Direct Comments: Jerry Robinson
From Direct Comments: Comic Book Creators in Their Own Words (2021), a collection of first person, footnoted reminiscences based on the surviving transcripts of some 20-plus interviews I conducted in the late-1980s and early-1990s for DC Comics' Direct Currents, the monthly comic shop giveaway that I wrote for the entirety of its almost 100 issue run.
Jerry Robinson (January 1, 1922 – December 7, 2011), born in Trenton, New Jersey, was a seventeen-year-old about to start college when he met Batman creator and artist Bob Kane at a summer resort, a chance meeting that resulted in a career that persists to this day. Jerry began as Kane’s assistant and soon graduated to both penciling and inking. Among his many contributions to the Batman mythos of the 1940s was a definition of the strip’s look and style, the creation of the visual look of the Joker, and the naming of Robin, the Boy Wonder. After leaving Batman, Robinson went on to work on Vigilante and Johnny Quick for DC, the Green Hornet and features for Harvey Comics, and other publishers, including Atlas and Western Publishing. In 1961, he began writing and drawing political and social commentary strips for the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate and Classroom Fluffs and Flubs for the New York Daily News. In 1977, Jerry became the editor of the Cartoonists and Writers Syndicate, which syndicated cartoons and features to forty countries around the world.
I was born in Trenton, New Jersey, too long ago for my taste. Everybody says that anybody who plays tennis as well as I can’t possibly have worked on the original Batman, so I’d rather leave it at that.
I guess I was always an artist, but I wasn’t interested in art, as contradictory as that seems. I never thought of being an artist. I’d always drawn as a kid. They tell me when I was in kindergarten I used to lie on the floor and draw, portraits of my grandfather and so forth. But I never took art in school because in those in those days, you had to be a dullard to take art courses because they didn’t give you any credit towards college. But I was the cartoonist for the high school paper and one of the editors as well. So, in that sense I was drawing all the time but never with any thought of becoming an artist.
What I finally decided to be was a journalist and I came to New York to study at Columbia and that’s how I got into this mess.
I sold ice cream that summer, to earn enough money for my first year of college. The ice cream cooler was on a bicycle with a cart on the back, that’s how they did it before things were mechanized. Being the new boy on the block, they gave me the outer most franchise of the city so by the time I bicycled all the way out there, sold ice cream and rode back, I think at the end of the summer...well, I started out at ninety-eight pounds because I was on the ninety-eight-pound track team, so I think I was down to seventy-six pounds.
I averaged $17.50 a week. My mother persuaded me to take $25 of that hard-earned money and go away to a resort somewhere to fatten up because she didn’t believe I could survive the first year of college at my current weight.
I think it was in the Poconos. As I mentioned, I’m an inveterate tennis player because my older brothers liked tennis before me, they were on high school and college teams and I played on my high school team. So, my first day out, I ran out to the tennis courts to find a game and I wore a painter’s jacket, which was a fad in colleges in those days, but the kids in my high school kids were imitating it because we lived near Princeton University. It was decorated by—people would put decals and whatnot on them, and I guess anybody who could draw would draw on theirs, which I did. I had cartoons all over me and I was wearing it as a warm-up jacket. Someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked who had done the drawings, and I confessed I had. He introduced himself and it was Bob Kane.[1] I don’t know why he was at the tennis court because he didn’t play tennis.
He asked me if I had heard of Batman, and much to his chagrin, I hadn’t. It had just debuted earlier that summer and there were only a couple of issues of Detective Comics out. We became friendly that week and, one day, we walked down to the local village to a candy store to find a copy and that was the first time I saw Batman.
I knew nothing about comic books. I used to enjoy the newspaper comic strips. I remember on Sundays we would get the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Record because they had the best Sunday comics. And when I was younger, I used to see these books that reprinted the syndicated strips, but that was it. So, I didn’t know anything about comic books when I saw Batman and I guess I wasn’t too impressed. I mean, I wasn’t really taken by my first exposure.
