kane, along with writer Bill Finger, had just [1939] created Batman for DC's predecessor National Comics". The publishing director Paul Levitz wrote around the same time that Batman was "the creation of Bob Kane and Bill Finger" ("the creation of Bob Kane and Bill Finger.").

Fingers granddaughter Athena Finger finally succeeded, more than forty years after Fingers death, in persuading the Warner Group to officially co-creator the, alongside Bob Kane, in the Batman comics and other Batman publications (films, series, etc.) Credit figure. In September 2015, Warner announced that, following an arrangement by the group with Fingers descendants, Finger would be named as co-creator of the character in all Batman products from 2016 onwards: The film began with Batman vs. Superman and the second season of the Gotham series . Since 2016, the credit line in all Batman comics and other Batman adaptations (such as movies and video games) is no longer "Batman created by Bob Kane" - as was the case from 1939 to 2015 - but "Batman created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger ".

Appreciations

The Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing has been presented at the annual Comic-Con International trade fair since 2005 . This award honors one living and one deceased comic book author.

In December 2017, the southeast corner of East 192nd Street and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx was renamed "Bill Finger Way". The reason for this is that this locality is located near Poe Park, where Finger and Kane discussed their Batman ideas at the time.

In 2017, the documentary "Batman & Bill" was published on the Hulu platform, dealing with Finger's long-forgotten role in the invention of Batman and the design of his world.

In 2018 an asteroid was named after him: (101723) finger .

marriage and family

Finger was married twice. His first marriage resulted in a son, Frederick "Fred" Finger, who died in 1992 of AIDS. Fred Finger had a daughter, Athena (* 1976). After his divorce from his first wife, he was a second marriage, Finger was married to Edith Simmons. This marriage also ended in divorce.

Web links

• Literature by and about Bill Finger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Bill Finger in the Internet Movie Database (English)