Batman red-handed?

What do you think of this?

http://henryvallely.blogspot.com/2006/05/gang-busters-secret-origins-of-batman.html

I'm not sure what to think... A comment on the page mentions Bob Kane admitted to hacking plenty of his Batman work -- stealing ideas, hiring ghost artists, etc. Expediency was the name of the game, comics were not considered art back then and it was OK to rush. In this respect I can understand a degree of normal cribbing -- such as repeating a common pose of Batman swinging on a rope with hardly any alterations.

The Bruce Wayne panel still copies the Henry Vallely pose closely enough to disappoint me a bit, though. I'm not sure why I care... Maybe because it's a really important scene in Batman history. And maybe this is just interesting trivia.

One commenter on the blog asks, "No offense, but how many ways are there to draw a man in a suit thinking at a desk?" and the answer is, about a thousand ways that look nothing alike. It gets beyond normal "referencing" (as I've been doing in the effort to feature an elephant in a comic I'm working on, which means looking at many elephant photos to get the poses right) and darn near tracing, as you can see in the animated gif below:

Yes, it matters. It's a bit of history I didn't know, a new view of Bob Kane. Nothing crushing, though. I don't blame the blogger, he's just sharing trivia he finds interesting, as I did.

wordmonkey said:

But again, classic pondering pose. I wouldn't hang the guy JUST on that panel.

Click to expand...

I'm not hanging him either; I get the point that such cribbing was normal and less frowned upon back in the day. Hell, a whole 64-page comic book sold for a dime -- how much time did they feel they owed us? So maybe it just wasn't supposed to be an art source.

This particular pose was definitely cribbed, though. No question. Far too many coincidences -- shoulderline, hairline, lips, fingers, shape of the brow, on and on. With much of this I'm focusing on the matched angle, which nails it -- if you Google images for "pondering" you'll see what I mean, where your Holmes-style classic pondering pose does indeed exist (hand, fingers or fist to the chin) but the angles, shapes of fingers, shapes of heads, etc. vary beyond count. This is without considering the coincidence of other examples with the same source and copier involved. Little enough was done to hide the fact to make it clear that the artist knew no one would really care.

This makes it interesting trivia to me. I didn't mean to imply that it damages my appreciation for the ongoing Batman character... don't think it does much.