But Bob had been impressed by the drawings I’d done. I’d already been accepted at Syracuse University and was going to attend school there in the Fall. Bob said that was too bad, because if I was going to be in New York he would offer me a job on Batman, which he was starting to need more help on it. He told me I could make much more than I was selling ice cream. I was surprised. “Just for drawing pictures?” This immediately fired my imagination, so I quick called up Columbia University in New York, where I’d also applied, to see if my application was still good. It was, so then I called Syracuse and cancelled there, and finally I called home and told my mom I wasn’t coming home, I was going straight to New York. I went right from the mountains to New York City. And here I am.
Bob had no one else working with him at the time except Bill Finger,[2] who should have been his credited collaborator, really. I was a student at Columbia by day and worked at night on Bob’s stuff. I started as his assistant and after about a year of burning the candle at both ends, I just couldn’t quite do it anymore. I don’t know how long I lasted at Columbia. Maybe two years.
The big break came when I was hired to work directly for DC Comics rather than in Bob’s employ. Bill and I were getting offers from all over. Everybody wanted anybody who was connected with Batman because it was becoming such a huge success. But there were just the three of us, and only two of us were obtainable. And I remember that every month or so Busy Arnold[3] would take me out to lunch. He once offered me a whole line of books to create and edit, and I was about to take that when DC prevailed on my loyalty to them and made me a better offer than they had before. Not better than Arnold’s, but good enough.
My most notable contributions to the Batman mythos were the Joker and coming up with the name for Robin, which isn’t often mentioned. The costume was a joint affair with Bob and Bill and me, we all pitched in different bits and pieces. The costume, like the name, was based on Robin Hood, not “Robinson” the Boy Wonder, as some publicity said at the time. When you’re seventeen or eighteen and you want to appear older, you don’t want to be called a boy wonder. You don’t want to be a boy anything. Now I’d be happy if anybody called me a boy anything. I was responsible for the initial concept drawing and name of the Joker, the playing card, and that first sketch which has been reproduced everywhere. The rest was really a collaboration. Bob and all of us would throw ideas around and then they would get fleshed out. So, I would say, being very objective, things were mostly co-creations, except that the original concept of the Joker, the bizarre villain with the contradictory sense of humor, that was my concept. Bill wrote that first story and I think in words rounded out the concept and deserves as much credit as Bob or myself. And Bob fleshed out the rough visual of the character.
When I went to work for DC, I was still drawing Batman, just not for Bob. In those days, Bob’s contract called for his studio to produce a certain number of Batman stories every month and DC would produce the rest in-house. That’s when I began to do my own stories, pencils and inks and covers. I also continued to ink some of Bob’s stuff as well and then we hired George Roussos to help ink.[4] He became my assistant on the inking. Because Bob, at that time, you know, the pressure, the work we had to do, the pencils, the inks. We got very loose breakdowns and we had to do a lot of penciling before we could even start inking, but I was most interested in doing my own stories, from inception.
I was on Batman until 1946. I had been kind of moonlighting on some other features while I was working for DC, using a phony name so they wouldn’t find out. I did a number of issues of Green Hornet for Harvey Comics in the early days. In fact, King Features wanted me to do a Green Hornet syndicated strip, but that never came through. I worked for a lot of different publishers. Magazines would launch, run for a few issues, and fold. Just a lot of individual stories. Some things I think for Joe Simon and Jack Kirby.[5]
And then I went into advertising, primarily, and then book illustration. I illustrated maybe thirty some books for various publishers, most of the major publishers. All kinds of books. Biographies, histories, works of fiction, you name it. I had a book agent and she’d bring in the books and ask if I wanted to illustrate them. I remember illustrating a whole series of biographies of great Americans. Science books, a whole gamut of things.[6]
In the early 50s I began to teach at what was originally known as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, which then became the School of Visual Arts. At the same time, or just before that, Mort Meskin and I formed a partnership. Mort and I were old friends. In fact, I had brought Mort up from another comic company downtown, a smaller one, to DC where he created Vigilante and Johnny Quick and he was doing those while I was on Batman. In fact, we had an apartment together. He and another artist, who came from my hometown, Bernie Klein, who was a great artist, and I brought him to DC as well. He was drafted and killed in Italy during the war. He was a combat photographer. He was killed at Anzio. That was the first great tragedy in my life. He was like my brother.
