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I love Batman I have all my life there's just something timelessly appealing about the notion of a human who brings himself to the peak of the human condition both physically and mentally in order to devote nay sacrifice their life to fighting crime especially when that person is a billionaire who spends his valve on doing good for once my favorite era is the dark and gritty modern age that began in the mid-1980s and concluded around ten years ago but that's part of the beauty of Batman he's been around so long and been through so many changes with so many errors that there is basically a Batman for everybody whatever their tastes it's no real surprise then that Batman is one of the highest-grossing media brands of all time having generated an estimated 30 billion dollars in revenue for his owner DC and with his new issues almost always occupying the top spot on monthly comic book sales charts there's no denying that when artist Bob Kane and writer bill finger created the Batman in 1939 they gave birth to a cultural phenomenon but a few years ago comic book colorist Antony Colin and writer wilmarie identified striking similarities between the very first Batman comic story and a novella written two and a half years earlier about another fictional crime fighter who is far less well known today now they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but at what point do you cross the line from drawing inspiration from to just plain stealing someone else's ideas before delving into the details of the stories in question it's worth noting that there's always been some tension incorrectly attributed credit for Batman's creation since Batman's first appearance in 1939 only Bob Kane was credited as the creator of Batman even though Bill Finger was known to have done most of the legwork and not only shaping the look of the character but the names and the concepts and the backstories of all the characters who populated Gotham City from Batman's closest allies to his greatest enemies it wasn't until 50 years after bill fingers death that Bob Kane admitted bill never received the fame and recognition he deserved and it wasn't until 2015 that Bill Finger finally started getting credit even then there are disputes over whether renowned characters like Dick Grayson and the Joker are primarily the work of Bill Finger were artists Jerry Robinson who did a lot of if not all the penciling on early Batman comics but always under Bob Kane's name on the byline the point of all this is to demonstrate that the nature of the comic book industry in the 1930s and 1940s means that so many Western superheroes have nebulous origins the sense of creator ownership wasn't very strong back then and writers and artists were guns for hire whose creations were contractually the intellectual property of the publishers who hired them this was the age of pulp fiction a time when authors like HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard gleefully shared the names and places of their fictional universes with countless other authors to do with as they wished a time when prolific geniuses like Walter B Gibson happily wrote under the pseudonym Maxwell grant so that his publishers could hire any number of other authors to recount the stories of his creation America's then most popular crime fighter the shadow this is where the plot thickens younger viewers may enjoy reading the shadow comics that have been published very intermittently in the last 33 years if you're my age you may have been introduced to the shadow through the 1994 film starring Alec Baldwin as Lamont Cranston an aristocratic New Yorker who is a pointless playboy by day and the vengeful shadow by night who uses the arts of combat and deception that he learned in the Far East to purge criminals in the asphalt jungle tough sorry wrong clips have got confused older viewers or at least North American viewers may have discovered the shadow through the classic radio show that ran continuously from September 1937 to December 1954 most famously featuring the voice of Orson Welles as Lamont Cranston for its first year and easily and consistently being the top-rated daytime radio broadcast in the United States at that time the success of Batman paled in comparison to the money-making machine that was the shadow frankly it's impossible that Bill Finger and Bob Kane didn't know of the shadow the shadow first appeared as a fleshed out character in April 1931 in an ongoing series of 325 novellas owned by Street and Smith publications Incorporated and all written by Maxwell grant a pen name deliberately created to hide the fact that several different authors worked on the books but for 282 of those stories Maxwell grant was magician Walter B Gibson who effectively created the shadow and certainly defined the character the shadows modus operandi was to gather intelligence on crime through numerous clever disguises much as Batman does and just like Batman the shadow is a master planner always two steps ahead of his prey the shadow employs stealth to strike terror into the hearts of criminals and is always ready to use his twin 45 automatics just like the earliest Batman story showed Bruce Wayne loading up to kill his victims in fact Bob Kane said we didn't think anything was wrong with Batman carrying a gun because the shadow used one but these are merely superficial similarities that could be classified as literary tropes or reflections of the contemporary cultural norms rather than deliberate artistic theft however the same cannot be said of the plot of the very first Batman story published in Detective Comics number 27 in May 1939 entitled the case of the chemical syndicate the story begins with young socialite Bruce Wayne having a pleasant evening with his friend Commissioner Gordon then the phone rings a big case has come in the chief