Toronto Comicon Report

Another very good show put on by Peter Dixon, Kevin Boyd, and the rest of the team from Paradise Comics. Highlights of the show for me personally:

Jerry Robinson. What a man. Wow. I had I guess a “working knowledge� of his career, but the 75 or so minutes of his panel could’ve gone on for another 6 hours and I still wouldn’t have had enough. Panel was run by noted comic historian and Steve Ditko expert Blake Bell, whose knowledge of bygone eras always impresses me. Highlights of the Robinson panel (with my paraphrasing all of it):

(1) Robinson recounting he and Bill Finger congregating in Bob Kane’s apartment working through story details, specifically the creation of Robin. He said the three of them came up with a list of names for the side-kick a mile long and that Robin was his choice because as a young man he’d enjoyed reading “Robin Hood� adventures. This did debunk a myth that I’d heard that the “Robin� came from “Robinson�. Jerry did say as soon as they agreed on the name that Finger added “The Boy Wonder� portion and that Bill and Bob routinely would refer to the then 18-year old Robinson as “Robin, the Boy Wonder�, a nickname he despised at the time. Now some 83 years old, Robinson said that he’d appreciate it if anybody at the show referred to him as “The Boy Wonder�, which got a lot of laughs from the crowd.

(2) A question was asked about DC’s Dark Knight Archives and a story that had been attributed to Gardner Fox. From Jerry “Wrong. Bill Finger wrote that story.� Robinson seemed resigned to the fact that DC’s research in assigning credits on many of the archived Batman stories was not very thorough and that they’d failed to check the validity of credit on much of the Golden Age work. He was very understanding of this, but did mention that there were people still around that could’ve been consulted – most notably, him!

(3) I asked him what his opinion was on the co-creation of Batman credit belonging to Bill Finger (admittedly knowing full well what he thought from my own research.) Robinson said it was too bad that Bob Kane was dead because I should’ve asked him. He said on more than one occasion that Bob was a very nice man, but on the point of the Dark Knight’s creation he said he’d never be able to forgive Bob for failing to credit Finger. He did say that he had personally been in touch with Paul Levitz and that a special Bill Finger award had been created and would be presented for the first time as this summer’s San Diego Comic Con.

(4) On this vein, he briefly recounted his involvement with Neal Adams in spearheading the Siegel and Shuster settlement. I commented that Jerry and Joe fought that battle together because they were such good friends and couldn’t understand why Kane and Finger hadn’t done the same. That was when he said that was a question for Bob that we’d never really know the answer to.

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