ENTERTAINMENT
June 27, 1989 | STEVE WEINSTEIN
Lost and forgotten in the seemingly unceasing "Batman" hoopla is the name of the man who wrote the first Batman comic book stories. Bill Finger, who died in 1974, collaborated with artist Bob Kane on the original "The Bat-man" comic book that appeared in May, 1939, according to "The World Encyclopedia of Comic Books." Kane, the recognized creator of Batman, received a credit on the film as the creator of the Batman comic characters. Finger's name is nowhere to be found. "I'm annoyed at the whole thing because people should get what they deserve," said Lyn Simmons, Finger's widow, who asked Warner Bros.
NEWS
November 17, 2005 | Geoff Boucher, Times Staff Writer
ONCE upon a time, you could safely speak up at a dinner party and mock comic books as the empty calories of a juvenile diet, the brightly colored cotton candy of the magazine rack. Those days are gone. Comic books (sorry -- graphic novels) are now treated in some quarters as museum pieces -- that is quite literally the case at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Hammer Museum, which, starting Sunday, will co-host an exhibit that anoints and annotates the "Masters of American Comics."
NEWS
August 29, 1997 | Associated Press
The late Marvel Comics editor Mark Gruenwald got his wish: His ashes were blended with ink and made into a comic book. "This is something that he really wanted because he really loved comics. He wanted to be part of his work in a very real sense," said Mark Harras, Marvel's editor in chief. The ashes of Marvel's senior executive editor were mixed at a printing plant in Canton, Ohio, for use in "Squadron Supreme," a reprint of a limited edition 1985 comic he wrote, Harras said Thursday.
OPINION
May 19, 2013 | By Larry Tye
My nomination for American hero of the 20th century is someone who lived half his life in disguise and the other half as the world's most recognizable man. He appeared on more radio broadcasts than Ellery Queen and in more movies than Marlon Brando, who once played his father. He helped give America the backbone to wage war against the Nazis, the Depression and the Red Menace. He remains an intimate to kids from Boston to Belgrade and has adult devotees who, like Talmudic scholars, parse his every utterance.
ENTERTAINMENT
April 11, 2010 | By David Ng >>>
Look, up in the sky! In case you haven't noticed already, our entertainment stratosphere has grown crowded with muscle-bound superheroes in almost every conceivable shape and size: the franchise-rebooted likes of Spider-Man and Superman, battle-armored warriors such as Robin Hood and Perseus. To whom do we owe our super-saturated superhero culture? It would be easy to lay all of the credit (or blame) at the feet of comic-book artists and Hollywood executives. But superhero roots go much deeper than that, and if you excavate long enough, you will inevitably bump smack into Richard Wagner, the 19th century composer whose four-opera cycle "The Ring of the Nibelung" is regarded by many as an important genetic mother ship for today's fleet of action heroes.
NATIONAL
March 15, 2009 | Associated Press
A rare copy of the first comic book featuring Superman has sold for $317,200 in an Internet auction. The previous owner had bought it secondhand for less than a buck. It is one of the highest prices ever paid for a comic book, probably a testament to the volume's rarity and excellent condition, said Stephen Fishler, co-owner of the auction site ComicConnect.com and its sister dealership, Metropolis Collectibles. The winning bid for the 1938 edition of Action Comics No.