Anyway, somewhere along the line, Mort and I became partners and continued his features, Vigilante and Johnny Quick, together, and then did a lot of other features for other publishers, such as Black Terror and the Fighting Yank. And some other things for Simon and Kirby, who were packaging a line of comics for another publisher. I went back into comics for a period of time with Mort, several years. That was a good time. We worked together so well and knew each other so well. I think he’s one of the unsung heroes, a master of the comics of that era. I think we both did some of our best work in that time.
Then at one time in the 1950s I signed a contract with the Herald Tribune syndicate to do a science fiction strip called Jet Scott for a couple of years, daily and Sunday.[7] And that went quite well and at the end of two years we were in a big debate whether or not to continue it. Me particularly because it was very illustrative and an enormous load of work. I don’t think I had a day off for two years. And you know a comic strip is an unending struggle. One is eaten up every day. And while we worked very hard on the books, there was lag time between issues. It was almost luxurious compared to a syndicated strip, particularly an adventure strip.
And I don’t know anybody who does the whole job alone, which I did except for the lettering. I enjoyed it because I change things up with each story, which ran about six weeks in length. I would try to treat each episode as a separate entity, using whatever technique or approach I thought fit that particular episode. If it was set at sea, I might use Craft tint,[8] if it was set at the circus, I might do something else.
But at the end of two years, we were at a plateau, and I didn’t know whether to sign again. We had met our guarantee, and I think we were running in about seventy-five papers, most of the major ones, which was good, very good in those days. But it wasn’t making enough that I could afford to hire a bevy of assistants, like a top strip could, and I was doing well with the books and advertising and so I guess it was mostly me that didn’t want to continue it.
I made the decision to drop it, and to show you how important timing is, within months after I stopped doing the strip, Russia launched Sputnik and that caused a revival in outer space and science fiction. And particularly the kind of thing we had been dealing with. Jet Scott was kind of contemporary science fiction, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. Just a little bit ahead of what was really possible at the time. It would have been just the vehicle for that revival of interest. After that a flurry of other strips came in. If we’d continued, I might still be doing it today.
I was also still teaching at the School of Visual arts and enjoying it very much. I was doing a full load of comic book work at the time and teaching every night from six to ten p.m., five days a week. But a lot of my students were successful breaking into comics it and it was very satisfying. Students like Steve Ditko (Spider-Man, Dr. Strange, Mister A), Bob Fujitani (Flash Gordon and countless comic book and comic strip credits), Mort Gerberg (newspaper and magazine cartoonist), and Jack Abel (penciller and inker for DC and Marvel), when they’d reach a level of competence in one area or another, I’d get freelance jobs for them at the comics houses, which were flourishing during those years.
It was at that time, I think, that I got together with Stan Lee. I worked with Stan for a good part of the 1950s at Atlas Comics, just before it became Marvel. I did all sorts of things, some books continuing, a lot of one-shots or I’d do a story for the various magazines. I did a lot of Westerns, science fiction, crime, war. Sometimes I did the whole book, sometimes just the lead. I worked very well with Stan. I thought he was a very good editor. I think that’s kind of a lost period. Nobody remembers that stuff now.
Then I did a lot of work for Western Publishing. I did a number of books for several years, like Bat Masterson, a lot of adaptations of movies that they specialized in. Lassie. I really got to hate that dog. I would invent ways of hiding Lassie. If she was running across a field, I’d hide her in tall grass so all you could only see was her tail. If she was coming onto a room, I’d just show her nose poking around the door.
I was also active in the National Cartoonist Society (NCS) and later became president of the organization. I traveled on a number of trips with NCS, which was great, to entertain the troops for the USO. We went to Japan and Korea, several trips to Europe and South Africa. Those were gratifying and interesting trips, and what I saw on them helped me later with my syndicate because of some of the graphics I saw from around the world.
