THOUGHTS ON BILL FINGER

I've recently finished two DC ARCHIVES collections of Golden Age Batman comics, and once more I am impressed with the level of quality in comparison with other formula-comics from the period. Yet the nature of this extra quality is hard to define.                                       

Whatever that "je ne se quoi" might be, it has nothing to do with a flouting of formula, that tedious preoccupation of the comic-book elitists. During the Golden Age, the dominant practice of comic-book publishers was to load their magazines with short stories of about eight pages each. This seems to have applied whether or not the magazines featured continuing characters, and the strategy probably evolved from the idea that the kid-readers had short attention spans and were more likely to pick up issues if they offered a lot of varied content. For adventure comics in particular, there evolved the formula that some have called the "three-act structure:"   

   (1) Villain, whether new or recurring, launches his first crime, defying either conventional lawmen or the starring hero, but escapes, (2) The hero crosses paths with the villain again, and the villain either simply escapes or subdues the hero and leaves him in a death-trap, (3) The hero either escapes a trap or finds a new means to track down the villain and defeats him, whether he's captured, dies, or merely seems to perish.                                                                       

 I haven't read every Bill Finger out there, even in comics alone. But I think I'm aware of all of his "career highs," and Rik Worth's book on the early days of Finger and his BATMAN co-creator Bob Kane has helped fill in a lot of blanks on this era of comics-history. Going by this biography, as well as an interview with Finger's grown son in ALTER EGO magazine, it appears that Finger didn't have any pretensions beyond making well-crafted formula adventure-stories for most of his life.                         

 What Finger seemed to have, though, was an inordinate talent for creating characters who transcended the limits of their formulaic stories. Dozens upon dozens of other writers followed the aforementioned "three-act structure" for such characters as Vigilante, Wildcat, Star-Spangled Kid, Tarantula, Human Torch, Black Terror and all the rest. But most other formula-stories in other features never escape the bounds of their own restrictions. Finger seems not only to have possessed the ability to take the formula-elements to their furthest extremes-- far more, I'd argue, than many more critically lauded talents like Jack Cole and C.C. Beck-- he also seemed to have inspired most of the other writers in the Bob Kane "stable," such as Edmond Hamilton and Gardner Fox. I'm not saying that any such imitations came about for abstract artistic reasons, though. If Gardner Fox wrote better stories for BATMAN than he did for RED MASK, it's probably because he recognized that the people writing the checks expected a special level of craft.                 

Finger also holds a special place in forging the trope of "the criminal who makes his crimes follow an artistic pattern." There were "pattern criminals," in the sense I'm using the term, in the pulp prose fiction on which most Golden Age adventure-comics patterned themselves, and a few preceded the rise of Superman and Batman. But what I've encountered in those earlier sources usually fit one of two types. First is the "one-gimmick villain,"-- an evildoer who gains control of one distinctive weapon, like the poison vampire bats of the Spider's 1935 foe "The Bat Man." Second is the "all-purpose villain," who can conjure a lot of weapons from an illimitable arsenal, like the 1938 "Munitions Master" from DOC SAVAGE, or Superman's first two "mad scientist" foes, The Ultra-Humanite and Luthor. Barring any new revelations, though, the Joker appears to be a third type: the "pattern criminal," who repeatedly keeps using gimmicks that reference some particular fetish or propensity. The Joker only uses one humor-based gimmick in his debut, the famed "Joker venom," but Finger and other Bat-writers kept finding new gimmicks for the Clown Prince of Crime to employ in his war of one-upmanship with the Dynamic Duo. Jerry Siegel debuted Luthor a month or so after the first appearance of the Joker, but as stated he was always an all-purpose villain. Siegel didn't tap into the appeal of "pattern criminals" until he launched his own somewhat risible take on Batman and Robin with the duo of "the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy" in October 1941. The Kid and his partner began battling arguable pattern-types like The Needle-- though I imagine Finger's second big antagonist, The Penguin, predated all or most of these by some months, since he popped up just a couple months after the Kid's debut. Superman's first recurring pattern-criminals, The Prankster and The Puzzler, both debuted in 1942.                                                                                   

