Sun Jun 24, 2007 — by Robert Greenberger

The Case of the Chemical Syndicate

How The Shadow was the template for Batman

Every so often historians find something that appears to be the final piece to a puzzle.  Comic book historians have certain mysteries or questions they’d like answers to.  Recently, Anthony Tollin and Will Murray pinpointed the source material that helped inspire Bob Kane and Bill Finger to create the character of Batman.  The results can now make people further consider how much of Batman is Kane and how much is a result of the popular culture of his day, providing fodder to be reimagined in a new medium.

Comic Mix talked with Tollin, a longtime comic book veteran, who has been producing new facsimile editions of The Shadow and Doc Savage for the full details. 

Greenberger: Tony, for those less familiar with your name, give us the short hand background on your career in comics and old time radio.

Tollin: 20-year DC career, beginning as proofreader, then assistant production manager/color coordinator, then cover colorist for a decade and interior colorist of Green Lantern (15 years), Justice League of America, Superman, Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Shadow Strikes, Doc Savage, The Phantom, etc.  Also co-colored Batman and Detective Comics as a team with Adrienne Roy through much of her 16-year run on the titles (190 issues of each, not to mention The Brave & The Bold, Batman and the Outsiders, Shadow of the Bat, Robin, etc.) And also work at Disney, Topps, Marvel, National Lampoon’s Sunday comic section parody, PS Magazine for Murphy Anderson. Also wrote 70-plus old-time-radio historical booklets for Radio Spirits and the Smithsonian Historical Archives, scripted Stan Freberg's When Radio Was for six years, and co-authored The Shadow Scrapbook with Walter Gibson.

Greenberger: And what about your fascination with The Shadow?

Tollin: I fell in love with the character in junior high, after previously reading Walter Gibson's magic books as an amateur magician and ventriloquist.  Back then Shadow pulps were few and far between, so I rationed them, only allowing myself four chapters per day. This was back around the time of the Batman television series when Bats was often pretty silly. The Shadow embodies mystery and intrigue. Of course, Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams later brought Batman back to his dark and mysterious roots, but I guess I was a bit ahead of the curve. The magic of Walter Gibson's shadowy creation is that it gave the hero the charisma normally reserved for the villain. The melodrama villain, parodied by Dudley Do-right's Snidely Whiplash, was always the most fascinating and charismatic character in the play. Are we as fascinated by Jonathan Harker or Luke Skywalker as we are by Count Dracula or Darth Vader? Of course not! Gibson described The Shadow as a "Benign Dracula." In the conventional melodrama, the villain in black laughed evilly as he tied the girl down to the railroad tracks. Gibson turned that around, so that the menacing laughter and the arrival of the man in black represented rescue and salvation, not doom. The Shadow is a hero in black who owns all the power and charisma of the melodrama villain. That was, and still is, a brilliant innovation.

Greenberger: You've been researching the Shadow on radio and in print for years.  How did you finally discover this nugget?

Tollin: A few months back, Will Murray reminded me of Bill Finger's quote that his first Batman "script was a take-off on a Shadow story." (from Steranko's History of the Comics Volume One)  I kept thinking about it and it occurred to me that nobody had ever bothered to find out which "Shadow story" was lifted. I suggested that to Will over the phone one night, and with his assistance I had found the story in less than 20 minutes. Will and I each had ideas as to which stories it couldn't be, so it became a process of elimination. We had both thought it would be a lot harder than it was. I had expected the lift to be less blatant. It turned out to be the same story with basically nothing changed. I mean, it was a chemical syndicate in both stories! Finger didn't even change it to some other kind of business. And The Shadow is described as "bat-like" in the rooftop scene where Batman makes his first appearance in costume.

Curiously, it turned out to be the first Shadow novel not written by Walter Gibson. Neither of us recognized it as the inspiration for "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate" when we first read it back in the 1970s. And because we were both friends of Walt Gibson, we tend to spend a lot more time reading his 283 Shadow novels than Theodore Tinsley's 27 novels.

Greenberger: What makes this story significant for comic book fans?

Tollin: Well, it clearly establishes that without The Shadow, there would be no Batman! Since the first Batman story was a start-to-finish lift of an earlier Shadow novel, it establishes that the similarities between the two characters were no accident. Bruce Wayne is wealthy young man about town Lamont Cranston. The friendship between Bruce and Commissioner James Gordon (whose name comes from The Shadow's sister magazine, The Whsiperer) is no different from the relationship between Cranston and Weston. Batman's talent for escapes also comes from The Shadow, since the first recorded Batman escape duplicates The Shadow's in the same story. And the Shadow lifts continued in subsequent stories, even ones written by Gardner Fox, which gave Batman an autogiro, Bat-a-rangs like The Shadow's cable-outfitted "yellow boomerang," and a suction-cup device for scaling walls ... all Shadow gimmicks. Without the Knight of Darkness, there would be no Dark Knight.

