Bob Kane’s Creations

Originally published December 11, 1998, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1308

With the passing of Bob Kane, I thought I’d indulge in some memories of the character most associated with him, namely…

Courageous Cat.

Okay, not really. But boy, do I remember Courageous (as I date myself to such a degree that you can measure it in radioactive half-life.)

Courageous Cat, for those of you too young to recall, was a cartoon series credited to Bob Kane. Truthfully, I have no idea how much of it was developed by Kane himself, just as I remain fuzzy on just how much of Batman’s creation was by Kane, as opposed to such imaginative craftsman as Bill Finger or Jerry Robinson. Nevertheless, Courageous Cat (simply “Courageous” to his associates) was somewhat unique.

He had an insidiously catchy theme tune that was annoying impossible to get out of your head once it was in there. Indeed, the dámņëd thing is probably going to be stuck within my skull for the rest of the evening just as a result of my having written this column.

Courageous Cat (and I’m working from memory here) was a costumed crime fighter, decked out in a garish leotard with, I believe, a star on it. He resided in a cave called, naturally, the Cat Cave. I seem to recall the cave entrance being in the shape of a cat head. He also had a side kick with a high pitched voice named “Minute Mouse.” It was never clear exactly why he was called this. Perhaps it was supposed to be a takeoff on “Minute Men.” Perhaps that was how long he could talk in that annoying falsetto before you were ready to hurl a brick through the TV screen. Maybe a minute was all he managed to last in the sack. It was hard to tell, really.

All we knew for sure was that they were a dedicated team, fighting crime by leaping into the Catmobile and hurtling into the city to battle such vicious foes as a scheming frog who had a tendency to dress in jackets and slacks that made him look like Ricky Ricardo during show nights down at the club.

Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse sped around town in the Catmobile (whether his residence was the stately Cat House was never mentioned.) Neither had any civilian identity that was ever indicated, and their faces were not masked.

And best of all was Courageous’ main means of fighting crime. Batman may not have carried guns (at least, later in his career he didn’t) but Courageous more than made up for it. He used, so help me God, trick guns, not dissimilar from trick arrows favored by Green Arrow (and I have to say, by the way, in relation to nothing in particular… am I the only person in the world who was never blown away by the name “Green Arrow?” I don’t pretend to know everything—you could drive a fleet of Hondas through the gaps in my education—so maybe there’s some sort of historical reference that I’m missing. And no disrespect is intended to the comic greats who developed the characters. But as a kid, it seemed to me that the reasoning was, “So, okay. We’ve got this guy. And he’ll be rich like Batman, and have a sidekick like Batman, and drive a car like Batman, but he’ll use arrows and be dressed in green like Robin Hood… so, uhm… we’ll call him… uh… Green Arrow.” Wow. I mean, sure, the arrows were green, too (when the colorist remembered) but it just doesn’t seem that daunting. Robert Louis Stevenson, of course, wrote the famous novel The Black Arrow, detailing the story of young Richard Shelton and his involvement with the titular outlaw band. Black’s a cool color. You wouldn’t want to hear the Black Arrow is after you. But “green” just doesn’t do it somehow. And I’m not sure that “Green Lantern” was any better. Melding two different words into a new name works if it conjures up an image; even a ludicrous one… “He’s a cat… and he’s courageous!” Courageous Cat!” “Batman! He’s a man… but looks like a bat!” “Green Lantern! He’s… got this lantern, and it’s, uh… it’s, y’know…green…” Perhaps that’s why the team-up book in the 1960s worked so well; it combined the two guys at DC whose names made the least sense. But I digress…)

Anyway, Courageous used trick guns. The actual operation and make of the gun seemed to vary from one cartoon to the next. In some, Courageous had a single gun with a variety of trick settings to it, making it capable of firing lariats, nets, and blasts of water with equal facility. This was somewhat beyond ludicrous (as if the talking cat fighting a frog who was the same height as the cat was somehow more credible.) The alternate version showed Courageous using different guns for different occasions. How did he store them? In the lining of his cape. He’d pulled wide his cape to reveal a variety of guns hanging in pouches. This, of course, probably would have required that his cape be so heavy that it likely would have strangled him, but heck… maybe that’s what made him so darned courageous.

Of course, since Batman had Catwoman, it would have been nice if Courageous Cat could have gone up against Batwoman, but the name was already taken by DC. Darn. What an intercompany crossover that could have been.

* * *

I didn’t understand Batman at first when I was a kid. Since my primary exposure to heroes had been Superman, I didn’t understand why Batman didn’t fly or have super strength. He was a master detective, true, but so was Sherlock Holmes, and he didn’t require a cape and mask to go about his job. I had no clue as to why Batman was, or should be considered, a superhero.

