Author Marc Tyler Nobleman spent years chasing the truth about Batman's uncredited co-creator. It's a real story about persistence for anyone who's ever been passed over.
GROWTH PILLAR: Leadership & Ops
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A real example of how persistence pays off, even after years of rejection. Lessons on fighting for what's fair without burning bridges.
*The image used here is AI generated of Marc Tyler Nobleman*
Marc Tyler Nobleman helps people see what it really takes to get credit for work someone else tries to claim.
Marc Tyler Nobleman, an author and keynote speaker, joins East Trade Winds to share the real story behind Batman's hidden co-creator. Marc used storytelling and creative writing to uncover Bill Finger, the writer who shaped Batman but went uncredited for 25 years. His seven-month hunt for the truth became a lesson in storytelling techniques ~ turning a forgotten history into a story people could not ignore. He explains how persistence and resilience led to a historic credit change at DC Comics, plus a Hulu documentary. This episode is for business owners and leaders who need a reminder that persistence pays off, even when everyone tells you it won't work.
Key topics covered:
Guest links: Marc's website · LinkedIn · Instagram · Bluesky · YouTube · Facebook · Threads · X · TikTok
Session hosted with Wayne Pratt and Percy Barr.
— PARTNERS ON THIS EPISODE —
Next Steps
Marc (00:05)
So, as you know, my name's Mark, and my by trade I'm a storyteller, and that has two branches. I write books for mostly for kids, and I speak to audiences of all ages. And I'm gonna tell you what has become my best story.
It's about Batman. Don't panic if you're not a superhero fan. No one, no one name-dropped about Batman before, but it's okay. This is not just for superhero fans. I'm gonna start by showing you three numbers, which is not a riddle. It's not a mystery that you need to solve. It's just three numbers I want you to put in the back of your mind, and we'll come back to them at the end. So we're gonna start at the end. The back cover of my book says this and only this: Batman's biggest secret is not Bruce Wayne. So even if you are not.
A hardcore geek, you know that Bruce Wayne is Batman's real name, his secret identity. And I am saying I have a secret bigger than that. My secret goes back to the start of Batman. Every Batman story has only one name in the credit: Bob Kane. Bob was an artist. Here's Bob. And here's the thing about that credit line Batman created by Bob Kane. It is not true. There was another
From day one. His name was Bill Finger. He was the original writer and therefore co-creator of Batman. But in 25 years of Batman stories that he wrote, he was credited exactly zero times. Bob Kane took full credit. This is what Batman would have looked like if they went with Bob's vision. But he showed that to Bill, the writer, and Bill transformed it out loud.
And Bob took every suggestion that Bill made to create the Batman that you all know. So this was Batman's first appearance. Bob drew it, but Bill wrote it and designed it. Yet the only name there right from the start, right at the bottom, was Bob's. And it wasn't just the first Batman story that Bill wrote. He also wrote the first appearances of Robin, The Joker, The Penguin, Catwoman.
And many, many more. Many that even an a person who's never read a comic could could name drop. So after Bill's long run of writing Batman Anonymously, this guy, whose name was Jerry Bales, figured out that it could not be just one person producing all these Batman stories every month. Batman was in the star of two comics and appeared in other stories as well. So for a quarter century, there was only one name on all these stories.
And Jerry thought that's just not doable. That's not human. So he did some detective work of his own and found out about Bill and actually found Bill, reached out and got Bill to do what was his first interview ever. So Jerry exposed Bill to the world, so to speak, but this was 1965. So he did it in a very low res way. He just wrote a two page article, which he mailed by postal mail to Batman fans all over the country, which was how we learned that that that Bob did not act alone.
When Bob found out about this, that Bill had finally been coaxed out, he wrote a six-page letter, which was published in a Batman fanzine, that fan magazine, in which Bob said, in the third person, or not third person, but referring to himself, I Bob Kane and the sole creator of Batman. I challenge Bill Finger to repeat these claims to my face. In other words, Bob was doubling down and saying that Bill was lying. Sadly, that didn't change much. Neither of these things changed much. And within a decade,
Bill died at age 59 with no credit, very little money, no obituary, no funeral, and no gravestone. It was just like he vanished off the face of the earth. So there turns out there was one short article about him in a comic magazine, which I am happy about. But if Bill died today, he would be on every news feed in the world. Top of the top of the feed. But in 1974, that was it. And then I met a man.
I found a man named Charles, one of Bill's longtime friends, not a famous person, but just someone who'd worked in the industry. And Charles told me the very sad story that he'd heard that Bill ended up here on Heart Island, which is off the coast of Manhattan, or New York City rather. It is a what's called a potter's field, a graveyard for people that do not have someone to take care of them. There are no gravestones. It looked like this. So it makes a sad life have an even sadder ending.
