Fingered in a Good Way Bun Toon! YAY!

Sometimes the good guys win one.

Congratulations on everyone who did right this week.  There’s a few that deserve a shout out, but perhaps one in particular…

Marc and I are prepped and ready to fight the good fight when it comes to the creation of Courageous Cat.  My information tells me Stan Lee was involved.

Ty the Guy OUT!

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Most readers of this Bunny Blog know I might have had a thing or two to do with Marc’s book, but I cannot stress enough the above-and-beyond work that Marc did since the graphic novel/kid’s book was released.

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I noticed my Batman without Bob Kane strip is being reprinted all over the internet again this week…but I SO prefer that people run with the PROPER one, so here it is again…

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For last week’s Bun Toon featuring GOOD MAN, Co-Created by Bob Kane, click here.

for the Bun Toon Archive click here.

To go to Marc’s blog and read about his adventures in Finger-Land, click here

Happy New New Year Bun Toons! YAY!

Happy New Year everybody (he said, knowing it isn’t)!  Wasn’t last night a blast (probably  not)?

It’s OFFICIALLY the first of the new year,  here at Bun Toon Central, and time for the Most and Least Popular Bun Toons of 2014 to be revealed.

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Our champion of the year was read by far, far more folks than possibly any Bun Toon of all time.  There’s almost no way to tell.  Normally, I use the local webcounter here, and tally up all the links back to determine how many eyeballs landed on my humble bunny funnies, but this little viral monster ended up everywhere online, on everyone’s ELSE’S tumbler, on their website and eventually onto the printed page as a poster (available exclusively at Reno’s Wizard World Comic Convention last year!).  I can’t count up other people’s tumbler numbers, and couldn’t even guess at how many people lifted this Bun Toon whole cloth, so we’re just going to say “lots and lots” and leave it at that.

And it’s all for the love of Mr. Finger…

That version above is actually the “cleaned up” version of the strip, which originally ran in a much cruder form, but it was hard to read, and I wasn’t proud of the pastiche style…

The original looked like this:

But who can read that lettering?

Best parts of crusading for Bill The Boy Wonder last year:  Creating awareness of his story, and getting to talk to his granddaughter Athena Finger.  The tide is starting to turn towards justice for Bill’s place in history:  If you go to Batman’s wiki page, it says co-created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger nowadays.  It’s only DC Comics that can’t admit it, but the part of fandom that isn’t controlled by an iron-clad legal document that keeps Finger from getting his due credit, is happy to embrace Batman’s other papa.

Finally.  Batman fans have been given the Finger.

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Time for hilarious failure.

When they decided to kill off Wolverine, right after bringing Peter Parker back from the dead, slightly after the return of Jean Gray, but after the murder of Professor X, which was followed by the return of Nightcrawler…I started to think there was no choice…at least if I wanted my Bun Toons to catch on.

That’s Ortiz, the Hispanic Pool Boy in the last panel, a beloved ethnic slur that showed up in the strip a few times over the summer.  He wasn’t popular either.

That strip up there was only the SECOND least read Bun Toon of the year…the honour of being dead LAST was earned the very next week when I decided to keep up with this silly Dead Bunny Saga…and NO ONE showed up to play along.

The Pepsi drinking version of the Bunny (with the backwards signature on his shirt) hosted Bun Toons for the rest of the summer, but I quickly stopped making reference to his being an evil twin as no one seemed to notice or care.

Sigh.

Eventually, I simply put the signature on the shirt the right way ’round again in September, and the readership boycott drew to a close.

I thought it was a funny “take” on the industry’s fondness for slaughtering its heroes, but I’ve never been so wrong in my instincts before.

Which means, the epic, twenty-eight part “Return of the Bunny” will never see the light of day.  It’s a pity, because I would have brought back the Watcher, Gwen, Jor-El and Lara, and Jack Kirby in successive chapters.

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See you NEXT week for the start of Bun Tooning 2015!  (No entry tomorrow, I don’t want to overstay my welcome with six Bun Toons in a row!)  What’s coming up will surprise you, because it will surprise me.  I never know what these little stories will be about until Saturday morning.

Ty the Guy OUT for 2014!

Reno Convention Bun Toons!

I’m in the sunshine, all you snow covered Canadians, you!

