Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Who Really Created the Joker?


The feedback I've gotten from my appearance on Kevin Smith's Fatman on Batman has been incredible! Sales of my Pop Sequentialism book have been off the chain and the spike in listenership on my Pod Sequentialism podcast has almost doubled my audience.

Click here to stream my podcast
After recording the audio-only version of the show Kevin had me back for the videocast to which I'll be posting a link as soon as it goes live. I've posted a little teaser photo to the left of us holding the smoking gun, as it may be.

In researching the history of Jerry Robinson's involvement with the Joker I amassed a mountain of info that didn't get mentioned in either broadcast, and I wanted to dedicate a version of my own show to the proto-Joker pagers to elaborate on how I came to posses them and what these pages may mean to fandom.

If you haven't heard it by now, I purchased some original art a few years back when setting up the follow-up to the original Pop Sequentialism exhibition. The pages turned out to be preliminary, unpublished (though later incompletely copied) pages that retell the origin of Robin that feature a villainous clown character that was never entered into the official cannon, which would seem to support Jerry Robinson's lifelong claim to having created the character, and losing that credit after bringing his idea to Bob Kane and Bill Finger.

As Kevin said in his podcast, this is a real barn-burner. It's not just a mystery, it's a matter of real significance that effects pop culture history.

I previously posted images right here in the blog, which you can see again below.
Listen to the show before rushing to judgment based on the images alone.

Stream it here on the Meltdown Comics site.
Or Subscribe here via iTunes.

Front of the page

Back of the page

Second page from set

Tune in every Sunday for a new episode of Pod Sequentialism with Matt Kennedy!

2 comments:

  1. I thoroughly enjoyed the Fatman episode and quickly found my way here for the sequel. As a historian, I appreciated the steps you took to uncover all that you could regarding these pages. Excellent work!

    When I heard you mention the actual circumstances surrounding Robinson having to give up the writing of the story in the issue, it struck a memory. I got home from work and found out why: Robinson wrote an introduction to one of the Shadow reprints (http://www.shadowsanctum.com/pulps/shadow9.html). Here, he recounts how he came up with the idea of Joker and how he had to give it up.

    Again, fantastic episode. It's so good to have proof that we all is the truth...

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete