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12/09/11(Fri)00:23 No.32143512Jerry
Robinson, a pioneer in the early days of Batman comics and a key force
in the creation of Robin the Boy Wonder; the Joker; Bruce Wayne’s
butler, Alfred; and Two-Face, died Wednesday afternoon in New York City.
He was 89.
The illustrator with a far-ranging career – after
shifting in the early 1960s into political cartooning, he would serve as
president of the National Cartoonists Society and then author the
exhaustive and well-regarded “The Comics: An Illustrated History of
Comic Strip Art” — died in his sleep during a late afternoon nap,
according to Michael E. Uslan, a close family friend and an executive
producer on all the Batman feature films since the 1980s.
The original art for a classic cover by Jerry Robinson (Jerry Robinson/Skirball Cultural Center)
Born
on New Year’s Day 1922 in Trenton, N.J., Robinson was a still a
teenager when he stepped into the fledgling comic book industry after a
chance meeting with Bob Kane, who showed the youngster the
just-published issue of Detective Comics No. 27, which introduced a
masked man-hunter called Batman. Robinson was at a resort in the
Catskills and wearing a white painter’s jacket that caught the eye of
Kane because the teen had covered it with his own illustrations.
“That
was a fad then, kids would get these linen jackets with all the pockets
and personalize them with all this razzmatazz,” Robinson told Hero
Complex in 2009. “I was wearing mine as a warmup jacket and someone
tapped me on the shoulder and asked, ‘Hey, who drew that stuff?’ It was
Bob Kane, who had just finished the first issue of Batman [which was
"Detective Comics" No. 27]. I didn’t even know what that was. He showed
me the issue that was on sale there at the local village. I wasn’t very
impressed.”
However, Robinson, fresh from high school graduation
and selling ice cream, was impressed with the offer of an art-table job
in New York City. He left the resort and, just 17 years old, went
straight to the city where he would ink over the pencil drawings of
older artists, do the lettering in the word balloons and help with
design and background. Eventually, the gifted youngster moved up to the
job of penciling, which is a marquee spot in the production chain,
although it was not exactly a time of glamor for the American comic
book.
Jerry Robinson's playing card sketch led to the visage of the Joker (Jerry Robinson collection)
Working
with Kane — who was a decade older — opened up new frontiers for the
gifted young artist, but Kane took the credit when Batman became a
sensation. It was Robinson, who started working on Batman in 1939 with
Kane and Bill Finger, who came up with the name “Robin” for Batman’s
sidekick, and he was the creator or key contributor to the first and
formative appearances of enduring characters such as the Joker, Two-Face
and Alfred, Bruce Wayne’s butler. As comics historians now credit
writer Bill Finger with co-creating the Caped Crusader, they also
acknowledge that the polished, high-verve style of Robinson is clearly
evident in many issues that do not bear his name.
In those early
days of the comics industry, the product was seen as totally disposable
and all the original art in the office would be thrown away. Young
Robinson, though, so admired the work of his older peers that he fished
the pages out of the trash and saved them. That led to Robinson
possessing perhaps the most esteemed collection of original art from the
golden age of comics. Key artifacts from that pen-and-ink archive were
displayed at museums, including the Skirball Cultural Center in 2009,
and then sold at private auction in 2010.
For today’s comic book
artists, Robinson was one of the last and most admired links to the
genesis era of the American superhero.
“Jerry Robinson
illustrated some of the defining images of pop culture’s greatest
icons,” said Jim Lee, perhaps the most popular comic-book artist of the
last 25 years and now the co-publisher of DC Entertainment. ”As an
artist myself, it’s impossible not to feel humbled by his body of work.
Everyone who loves comics owes Jerry a debt of gratitude for the rich
legacy that he leaves behind.”
Neal Adams, the comic book artist
who became a fan-favorite in the 1960s and a champion for creator
rights, said that young Robinson brought an energy and intuitive
understanding of his audience to the Batman comics. Nothing showed that
more, Adams said, than the addition of Robin, the plucky daredevil
sidekick who provided an entry point for every kid who spent their
nickels on Detective Comics, or characters such as Two-Face, which
showed Robinson’s affection for Chester Gould’s “Dick Tracy.”
