If you look at all the mainstream attention Robert Kirkman is getting due to the success of AMC's The Walking Dead, you'd think it was crazy. (Really, a comics writer on The View?) But in reality, it's hardly the first time. In the 1960s, when the Adam West Batman television series kicked off, Bob Kane experienced his own groundswell of attention -- and he loved it. Around that time, Kane started branching out from his comics illustrating to do a series of oil paintings of Batman and the primary characters in Gotham City, and took to showing them -- and posing in great posed photos like the one above (via Pop Culture Safari).

It was later revealed that to create these paintings Kane had hired artists to "ghost" after him, much like he hired artists like Sheldon Moldoff to assist his comics work in the '50s and '60s. It's hard to say how much of the paintings are his and how much he had assistance on, but either way they're a unique treasure -- just like these photos of the paintings and Kane hamming it up for the camera.

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