10 Things DC Comics Want You To Forget About Batman

3. He's A Total Rip-Off

Not only did Bob Kane rip off his co-creator, but Kane and Bill Finger kind of ripped off the character wholesale in the first place. Inspired by the pulp stories and radio serials of the era, Batman was an amalgamation of a number of existing anti-heroes: Doc Savage, Dick Tracy, The Phantom, but most of all, The Shadow. Star of countless magazine stories, comics, radio drama, TV shows and films, The Shadow dressed all in black to blend into the shadows and use fear as his principal weapon in fighting criminals; he faces both street-level criminals and insane supervillains; and by day, he's a billionaire socialite man-about-time, known throughout the higher classes of a metropolitan city. All of which sounds rather familiar. Finger was open with the "influence" years later, and years later Batman and The Shadow met in the pages of a comic book, with the Dark Knight admitting the pulp hero was his "greatest inspiration", the two of them shaking hands and parting ways. Which is nice, if not legally binding.