Batman: How Did Bob Kane Fake Doing 'Spur of the Moment' Drawings?

Welcome to the 884th installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed, a column where we examine three comic book myths, rumors and legends and confirm or debunk them. This time, our second legend is about how Joe Giella helped Batman co-creator Bob Kane fake doing "spur of the moment" drawings.

Recently, the comic book world lost one of the last Silver Age comic book greats, Joe Giella, the man who was the main inker for the Silver Age Flash and Green Lantern revivals, as well as the main Batman inker when the Batman TV series exploded on to the scene in 1966. In honor of Giella's passing, all three legends for this installment of Comic Book Legends Revealed will be about Giella and his comic work. This time around, this legend is about a hilarious scenario that Giella was once in with Batman co-creator Bob Kane, who famously stopped drawing comic books well before he "officially" stopped drawing comic books, and thus ghost artists like Giella were an important part of maintaining Kane's mystique as an artist.

What was the deal with Bob Kane and ghost artists?

As I have detailed a number of times over the years, and especially in Comic Book Legends Revealed (including some relatively recent installments), Bob Kane, the co-creator of Batman, eventually stopped drawing Batman comic book stories, choosing instead to hire other artists to draw the comic book stories for him, and then he would submit them to DC as though Kane himself drew them. This was because Kane had a special deal with DC that required DC to buy as many stories as Kane could submit, and pay him at a high rate. So the rate was high enough for Kane to pay someone else an above-average page rate (or if not above-average, at least decent enough for the constant steady work to be worth it) to do the pages for him. When he started doing this with Lew Sayre Schwartz, Kane would at least draw the Batman and Robin figures in each story (with Schwartz leaving space on the pages for Kane to draw them) to, I suppose, maintain the veneer in his mind that he was still kind of drawing the stories still, but by the time Sheldon Moldoff took over in the early 1950s, Kane wasn't doing any of the art at all.

Because of this, Kane's skills as an artist atrophied a great deal by the 1960s. In a recent Comic Book Legends Revealed, I shared a story of how Julius Schwartz (the editor who took over the Batman titles in 1964 and successfully got Kane to agree to "modernize" his art, meaning that Sheldon Moldoff had to modernize his artwork) messed with Kane one time by making him do an art correction on a Batman story while at the DC offices, knowing that if Kane was still doing the art at all, he certainly wasn't doing enough to be able to easily do an art correction on the spot. In that instance, Kane just paid another DC staffer to do the correction for him, while taking credit for it with Schwartz.

However, that certainly did bring up a major problem for Kane. It was one thing to take credit for other artists' work, but what happens when you have to demonstrate that you can draw yourself? It's certainly a bit of a pickle, especially since Kane was such a lover of publicity that he WANTED to do as many public appearances as possible. Well, as it turned out, he solved his problem with a little help from Joe Giella (who was inking "Kane" on the Batman titles at the time, and also ghost penciling and inking the Batman comic strip under Kane's byline).

How did Joe Giella help Bob Kane fake drawing on the fly?

In a great interview with the always informative Bryan Stroud, Giella explained how he helped Kane out back in the day:

For awhile Bob had a television show where he would sketch characters on a pad in front of a live audience. He'd do about a dozen drawings of each character. What many people don't know is that he was drawing over light lines I'd laid down, using his magic marker. I was paid by him, out of his own pocket, but my kids used to say, "Dad, that's not fair." I had to explain to my kids that I was assisting him.

I actually am unsure whether Giella was talking about a specific TV show that Kane had (presumably something local in New York) or if he was talking about a common thing that Kane would do at the time, which was to do drawings as a publicity thing (like he did that stuff to help promote the then-upcoming Batman TV series at the time). Presumably some of those would be on television. I'm not saying Giella is wrong, I just don't know the TV show he is talking about specifically. However, either way, Kane regularly DID do the sketch pad in front of a live audience routine, so I'm sure Giella is recalling things correctly in general, I just don't know the specifics of the setup.

Just for fun, here's another Giella anecdote about Kane that he told Stroud:

A true story about Bob Kane: Bob asked me to go with him to the police station to recover his lost wallet. We walked to the desk and Bob said, "I'm Bob Kane and I lost my wallet." They didn't know who he was and that made him very indignant, so he practically shouted, "I'm Bob Kane, the creator of Batman!" I felt like crawling under a desk. The police gathered around him and started asking all kinds of questions and really rolled out the red carpet. I stood there in amazement, thinking, "These guys are nuts."

Thanks to Bryan Stroud and the late, great, Joe Giella, for the information!