New Year's Day marked the 100th anniversary of Jerry Robinson's birth. We lost Jerry in 2011 and it truly was a loss for all of us, even the people who weren't lucky enough to meet the man in person. Robinson was just a teen when he made historic contributions to the Batman mythology and to popular culture in general as a key creator of the Joker, Robin the Boy Wonder, Two-Face, and Alfred Pennyworth. The legacy of those creations is alive and growing by the year. The Joker now rivals Darth Vader as the darkly charismatic epitome of screen evil. The Warner Bros. film Joker is now the highest-grossing R-rated release in Hollywood history and its star, Joaquin Phoenix, became the second actor in a decade to win an Oscar portraying the wild-card title character. Colin Farrell will be the third actor to portray the Penguin on the big-screen when The Batman swoops into theaters in March. Pennyworth returns for a third season this year, while Robin will be back in action for the new season of Titans.
It sounds strange, Robinson's amazing journey began shortly after he graduated high school in Trenton, N.J., thanks to a personalized jacket. The youngster was already a gifted cartoonist and he was literally wearing his talent on his back during a visit to the Catskills when serendipity tapped him on the shoulder.
“That was a fad then, kids would get these linen jackets with all the pockets and personalize them with all this razzmatazz,” Robinson told me back in 2009. “I was wearing mine as a warm-up 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.’ 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.”
Robinson, however, was impressed with Kane's subsequent job offer. “It was," Robinson said, "the beginning of everything for me.”
Kane, a decade older, did give the Jersey kid his big break but he also took a lot in return. Robinson didn't get public credit for his contributions. The same thing happened to Bill Finger, the writer who only decades later was recognized as the co-creator of Batman. Looking back, it's not hard to perceive Robinson's unacknowledged presence in the panels of early Batman adventures. Kane's rough-edged illustrations initially made Batman resemble an imported version of Dracula but, over the span of months, the art became far more polished, more buoyant, and more ambitious in composition and perspective.
Robinson didn't stay in Gotham City nor did he languish in Kane's imposed shadow. His career path veered toward journalism and political cartooning. It was there that he found the signature pursuit of his unique professional odyssey.
“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 me. “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.”
I went back and found this great Los Angeles Times video of Robinson reflecting on his work and life. The video was shot by Jeff Amlotte and I conducted the interview. The setting was the Skirball Cultural Center, which was hosting an exhibit called “ZAP! POW! BAM! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950.” A good number of the extraordinary pieces in the exhibit were salvaged by Robinson in his youth (in those days the original artwork for comic books was routinely scrapped), another reason to be grateful for the heroic presence of Robinson in the earliest days of Gotham City.
