I took part in the Inktober challenge this October, creating 31 inked illustrations in 31 days and posting them online. My Inktober 2015 theme: Paying tribute to Bill Finger Award winning comic creators & their characters. The award, which honors the memory of Batman co-creator Bill Finger, recognizes comic book writers who have not received their rightful reward and/or recognition. For the project I created 23 character illustrations and a comic illustrating part of a letter written by Bill Finger.

Here’s the 23 character illustrations I worked on during the weekdays:

Here’s the comic I inked on the weekends, based on a paragraph Bill Finger wrote in a letter:

About the theme:

Earlier this year I got interested in the Bill Finger Awards and thought it might make a good inktober theme. Part of this project was about educating others about the creators who’ve won the award, but it was also an excuse for me to learn more about these creators as well.

Ideally it would have been great to involve words from these creators into the project, but due to time constraints I settled on illustrating characters they had created instead. I think the characters give you some sense of who they were as a creator, even though some of their best written work may have not come about with these characters.

When I picked this theme, I had no idea that Bill Finger would be experiencing a historic month in October, finally getting official credit for his work on Batman. I was excited & humbled to be working on this project at such a historic time in comic history.

About the Bill Finger comic:

Since there were only 23 writers who had received the award, I suspected I also needed a project to do on the weekends as well. I wanted to do something related to Bill Finger,  so I read through Marc Nobelman’s excellent book “Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman.” Through Marc’s blog I noticed a couple of letters that Finger had wrote, and the idea of doing a comic based on one of those letters came to me.

The 1965 New York Comicon (also known as Kalercon or Academy Con) was a followup to the 1964 New York City Comicon, known as the first comic convention in history. One of the highlights of the 1965 convention was the first professional comic book panel ever assembled. The panel, moderated by Jerry Bails, included Gardner Fox, Mort Weisinger, Otto Binder and Bill Finger. (A transcript of this panel has been printed in “Alter Ego” #20, as well as other remembrances about the con–it’s well worth buying a copy.)

The idea that Finger & Binder went out after the convention and ruminated on their cultural impact seemed significant to me. Here were two guys who had worked in comics for over two decades and they were just starting to realize how much their work meant to fans. Comic fandom was a fairly new thing back then, and I thought it was interesting to read about how these comic pioneers felt about the rise of fandom & conventions.

The 1965 con was also a big milestone in Bill Finger’s life in many ways. His work on Batman had gone unrecognized to a large degree before this convention, and an article written by panel moderator Jerry Bails that fall finally spread the word through fandom of Finger’s role with the character. This unfortunately led to many complications for Finger in the following years; Binder himself did not fair well in the years to come either, though for different reasons. I didn’t have enough panels to go into their life stories, so I settled on examining this short bright moment in both of their lives.

This comic also has somewhat of a local tie for me as well. Bill Finger’s letter was addressed to Tom Fagan who lived in Rutland, Vermont, home of the Rutland Halloween Parade. However, Fagan wrote for the fanzine “Batmania,” which was created and distributed right here in Columbia, Missouri, by Biljo White. When Tom Fagan met Finger & Binder at the 1965 convention, Binder even recognized his name from his articles in “Batmania.” (Fagan gave a report of the 1965 convention in “Batmania” #7.) Biljo White was an integral part of the fanzine community and the story of Bill Finger has a significant connection with “Batmania.”

A few notes on the “Dimension from Convention” comic:

• According to “Alter Ego” #20, Tom Fagan wrote that Binder & Finger went to the “hotel’s downstairs dining chamber” after their panel, where they ate and were interviewed by a reporter from “The New Yorker.” This might have been where the scene from Finger’s letter took place, but for the sake of my story I imagined that they went out to a bar after the convention as well.
• In “Alter Ego” #20 is a picture of Otto Binder from the 1965 convention, so I got what he was wearing correctly, whereas I was just guessing at Finger’s attire.
• I did fix one minor typo in Finger’s letter so it would read correctly.
• The villains in the comic have significance: Clayface & Riddler were co-created by Finger, Jax-Ur & Braniac were co-created by Binder.

About the inktober process:

This was my second year of doing the inktober challenge. Last year my approach was a free-form effort, waking up everyday and settling on something to pencil & ink. I really wanted to try a theme this year in the hope that it would give some more structure to the work.

The theme was great in some ways. I woke up everyday with a fairly good plan of what I was drawing each day, and the variety of oddball characters kept me interested throughout the whole month. The comic panels I drew on the weekends were also a really great break from doing the characters all week long. (I did these panels in black & white which saved a lot of time–I added the computer tones to the comic after inktober.)

On the other hand, the theme was incredibly time consuming & labor intensive. At first I thought I’d just be drawing simple full body shots of characters, but that quickly evolved into doing full illustrations which included props, backgrounds, character motivations, etc. For the most part I tried to not directly copy characters, poses, & situations, but challenged myself to come up with variations that paid tribute to the original works. This led to a lot of extra research during the month, and my other creative projects went by the wayside.

Conclusions:

I’m glad I did this project–I built a lot of skills this month that I didn’t have before and learned a bunch about creators I wasn’t familiar with. However, if I attempt inktober in the future, I will definitely have to do something less time consuming.

[Updated copyright notice on images 04-23-18.]