Hey there internet family.  I’m not at my desk today…I’m not within a thousand miles, or even my own country at the moment, as I’m in RENO, NEVADA for the Wizard World Convention this weekend, signing the comics and meeting the peoples.

Normally, I don’t put up a Bun Toon on convention weekends, and I run an old one, but today, we’re doing a slight variation on that.

See, I was asked to give the Wizard folks an image to do up as a poster for the convention, and the one that was decided upon was my Bun Toon about Batman without Bill Finger.

The original art for that was pretty low-rez and sloppy as it was for a Bun Toon, not a poster.  So I did up a proper, put-some-effort-into-the-artwork version of this year’s most popular Bun Toon and this is the result…available as a poster in Reno!

I think if you click on that it gets bigger in your browser…try it and see!

Ty the Guy OUT!

ALSO exclusively available in Reno is my alt cover variant for Superior Iron Man #1

But…since you guys are so good and deserve it, here’s the cover without the trade dress, only available RIGHT HERE at Bun Toon Central!

My wife Keiren did most of the colour work on this one.  Knocked it out of the park, she did.

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For last week’s original, not a re-run Bun Toon, click here.

For the Bun Toons archives, click here

 

Real Quick Bun Toons! YAY!

I’m late…I’m late…for a very important date…

Whoops!  My new Batman series is on the stands, which means I haven’t got time to mess around!  I owe the office another issue yesterday.

But there’s always a speedy Bun Toon.

Buildings and other people take time.  Who has the spare minutes?

Ty the Guy OUT!

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In other news…

It’s been 75 years since Mr. Finger and Mr. Kane first created the Bat-Man in Detective Comics #27.  To celebrate that event, DC Comics is releasing a special commemorative edition with a reprint of that first story and a new story by some current creators…

That in itself, is not that big a deal.  They do that every couple of years with their flagship characters…

But this time, something NEW happened.

Bill Finger got a cover credit for writing that story.  That’s never happened before.

Score one for Bill.

Thanks DC.

Is that the hint of a smile, Bill?

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For the previous real quick Good-Man adventure, click here

For last week’s Bun Toon, pandering to movie goers and X-Men fans alike, click here

the bun toon archive is one click away

Big Choice Bun Toons! YAY!

Changing shirts for the duration of the Olympics

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To be fair, Pete Best might not have made it to the Ed Sullivan performance, but he did make a couple of million dollars off his contribution to the Beatles’ Anthology albums, and he’s gotten to outlive a couple of his ex-band mates, so he wins in the end.

Bill Finger didn’t even get a Google Doodle on his birthday, so sigh.

Ty the Guy OUT!

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Your Bonus Batman vs. the Beatles moments are fun-

First up:

Behind this gorgeous Neal Adams cover is a story by Frank Robbins about Batman and Robin solving the mystery of Paul McCartney’s murder…using clues found on album covers.    Well…the murder of Saul Cartwright…I guess the editor wouldn’t let ’em use the REAL Paul, as he wasn’t actually murdered.

This is a cover I did for Batman and Robin Adventures #13.  It came out around the same time as Beatles’ Anthology, so…

…the story revolved around Scarecrow using the Anthology broadcast to piggy back a fear frequency to America…we still weren’t allowed to use their real names, so I named Paul McCartney “Mike McGear” (an in-joke for Beatlesmaniacs, anyone know why?).

Basically, this Batman meets the Beatles thing has been going on for a while…

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For last week’s special tribute to Debra Jane Shelly click here

For the Bun Toon that started all this Bill Finger attention last month, click here

For the Bun Toon Archive, click here

Even More Of This Bun Toons! YAY!

Hoo boy, did we see a lot of traffic this week.

My comic strip about Batman, Bill Finger and “what might have been”  viraled up more than any other Bun Toon I’ve done.  It was forwarded on facebook, touted on tumbler, tweeted and redditted, scrawled under the overpass in the bad side of town, chatted about at the important parties, passed along in secret codes to the people who needed to know, and talked about  amongst the un-contacted rainforest tribes in  New Guinea.

If you haven’t read it…here it is…

Click here and jump on a bandwagon!

First –let’s get this straight:  I didn’t do it to bitch slap Bob Kane.  

That’s Steranko’s job.

And I didn’t do it as some anti-corporate comment about work-for-hire contracts, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with any or that.

