It is an established fact that Kane and his father negotiated a byline for Batman. It is a fact that he hired others to do the work. It is a fact that he has claimed creation of characters and ideas that were introduced in stories that it is an established fact that he did not work on. It is an established fact that he hired another artist to produce lithographs that he sold as his own work, when the first Burton film came out. It is fact that he went to school with Will Eisner, yet kept shaving years off his age, in interviews, over the years, to Will's amusement.

Kane's memoirs, however, contained demonstrable falsehoods and other anecdotes that people who were there and knew him said were BS.

As to who actually did what, things like the creation of the Joker have so many elements and influences that you can't really say this guy created him, as he is part Bill Finger's ideas, part Jerry Robinson's designs, and perhaps part Kane's input, though there have been interview subjects who have claimed that Bill Finger showed Kane a photo of Conrad Veidt, in The Man Who Laughed and Kane had never seen the picture.

When you talk about history, you have to go with the best sources available, which is why many things once considered fact are re-examined later, as new sources are unearthed. Much Cold War history, from Western sources underwent revision when the Soviet Union broke up and KGB files were made public, showing that some things were false and some things misbelieved were, in fact, true.

With Bob Kane, Bob Kane is a pretty unreliable source. It is more than just bad memory.

There is a general consensus of sources, from the period, that the major creative force in building the early mythos was Bill Finger. Not that he was the original thinker; but, he was the one who cribbed or suggested cribbing things from other sources, like pulp novels, movies, literature and other sources. He had swipe files and he took ideas from them; but, he was generally pointed to as the one who was originating the actual stories. Batman's Rogues Gallery owed much to Dick Tracy and Terry & the Pirates (Catwoman and the Dragon Lady have much in common); but, Finger is generally agreed to be the one who took those influences and fleshed out the villains and other characters.

The argument with Stan & Jack revolves around what you consider to be creation and how much conversation the pair actually had. The best idea you get is in hindsight, where Jack's solo work has tremendous plots, in many occasions, but clunky dialogue and maybe less developed personalities, while Stan was less interesting in his writing when not paired with an artist who could plot on his own. That leaves you with the collaborations being just that, where one complimented the other and neither could be considered the sole author. As to whose contribution is greater or more definitive for any one work, that is always going to be filtered through bias, as it depends on the story and artistic elements you think carry more weight. The reality is most likely that one had an idea, that inspired another idea in the partner, which led to a new idea by the first, which the second developed further....and so on. That's what happens in collaboration. With Kane and his crew, the general consensus seems to be that he was not collaborating on anything, as far as creating the work, but was taking his contractual cut. That's not to say that he didn't have a hand in hiring Finger, or Robinson or Moldoff; but, he pretty much let them do their thing and went off and did his thing, somewhere other than comics. In that, he was no more the author of the batman stories than Martin Goodman was of the comics he published. He hired and fired the people or hired and fired the editors who hired and fired the writers and artists, just as Kane hired his ghosts and staff, just as Eisner & Iger hired their staffs and just as many comic strip artists hired and fired their assistants and ghosts.

ps I just re-read the line where you said "But to say, we can't know anything because we weren't there, so why think about it at all, is an invitation for ignorance" and then the anti-intellectual attitude bit and realize I skipped over a line and lost context.

So, me am not so S-M-R-T.

Thanks for the great replies, folks.

A certain comic creator did used to get a little boring with variations of, “So, where was your office at WB?” Or, “You didn’t work at DC, so how do you know this or that?”

That’s the extreme I am thinking of. Naturally, this creator had opinions on, say, Ed Wood’s films or King Kong.

We do have to have a leap of faith. I did pick up some issues of Starlog as a kid. There’s no way I - or anyone - could have verified every sentence from each issue, we have to trust that the writers and editors got it right 95% of the time. But there are people in this world who seem to want a source/paper trail for everything, up to and including the brand of tea you had for breakfast! (Such people seem rare)

Reputation counts, too. TwoMorrows is diligent and robust, so I’ll accept what they write. At other times, though, my gut tells me something else, e.g. some tabloid ‘news’ about a superhero film seems so unlikely that I conclude it’s just an editor/writer filling space.

There are events that can verified by other writings. And " the truth is generally in the middle " is an interesting but faulty premise. If I get robbed at gun point , and the suspect is caught, do we just figure I probably didn't really get robbed and that the truth is in the middle? Sometimes a person is definitely wrong. Sorting through what really happened just takes some work. 

As someone who has actually earned money writing about the history of comic books, I suppose I ought to weigh in. I've learned several lessons along the way, such as that people's memories are imperfect, interviewers and their subjects sometimes have agendas other than telling the truth, there are questions that can and will never be answered, and that it's okay--and even preferable---to say "I/we don't know."

My article for Alter Ego on the Golden (and Silver) Age histories of Flash, Green Lantern, and Hawkman contained several factual inaccuracies that I corrected when I covered that same material in American Comic Book Chronicles 1940-44. I also made an effort to present all sides of any controversies and I didn't hesittate to dismiss, with explanations, a number of oft-repeated "facts" that were anything but. And still mistakes crept in, and I was sometimes overridden by my editorial supervisors. For instance, in introducing Maxwell C. Gaines, I originally included the phrase "Max to some, Charlie to others" which Roy Thomas insisted be removed because (and I'm paraphrasing) "I never heard anyone refer to him as Max." even though there are numerous sources, such as Frank Jacobs' "The Mad World of William M. Gaines," that quote contemporaries of Gaines who did exactly that.

The upshot of the above is that even the most conscientious historians (as I fancy myself to be) can be wrong or affected by others' agendas. So my advice is to read as wide a variety of sources as you can, identify the historian and.or his sources' biases where you can, and remember that history is an ongoing process and always subject to change.

Cei-U!
I summon the early morning ruminations!