sense. If there were spying in Gotham City, the police commissioner would just pickup the phone and call the CIA, wouldn't he? You have to have some logic. We had a bit in one of the shows where Batman is following a crook in the Batmobile, and he pulls up to the curb and starts to get out to chase the guy. But there's a cop there and he points to a sign that says No PARKING. Batman says, 'You're absolutely right, Officer,' and backs up his car. Now that's just idiotic. I argued about it. I mean, look, he was in hot pursuit. No body is that square."
Semple caught himself sounding excited. "This town is insane. The name of the game is take their money and go live somewhere else." As I talked to him, two lines from one of the Batman scripts ran through my mind. The scene is a bank vault that has just been broken into by a villain called Falseface and one of his thugs. The thug says, "We did it! We're rich beyond the dreams of avarice!"and Falseface replies, "Not beyond my dreams of avarice!" The money generated by Batman is almost enough for Falseface.
Semple, for instance, gets $1,000 on a bad week (the $1,000 is for being editorial adviser, a not-very-taxing duty; he gets more when he writes a script). The licensing firm handling the promotion of Battoys and Batgadgets says that gross Bat sales for 1966 should reach $75-$80 million, or about 50 percent more than the best year for James Bond knickknacks.
Not much of this prosperity, how ever, seems to have reached Bob Kane, the man who invented the Batman comic strip 27 years ago. Kane, who is in his mid-40's, is a pleasant, somewhat rueful-seeming man who lives in a modest, cluttered bachelor apartment in Manhattan. In the last few months he has seen a lot of reporters but he still seems surprised to find himself being interviewed. "Yeah, that's right," he had told me the week before, "I created Batman at 19. I was just out of DeWitt Clinton High School, it was a big thing." He smiled. "It was like I was the da Vinci of the Bronx. I was famous young. The last five years have been a little quiet."
He went on, "Camp? I knew camp like two weeks in the country, But I meant for the strip to be a put on".( This is not is not really convincing. The original Batman burned with belief, or at least with wish-fulfillment. I know. I was eight. I used to read Batman and go out and jump off garages. But maybe eight year-olds jump off garages now after watching Adam West. At any rate, it is said that Batman-watching families with eight-year-olds in them are torn with dissension because of the"Daddy, stop laughing" problem.)
Kane has also said of his creation, "Batman is what I always wanted to be but never could." This seems more believable than his claim that he was kidding right from the beginning. Kane certainly takes Batman seriously now. Musing about his character's popularity, he told me, "Something happens to people when they see a guy in that suit. You know, people need a hero. A few years ago it was Ike, then Sinatra...
Not everyone sees it that way. As we rode in a taxi a few weeks ago, Kane coyly asked the driver if he had seen Batman. The man said yes, and Kane asked him how he liked the, show. "I think it stinks," said the cabbie. Kane looked shocked, but said nothing.
Kane does not have any of his original dwawings, which could be worth