In 1961 I started doing political cartoons. I signed a contract with the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate for Still Life, a strip using inanimate objects that commented on the news.[9] It was rather avant-garde for the day and I tried to do something intriguing with the graphics. It was a daily panel of political and social satire. I really enjoyed doing it and getting back to my roots in journalism. I was always very interested in politics. History and political science were always my favorite subjects.
During a newspaper strike in New York,[10] I sold Still Life to some of the alternative newspapers that popped up to fill the void. I also went up to the local NBC News affiliate, which had expanded its evening news coverage, and they bought some of the strips and showed them on the air the same evening.
After the strike was over, I went up to the New York Daily News and saw the editor, Dick Clark. He had been following Still Life in the interim paper and liked the strip, but thought I was already signed with a syndicate, so he hadn’t bothered to call me. I walked out of there a half hour later with a contract signing me to the News and to the syndicate. I did Still Life for seventeen years for them. We also sold it in Europe, and the strip won the National Cartoonist Society’s Newspaper Panel Cartoon Award in 1963.[11]
About a year later, I came up with the idea for Classroom Flubs and Fluffs for the News’ Sunday comics section. That was really fun, because I had a whole half page in the Sunday comics section every week and I could do anything I want. I would get up to fifteen hundred letters a week. At one point I was getting more mail than the president. And it was coming from all over the world. It was incredible. In addition to being in the News, it was also later syndicated elsewhere by my own Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate, running from 1962-1979.
I founded the Cartoonists and Writers Syndicate in 1978 on the idea that cartoonists could best promote their own features. We would do features that the big syndicates didn’t find viable, that weren’t mass appeal strips. In effect, that’s proven to be true in that we’re still going, still doing new things. I started with my own strip, which had already gone from being called Still Life to Life with Robinson, after about seventeen years. I’d gotten tired with the limitations of using inanimate objects, so I gradually changed from a panel to a horizontal strip, using caricatures, whatever I needed for the gag.
[1] Bob Kane (October 24, 1915 – November 3, 1998), creator of Batman… yes, with the help of the likes of Bill Finger and Mr. Robinson, but we’re here to praise Jerry, not bury Bob.
[2] Milton “Bill” Finger (February 8, 1914 – January 18, 1974) was a comic strip and comic book writer who has been called the “co-architect” of the Batman strip. For years denied credit for his contributions for contractual reasons, Finger finally began receiving official recognition and credit in both the comic books and on-screen adaptations of the Dark Knight in 2015.
[3] Everett M. “Busy” Arnold (May 20, 1899 – December 1974) was an early comic book packager and publisher of Quality Comics.
[4] George Roussos (August 20, 1915 – February 19, 2000), sometimes known as “George Bell” was an artist and colorist known for his Golden Age runs of Vigilante, Air Wave, and Johnny Quick, among other work, and later at Marvel Comics as an inker on early issues of Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four. He was later Marvel Comics’ staff colorist.
[5] Honestly, no kidding, if you don’t know, I don’t know what induced you to read this book in the first place?
[6] I was pleasantly surprised to discover much later in life that one of my favorite childhood books, The Magic Tunnel by Caroline D. Emerson (Four Winds, 1964) had been illustrated by Jerry.
[7] Written by Sheldon Scott, Jet Scott was a Herald-Tribune Syndicate strip that ran from January 28, 1953 – January 25, 1955.
[8] A type of artboard that has invisible dots printed on it in a pattern. After the page is drawn, a special chemical is applied that reveals the dot-pattern in the areas where it’s been brushed on by the artist.
[9] From the Cartoonists & Writers Syndicate, 1962 – 1979.
[10] Lasting from December 8, 1962 – March 31, 1963, the strike cost workers $50 million in lost wages and the city’s newspapers over $100 million in lost ad revenues and circulation.
[11] He also won NCS Award in the Comic Book Division (1956) and in the Special Features category (1965), as well as being awarded the Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000. He’s also a 2004 inductee of the Comic Book Hall of Fame, and the 2011 recipient of the Sparky Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Cartoon Art Museum.
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