Stan Lee Wishes His ‘Friend’ Bob Kane Was Still Alive So He Could Rub His Face In Marvel’s Movie Success
On the off chance that you want to kick off your weekend by going into a blinding rage, I have some good news! Stan "The Man" Lee, one of the founding fathers of Marvel Comics and the co-creator of characters like Spider-Man and Thor, recently did an interview with Bloomberg Television where he said the phrase "I wish my friend Bob Kane were still with us — he’s the fellow who created Batman," a collection of words that I do not understand.
Unfortunately, the report transcribing the quote did not mention whether Lee was rolling his eyes and making a wanking motion while he said this, so we're forced to assume he was sincere.
If you're unaware of why Lee's reference to Kane as the creator of Batman is, to say the least, slightly off-putting, the short version is that Kane did the least amount of work in Batman's creation, lied about it for years to the point of forging the dates on "design sketches" and claiming he was seven years younger than he actually was, never mentioned his collaborators until after they were dead, and legally locked himself in as the sole creator of Batman in perpetuity. In short, he's the absolute f**king worst. For Lee, who is himself a fairly controversial figure in comics when it comes to giving credit where credit is due, to casually reference Kane as "the fellow who created Batman," well, it's not a good look.
That said, the full text of the quote is a little more revealing:
“I wish my friend Bob Kane were still with us — he’s the fellow who created Batman,” Lee says. “Bob always used to tease me about the fact that Batman was a big deal on television and in movies, and we at Marvel had done nothing. I wish he was here now so I could return that teasing. A character should be somebody that the reader, or viewer, really cares about, and maybe at Marvel we put a little more effort into refining the characteristics and the nature of our heroes, maybe a little more effort than they have on the other side of the aisle.”
If you read this as Lee saying, with his usual geniality, that he just wishes Bob Kane was around so he could rub his stupid face in all of Marvel's recent movie success and tell him to put it in the Suck It Bucket, it's a lot easier to take.
It's worth noting, however, that those two were bros, as evidenced by an installment of the "Comic Book Greats" series sent to CA by Top Shelf's Leigh Walton, where the two old friends chat about how Kane and only Kane and nobody else certainly not any other writers or artists like Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson and Dick Sprang and Sheldon Moldoff, created Batman, while Kane waves around the copy of his (ghostwritten) autobiography where he falsified the dates on sketches and claimed that he wished he could go back in time and credit Bill Finger, something he felt safe in saying only after Finger was dead.
I challenge you to watch that dude talk without clenching your teeth so hard that blood shoots out your nose. I made it two minutes.