It also raises questions about the extent of Bob Kane's actual contributions to the feature that bears his creator credit. If Finger's first Batman script was a blatant retelling of an earlier Shadow novel, and Finger also suggested the Caped Crusader's bat-eared cowl, bat-scalloped cape, black-and-gray costume and utility belt, what did Kane personally contribute to the feature besides its title? And as to Kane's claims that  Douglas Fairbank's acrobatics in The Mark of Zorro were an influence, it now turns out that it was  movie-buff Bill Finger who regularly supplied  the acrobatic stills  of Fairbanks  to Bob Kane and his assistants.

Also, Theodore Tinsley's first Shadow novel mentions "bat-like" and "bats" on seven occasions. This is most unusual for a Shadow novel. One really has to ask, did this novel actually inspire Batman's creation from the very start. I mean, it's a bit of a stretch to assume that Kane and Finger came up with the idea of Batman first, and that it was a complete coincidence that the story Finger chose to imitate was comparatively crawling with bats.

 Of course, comic strips and comic books back then regularly lifted from what was hot in other media. Radio's The Aldrich Family (and its Broadway predecessor What a Life, which first introduced Ezra Stone as Henry Aldrich) begat Archie Andrews. Frank Packard's Jimmie Dale, The Gray Seal was lifted as the Green Hornet and The Phantom (before Lee Falk changed his mind and added the jungle motif four months later), while radio's Chandu the Magician (with his girlfriend Princess Nadja) certainly influenced Mandrake and Princess Narda. And let's not even mention the similarities between a certain Clark who is the Man of Bronze and promoted as "Superman" in 1934 house ads, and another Clark who was the Man of Steel. And, of course, it didn't stop with the Golden Age. I'm sure it was no coincidence  that Barry Allen was a police lab scientist like the character of Ray Pinker on the then #1 TV series, Dragnet(or the police scientist played by Jack Webb himself in Dragnet’s film inspiration, He Walked by Night). There are plenty of similarities between Doc Savage's Iron Crew and the Challengers of the Unknown, and also the Fantastic Four. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were both Doc Savage fans as teenagers. It's probably no coincidence that the Fantastic Four are led by the world's greatest scientist, and operate without secret identities from the top floor of a famous Manhattan skyscraper. And Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm are constantly insulting each other and picking fights just like Monk and Ham. The first generation of comic book professionals didn't grow up with comic book superheroes, so they imitated the pulp superheroes of their own teenage years.

Greenberger: Is there anyway to know if Bill Finger and/or Bob Kane read The Shadow pulps at the time?

Tollin: Oh, yes.  Bill Finger confirmed it in the Steranko History.  He also admitted that "I patterned my style of writing after The Shadow.... It was completely pulp style." Kane acknowledged a Shadow influence in the text feature that accompanied "Gotham City Line-up," the 1964 "new-look" story that killed off Alfred Pennyworth. (Though of course he got better.) Bob Kane admitted reading hero pulps like Doc Savage when Finger loaned them to him, and also admitted, "We didn't think anything was wrong with Batman carrying a gun because The Shadow used one."

Greenberger: What prompted you to begin the current cycle of reprints?

Tollin: The opportunity to bring Walter Gibson's wonderful stories back into print, after a 22-year hiatus.  And the reprints have been as successful as I'd hoped. There are a lot of others who love these classic characters. One of the nice rewards is that most of the subscription checks and renewals are accompanied with "thank you" letters from people telling me how glad they are to be getting the stories in this double-novel trade paperback format. And everyone seems to really like the historical articles too. 

One thing I'm hoping to accomplish is to introduce readers to the real Shadow of Gibson's novels. Too many comic fans and creators see The Shadow as a murderous executioner, which he certainly wasn't in Gibson's novels. People see the strong cover images of the blazing '45 automatics and think that's what the character is about. No, The Shadow is about mystery, deduction and misdirection. The Shadow's powers of deduction are rivaled only by Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe. (By the way, Gibson did know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; they were introduced by their mutual friend, Houdini.) The Shadow is certainly well armed, usually carrying four '45 automatics into battle. But he basically treats them as a soldier or police officer would, only using them when his life or an innocent's is at stake. The Shadow is certainly not a bloodthirsty executioner (while his imitator The Spider certainly is).

I certainly hope the availability of these new reprints well help comic book and motion picture creators to get the character right in the future, and allow them to draw inspiration from more than just the cover paintings.

TOMORROW: Tony talks about what other goodies can be found in this special issue plus some additional insights to DC Comics, Batman and the pulps' legacy.

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