Brutal. I was just devastated not only as a writer, but as a human. So twenty five years later, Bob, the artist who had taken full credit all those years, passed away. And his gravestone is the opposite.
So clearly you can put whatever you want on your gravestone. No one is going to fact check it. Now, meanwhile, this guy was born. Sorry for the plaid, you know, disaster there, but that's that's how you dressed in the 80s. As you can see, I had a comic in my hand that was not unusual. For those of you who are die, you know, really into the minutiae, it was Batman and the Outsiders number six, nineteen eighty-four. I wasn't just a comics reader. I also dressed up, which is now called cosplay. Here's me as Robin. not once.
Not twice, not three times, but four to well, well, I have a fourth time coming up. There's three right there. That's enough for now. I also wrote some fan fiction, old fashioned way, on a typewriter. And there was a fifth time I dressed up as Robin, but not, it's kind of half-hearted there. That was just a pose because I actually auditioned for the role of Robin in this movie. And when I say audition, I mean I showed up to an open casting call. There were hundreds of guys that looked like me. And spoiler alert.
I did not get the role. This guy did, Chris O'Donnell. So, and that's for the best. So, in 2006, I came around to deciding to write about Bill because I've been this passionate fan of superheroes my whole childhood. And then I became a writer. So it was inevitable that these two paths would cross. I did not know the challenge that lay ahead. This was not just another book. This was not just another story to research.
Even though Batman is one of the most iconic characters of all time, Bill was pretty much a mystery. He died with only four interviews out there, and most of them were not easily accessible. In fact, I think none of them were on the internet. two were in out-of-print books, two of them were lost in someone's archives that had never even been published. So, on that note, Bill himself left very few photos behind. I'll show you the ones that I found. I found this one and this one.
And that's it. Which is staggering for a guy who created Batman. So I rolled up my sleeves, turned into detective mode like Batman himself. It took seven months and nine sources and lots of cold calls, but I ended up finding 11 more photos of Bill, none of which had been published. Here's one of Bill and his first wife in the 40s. Here's Bill and his son Fred at the zoo in the 50s.
and for those of you wondering if I found any photos of Bill in the backyard, fertilizing the grass, topless, yes, yes, I did. So these were all in people's attics or basements or just forgotten archives. No one thought any of this was relevant or had any posterity to it besides the fact that this was a guy that they knew personally. They didn't realize how important it would be to fandom and to scholarship really, to have these images displayed or distributed.
First photo I looked for, I thought I'd find in five minutes. It's a photo everyone has, at least in the States, probably in Canada too. A high school yearbook photo. So I went to Bill's high school in New York because they told me they'd never found it, which sounded odd. And I looked through 1930s yearbooks for people with the last name Finger, which I saw. But none of them were Bill Finger. And then I was speaking with Bill's second wife, a woman named Lynn.
Who told me something she was probably the only living person left to know, which was that Bill was not his real name. His birth name was Milton, but he didn't like it and he changed it sometime after high school. So I went back to the school and told them that. And this is what they emailed back. Bill's yearbook photo, which I looked right at, and so did they. But I was looking for Bill Finger.
So I missed it. It's a reminder how often we get so caught up in speed and productivity and getting things done quickly that we might miss something that's staring us in the face. So it's a good reminder to slow down. Now I told you the sadness about Bill's final destination, and I'm happy to report that that was not correct. In my primary research, and again, this is the kind of work that I do often where I'm a I'm an AI user.
And I see the value of it, I see the risk of it too. But I'm not going to knock AI like a lot of writers do. But I will say this: there's plenty that it can't do, clearly because it's not in the real world. It did not was not able to go to that high school and look through those yearbooks and talk to those historians there. And it was not able to find out that Bill did not end up in a powder's field, rather, this. On the other side of the country, this is the state of Oregon. This is Bill's final resting place.
His only son, Fred, whom you saw at the zoo, grew up, took his dad's ashes to that shoreline, and spread them on the sand in the shape of a bat. And the only place this information lived was in the heads of the people whom he told. It was never documented, which means it's not only not online, it's not accessible in writing at all until my book. So this is the kind of story that I live to tell. Things that
Will really make people's eyes pop out of their head and their jaws drop simply because they've never heard it. They couldn't possibly have heard it, because it's only in living memory of people that they don't know. So in 2012, the fruits of my labor came out, my little book. And this was the first book on Bill Finger, the first book on the creation of Batman told from the perspective of the other guy, the unsung creator, the unknown person. So there was a bit of intrigue to that.
And it's not the typical approach that people take in children's books. Usually we're telling this this the Pat story of the of the notable name who is a child and has a dream and tries to fulfill it and fails a few times like everybody and then succeeds. So the book ends on a high note with whatever that notable accomplishment is that people already know. We just didn't know the backstory. This is different. This starts with someone already in adulthood, who doesn't have a big vision, he just wants to be a writer, ends up creating a character that becomes one of the biggest multimedia properties of all time.