“You
say ‘Batman,’ I say ‘Batman and Robin,’ it was the team that mattered
to me as a kid and Robin was the guy every reader wanted to be,” Adams
said Thursday by phone from New York. ”As I grew up and fell into this
stuff, I realized that everything I liked about Batman ending up being
the stuff that Jerry Robinson created. ‘Who is this guy? He did all
that? Yes he did all that.’ When I started doing Batman the stuff that
came back in — Two-Face, who they hadn’t used in years, and the Joker
and Alfred — all was from the stuff that Jerry Robinson did and when you
go see the films, a lot of that it is there, too. You can’t make a
Batman movie without Alfred.”
Comic books were just one stop in
Robinson’s long and eclectic career. “He was no one-trick pony,” as
Adams puts it. There was also the 1953-55 comic strip ”Jett Scott,”
created with screenwriter Sheldon Stark, that was recently collected
into a lavish hardcover by Dark Horse Comics, and his work as a curator
with a specialty in art-as-activism, which led to his invitation from
the United Nations to produce two major exhibitions, the Ecotoon
collection of environmental art at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in
1992 and the Human Rights collection of political commentary in Vienna
in 1993. Robinson also drew for Playbill, contributed to more than a
dozen books and shot photographs around the world for exhibition and
publication.
“There was an intellect behind everything he did and
no one that ever called Jerry and asked for help ever got a ‘No,’” said
Adams, who sought and got Robinson’s help in the 1970s for a successful
campaign seeking a pension for Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the
creators of Superman who had fallen on hard times even as their
brainchild continued to pile up hundreds of millions of dollars for
Warner Bros. ”Jerry didn’t hesitate a moment, ever, if he had a chance
to help someone.”
Robinson’s satirical eye led to two
award-winning newspaper features, Still Life and Life With Robinson,
which were syndicated throughout the 1960s and ’70s and part of a
three-decade career of published political commentary. The New York
Times once praised Robinson and his newsprint humor for “a commentary
more humorous and his approach more timeless than that of most other
political cartoonists.” Far from Gotham City, Robinson considered this
to be the defining core of his career.
“I did 32 years of
political cartoons, one every day for six days a week, I wrote and drew
every word, every line,” Robinson told Hero Complex. “That body of work
is the one I’m proudest of. Looking at the Batman pages is like
revisiting my youth. My first seven years in New York were the first
seven years of Batman itself. While my time on ‘Batman’ was important
and exciting and notable considering the characters that came out of it,
it was really just the start of my life.”
The newspaper strip "Jett Scott" by Jerry Robinson (Dark Horse Comics)
Still,
Robinson was proud of his years working in comics, especially of his
creations Atoman and a masked wartime hero called London. During his
time in the field he drew sci-fi, horror, romance, war, crime and spent
time on adaptations of well-known characters from other media, among
them Green Hornet, Lassie and Bat Masterson. The success of the recent
Batman films brought Robinson back into the spotlight — he even visited
the Cardington, England, set of “The Dark Knight” and attended the
premiere — but watching the Joker break box-office records was a
bittersweet experience for Robinson.
“It was based on a playing
card and the character had a lot of mystery to him early on,” Robinson
said of the creation of the Joker. ”We had no idea, of course, that we’d
still be talking about him all these years later. When I think of the
money from that movie — a billion dollars — I get a chill when I hear
that. We should have copyrighted what we had done. But of course, we
didn’t know. We were young and no one could have seen all of this…. It
was a new industry and we were pioneering a new mythology. We had no
past so we had very few rules. We also didn’t expect any of it to last.”
Robinson is survived by his wife, Gro; his son, Jens Robinson; his daughter, Kristin Robinson-White; and two grandchildren.
[UPDATE
: In a statement from the family, Jens Robinson wrote of his father:
"In addition to those closest to Jerry who knew him as husband, father,
grandfather, father-in-law, uncle and dear friend, Jerry was adored
personally and respected by so many people around the world. His comics
creations, especially the first supervillain, the Joker, are cherished
by many millions more. Jerry was one of the last remaining links to the
Golden Age of comic books in the 1930s and 40s. Among his numerous
awards and accomplishments, Jerry was most proud of his fight for
creator rights, notably on behalf of his friends the Superman
co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and oppressed political
cartoonists abroad. In his later career he revolutionized the way
political cartoonists worldwide are distributed outside their own
countries through the formation of the cartoon syndicate he founded."]
– Geoff Boucher |