  I think Finger's power to create good villains-- and, hypothetically, his ability to inspire other creators by his profit-making example-- sprang from his interest in figuring out at least rough psychological motives for his evildoers, just as he may have done for his heroes. This interest in even shallow psychology outstrips most of Finger's contemporaries. Jack Cole had an artistic talent which none of the BATMAN artists could have emulated had they wanted to, and also a taste for the ghoulish that exceeded the best japes of the Joker. But Cole's villains are almost entirely one-dimensional, and his best-known hero Plastic Man is not too much better. Both Rik Worth and Fred Finger suggest that Bill Finger was a dreamer who never quite grew up, so that he was rarely able to manage money or time. But I'd argue that even in his weaker stories-- and Finger did a lot of goofy, poorly conceived stories in addition to his quality fare-- he shows a greater, perhaps childlike ability to take the weirdest ideas seriously, in a spirit of uninhibited play.                  

MYTHCOMICS: "CRACKS" (SHOWCASE 94 #7, 1996)

I didn't follow much of the KNIGHTFALL continuity in the 1990s Batman titles. I knew at least generalities: that, after the original Batman had his back broken by the villain Bane, a substitute for the Caped Crusader had to be found. One Jean-Paul Valley took over the mantle, albeit wearing a high-tech suit-- possibly an editorial comment on the then-popular vogue for Image-style heroes-- and passing himself off as the authentic crimefighter.

I've usually found Peter David's writing, however entertaining, to be antithetical to the notion of symbolic discourse. However, David succeeds in this "imitation Batman" story due to two other overriding factors: that the art is supplied by Craig Russell and Michael Gilbert (both credited for both penciling and inking chores), and that here David is able to work with the rich mythology of the Bat-universe.

As the Jae Lee cover makes clear, this is a story devoted to Batman's frequent foe, the Penguin. In contrast to the Golden Age version reviewed here, the nineties version of the criminal no longer involve him committing clever, bird-based robberies. "Cracks" is structured like a crime story, focused on the Penguin-- whose criminal status is concealed under the veneer of respectable
activity-- being interrogated by Commissioner Gordon at police headquarters. At the time the story opens, "Armored Batman" has been operating for some time, though many persons-- including both Gordon and Penguin-- suspect that Valley is not the real deal.

The wordless first page establishes that the Bat-signal-- artfully reflected in the Penguin's monocle-- is shining in the sky, and the dialogue on the next relays that the signal has gone unanswered for half an hour. Gordon needs Batman because Penguin has boasted of having kidnapped the Commissioner's wife, and that she's doomed to perish in a giant egg about to fill with poison gas. What does Penguin want, to reveal her location?

Of course, Penguin isn't going to reveal his desire right away. He masks it by blathering about the evolution of birds from dinosaurs, and states that both he and Gordon are dinosaurs because they came from a time that valued "style and finesse." (Implicitly another shot at the banality of Image Comics, which David was wont to criticize more than a few times in that decade.) Then the villain challenges the cop to figure out what he Penguin wants in exchange for the information.

Eventually, after much cat-and-mouse dialogue, Penguin does reveal what he wants-- to affirm his suspicion that New Batman is a "decoy"-- but Gordon takes it further. Forced to play psychologist, the cop baits the villain by asserting that he suffers from "the most massive inferiority complex in all of Gotham," and that the real reason he wants so badly to know about Batman's fate is because he wants "to be treated by Batman as if he's important." There was nothing startlingly new in this observation. Penguin's first appearance played upon the scorn he received for his birdlike appearance, and later iterations, especially one by Denny O'Neil, made his complex explicit. But David does add, in counterpoint to the evocative art, a leitmotif in which Penguin constantly throws bird-metaphors in the Commissioner's face, and then finishes by claiming, "We both worship winged creatures, but I can still function without mine. Can you?"

Gordon's final strategy is one which Batman himself has been known to employ: dragging an unrepentant villain to a rooftop, and asking him if he wants to learn how to fly.

However, to the cop's good fortune, Valley-Batman then appears on the same rooftop, revealing the reason for his absence: that he'd already ferreted out the location of the Commissioner's wife, and didn't want to waste time answering the signal. And though the reader knows it's not the real Batman, the hero makes clear that, as far as crooks like Penguin are concerned, he'll always "be there" to stop them. Then the final page once more echoes the image of the Bat-signal reflected in Penguin's monocle-- only this time as an symbol of the "cracks" in his pose of superiority: his existential fate, insofar as a comic-book villain can have one, to suffer eternal defeat at the hands of a hero.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE GOLDEN EGGS" (BATMAN #99, 1956)

The cover to BATMAN #99 doesn't include any images of the crusader's second most famed felon, so I'm leading off with the cover of the 1966 paperback reprint of the story "The Golden Eggs," which to my knowledge is the only place where the tale has seen reprint.