of a chemical syndicate has been found stabbed to death in his home his personal safe has been opened and the secret contract held within it is Gordon takes Bruce along to the crime scene because why not they learn the victim was one of four partners in a chemical manufactory all of whom have received death threats that very same night a second partner is murdered and his safe cracked the third partner visits the fourth partner only to be captured and put in a clear glass chamber to be gassed to death luckily the Batman was tailing him and saves him by stuffing cloth into the gas jet it turns out the murderer is the fourth partner who had sealed secret contracts with each of the other partners to buy out their shares in the business but he didn't want to pay the shadow story begins with club man Lamont Cranston visiting his friend Commissioner Ralph Weston who lets Cranston tag along in the case of a partner in a chemical manufacturing plant who is receiving death threats then he's murdered his safe has been opened and the secret contract held within it is gone then a second partner is murdered and his safe cracked the third partner visits the fourth partner only to be captured and put in a clear glass dome to be gassed to death luckily the shadow saves him by stuffing cloth into the gas jet it turns out the murderer is the fourth partner who had sealed secret contracts with each of the other partners to buy out their interest in the business but he didn't want to pay the similarities between these two stories are shockingly clear bill finger and Bob Kane didn't even bother to change the nature of the business at the center of the plot but it goes even further because the shadow novella included illustrations by artist Tom Lovell illustrations which Bob Kane clearly miked shall we say now the images I'm about to show you come from an article by dial B for blog which is a great feature about many instances in which Bob Kane borrowed from other artists work in his career I urge you to check it out and there's a link in the description below it is painfully obvious that the design of the gas chamber in Batman was lifted directly from the shadow not just the bell-shaped glass dome but the controls for the gas tank furthermore the illustration of a scene in which the shadow confronts criminals on a rooftop clearly influenced a similar moment in Batman right down to the shape of the chimney and that's not all partners of peril was the first shadow story not to be written by Walter B Gibson it was in fact the first of 27 stories by Theodore Tinsley writing under the name Maxwell Grant for the most part Tinsley does a fantastic job of mimicking Gibson's style but he does use some telltale words that Gibson never really used most notably Tinsley compares the shadow to a bat no less than seven times in partners of peril incidentally the stories also refer to the shadow as the knight of darkness so in addition to nicking the plot one has to wonder just how much were bill finger and Bob Kane inspired by this particular shadow story and in case it's still not clear just how closely these stories resemble one another the cover of the recent reprint of partners of peril explicitly states it is the novel that inspired Batman this collection also includes another 1936 story by Theodore Tinsley about a crime boss who wears clown makeup and calls himself the Joker now before he died Bill Finger admitted that the case of the chemical syndicate was a take-off of some shadow story and the owners and writers of the shadow never sued DC or complained about this so perhaps we should give Bill Finger and Bob Kane credit for compressing a 60 page book into a 6 page comic and several times beginning in 1973 DC has published comics that unite Batman and the shadow and somewhat sweetly acknowledged the influence of the pulp hero on the Caped Crusader after all there is another saying there's nothing new Under the Sun so it's important to remember that a very few works of fiction can be truly original and even fewer can be created in a vacuum every comic book character or story right down to individual panels is informed by the rest of the medium either by conforming to the accepted standards of the day or by a daring to what is popular or by deliberately moving away from the mainstream every act of creation in fiction is a response to something else so when the world's greatest detective displays influences from fictions greatest detective that's understandable when the dandy playboy dons a black mask and a Corrupter an outfit to terrorize his opponents it's only fitting for DC creators to acknowledge Zorro and the bat whispers with the occasional wink and a nod and sometimes with explicit attempts to make art imitate life but when a story the first story your new heroes grand debut is a close to carbon copy of someone else's writing and doesn't pay tribute to its inspiration well then that's not just lazy it's downright criminal but I encourage you to decide for yourself by reading both the case of the chemical syndicate and partners of peril or listening to the audiobook version which is widely available and if you want to explore the world of the shadow you can read the reprints of the original novellas or you can listen to episodes of the classic radio show online or you can read the comics and I recommend you start with Matt Wagner's the shadow year one although my humble opinion the best shadow comics of those written by Michael kalutara and published by dark force in the 1990s including the adaptation of the movie and I really enjoy the movie the music is amazing thank you to all of our patreon supporters for keeping this channel going without you we wouldn't be here today and if you want to explore more interesting topics and just click on screen right now I'll see the patrons on discord sometime soon and I'll see you guys next time