And dies with nothing. So it's it's flips the script. It's it's a bit of a downer, but there's also hope at the end. And that's where the afterword of a book comes in. Those of you that are authors yourselves, you know about this. It's getting on the road or getting on the internet and promoting it, spreading the gospel of your story or of your of your work. So I've been around the world doing this. I've been to 20 countries, speaking to kids and adults, a lot of loyal fans, not to me or to Bill Finger, but to Batman. But when they learn about Bill, they they sign on, they're quickly on board.
I had the chance to do a TED talk, probably the first Batman TED Talk. And then in 2015, after three years of me running my mouth about this, everything changed. Not three, more than three, but three years since the book came out. Because of Fred, Bill's son, the guy that you've already seen. And you've actually already seen that hill and beach behind him. So I learned a few things about Fred when I started the project. I learned that he was an only child. I learned that he was gay.
And I learned that he died in 1992, which was 15 years before I started. So I thought that's the end of the bloodline. I can write a book about it, I can spread Bill's legacy, but I have no chance of changing that credit line because I need to have an heir to do that. You need a legal heir to leak to challenge something like that. So you can imagine my surprise when I learned that two years after Bill died, his son Fred here.
Had a daughter, which means Bill Finger had a grandchild, which means that credit can be contested. So I found her and I tried to talk her into doing that. She was not keen. It was seemed too daunting, and I understand that. Batman is owned by DC Comics, which is owned by Warner Brothers, which is owned by Warner Brothers Discovery, which can buy and sell each one of us ten times before noon. So it's a daunting challenge to figure out how do I go about getting them to
Do something moral. They don't have a legal obligation to change that credit line, but contr cause contractually, Bill never had a contract. But morally, they should do it. And Athena was also daunted by this. Batman is one of, as I said, one of the most lucrative franchises of all time, a $30 billion property. Not quite as lucrative as Hello Kitty for some reason. I don't understand that, but still not slighting Hello Kitty. It's just
That that struck me as this an interesting one to be about Batman. But Athena, the granddaughter, did agree after a little bit of convincing and soul searching to do this. And we mounted this unprecedented campaign to get DC Comics to add Bill's name to the credit line, which people told me to my face would never happen. After nine years, it did happen. So this was the first time in history that DC Comics changed an existing credit line. And it made a lot.
of news. Not maybe not the kind of news that you're looking at, but in the geek world it was everywhere. And it was very validating and vindicating because people said it couldn't happen. And my feeling is, yeah, you know, opening a Starbucks on Jupiter, that can't happen. Adding a name to a credit line, even though there's a lot of money at stake, that can happen. That's not undoable. You just have to be persistent and, you know, be willing to have people slam doors in your face and think what you're doing is a waste of time.
I'm very good at that. Any creative person is very good at getting rejected and persevering. Otherwise, you're not going to be a creative professional. So now every Batman story is different. Whether it's a comic or a book or a video game or a TV show or a film, they all now say Batman created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger. And so this led to a film, a documentary on a US streamer called Hulu.
and this was the first documentary, based on a children's book. So before we wrap let's go back to those numbers. Again, it wasn't supposed to be something you figure out. these numbers represent just a few of my rejections along the storied path. So one of the things I tried to do was get Bill something in lieu of a grave.
so we got them a street renamed in New York City. And New York City has, you know, notable acts and notable people lived on just about every street in New York. So it's it's there's a lot of bureaucracy to cut through to get them to pay attention to you for something like this. Took me six years to get them to agree to do just this little thing. This is not a big ask and not a big lift, in my opinion. The documentary took nine years to make, two false starts or starts that that were stopped because the companies at those stages backed out.
And the book itself that started all this was rejected 34 times. And that's not even my record. So the reason I tell this story is not because I expect a lot of people to care about Batman or Bill Finger, but because it's, in my opinion, a story of resilience. And it's a story of a person who has a vision and sees it through no matter what. And I'm talking not just about me. This is not a me, me, me thing. This is a thing about Bill. Bill did something that really changed the face, the course of history.
Batman was the first comic book hero who had a motivation to do what he's doing. He had a psych there was a psychology there. He was scarred as a child, and then he decided to use that to help people as an adult. Before that, comic book characters were one dimensional. They just did good because it was the right thing to do. Bill gave Batman Bruce Wayne a believable reason in a way. It's still weird. It's still a bit skewed, but it's somewhat believable that he did what he did because of his childhood trauma.
So I tell this story to remind people that you may get you're going to get rejected and you're going to be discouraged and demoralized and you're going to think that this day is the worst day ever. This sucks. But maybe if you wake up the next morning and keep going, you'll get somewhere.
Thank you for listening.