Continue Reading Below Advertisement

However, when even tracing started to feel too much like work, Kane simply hired ghost-artists. It got to the point where Bob Kane was the sole person credited on every Batman story, despite often not writing or drawing a single panel. So why does every Bat comic still include the credit "Created by Bob Kane"? In the 1940s, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, were trying to get the rights to the character back from DC, and hoped to recruit Kane for a joint suit against the company. Faster than you can say, "Holy dick move, Batman," Kane allegedly ratted them out to DC, giving the company plenty of time to mount a legal defense, and scoring Kane a lot of points with DC.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

He cashed in those points to negotiate a better deal for himself, and his new contract included a provision that Kane would always and forever be credited as the sole creator of Batman. There was presumably also a clause that stipulated he was legally allowed to shit on Bill Finger's head whenever the mood struck him.

via comicvine.com

He even dressed like a supervillain.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Impossibly, things actually managed to get worse for Finger, as Marc found in his research. In 1965, after learning that Finger had finally begun telling people that he'd created most of Batman, Kane flipped out. "Bob wrote a six-page letter for the fanzine Batmania in which he essentially called Bill a liar with 'hallucinations of grandeur,'" Marc says. Kane's argument? Finger couldn't possibly have been the creator of Batman because he wasn't officially credited as such, which is sort of like stealing someone's watch and then insisting that it never belonged to them because it is currently on your wrist.