Batman: The Case of the Stolen Story

[Rikdad]

In the 2000s, it was revealed that the plot of the first Batman story was stolen outright from a 1936 story featuring The Shadow. But the theft went further than what was shown back then. Here, I make the case not only that important concepts that define the Joker were also, but stolen from the very same story.

http://rikdad.blogspot.com/2021/12/b...len-story.html

[HsssH]

Batman lifting from Shadow is pretty much public knowledge, but I wasn't aware that so much was lifted.

And now I start wondering what other old stories that didn't make much sense were lifted from other stories.

[Rikdad]

The idea that characters' concepts generally lifted from earlier ones is indeed a big topic; objectively, it's clear even that, say, Spider-Man is drawn to a considerable extent from Superman. And, of course, Superman from Hercules and Samson and perhaps those from Gilgamesh.

I think it's a new observation that the nonsensical aspects of such a story can come from the careless borrowing of details. And I do wonder how widespread this is. Reading this one Shadow story carefully was not a quick exercise and I can't imagine trying to read all of them, much less a wide survey of the genre, but it seems very unlikely that this one story was pilfered so thoroughly, but no others got the same treatment.

FWIW, in an earlier draft of this piece, I noted a similarity between the plots of The Two Jakes (the sequel to Chinatown) and "Partners of Peril." The movie also has an audio clip of The Whistler, which was a radio noir series that flagrantly ripped off The Shadow.

[HsssH]

To me big difference is how much time has passed. Even if we take Spider-Man and Superman, Superman is couple of decades older. While Shadow stories were published roughly at the same time as Batman was created.

[Rikdad]

I agree entirely. If Spider-Man had come out just as he did in 1940, the comparison to Superman would have been inevitable, but the entire genre was so developed by then that the comparison wasn't so obvious.

Given the tight sequence of detective characters in costume between The Shadow, Crimson Avenger, Batman, and Sandman, the greatest feature distinguishing Batman – the key to his success – might just be the costume, which was soon copied by Sandman and Crimson Avenger.