I did it as a little plea for some attention on Bill Finger’s 100th Birthday (rapidly coming up on Feb. 8th of this year!).  My friend Marc Tyler Nobleman had this idea that Bill Finger deserved a Google-Doodle to mark the occasion, since Bill more-or-less/we-can’t-say-it-LEGALLY/no-one-really-argues-it-though, created most of what we know of as Batman an Robin, but his name almost never comes up around any of the movies, comics, books and TV shows that feature his characters….and Marc thought a Google Doodle would be a good way to celebrate Mr. Finger’s Dynamic Duo of contributions to 20th Century Pop Culture  (putting aside for a moment that Bill Finger also co-created Green Lantern and Joker and Catwoman, etc.)

Nothing catches on as a grass-roots movement unless there’s a mess of bumper sticker catchphrases summing up the complexity of the concept into worthless bite-size ideas chunks.  With that in mind, I give you the following images that you can right-click and use for your own facebook-tumblr-twitter worlds.  Help get the word out on Bill’s Hundredth Birthday, and our campaign to get him a google doodle.  

I’m tired of hearing that Bill Finger was the “unsung” hero of Batman.

Let’s  get him SUNG.

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right click any image and put it on social media today!

My wife didn’t care for this one…

This might work on Spider-Man fans…every bit helps.

Clearly I’ve run out of ideas…

This is the week to campaign…the birthday’s only a couple of weeks away.

Ty The Guy OUT!

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For many other Bun Toons past, some of which involve Batman, and many of which involve rabbits…click the archive here

Giving Comics The Finger Bun Toons! YAY!

Let’s give the comics industry the Finger.

We’re coming up on an anniversary on Feb. 8th of this year.

That will mark the 100th Birthday of Milton (Bill) Finger, the REAL creator of Batman.

Mr. Gotham City hisself..

Now according to the official story, Batman was created by Bob Kane (and no one else) but most comic fans know that’s not the true story.  While there’s no doubt that Bob Kane did contribute something to the character of Batman (apparently he came up with the name), the overwhelming creative force behind the super-hero we all love was Bill Finger.

Without Bill writing the scripts and shaping the visuals, we don’t have Robin, Bruce Wayne, the Bat-cave, the Batmobile, the Penguin, Gotham City, the Signal, Commissioner Gordon, Alfred the Butler, Wayne Manor, the Batarang, Catwoman, the basic look and color scheme of the Batman costume, the Joker, The Riddler, The Scarecrow (as well as Green Lantern, Wildcat and a host of other characters!)

But Bob Kane, did, in fact, come up with the name…so let’s see….

This Feb 8th, you can do something to give the comics industry the Finger and give Bill his proper due.

Send a note to: proposals@google.com    — and suggest that Google give Bill Finger a Google-Doodle on his 100th anniversary.  Holy Justice, Batman, it would be spiffy!

For more about this subject, check out my friend Marc Tyler Nobleman’s blog….  Marc is a bit of an expert on the story of Bill Finger….he literally wrote the book on it!

Ty the Guy OUT!

Some unseen pages from the book about Bill Finger that Marc and I did a while ago:  This two page sequence shows just a fraction of the stuff Finger created…

and here’s another unseen two page spread from the Bill Finger book…Marc didn’t like the image of Bill and Bob working together as his research suggested Bill didn’t hang around Bob Kane while Bob drew…and let’s be honest….Bob didn’t draw all that much.

You’ll have to get your own copy of the book “Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman”  yourself to see that pages we finally went with for these sequences…

And please, go pester the Google people about Bill’s doodle.  It would make Batman proud.  The real one with the pointy ears and the blue cape.

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For last week’s Bun Toon about Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, click here.

For the Bun Toon archive (going back decades, now!) click here

Batman Stuff! Plug! Plug! Plug!

On sale now!

Mad Magazine goes after the big summer movie.  Check.

Ty Templeton featured on a couple of pages of amusing Batman spoofing and high spirited satire.  Check.

And just in case fanboy outrage is more your style.  Remember “Bill The Boy Wonder:  The Secret Co-Creator of Batman” is on sale everywhere.  The first book ever written (and drawn) about Batman’s REAL father, is being well reviewed and is FLYING off the shelves.

Who’s giving it good reviews?  Check it out…

Bill Finger for the win. And Mark Tyler Nobleman, too. And me!