For some reason, my grasp of the character crystallized in an issue of World’s Finest. There was a sequence where Batman was squaring off against, of all things, an army of knights. As Batman descended upon him, the knights were apparently unaware that our hero’s attire was supposed to strike fear and terror into their cowardly hearts… possibly because, being knights (of the round table, as I recall) they weren’t cowards. The knights unleashed a volley of arrows directly at Batman while the caped crusader was dropping towards them from above. By rights, Batman should have been a pincushion. Instead he actually manages to twist and turn in midair and avoid the deadly barrage. And I’ve always remembered the captions that ran in that panel, that went something like this: “No ordinary man could possibly dodge a hail of arrows in mid-air. But we never said Batman was ordinary!”

And I read that as a kid and said, “Oh, okay. I get it now. Although Batman supposedly achieved his status through years of training, in point of fact he’s got about as much to do with normal humanity as does Superman.”

Batman has been compared to Sherlock Holmes, but Holmes wasn’t superhuman. Arthur Conan Doyle based the character’s amazing analytical skills upon a real individual, Dr. Joseph Bell. Batman’s also been compared to Zorro, but–at least when he started out–Zorro was eminently human. He only came out at night when he could hide in shadow, and at one climactic point of Zorro’s first literary outing (in The Curse of Capistrano), Zorro and the heroine find themselves pinned down in a deserted house, outnumbered by soldiers with nowhere to run. Zorro doesn’t superhumanly fight his way out against insurmountable odds. He basically turns to the girl and says, in effect, “Well, we’re screwed now. We’re done for. Sorry.” Only a last minute, timely arrival of an authority figure prevents Zorro from being captured and executed. The early sequence in the recent film, The Mask of Zorro depicting Zorro riding up in broad daylight and engaging a dozen or so soldiers in swordplay—while unquestionably spectacular—has nothing whatever to do with Zorro as originally conceived. Batman was a superhero because he was above humanity. If you worked and trained hard enough to the point where you could distinguish two hundred different types of tobacco or dirt samples, you could be Holmes. If you trained in fencing and horsemanship, and stuck to back roads at night when you rob people, you could pull off Zorro. But train all you want, study as much as you desire—ain’t no way you dodge a volley of arrows in mid-air. Will Not Happen.

Even so, I found Batman more accessible than Superman, because even though he was bigger than human, he still had some nominal connection to We Mere Mortals. I blush to disclose that I was a fan of the Adam West TV series. I remember the day my father came home and told me he’d gotten us tickets for opening night to the circus…and it was the night that Batman debuted after an entire summer of promos. I sat at the circus that night and crabbed the whole time (it wasn’t as if I could have set a VCR.)

I remember when we went on a big trip to Europe… the week that the Batman theatrical film opened. I sat in the south of France and crabbed the whole time. I’m amazed, in retrospect, that my father didn’t throw his young son off the top of the Eiffel tower, shouting, “Let’s see Batman get you out of this one, you little ingrate!”

Ah, the joys of youth.

I also had, of all things, a black and white 8 millimeter film that was one of the chapters of the original Batman movie serial which we’d picked up in a department store. In this day and age of easy video release, it’s impossible to describe what that chicken-scratching little reel of silent b&w film meant to me. I ran it over and over again. Never found the next installment, so I spent years wondering how the plummeting Batman at the end of the installment managed to cheat death. Eventually, when I grew up, I got the entire serial (with voices and everything) on video tape. As an adult I was amazed at how unbelievably cheesy it was. Ill-fitting costumes, no budget to speak of, wooden acting… and a hideously anti-Japanese slant (no bad pun intended) that is astounding now, but very much of the time.

“Who created Batman” seems still to be a matter of debate. The question becomes problematic, although the fact that not everyone involved received their due seems indisputable. It’s the same problem one runs into when discussion centers around nearly any commercially crafted character who becomes a franchise. Look at Spock: Gene Roddenberry created the notion of a pointy-eared, Satanic-looking individual, but he was perfectly emotional in his early incarnation, prone to grinning or emotional outbursts. It was Leonard Nimoy who came up with the nerve pinch and the mind meld, and Nimoy claimed that an early director suggested the emotionless reading of the word “Fascinating,” and it was supposedly from that that much of the character’s detached manner was derived.

I think the probable answer is that it both matters and it doesn’t. It matters because, as this column has stated in the past, one should receive credit where one is due. The names of Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson and others deserve to be up there with Kane. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter… in that Batman became more than the sum of his parts.

But one of those parts was indisputably Bob Kane. For that, at least, we should always be grateful.

Gee, I wonder if anyone argues about credit due for Courageous Cat…

(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)