The paperback obviously came into being to cash in on the 1966 teleseries. The series patently diverges from the comic in many ways, some of which greatly annoyed comics-fans, as I covered in the course of the three-part BATTLE FOR BAT-LEGITIMACY series. However, one of the things that the series got right was the thoroughly unrealistic concept of the "pattern-criminal."

The "pattern-criminal" was the name I applied back in The Day to all characters whose crimes followed some sort of pattern that had intense meaning for said characters. These crooks didn't simply stick up banks or museums at random, but constructed their heists like theatrical performances designed to one-up the forces of law and order generally, and Batman specifically. To be sure, the comics did "pattern-crimes" better than the series did, given that the comics were exclusively aimed at an audience invested in enjoying escapist, unrealistic "cops-and-robbers" stories.

I would assume that there may have been some precursors to this form in prose fiction, particularly in pulp fiction, but even the weird fiends of the DOC SAVAGE feature don't seem nearly as fetishistic about their crimes. So far as I can tell, Bill Finger invented the concept in comic books with the 1940 debut of the Joker in 1940. In his first appearance the Clown Prince's only fetish-crime consists of killing off his victims with a "venom" that makes them grin horribly as they expire. Yet Finger didn't immediately apply the notion to all of Batman's antagonists. Both Hugo Strange and the Cat-- later, Catwoman-- appear in the same issue as the Joker, but their crimes don't follow any pattern as such.

Both Joker and Catwoman began emphasizing "pattern-crimes" over the years, as did the aforementioned "Birdman Bandit," the Penguin. He first appeared in DETECTIVE COMICS #58 (1941), but despite his bird-like appearance, he committed no "bird-crimes" at the time, but was defined more by his use of weaponized umbrellas.

Later Penguin stories had the master malefactor switch off between patterning crimes after birds or after umbrellas, but many of these stories didn't pursue the patterns with enough symbolic complexity to propagate. This Finger-Moldoff story, whose title is borrowed from the fable of "the Goose with the Golden Eggs," is one of the exceptions.

By then, it was quite common for supervillains to seize upon some reversal in their fortunes, and to seek to turn it around, the better to demonstrate their insidious inventiveness. As the story escapes, the Penguin has escaped one of his hideouts just before Batman and Robin break in. He takes refuge in a second, rather shabby hideout, but he's brought one item from his old digs with him: a box of bird-eggs. Nothing daunted, the villain then gets the idea to pattern his next crimes according to whatever birds hatch from the eggs, as if to show off his brilliance at being able to profit from the vagaries of fate. The one vagary he can't fathom is a single egg in his collection that he doesn't recognize.

I won't spend a lot of time on each of the Penguin's "golden egg" crimes, but they all share a cosmological aspect, in that they reproduce scientifically observable ornithological factoids. Like most of the ego-driven Bat-villains, the Penguin gives the lawmen a clue as to his impending plans. In one scene, he sends the remnants of a herring-gull eggshell to police HQ. Batman, whose knowledge rivals that of the super-crook, knows that the crime will follow the herring gull's pattern of dropping clams from great heights in order to break their shells. So of course the Penguin uses a helicopter with a claw-attachment to lift a safe out of a skyscraper-office.
Each crime is an occasion for writer Finger to show off his research into bird-lore, and in one of the endeavors, Penguin's main crime is accompanied by a distraction-technique, fooling the Dynamic Duo into chasing the mad laugh of a "kookaburra."

In the end, the crimefighters trail their foe to his hideout. Penguin gets the drop on them with one of his umbrellas, one holding an artificial bomb-egg. (If he'd been the TV-villain Egghead, he would have dutifully called it an "eggs-plosive.") Penguin is hoist on his own petard when the "mystery egg" hatches, releasing a baby alligator that bites his shin and allows the heroes to disarm him. He returns to durance vile as usual, not forswearing crime as such, but casting a pox on all eggs.