And that’s not even mentioning my ongoing Spider-Man work (tying into LAST week’s big Super-hero movie.)

If it turns out I’m working on the Hobbit or the next instalment of The Bourne Identity, I’ll let you know.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your BONUS Batman Movie Moment:

I’ll help you sneak into your movie, if you help me sneak into mine.

Plug, Plug, Plug. Baby needs new size twelve shoes.

Plug.

Plug.

Spider-Man Plug.

On Sale Tomorrow.  I wrote it (Dan Slott helped).  Matt Clark drew it.  Marvel printed it.  You’re going to love it, I promise.  MOST. FUN. MARVEL. STORY. I’VE. EVER. WRITTEN.

Plug.

Ultimate Spider-Man Adventures #3.  Coming next week.  I drew one of this issue’s interior stories.   Two Spider-Man Comics in two weeks!  Plus:  Spider-Man in the movies, yo!  Spider-Man on the comics’ stands! I’m at pop culture ground zero, fellow babies.

Batman plug.

Plug.

On sale in July.  I drew this one.  The true story of Batman’s creation, finally giving due to BILL FINGER, the REAL creator of Batman.

Plug.

Some pages from Bill  The Boy Wonder.  This scene recreates the moment Bob Kane “created” Batman.

Plug.

Another scene from Bill  The Boy Wonder.  This the moment that Bill Finger explains to Bob Kane how to fix that first version of the character so that people will actually read it.

plug.

On Sale in July.  The Bat-Fan in you needs this book.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here, now your Bonus Plug:

naughty Halloween revellers ruin it for the rest of us.

Jerry Robinson 1922 – 2011

Jerry Robinson passed away yesterday, just a few weeks shy of his 90th birthday.  He was the last surviving member of the group of four men who created the mythology of Batman :  Bob Kane, Bill Finger, Dick Sprang and Jerry Robinson.   Jerry was Bob Kane’s first ghost artist, and probably the most important of the Batman artists of the Golden Age.

Along with writing partner Bill Finger, Jerry Robinson created the Joker, Alfred the Butler, Robin, the Batcave and a host of other important parts of Gotham City while Bob Kane watched from across the room and pretended to be the one doing it.  Though Kane spent his life lying about the huge contributions that his partners made, comics historians did eventually see through the nonsense, and Robinson lived long enough to get his due as one of the seminal creators of our industry.   There was at least THAT justice.

Batman and Robin, keeping the cartoonists' drawing table safe, thanks to Jerry Robinson!

I had the rare chance to meet him a couple of times over the years, at awards ceremonies and conventions, etc, and Jerry was delightful and awe-inspiring company whenever I was fortunate enough to be around him.  I’ll never forget the first thing he said to me, though:  When I told him I was a Batman creator, writing and drawing the characters he helped create, he reached out to shake my hand and said (with a twinkle in his eye) “Where’s my cheque?”

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jerry Robinson…my world would not be the same without having shared the planet with you for the last forty-eight years.  You gave me a childhood filled with unbridled joy and fun and I cannot conceive of who I would have turned out to be if you’d never been there before me.

Ty the Guy OUT!

Here now, your Bonus Jerry Robinson moment:

I have a bunch of images of Jerry Robinson on my computer because I recently had to draw his portrait for a project about Bill Finger (see the top of this column for the drawing) but I went searching for a photo of the man to adorn this blog post and was astounded to discover the first two or three images of Jerry that pop up on google search are photos of Jerry posing in front of one of my drawings of the Joker.  Why Jerry would pose in front of MY drawing of his character, rather than one of his own drawings, is baffling to me, and I assume the photographer didn’t know he’d matched up the wrong artist.  But I am humbled and honoured to have Mr. Robinson and I share a few photos like that.

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NOTE:  For those in the Toronto area:  The Toronto Cartoonist Workshop Faculty Art Show for its instructors is tomorrow night, Friday December 9!  I’ll have at least one framed image of the Joker up on the wall, but I’ll make a point of bringing the original art for my portrait of Jerry with me to show off as well as sharing the wall with fellow instructors LEONARD KIRK, DAVE ROSS and ERIC KIM.

Come on down and see how comic book artists live and work, but don’t feed us, we have a very specific diet and might become ill with real food.

587A College Street (at Clinton), Toronto, 7-10pm