The boys behind men in capes

Jerry Robinson, an essential figure in the early history of Batman and the American comic book, has many of his vintage ink treasures on display at the Skirball Cultural Centre, among them his 1940 sketch of the Joker, the cackling clown who today rivals Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter in popcorn-film villainy.

But in Robinson's long and wandering career as an illustrator, this new, sleek installation is hardly the most important art show — that distinction belongs to a one-man exhibit he staged 70 years ago on a tennis court in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

Robinson was fresh from high school graduation in Trenton, New Jersey, and splurged on a visit to a leafy resort.

He arrived on its tennis court wearing a white painter's jacket that he had decorated with his cartoons, the same sort that had made him a popular contributor to his school paper.

“Children would get these linen jackets and personalise them with all this razzmatazz,'' he recalled. “Someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked, ‘Hey, who drew that stuff?' It was Bob Kane, who had just finished the first issue of Batman. I didn't even know what that was. He showed me the issue. I wasn't impressed.''

Robinson, however, was impressed with Kane's offer of a drawing-table job in New York. The teenager had been accepted at three universities and had planned to go to Syracuse.

But after the serendipitous meeting, he phoned Columbia University in the city and said he was on the way. Born on New Year's Day, 1922, Robinson still has the lean physique, tan and alert eyes of a lifelong tennis player.

He lives in Manhattan but on a recent afternoon he was visiting the Skirball to check on the exhibit of his collection of original drawings from the golden age of comics, an archive that, quite literally, is a lesson in the potential of trash to reach museum walls.

In the years after he met Kane, Robinson worked on Batman and other comics and made a habit of rescuing the drawings by his peers that routinely ended up in the garbage.

Those poster-sized pages — many worth thousands of dollars — make up the heart of the Skirball exhibit ZAP! POW! BAM! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950.

Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Joe Shuster, Mac Raboy, Lou Fine and Robinson are some of the artists featured, a circle of young Jewish artists who became the basis for the ink-stained dreamers in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

The Jewish heritage of those creators makes the exhibit a natural for the Skirball, said Robinson, who is working on a book about Jewish traditions echoing in classic comics art.

“You look at Superman, the story of an orphan coming to America, keeping his identity secret and the names Kal-El and Jor-El. You can trace lines to the background of the creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, both Jewish,'' Robinson said.

“Overall, there was a remarkable confluence of events that led to the medium and the Jewish participation. Immigration brought a lot of great talent from Europe and they brought with them their traditions of storytelling and learning and studying.

"When comics came along in the 1930s, there was a talent pool waiting. And one reason is so many areas were closed to Jews.

"Colleges, advertising agencies, many of the corporations — the doors that were closed led to the one that was open.''


There is a crowded shelf of pop-culture studies on the sparkling role that young Jews played in the early comics but this exhibit looks to tap into a more urgent trend — the seemingly unstoppable surge of superheroes in film, video games and animation today.

At the top of that list is The Dark Knight, which last year pulled in $1 billion at theatres and won an Oscar for the late Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker. Considering that Oscar-winner Jack Nicholson also made history with a record $60-million payday for portraying the criminal clown in the 1989 film, it is a bit startling to consider the effect of that small Robinson drawing.

“That's the one, right there,'' Robinson said, pointing to the pen-and-ink piece. “It was based on a playing card and the character had a lot of mystery to him early on. We had no idea, of course, that we'd still be talking about him all these years later. When I think of the money from that film — a billion dollars ... I get a chill when I hear that. We should have copyrighted what we had done.

"But of course, we didn't know. We were young and no one could have seen all of this. ... It was a new industry and we were pioneering a new mythology. We had no past so we had very few rules. We also didn't expect any of it to last.''

By the late 1940s, Robinson had left Batman and was working with Stan Lee at DC's rival, Timely Comics, which would later be known as Marvel. In the 1950s his comics work veered away from superheroes and into romance, war and adventure.

In 1961, he moved into an art sector that was closer to his original aspiration, journalism, by becoming a political cartoonist. He would serve as president of the National Cartoonists Society in the 1960s, when that professional organisation was still in its glory days with Schulz and Capp among its ranks.

He would contribute to magazines and more than two dozen books, including his well-regarded 1970s survey The Comics: An Illustrated History of Comic Strip Art.

“I did 32 years of political cartoons ... I wrote and drew every word, every line,'' Robinson said. “That body of work is the one I'm proudest of. Looking at the Batman pages is like revisiting my youth. My first seven years in New York were the first seven years of Batman itself. While my time on Batman was important and exciting and notable considering the characters that came out of it, it was really just the start of my life.''

Not all of the Batman memories are pleasant. Kane, a decade older than Robinson, gave the Jersey youth his big break but he also took the public credit when Batman became a sensation.

Comics historians now credit writer Bill Finger with co-creating the caped crusader and they also acknowledge the spirited, polished style of Robinson is in many issues that do not bear his name. In the earliest issues, Batman had seemed more like Dracula than Dick Tracy but that changed with Robinson's ascension and the arrival of Robin the Boy Wonder, a character that Robinson named.

Robinson also was a key player in the creation of Two-Face, the Penguin, Alfred the Butler and other signature aspects of the Gotham City saga. Kane, who died in 1998, disputed Robinson's claim to the creation of the Joker. Robinson said with a shrug he won't argue with ghosts.

Comics historian Mark Evanier said Robinson need not worry, his legacy is secure: “Jerry is one of a handful of folks who created iconic images that the world will never forget. The Joker keeps dying in Batman stories but will never die in popular fiction.''

Robinson revealed recently that he plans to sell his entire collection of original art, a staggering bit of news. “There are hundreds of pieces, there's nothing like it anywhere else in the world but I'd like to sell it intact. I won't do an auction. I spent 70 years bringing all of it together. I don't want it dispersed now.''

There is one piece of art that he doesn't own that he wishes he could get his hands on, even if only for a moment. “I wish I had that old jacket I was wearing the day I met Bob. You know, I can't even remember what the cartoons on it looked like. That is something I would like to see again.''

ZAP! POW! BAM! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950, is on at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles until August 9.